Introduction to Chinese characters

Chinese characters are linguistic signs, not pinyin. Chinese words or morphemes are represented by ideographic symbols.

A Chinese character usually represents a word or a morpheme in Chinese, which forms the characteristics of unity of sound, form and meaning. Chinese characters are square characters composed of strokes, so they are also called square characters. Such as "che", "Shang" and "Ming", directly express the meaning of language in the form of words; "Question" can refer to both meaning and sound, "door" refers to sound, and "mouth" refers to meaning.

After thousands of years of evolution, Chinese characters have gradually formed "seven styles of Chinese characters", namely, Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Jinwen, seal script, official script, cursive script, regular script and running script.

Japanese: Chinese characters (Chinese characters); かんじ (hiragana)

Korean/Korean:? (proverb); Kanji (Korean Kanji)

Vietnamese: ch? hán; ? Chinese (Nanzi)

English: Chinese characters

Arabic:

Spanish: los caracteres de chino

French: les caratèRES de chinois

German: Chinese

Russian: китакскиниерогли

Portuguese: Chinese

Italian: I caratteri cinesi During the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the common word was Oracle Bone Inscriptions. This is a mature and systematic writing, which laid the foundation for the development of Chinese characters in later generations. After that, the number of popular inscriptions on bronze inscriptions has increased, but the shape has not changed much.

After the Spring and Autumn Period, due to the warlord regime, there were "different glyphs". After the reunification of the Qin Dynasty, in order to consolidate the rule, the first emperor ordered the Prime Minister Reese, the Zhongche government to order Zhao Gao, and the Taishi government to order Hu Wujing. The characters were sorted out, and based on the original characters of Qin State, the seal script was formulated as a standard font, which was widely used in the whole country. Later, according to the popular fonts at that time, Bian Cheng sorted out simpler font official scripts, which were widely circulated throughout the country as daily words.

In the Cao Wei era, Zhong You created the original script (regular script). At this point, the evolution of Chinese characters has been perfected. Moreover, since the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the writing of Chinese characters has become a special art, namely calligraphy.

China historians generally believe that the source of China characters began in Shang Dynasty. In fact, Oracle Bone Inscriptions was very mature in the Shang Dynasty. Before this, there should be a process from occurrence, development to maturity, so some people advocate pushing it to the end of summer; Others think that we have our own opinions before promoting Zhixia. Guo Moruo pointed out in Dialectical Development of Ancient Chinese Characters: "When did Chinese characters originate? I think this can be seen from the age of Xi' an banpo village site. " "Banpo site is about 6000 years old." "Banpo site is a typical Yangshao culture in Neolithic age", "Banpo painted pottery often has some simple descriptions with similar words, which are quite different from the patterns on the utensils." "Although the meaning of the description is not clear, it is undoubtedly a literal symbol." "Absolutely can be said to be the origin of China characters, or the Jie legacy of China's original characters. "On this basis, China civilization should be nearly 6000 years. When did China's writing begin? When did the oldest writing appear? What do they mean? So far, there is still a hundred schools of thought contending, and it seems that a lot of materials are needed to prove it. The number of Chinese characters is inaccurate, about100000 (the Chinese character library of Beijing Guoan Consulting Equipment Company has 9 125 1), and only a few thousand Chinese characters are used every day. According to statistics, 1000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 words can cover more than 98%, and 3,000 words have reached 99%. Simplified statistics are not much different from traditional statistics.

With regard to the number of Chinese characters, according to the records of ancient dictionaries, we can see their development.

Cang Xie has 3,300 words and is well-read. The Qin Dynasty had a calendar. In Han Dynasty, Yang Xiong's Xun Bian has 5340 words, and Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi has 9353 words. According to the printing performance of Moon Hee in Tang Dynasty, it is recorded that Jin wrote 12824, Wei Yang Chengqing wrote Zitong 13734, and Gu wrote 169655 in Southern Dynasties. Jade Piece is a supplement to Sun Qiang in Tang Dynasty, with 225,665,438+0 words. There are as many as 365,438+0,365,438+09 words in Lei Pian edited by Sima Guang in Song Dynasty, and 53,525 words in Ji Yun edited by officials in Song Dynasty, which was once the book with the largest number of words. Kangxi dictionary in Qing Dynasty has more than 47,000 words. The Chinese Dictionary edited by Ouyang Bocun in 9 15 has more than 48,000 words. 1959 the dictionary of dahanhe, edited by tsuji Hashimoto of Japan, has 49,964 words; 197 1 year, The Chinese Dictionary edited by Zhang Qiyun has 49,888 words. 1990 The Chinese Dictionary edited by Xu Zhongshu has 54,678 words; 1994 The Sea of Chinese Characters edited by Leng Yulong has 85,000 words. The fifth edition of the Dictionary of Variant Characters compiled by the education authorities of Taiwan Province Province contains both regular characters and variant characters, with a total of *** 106230 words, which is the dictionary with the largest number of Chinese characters.

There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters in history (there are also more than 60,000 sayings), most of which are variant characters and rare words. The vast majority of variants and uncommon words have been standardized, except for ancient Chinese, which generally only occasionally appears in names and places. In addition, after the first batch of simplified characters, there are a number of "two simplified characters", which have been abolished, but a few numbers are still popular in society.

If learning and using Chinese characters really need to master the sounds, shapes and meanings of 70,000 to 80,000 Chinese characters, then Chinese characters will be the characters that no one in the world can and will not learn and use. However, most of the Chinese characters included in the Chinese Dictionary are "dead words", that is, words that have existed in history and are abandoned in today's written language. According to statistics, there are 589,283 words in the Thirteen Classics (I Ching, Shangshu, Biography of Ram, Analects of Confucius, Mencius, etc. 13 ancient books), including 6,544 variants. Therefore, in fact, there are only over 6,000 Chinese characters used in people's daily life.

In the computer coding standard of Chinese characters, the largest Chinese character coding is CNS 1 1643 in Taiwan Province Province, and the full-character database of version 5.0 can query 87,047 Chinese characters, 1077 1 pinyin word, with 894 symbols. The big five codes commonly used in Taiwan Province and Hongkong include 13053 traditional Chinese characters. GB 18030 is the latest internal code character set in People's Republic of China (PRC). GBK contains simplified characters, traditional characters and 209 12, while earlier GB23 12 contains 6763 simplified characters. Unicode's unified ideographic basic character set for China, Japan and Korea (Korea) contains 20,902 Chinese characters, totaling more than 70,000 characters.

In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was insufficient, and many things were represented by interchangeable words, which caused the ambiguity of text expression. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large number of words. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters makes it difficult to learn Chinese characters, and the meaning that a single Chinese character can express is limited, so the meaning of many single Chinese characters is expressed by Chinese characters, such as common double spelling words. The development of Chinese characters tends to create new words instead of new words. Early unearthed materials related to the origin of Chinese characters in Oracle Bone Inscriptions of Yin Ruins. These materials mainly refer to the carved or painted symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and early historical society, and also include a few symbols engraved on Oracle Bone Inscriptions, jade and stone tools. It can be said that they provide a new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are a combination of form, sound and meaning, and most Chinese characters are composed of form and sound.

Liu Shu is the basic principle of Chinese character formation. Six books are mentioned in the Book of Rites, but the specific contents are not explained. In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty expounded the structural principles of "Six Books": pictographic, referential, comprehending, pictophonetic, phonetic and borrowing.

Pictographic characters: This method of creating characters is described according to the shape characteristics of an object, and so is the so-called "painting into its object, following its body". Such as the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, originally depicted the patterns of the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, and then gradually evolved into today's shapes.

Melons are hieroglyphics. In the word "melon", two strokes represent vines, the middle vertical hook represents melons, and the slap represents leaves. "Cucurbitaceae plants collectively" is the original meaning of "melon". "Like a melon", there are many things that look like melons in real life. For example, "melon skin hat" is a kind of hat; "Guapi Ship" is a kind of ship. "Like cutting a melon", the fate of the melon is divided, which is why it means this. People use "carve up" to mean division or distribution. It also means that several powerful countries unite to carve up the land of weak countries or underdeveloped countries. "Fool" means not smart. The word comes from the ancient "melon seed family" Jiang, who lived in Guazhou (Dunhuang, Gansu) during the Spring and Autumn Period, was called "Guazi". They are very diligent and always work nonstop when they are employed. However, some people regard their honest customs as "stupid", so there are "fools".

Refers to things: this refers to the method of expressing abstract things, using symbols or adding symbols to hieroglyphics to represent a word. The same is true of the so-called "things that each refers to". If people write "up" on it, people write "down" and "blade" on it, and add a little to the blade to indicate that it is the sharpest blade here, and so on. Arrogance is "smelly". People who are "rich" and have fields, "poor" work by "strength", and the traditional meaning of "cheap" is "cheap". The two "brothers" on the right are naturally "cheap" because they compete for money.

Pictophonetic characters: A unique sound represented by a specific shape (root) in a text. Such as Hu. This word can also be a root, combined with different attribute roots, can be synthesized into: butterfly, butterfly, lake, gourd, Hu, etc., with the same pronunciation (some only initials) to represent different things. Shape and sound are the most common methods and verve in Chinese characters.

There are four combinations of pictophonetic characters:

Left form and right sound: emotion, memory, hum, accuracy, structure, description …

Right-shaped left sound: period, war, parrot, pigeon, collar, gone with the wind ...

The form above and the sound below: space, basket, fog, grass, landscape, symbols. ...

From bottom to top: jar, commodity, marriage, base, fur, box. ...

Internal form and external voice: smell, ask, stuffy, beat, weave, argue. ...

The inner voice of appearance: garden, hoarding, disease, longing, pavilion, box ...

Form occupies a corner: Xinjiang, Teng, Planting, Cutting and Carrying. ...

With the reform of Chinese characters, some pictophonetic characters have changed the pronunciation of phonetic parts and no longer play the role of phonetic symbols. If you read half of it, you will be joking. "A scholar can only read half" has become an irony for "scholars" to read wrong words.

Understanding: This word formation method is to use two or more words to form a word and combine the meanings of these words into one meaning. For example, when the sun and the moon merge into one, the sun and moonlight become "bright". The word "person" and "word" are combined into the word "letter", which means that a person kept his promise in the past, that is, he kept what he had said, and "rest", "person" and "wood" were combined together, and a person leaned against a tree to indicate rest.

Some new words are formed by overlapping two or more identical words. Most of the two characters overlap in the left and right coordinate structure, and most of the three characters overlap in the tower-shaped upper and lower structure, which looks like a pyramid in gymnastics. For example, three "people" form a "crowd"; Three "fire" constitute "Yan"; Three "Woods" make up "Sen"; Three "days" constitute a "crystal"; Three "straightness" constitutes "foundation"; Three "waters" constitute "seedlings"; Three "mouths" make up "goods" and so on.

Due to the great changes in fonts, the source of Chinese characters can't be seen. For example, why add a crooked mountain next to a woman's personality? The correct etymological analysis can only be seen from the traditional Chinese character "Fu". The word "fu" on the left of the word "fu" refers to a woman, and the broom next to the woman is a broom. Together, women work at home with brooms. "Women, brooms are given to women" and "strength, fields are given to men" are in line with the social conditions of "women work outside the home" and "men plow and women weave" at that time. The etymology of quite a few words is not easy to see, so people call them "broken words".

"She" is a personal pronoun commonly used in modern Chinese, referring to the woman of a third party. This word is a variant of the ancient word "Xie", which was first used as a third-person female pronoun by Liu Bannong in the 1920s. This is not a new word.

Note turn: this is used to annotate two words, which are synonymous but have different shapes. Xu Shen explained in Hanshu: "Building a class, agreeing to accept each other, and taking the test as usual." What can I say? The ancient word "test" can be said to be "longevity", and "old" has the same meaning as "test", that is, the so-called old people take the test and the candidates are old. The Book of Songs Ya Pu also said: "A textual research on Zhou Wangshou".

Borrowing: In short, this method is to borrow a word to express something else. Generally speaking, if there is something new that can't be described, we should borrow a root with similar pronunciation or attributes to express it. For example, "You" originally meant the right hand (first seen in Oracle Bone Inscriptions), and later it was disguised as "You". Another example is "smell", which means listening with your ears. In "University", there is a phrase "turn a blind eye, listen but don't smell, eat but don't know its taste", which was later disguised as an olfactory verb.

Summarize the above six books-the first two, "The Law of Making Characters" also; Second, the "combination method" is also; The last two items, "using Chinese characters", are the same. In a word, the above principle is the theory of philology summarized by ancient philologists, and the rules of Chinese character creation contained in it are not original by one person, but have evolved over a long period of time in people's use and are the crystallization of collective wisdom from generation to generation. Chinese characters are composed of ideographic roots, such as gold, wood, water, fire and earth, which are combined together like building blocks. Because of its square shape, it is also called "square character". Structurally, Chinese characters have the following characteristics:

Chinese characters written in regular fonts (such as regular script, Song style, official script, seal script, etc. ) is a kind of square character, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters include letter combination words and combination words, and letter combination words can't be separated, such as "Wen" and "Zhong". Combined Chinese characters are composed of basic components, accounting for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of compound words are: upper and lower structures, such as "smile" and "tip"; Left and right structures, such as "word" and "family"; Semi-closed structure, such as "similarity" and "inclination"; Fully enclosed structure, such as "group" and "meeting"; Upper, middle and lower structure, such as "winning"; Left, middle and right structures, such as "points"; Pin-shaped structure, such as pin. The basic components of Chinese characters include single words, radicals and other non-word-forming components.

The smallest constituent unit of Chinese characters is strokes, and strokes also have certain meanings, such as horizontal painting (1), which can represent the horizon (such as a horizontal line in Chinese characters).

When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the order of strokes, are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontal and then vertical, first left and then down, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside and then inside, then sealed, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters with different writing styles may be different.

In terms of fonts, the fonts of various Chinese characters can be divided into three types. The first category is Song Style and Bold Style (including thick and thin lines) developed from movable type printing in Song Dynasty. The second category is the fonts evolved from calligraphy, such as regular script, imitation song style, running script, official script, calligraphy style, regular script, thin gold style, pen style and so on. The third category belongs to fine arts fonts, such as variety, tanning, amber, water column and so on. Most other fonts belong to the variants of the above three types of fonts, such as: Da Dian Song, Xiao Dian Song, Bao Song, Chang Song, Zhong Song, Yao Ti, etc. Big black, flat black, thick black, isobar (including thick, medium and thin isobar, and then evolved into thick, accurate and thin circle) and so on; From regular script, imitation song, etc. , Chinese books, fine imitation of Song Dynasty, etc. ; Beauty and black evolved from black body and song style; The body evolved from Li et al.

There is only one Chinese character with the least strokes. Some words are not written, but "biang" is a Chinese character with many strokes, with 56 strokes, 45 variants and 59 traditional characters. "biangbiang Noodle" is a kind of noodle originated in Shaanxi, and it is also a brand of noodle restaurant. This word is still in use now, and it has not been widely circulated. It has only become popular in recent years, and the word "biang" can only be found in Kangxi dictionary. In fact, the word "biang" can't be found in Kangxi dictionary.

There is a crossword puzzle about biang:

Fly to the sky at one o'clock, the Yellow River bends two times, open your mouth and talk inward.

One is in the east and the other is in the west. The left side is long, the right side is long, and there is a horse king in the middle.

In the bottom of my heart, next to the moon, put a sesame candy,

Push the car around Xianyang.

A Chinese character has as many as 84 pictures, which is pronounced "tai-to" in Japanese. Chinese characters are written Chinese characters, and each word represents a syllable. Now, Mandarin is used as the standard pronunciation in Chinese mainland. The syllables of Putonghua are determined by one initial, one vowel and tone, and the actually used syllables exceed 1300. Because of the huge number of Chinese characters, there are obvious homophones; At the same time, it also exists in the case that the same word has multiple tones, which is called polyphonic words. This situation is very common in various dialects of Chinese.

Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common are names and places, followed by transliteration of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original words, such as "Alas" and "Haha" laughter. But even so, there are still some ideographic elements, especially the names and place names of countries. Even foreign names and place names have some ideographic bottom lines. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated as "immortal".

Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, the pronunciation of a Chinese character was two syllables, a small syllable and a large syllable. Because Chinese characters themselves are not phonetic, although the number and writing methods of Chinese characters have changed from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, we can't see the phonetic changes. Special research is needed to infer their pronunciations in ancient Chinese and middle Chinese. The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic reading" and "training reading", and a word often has multiple pronunciations, because the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China in different periods are different.

In addition to Japan, some disyllabic characters are also used in other areas where Chinese characters are used, such as Li (sea), Hao (gallon) and Hao (kilowatt). However, due to the official abolition, it is basically not used in Chinese mainland, but it is still used in Taiwan Province Province, and most people understand its meaning.

The earliest phonetic notation methods are reading if and direct notation. Reading if the method is to use words with similar pronunciation as phonetic notation, and Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi adopted this phonetic notation method, such as "If you shoot, you can read correctly". Direct notation is to use another Chinese character to express the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, a woman speaks for herself, and the speaker says "Yue" is used for phonetic notation.

Both of the above methods have inherent defects. Some words have no homophones or homophones are so uncommon that it is difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "socks".

The anti-tangent method was developed in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit, which used pinyin characters. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be marked by backcutting, that is, the initial consonant of the first word and the vowel and tone of the second word are combined to make phonetic notation, so that all Chinese characters can be combined. For example, the pronunciation of "Lian" is the combination of the initial of "Lang" and the vowel and tone of "Dian".

Since modern times, phonetic symbols in the form of Chinese characters and phonetic symbols of many Latin letters have been developed. Phonetic symbols are still a part of teaching in Taiwan Province Province, but at present, Chinese Pinyin is the most widely used in Chinese mainland.

Because Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, the phonetic notation is weak. This feature makes the literature of the last 1000 years, like the western countries that use pinyin, have no big difference in wording, but it also makes it difficult for people to infer the ancient phonology. For example, the pronunciation of "Pang" comes from "Dragon", but today the former is pronounced as "Pang" and the latter as "Dragon" in Beijing dialect. How to explain this difference is a subject of phonology. Tones should also be paid attention to: flat tone, rising tone, rising tone, falling tone, Light tone (vowel ā-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a. However, unlike the relationship between "words" and "letters" in English, the meaning of morphemes is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it forms morphemes independently, thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent. Words include morphemes and phrases composed of several morphemes.

The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in hundreds of basic hieroglyphics, which can be synthesized into tens of thousands of Chinese characters, representing all kinds of things in the sky and underground; Thousands of commonly used words can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words. China was called Zishu in ancient times, and it was not called a dictionary until the publication of Kangxi Dictionary. The earliest dictionary in China was Shuo Wen Jie Zi compiled by Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Modern times can be roughly divided into two categories: one is comprehensive, such as Xinhua dictionary; One kind is specialized, such as a variant dictionary. 19 15 years, Zhonghua Book Company published the Chinese Dictionary.

The three largest Chinese dictionaries in the world are Chinese mainland's Chinese Dictionary (volume * *13, with 56,000 entries and 370,000 words), China's Taiwan Province Province's Chinese Dictionary (volume * */kloc-0, with 50,000 entries and 400,000 words) and Japanese Dictionary (*). Chinese characters are the characters that record Chinese. It has a history of about 6000 years and is one of the oldest characters in the world.

The most China Chinese character "He": At the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the movable type played by hundreds of actors kept changing, and the same Chinese character "He" was displayed in three different fonts: Da Zhuan, Xiao Zhuan and Kai Shu. This scene has been talked about so far, and this Chinese character with the meanings of "harmony", "ping" and "harmony" was once again selected as the "most China" Chinese character. The latest issue of "China Heritage" magazine released the results of the selection of "100 Chinese Characters with the Most Cultural Significance in China" organized by this organization. The word "he" won the highest number of votes in online voting, and was strongly recommended by experts such as Jen-der Lee, a researcher at the Institute of History and Language of Taiwan's Academia Sinica.