trait
Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world, and they are written symbols to record events. Formally, it has gradually changed from a figure to a square symbol composed of strokes, so Chinese characters are generally called "square characters". It has developed from hieroglyphics (ideographs) to phonetic symbols with both sound and meaning, but the overall system is still ideographs. Therefore, Chinese characters have the characteristics of integrating image, sound and meaning. This feature is unique in world writing, so it has unique charm. Chinese characters are the treasure of China's culture for thousands of years, and they are also our lifelong mentor and friend, and everyone's spiritual home. Chinese characters can often arouse our wonderful and bold associations and give people beautiful enjoyment.
2. Advantages
Chinese characters are the most widely used characters in the world. According to statistics, the number of people who use Chinese characters and Chinese has reached more than 65.438+0.5 billion.
Chinese characters are the oldest characters still in use. The earliest Chinese characters that can be seen and read now are Oracle Bone Inscriptions more than 3,000 years ago. This is a fairly mature system of Chinese characters.
Chinese character
There is no writing in the world that has gone through many vicissitudes like Chinese characters and is still young. The sacred script of ancient Egypt 5000 years ago is one of the earliest scripts of human beings. But then it died out, and the recorded ancient Egyptian culture was buried deep. Sumerian cuneiform also has a history of 5000 years. But after 330 AD, it also died out. The famous figures who declined in history include Maya and Boromir. Chinese characters not only have a long history, but also have a growing influence.
1. Chinese characters are one of the most beautiful characters.
Chinese characters have one character and one sound, and each sound is divided into four sounds. Therefore, it is the most beautiful language in the world because of its loud and clear reading, euphemism and beautiful rhythm. Poetry written in this language has a sharp and melodious aesthetic feeling, especially poetry, which pays attention to the level and level. So poetry can be particularly neat, rhythmic and catchy.
Because Chinese characters are pronounced loudly and have no light consonants, the advantages of Chinese characters in "man-machine dialogue" are obvious. Some people predict that 2 1 century will be "the century of Chinese characters".
Chinese characters are also one of the most beautiful characters.
How beautiful is it? It has become an art-calligraphy art, and the calligraphy art of Chinese characters can't be compared with any other words. The following ancient calligraphy works have become priceless.
Chinese characters are easy to recognize.
The field of vision of human eyes is always a surface, not a line, so linear arrangement is difficult to identify; Form a square at a glance. Pinyin text = linear text; Chinese character = box symbol. Chinese characters are more efficient than pinyin characters in reading.
4. Chinese characters are easy to understand and relevant.
Please compare the following Chinese and English words:
Chinese words and English words
ox
Bull bull
Cow cow
Calf calf
milk
Although the meanings of these six English words are all related to cows, writing and reading are "irrelevant". If you want to know them, you have to learn them one by one and remember them one by one. This is irregular. As for Chinese characters, as long as you know the word "cow", you will know that all words with "cow" are related to cows. Because Chinese characters have strong word-formation ability, if you know a certain number of Chinese characters, you will know countless words. Even if new words are produced, they are based on old words, and their meanings are easy to understand.
The disadvantage is that in mathematical physics and other scientific disciplines, the expression is very weak and complicated, such as operation, and only Arabic numerals and symbols can be used.
Only symbols can be used in mechanical building drawings.
More than 70 years ago, Mr. Lu Xun said: Square Chinese characters are "a nodule on the working people in China" and "a sharp weapon of obscurantism policy". Therefore, "China means that there are no words, and the proposal of Latinization has grasped the key to solving the problem", and "If you don't want everyone to sacrifice the old words, you have to sacrifice the old words". The weakness in China's modern history caused people's lack of confidence in its traditional culture. Even Lu Xun and Hu Shizhi can't avoid customs.
5. The characteristics of Chinese characters are intuition and expressiveness.
Chinese characters are hieroglyphics, and their distinctive features are closely related in form and meaning, and their intuitive meaning is obvious.
The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes it the only character in the world that can span time and space. Only children in China can read the Book of Songs 2,500 years ago and recite "Pigeons in Guanguan, in Jiangzhou, my fair lady, a good gentleman"; Only textbooks in China can use Tang poetry and Song poetry as the enlightenment materials that children must read. English three or four hundred years ago was difficult for others to understand except experts. It can be seen that Chinese characters are more conducive to readers to form a direct connection between form and meaning.
The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes it the most informative character in the world, so it is easy to identify and associate, which also brings great convenience to speed up reading.
Modern fast reading method was first produced and developed in Europe and America. Their characters all have one feature-they are phonetic pinyin characters, and a single letter is meaningless. Only a few letters are combined into a word. In this way, when reading, it conforms to the chunking principle of cognitive psychology, so it is conducive to fast reading. But our writing is ideographic, which is completely different from pinyin. So, can reading materials composed of Chinese and Chinese characters be read quickly? The answer is of course very affirmative: Chinese and Chinese characters are not only suitable for fast reading, but also suitable for fast reading. Specifically, there are mainly the following aspects:
First of all, the ideographic nature of Chinese characters facilitates the mutual understanding of form and meaning, which provides a natural advantage for fast reading;
Secondly, Chinese characters, as morphemes, have strong word-formation ability and concentrated common words, which provides convenience for fast reading;
Thirdly, Chinese characters, as pinyin characters, have obvious differences in homophones, which is also a favorable condition for fast reading;
Fourth, the writing form of Chinese characters is convenient for overall cognition and fast reading;
Fifth, Chinese characters, as compound brain characters, give full play to the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain;
Finally, the parataxis of Chinese grammar makes it concise, easy to master, easy to read quickly and intuitive.
Chinese characters are different from other languages in the world, which is the particularity of Chinese grammar itself, that is, parataxis Whether phrases are combined into sentences or simple sentences are combined into complex sentences, the first consideration is often the combination of semantics rather than the use of grammatical forms. As long as several key words carrying important information are roughly matched in meaning, communication purposes can be achieved concisely, and these words can be combined together, which is called "parataxis". This feature of Chinese grammar makes it unique in structure, flexible and changeable, with many meanings and emphasis on conception. Its parataxis, flexibility and conciseness are unmatched by other languages. The above characteristics of Chinese grammar are helpful for us to perceive and understand through tacit means in reading, which is very convenient for speeding up reading.
The above six characteristics of Chinese characters undoubtedly make them have considerable advantages over Pinyin in reading psychology, and make the written language of Chinese characters have higher speed and efficiency in all aspects of perception and understanding, so as to realize the coordinated development of reading speed, understanding speed and memory speed and read quickly.
Step 3 limit
Chinese information processing Because the typewriter keyboard itself does not consider the input of Chinese characters, the input of Chinese characters is often more difficult than pinyin characters. Chinese characters have not been popularized by Chinese typewriters, but have directly entered the stage of computer Chinese information processing. In the early days of computer invention, the question of whether Chinese characters can adapt to the computer age arose, and scholars who supported the Latinization of Chinese characters even took this as a reason.
With the emergence of various Chinese input methods, the computer input, storage and output technologies of Chinese characters have been basically solved, greatly improving the efficiency of Chinese writing, publishing and information retrieval. At present, there are thousands of Chinese input methods, mainly pinyin input and table input, and some of them are both. Chinese pinyin input, handwriting recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) technology have also been widely used.
Step 4 communicate
1. The influence of Chinese characters on Japanese characters
Although the Japanese nation has an ancient culture, it is quite late to create its own characters. For a long time, its people have used Chinese characters as a carrier to spread their thoughts and express their feelings, which is called "real name". At the beginning of the fifth century, there appeared a kind of phonetic alphabet borrowed from Chinese characters in Japan, which was called "pseudonym". In the 8th century, Japanese pronunciation marked with Chinese characters was relatively fixed, and its symbol was the compilation of Ye Wan Collection, so it was called "Ye Wan's pen name". It is the basis of pure Japanese phonetic writing.
Foreign friends tattoo
The final creation of Japanese characters was completed by Kibi No Asomi Makibi and master Kong Hai. Both of them lived in the Tang Dynasty in China for a long time and had a deep study of Chinese characters. The former creates Japanese "katakana" according to the radicals of standard pinyin Chinese characters, while the latter creates Japanese "hiragana" by using Chinese characters. Although pseudonyms have been popular in Japan since the tenth century, the use of Chinese characters has not been abolished. Today, Japanese characters, which have occupied an important position in the world, still retain more than 1000 simplified characters.
2. The influence of Chinese characters on Korean characters
Korean characters are called proverbs. Its creation and application is an important achievement of ancient Korean culture. In fact, South Korea in the Middle Ages, like Japan, did not have its own characters, but used Chinese characters. Silla changed slightly after reunification. At that time, Xue Cong once created "official reading", that is, using Chinese characters to represent Korean auxiliary words and verbs to assist reading chinese books. Finally, because of different languages, it cannot be popularized. In the early years of the Li Dynasty, Sejong set up a proverb bureau in the palace to make Zheng Linzhi, Cheng Sanwen and others formulate proverbs. According to China's phonology, they studied Korean phonetics, created 1 1 vowels and 17 consonants, and published and used "Training People in Andrew" in A.D. 1443. North Korea has its own writing since then.
3. The influence of Chinese characters on Vietnamese characters
10 century ago, Viet Nam was once a county in China. Officials from Qin, Han, Sui and Tang Dou ruled here, so they were deeply influenced by China culture. After Vietnam's independence, Chinese characters have been used as a tool for upper-class communication, school education and literary works. It was not until the13rd century that Vietnam had its own word "South". Zinan is a new word based on Chinese characters, which expresses Vietnamese pronunciation by pictophonetic characters, loanwords and literacy. By the 15th century, southern characters had spread all over the country, completely replacing Chinese characters.
word number
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.
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 variant characters and uncommon words have naturally disappeared or been standardized, and generally only occasionally appear in names and places other than ancient Chinese. 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.
origin
From the creation of characters in Cangjie to the discovery of Oracle Bone Inscriptions by Wang in Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty, scholars in China have been devoted to uncovering the origin of Chinese characters.
oracle bone script
Mysterious. There are many theories about the origin of Chinese characters in China ancient literature, such as story telling, knot tying, gossip, picture telling and calligraphy contract telling. It is also widely recorded in ancient books that Cang Xie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters. Modern scholars believe that systematic writing tools cannot be completely created by one person. If Cang Xie really exists, he should be a text organizer or publisher.
In recent decades, Chinese archaeologists have published a series of unearthed materials about the origin of Chinese characters earlier than Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Anyang 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.
Wang, a doctoral supervisor of Zhengzhou University, made a systematic investigation and comparison of the carved symbols on pottery pieces unearthed from more than 9 archaeological and cultural sites in China 100, and thought that the earliest carved symbols in China appeared in Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan Province, with a history of more than 8,000 years. These original materials are comprehensively sorted out in order to compare the occurrence and development of Chinese characters before Shang Dynasty. However, the situation is not so simple. In addition to the existing small-scale data of Zhengzhou Shangcheng site and Xiaoshuangqiao site (in recent years, more than 10 cases of Zhu Shutao's early characters of Shang Dynasty have been found), other symbols before Shang Dynasty are scattered and lack of contact with each other, and most of them are out of touch with Shang Dynasty characters. There are also some symbols with heavy regional colors and complex backgrounds.
Wang formally formed in the Central Plains, and believed that the formal formation of the Chinese character system should be in the Central Plains. Chinese characters are a writing system of independent origin, independent of any foreign language. However, its origin is not single. After many times and long-term running-in, probably in the early summer, our ancestors creatively invented the writing symbol system of recording language on the basis of extensively absorbing and using early symbols. At that time, the Chinese character system matured rapidly.
It is reported that according to the written materials unearthed from archaeological excavations, China had formal written materials at least in the Xia Dynasty. For example, in recent years, archaeologists have found the word "Wen" in writing brush and calligraphy on a flat pottery jar unearthed from the Taosi site in Xiangfen, Shanxi. These symbols belong to the basic configuration in the early writing system, but unfortunately such unearthed writing materials are still rare.
About 6000 years ago, there were more than 50 kinds of carved symbols on the outer wall of pottery in Yangshao cultural sites such as Banpo site. They are well-planned, regular and have the characteristics of simplified Chinese characters, which may be the bud of Chinese characters.
On the pottery in the late period of Dahankou cultural site and Jin Liang cultural site about four or five thousand years ago, it was found that there were relatively neat graphic descriptions, which were early graphic characters.
In the early 1980s, more complete characters were found on the pottery unearthed from the Xia cultural site in Dengfeng, Henan. This is the earliest written language with exact time confirmed by scholars in China so far.
In Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the commonly used 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.
At present, 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. In Dialectical Development of Ancient Chinese Characters, tui Guo Moruo pointed out: "When did Chinese characters actually 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? Still in the contention of a hundred schools of thought, it seems that a lot of materials are needed to prove it! At present, the earliest recognized characters in the world are cuneiform characters that appeared in the ancient Middle East, 5000-6000 years ago. However, some symbols carved on tortoise shells found in Jia Hu, Henan Province can be traced back to 8000 years ago [2].
Six categories of Chinese characters
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 the present shape.
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.
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. Arrogance is "smelly"; The "rich" have fields, and the "poor" work by "strength"; The traditional meaning of "cheap" is "cheap"; The two "brothers" on the right are naturally "cheap" because they are fighting for money.
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. Now "a scholar can only read half" has become an irony for "a scholar" 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.
Because their glyphs have changed greatly, we can't see their origins now. 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. There was no such word in ancient China, but it didn't appear until the 1920s of 19.
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? In ancient times, the word "test" could be used to mean "longevity", and "old" and "test" had the same meaning, that is, the so-called old people took the test and the candidates were old. The Book of Songs, Elegant? Bai 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.
develop
The evolution of Chinese characters has gone through thousands of years, including Oracle Bone Inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, seal script, official script, regular script, etc., and it has not yet been fully finalized.
Chinese characters were written in ancient times, before the Han Dynasty. More vivid.
Warring States Period text: "The princes are in power, not unified with the monarch, and evil rituals and music harm themselves, all of which go to their classics." "Different fields, different car paintings, different methods, different clothes and different words." It has a strong regional character.
The mainstream of the development of Qin characters and Chinese characters.
There are great regional differences in the characters of the six countries, which do not reflect the development track of Chinese characters and are tributaries.
1, Oracle Bone Inscriptions
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2. Jinwen
3. Big seal script
4. Xiao zhuan
5. Official script
6. Regular script
7. Running script
8, cursive script
I can only say so much, I hope you can understand. I hope everyone can adopt my answer, thank you! )