There is a legend that in the period of the Yellow Emperor a long time ago, the Yellow Emperor ordered his servant Cang Xie to create characters. Cang Xie was a strange man with eight eyes. He observed all directions with his eight eyes and saw all kinds of things. He simplified the shapes of these things and carved them on tortoise shells and animal bones, which became the earliest characters. This myth is absurd, of course, but it also illustrates the fact that Chinese characters evolved from pictographs.
In the primitive times tens of thousands of years ago, ancient people learned to express their meaning by language, and later they learned to use gestures. However, some things are difficult to express by language and gestures, so some people came up with a way to make marks, which are too many and easy to forget. Later, they used graphics to express their meaning. For example, "the sun" was painted in the shape of a circle, and "the tree" was painted in the shape of a tree. That's how the earliest hieroglyphs looked.
with the passage of time, human beings have entered the slave society. By this time, there are more things that need to be recorded in writing, and it is too cumbersome to express them with some graphic symbols. So people simplified some pictographs, and combined some pictographs to form a new kind of characters, which makes people easier to understand. For example, combining "man" with "wood" becomes the word "Hugh", which means a person sleeps by leaning against a tree. In this way, many characters have been created, forming a new type of Chinese characters-knowing characters.
In the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, many vassal states appeared on the land of China, and the characters of these vassal states were different, so there was a situation of polysemy and polysemy, which brought difficulties to cultural exchanges between countries. After Qin Shihuang unified the six countries, he ordered the unified use of a script-Xiao Zhuan. This kind of writing is much simpler than the previous writing, but it is still a little cumbersome, so an emergency vulgar style-official script has gradually emerged among the people. In the Three Kingdoms period, Zhong You of Wei created a simpler and more beautiful script-regular script. Since then, Chinese characters have established its square shape and began to have a shelf structure. Since then, people have successively created cursive script, running script and other fonts, and also emerged world-famous calligraphers like Zhong, Wang, Yan, Liu, Su, Huang, Mi and Cai. The development of Chinese characters has gradually entered a higher level.
With the development of Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters is increasing, so a tool for people to find Chinese characters has appeared, such as Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Kangxi Dictionary and so on.
after p>1949, with the establishment of new China, Chinese characters ushered in the spring of its development. In the early 195s, the central government issued a series of notices on the reform of Chinese characters, which boldly simplified some Chinese characters whose strokes were too complicated, so that everyone could read and use Chinese characters, which was undoubtedly a great pioneering work in the history of the development of Chinese characters.
In modern society, with the rapid development of science, some new changes have taken place in Chinese characters, such as Chinese characters representing chemical elements and some new things, and many Chinese characters have been given some new meanings. With the emergence of computer technology, how to input Chinese characters into computers has become a new topic. After 198s, China has developed a series of Chinese character input methods, such as Pinyin, Wubi font, ideographic code, natural code and so on. In order to adapt to the changes of the times, Chinese characters are constantly improving themselves and making great contributions to the development and spread of Chinese culture.
In recent years, some people think that Chinese characters are too complicated, and put forward a scheme of "Latinization of Chinese characters", thinking that Chinese characters should take the road of pinyin. But I don't think so, because Chinese characters have gone through thousands of years of historical tests, and have become a symbol of the Chinese nation and a symbol of China people. We should not abandon Chinese characters, but develop and improve them so that they can continue in the 21st century.