Introduction to Chinese Characters We deal with Chinese characters every day. Chinese characters are the writing that records the Chinese language. It has a history of more than 3,400 years. It is the most spoken script in the world and one of the oldest scripts in the world. Chinese characters are ideographic syllabic characters. There are 4,000 to 8,000 commonly used characters in modern times, most of which are pictophonetic characters. Modern Chinese character fonts evolved from oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, small seal script, official script, etc.
In long-term practice, human beings have not only created a glorious and splendid history, but also accumulated rich cultural knowledge. Culture has been preserved to this day by relying on writing. As a tool for recording, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, writing has made an indelible contribution to the progress of human civilization and the advancement and development of society.
Evolution From the ancient legend of the creation of Chinese characters by Cangjie to the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions more than 100 years ago, Chinese scholars of all generations have been committed to uncovering the mystery of the origin of Chinese characters. Regarding the origin of Chinese characters, there are various theories in ancient Chinese literature, such as "Story", "Knotting", "Bagua", "Pictures", "Book Deed", etc. Ancient books also generally record the legend of the creation of characters by Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor. Modern scholars believe that a systematic writing tool cannot be completely created by one person. If Cangjie does exist, he should be the organizer or promulgator of writing.
The earliest carved symbols are more than 8,000 years ago
In recent decades, the Chinese archaeological community has released a series of unearthed materials that are earlier than the oracle bone inscriptions at the Yin Ruins in Anyang and related to the origin of Chinese characters. These materials mainly refer to the engraved or painted symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and early historical society. They also include a small amount of symbols engraved on oracle bones, jades, stone tools, etc. It can be said that they all provide new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters.
By systematically examining and comparing the engraved symbols on pottery shards unearthed from more than 100 sites of 19 archaeological cultures throughout China, Wang Yunzhi, a doctoral supervisor at Zhengzhou University, believes that: China’s earliest engraved symbols Appeared at the Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan, it has a history of more than 8,000 years.
As a professional worker, he tried to further analyze these original materials through scientific means, such as the comprehensive use of some basic methods such as archeology, ancient writing morphology, comparative philology, technological archeology, and high-tech means. After a comprehensive sorting, some clues about the occurrence and development of Chinese characters before the writing of the Shang Dynasty were revealed.
However, the situation is not that simple. In addition to the existing small materials from the Zhengzhou Shangcheng site and the Xiaoshuangqiao site (more than 10 examples of early Shang Dynasty Zhu Shu and pottery inscriptions have been discovered at this site in recent years), they can be directly compared with the Yin Ruins inscriptions. Compared with the sequence, other symbols from before the Shang Dynasty are scattered and scattered, with many missing links from each other, and most of the symbols are inconsistent with the characters of the Shang Dynasty. There are also some symbols with strong regional colors and complex backgrounds.
The Chinese character system was formally formed in the Central Plains region
Wang Yunzhi believes that the formal formation of the Chinese character system should be in the Central Plains region. Chinese characters are a writing system with independent origin. It does not depend on any foreign characters for its existence. However, its origin is not single. It has gone through multiple and long-term development. About the time of entering the Xia Dynasty, the ancestors began to write Chinese characters. Based on the extensive experience of absorbing and using early symbols, he creatively invented a text symbol system for recording language. At that time, the Chinese character system matured relatively quickly.
It is reported that judging from the text materials unearthed from archaeological excavations, China already had formal writing at least in the Yuxia period. For example, in recent years, archaeologists have unearthed a piece of writing at the Taosi Temple site in Xiangfen, Shanxi. On the flat pottery pot, the word "文" written in calligraphy and ink was found. These symbols all belong to the basic configuration of early writing systems. Unfortunately, such unearthed writing information is still scarce.
Writing first matured in the Shang Dynasty
As far as the Yin and Shang written materials currently known and seen, there are many categories of writing carriers. In addition to writing on slips with brushes, the other main means of writing at that time were inscriptions on turtle shells and animal bones, pottery, jade, and pottery casting on bronzes.
The written materials of the Shang Dynasty are mainly based on the oracle bones and bronze ritual vessels used for divination in the Yin Ruins. It is the earliest mature writing discovered in China so far.
The characters of the Shang Dynasty reflected in the Yinxu period are not only reflected in the large number of characters and rich materials, but also in the way of character creation that has formed its own characteristics and rules. The structural characteristics of the basic characters of the Shang Dynasty can be divided into four categories: taking the physical characteristics of the human body and a certain part of the human body as the basis for character construction; taking the creations and objects of labor as the basis for character construction; taking the images of animals and livestock as the basis for character construction; take natural objects as the basis for character construction. From the perspective of the cultural connotation of the configuration, we can see that the objects chosen by these earlier and mature glyphs are quite close to the social life of our ancestors and have strong realistic characteristics. At the same time, the content described by these glyphs involves all aspects of human and nature, so it also has the characteristics of a wide range of sources of configuration.
1. Oracle bone inscriptions
Oracle bone inscriptions are written in the Yin and Shang Dynasties and are used by only a few divination historians. It is mainly written on turtle shell animal bones with a knife. Because the bones of tortoise shells are hard, the strokes are mostly straight and rarely round. Because the oracle bone inscriptions are carved with a sharp knife, the lines are thin and even. Oracle bone inscriptions are the earliest Chinese characters and have the characteristics of early Chinese characters: they are highly pictorial, have no fixed writing style, vary in size, and are highly random.
2． Bronze inscriptions
Bronze inscriptions, also called bell and tripod inscriptions, were popular in the Western Zhou Dynasty. It is a text engraved on bronze. The shape and structure of bronze inscriptions are similar to oracle bone inscriptions. Because bronze inscriptions are made by carving characters on molds and then casting them, it is easier to write. Therefore, its strokes are characterized by rounded characters and uniform sizes. The pictographic quality is lower than that of oracle bone inscriptions, and the stereotyping of characters has been improved, but there are still more variant characters.
3. The word "Zhuan" in "Shuowen Jie Zi" is taught as "citation of books". Duan Yucai notes: "The person who introduces books draws the pen and writes on bamboo and silk." It can be seen that the word "seal", Contains the meaning of "writing". Seal script can be divided into large and small seal scripts. Dazhuan is a kind of writing written by King Zhou Xuan in the late Western Zhou Dynasty, also known as Zhouwen. It has the same type as the stone drum script of Qin during the Warring States Period and the literacy textbook "Shi Zhoupian" used by King Zhou Xuan. The physical characteristics are generally consistent with the bronze inscriptions, with the characteristics of numerous strokes. The broad seal script refers to the oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, and inscriptions written before the Qin Dynasty, as well as the ancient inscriptions popular in the Six Kingdoms (Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, and Wei) during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. The unified font promulgated in the Qin Dynasty was modified by Li Si and others after sorting out the text. Because it is an officially issued unified font, it has been organized and simplified, so the number of variant characters has been greatly reduced, and the font shape is rectangular, laying the foundation for the "square shape" of Chinese characters. The small seal strokes are more symmetrical and neat, the lines are consistent in thickness, more rounded, the symbolism is enhanced, and the pictorial meaning is greatly disappeared. Because Xiaozhuan is simplified on the basis of Dazhuan, it is generally said that Xiaozhuan is the simplified form of Dazhuan.
Xiaozhuan calligraphy: The pines beside the wild crane's nest are the oldest, the rain has begun to clear on the cactus, the river flows with sound, and the bank is broken thousands of feet
4. Official script
Official script originated in the Qin Dynasty and became popular in the Han Dynasty. In the Qin Dynasty, official script and Xiaozhuan were used in parallel, and they were a convenient script for scribes to copy official documents on a daily basis. Xiaozhuan is difficult to write and cannot meet the needs of official documents in the Qin Dynasty. It is mostly used in more formal occasions. In order to facilitate and quickly write, the official script changed the round and even lines of the small seal script into square, folded, straight and thick strokes; the vertical and cohesive structure style of the small seal script was changed to a horizontal, flat and stretched style; at this time, the official script became no longer pictographic Chinese character symbols. The official script changed the fonts of Chinese characters tremendously. Therefore, the "official script" became the dividing line between ancient and modern Chinese characters. The Chinese characters before Xiaozhuan are ancient Chinese characters. Their most common characteristics are that they are strong in iconography and poor in stereotypes. The characters are composed of lines and there are no strokes, the elements that form characters. The Chinese characters after the official script are the modern Chinese characters. The characteristics of modern Chinese characters are that they are highly symbolic and stereotyped, and the characters are composed of a limited variety of strokes. In the Han Dynasty, official script replaced Xiaozhuan and became the official writing style, also known as "Han Li" (also known as modern official script). Han Li writing styles are diverse, one is mainly square pen, such as "Zhang Qian Stele"; the other is mainly round pen, such as "Cao Quan Stele". The Six Books of Principles of Character Creation are the basic principles of Chinese character composition. The Six Books were mentioned in Zhou Rites, but the specific content was not explained.
In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the construction principles of Chinese characters of "Six Books" in "Shuowen Jiezi": pictogram, referring to things, understanding, pictophonetic, transliteration, and pretense.
Pictographic: This method of making characters is to depict the object according to its appearance characteristics. The so-called painting is to follow the object. The four characters such as sun, moon, mountain, and water were originally used to depict the sun, moon, mountain, and water, and later gradually evolved into the current shape.
Referring to things: This refers to the method of expressing abstract things. The so-called "each refers to his own thing and thinks of it". For example, people write "upper" above it, and people write "xiao" below it.
Phonetic: This is a unique sound represented by a specific shape (root) in the text. For example: Hu, this character can also be a root. Combined with different attribute roots, it can be synthesized into: butterfly, butterfly, lake, gourd, hu, 鐐, etc., with the same pronunciation (some only have the same initial consonants) , expressing different things. However, due to changes in the phonology of ancient and modern languages, many pictophonetic characters of the same type in ancient times no longer have the same phonemes in today's Mandarin.
Knowing: This word-making method is to combine two radicals to derive new meanings. For example, when "sun" and "moon" are combined, sunlight plus moonlight becomes "bright". The word "人" and the word "言" are combined into the word "信", which means what a person has said in the past; "faith" means that the person always abides by what he has said.
Annotation: This is used when two words are annotations for each other, which are synonymous with each other but have different shapes. Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty explained: "To build a similar poem, we agree to accept each other, and it is always the same thing." , how do you say this? These two words, "kao" in ancient times, can be used as "longevity". "Lao" and "kao" are connected and have the same meaning. That is to say, the old person is kao, and the person who is kao is old. The Book of Songs' "Daya? 6? 1? Pu" also says: "The longevity test of the king of Zhou.". Su Shi's "Poetry on Qu Yuan Pagoda" also has ancients who are immortal, so why bother to test. One word. The words "kao" and "kao" all mean "old". It is particularly noteworthy that later generations of philologists also made a lot of explanations for Xu Shen's aforementioned definitions. These include "Xing Zhuo theory, Sheng Zhuo theory, and Yi Zhuo theory." "Three categories, but some people think that these three views are not comprehensive enough. Mr. Lin Yu, a contemporary ancient calligrapher, also explained that "zhuanzhu" is a form (root) that records two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. For example, "broom and" "Woman" and "Mother and daughter" in oracle bone inscriptions, etc.
Borrowing: In short, this method is to borrow a word to express other things. Generally speaking, there is an indescribable new Things are borrowed from a root with similar pronunciation or similar attributes to express this new thing. For example: "you" originally refers to the right hand (first seen in oracle bone inscriptions), but was later borrowed to mean "also". The original meaning of "smell" is to listen to things with ears. For example, in "University·Chapter 7" there is "turn a blind eye, hear but not hear, eat without knowing the taste", but it was later used as a verb for smell (although some people think this is a misuse). ).
To summarize the above six books, the first two are "methods of making characters"; the second two are "methods of forming characters"; the last two are "methods of using characters". The principle is a theory of Chinese characters summarized by ancient philology scholars. It has evolved over a long period of time and is not the original creation of any one person. The structure of Chinese characters consists of one or more radicals in a two-dimensional manner. (European languages ??are one-dimensional characters) arranged in a square in a specific space, so they are also called square characters. From a structural point of view, Chinese characters have the following characteristics:
There are The high information density means that when expressing the same thing, the same message can be expressed in a shorter length than phonetic characters, so the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high.
One Chinese character consists of more than 400 characters. The ideographic letters are basic radicals, such as gold, wood, water, fire, earth, etc., which are combined like building blocks.
The meaning of an unknown character can be broken down to form radicals and spaces. The configuration infers the meaning of the word. When the evolution of the times creates new things that are difficult to express in words, new words can also be synthesized based on the principle of root combination. For example, the Chinese word "uranium" is used in modern times to express a new discovery. A word newly coined from a chemical element.
The spatial arrangement of Chinese character roots has an impact on the meaning of the characters: For example, if it is also a combination of "心与死", the left and right rows are "busy", and the upper and lower rows are "forget". Different arrangements lead to different meanings. ; There is a component of the character "乂" on the right side of the text, which means that the right hand (the left radical of the hand represents the left hand) is holding something and doing something to the root of the left character (discovered by archaeological discoveries in bronze inscriptions and oracle bone inscriptions). If you hold something on the right hand, it becomes "攵", with this root, is almost always aggressive or using violence to achieve something, such as attacking, defeating, knocking, collecting, scattering, politics, animal husbandry, edict, etc. Font form (Chinese calligraphy): The strokes of the Chinese character "国" can be written in various ways, that is, they have different fonts; different fonts have different glyphs of Chinese characters.
Chinese characters written in regular fonts (such as regular script, Song style, official script, seal script, etc.) are square characters, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters include single characters and combined characters. Single characters cannot be separated, such as "文", "中", etc.; combined characters are composed of basic components and account for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of combined characters include: upper and lower structures, such as "xiao" and "jian"; left and right structures, such as "ci" and "ke"; semi-enclosed structures, such as "同" and "成"; full-enclosed structures, such as "Tuan", "Hui"; compound structures, such as "Win", "Ban", etc. The basic components of Chinese characters include single characters, radicals and other uncharacterized components.
The smallest unit of Chinese characters is the stroke.
When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the "stroke order", are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontally and then vertically, first left and then flattened, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside then inside, first outside then inside before sealing, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters in different writing styles may be different. Pronunciation: Chinese characters are a unique writing system for many dialects, and each character represents a syllable. Mainland China now uses Mandarin as the standard pronunciation. The syllables of Mandarin are determined by an initial consonant, a final and a tone. More than 1,300 syllables are actually used. Due to the large number of Chinese characters, there is an obvious phenomenon of homophones; at the same time, there are also situations where the same character has multiple sounds, which is called polyphone. This situation is common in various Chinese languages.
Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common ones are names of people and places, followed by transliterations of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original phonetic words, such as "woo hoo", "haha" and so on. But even so, there are still certain ideographic elements, especially the names of people and places in the country. Even for foreign names of people and places, there are certain bottom lines of meaning. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated into "immortal".
Because Chinese characters themselves do not represent sounds, although the number and writing methods of Chinese characters have changed from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, the changes in pronunciation cannot be seen. Special research is necessary to speculate on their pronunciation in Old and Middle Chinese. Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, a Chinese character was pronounced as two syllables, a minor syllable and a major syllable, similar to today's Korean and Japanese.
The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic pronunciation" and "training pronunciation". One character often has many pronunciations, which comes from the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China in different periods.
In Korean, it is roughly one word for one sound, and there is no training in reading.
In addition to Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters also use some polysyllabic characters, such as "浬" (nautical mile), "嗧" (gallon), "瓩" (kilowatt), etc. However, it is basically no longer used in mainland China due to official abolishment. It is still used in Taiwan, and ordinary people understand its meaning. Phonetic notation: The earliest phonetic notation methods are Duruo method and Zhizhu method. To read Ruofa is to use words with similar sounds to notate the pronunciation. Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi uses this phonetic notation method, such as "廻, she is also a pronunciation, and the pronunciation is accurate". The direct annotation method is to use another Chinese character to indicate the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, in "The woman is the one who talks about herself," the phonetic notation is done with "the speaker is Yue".
The above two methods have inherent imperfections. Some words do not have homophones or the homophones are too rare, which makes it difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "Socks Yinshao" and so on.
Fanqie method was developed during the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit using pinyin script.
The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be annotated by the fanqie method, that is, the initial consonant of the first character and the final and tone of the second character are combined to notate the pronunciation, making it possible to combine the pronunciations of all Chinese characters. For example, "Lian, Langdianqie" means that the pronunciation of "Lian" is made up of the initial consonant of "Lang" and the final and tone of "Dian".
In modern times, phonetic symbols in the form of Chinese characters and many Latin alphabet phonetic notation methods have been developed. Phonetic notation is still part of teaching in Taiwan, but currently the most widely used in mainland China is Hanyu Pinyin.
Since Chinese characters mainly express their own meanings, their phonetic notation is relatively weak. This feature prevents documents dating back thousands of years from being too disparate in wording and phrasing like the Western world that uses pinyin writing, but it also makes it difficult to infer ancient pronunciation. For example, "Pang" derives its sound from "龙", but in today's Beijing dialect, the former is pronounced "páng" and the latter is pronounced "lóng". How to explain such a difference is that there is no accurate number of Chinese characters in the topic discussed in phonology. There are about nearly one hundred thousand (the Chinese character library of Beijing Guoan Consulting Equipment Company has 91,251 Chinese characters). The Chinese characters used in daily life Only a few thousand words. According to statistics, 1,000 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%. The statistical results of simplified and traditional Chinese are not much different.
The total number of Chinese characters that have appeared in history is more than 80,000 (some say there are more than 60,000), most of which are variant characters and rare characters. The vast majority of variant characters and rare characters have died out naturally or been standardized. Except for ancient Chinese characters, they generally only appear occasionally in names of people and places. In addition, following the first batch of simplified characters, there are also a batch of "two simplified characters" that have been abolished, but there are still a small number of characters that are popular in society.
The first statistics on the number of Chinese characters was conducted by Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty in "Shuowen Jiezi", which included 9353 characters. Later, the "Yupian" written by King Gu Ye of the Southern Dynasties was recorded to contain 16,917 words, and the "Daguangyihui Yupian" revised on this basis was said to have 22,726 words. After that, Lei Pian, compiled by officials of the Song Dynasty, contained more characters, with 31,319 characters; Ji Yun, another book compiled by officials of the Song Dynasty, contained 53,525 characters, which was once the book with the most characters.
In addition, some dictionaries include more characters, such as the "Kangxi Dictionary" of the Qing Dynasty, which contains 47,035 characters; Japan's "Dahanwa Dictionary", which contains 48,902 characters, and 1,062 appendixes; Taiwan's "Chinese Dictionary" "Big Dictionary" contains 49,905 characters; "Big Chinese Dictionary" contains 54,678 characters. The book with the largest number of published words in the 20th century was "Chinese Character Ocean", containing 85,000 words.
Among the Chinese character computer coding standards, the current largest Chinese character coding is Taiwan’s “National Standard” CNS11643. Currently (4.0) *** includes 76 verifiable traditional, simplified, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters. , 067, but it is not popular and is only used in a few environments such as household administration systems. The Big Five code commonly used by Taiwan and Hong Kong contains 13,053 traditional Chinese characters. GB18030 is the latest internal code character set of the People's Republic of China. GBK contains 20,912 simplified, traditional, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters, while the early GB2312 contains 6,763 simplified Chinese characters. Unicode's basic Chinese, Japanese and Korean unified ideographic character set contains 20,902 Chinese characters, and there are two extension areas, with a total of more than 70,000 characters.
The initial Chinese character system did not have enough characters, and many things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the expression of the characters. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through stages of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters. The meaning that a single Chinese character can represent is limited, so many single Chinese meanings are represented by Chinese words, such as common two-character words. The current development of Chinese writing is mostly directed towards the creation of new words rather than new characters. /view/1712.htm?fr=ala0