Chinese characters, also known as Chinese characters, Chinese characters, and national characters, are a kind of characters widely used in the Chinese character cultural circle. They are morpheme-syllabic characters of ideographic characters. They were invented, created and improved by the Chinese people in ancient times. , the current exact history can be traced back to the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty around 1300 BC. Then to the small seal script of the Qin Dynasty, it was not named "Chinese characters" until the Han Dynasty. In the Tang Dynasty, regular script became the standard for handwriting used today - regular script. Chinese characters are the longest-lasting major script in use so far, and they are also the only characters among the major writing systems in ancient times that have been passed down to this day. Some scholars believe that Chinese characters are one of the key elements that maintain the long-term unity of northern and southern China. Some scholars also list Chinese characters as It is China’s fifth greatest invention. Chinese characters have been the main official text in all dynasties of China. Overview
Regarding the history of Chinese characters, based on existing ancient documentary records and now confirmed archaeological discoveries, it has a history of at least four to five thousand years, and the history of the origin of Chinese characters is the beginning of ancient Chinese civilization. , so we usually say that the Chinese nation has a history of 5,000 years of civilization? Archaeological and documentary records indicate that Chinese characters originated during the Yangshao Culture period, around 4000 BC. The character accumulation stage began in 2000 BC, and a considerable writing system was formed in the early Shang Dynasty [1].
Simplified Chinese characters
Chinese characters, derived from the Han nationality of the Chinese nation, are the most popular and widespread type of writing. During the evolution of Chinese characters over thousands of years, many differences have emerged. After the founding of New China, in the 1950s, a specialized agency was organized to standardize the shape, sound, and meaning of Chinese characters, commonly known as "simplified characters" (Chinese characters before the 1950s were commonly known as "traditional characters"), and Use reference books such as "Xinhua Dictionary" and "Modern Chinese Dictionary" to popularize and promote simplified Chinese characters and traditional (different) characters in these reference books. Currently, simplified characters are used in mainland China, while "traditional characters" are still used in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and other regions. Chinese characters are non-pinyin characters. In terms of writing, they are obviously different from pinyin characters. Even in China's neighboring countries, great changes have taken place. Take "Chinese characters" as an example: Simplified characters: Chinese characters Traditional characters: Chinese Pinyin: hàn zì Japanese: Chinese characters (かんじ) Wu language: Chinese character (hoe zy) Korean: ? (han ja) Vietnamese: Ti?ng Trung Qu?c English: Chinese character German: chinesische Schrift Russian: Китайский French: Chinois Arabic: ? Polish : Chiński Danish: Kinesisk Filipino: Intsik Portuguese: Chinês Greek: Κιν?ζικα Italian: Cinese Indonesian: Cina Hungarian: kínai írásjegy Finnish: Kiinalainen merkki
Features
Chinese characters are one of the oldest writing systems in the world. They are the written symbols that record the Chinese language. The shape gradually changes from graphics to square symbols composed of strokes, so Chinese characters are generally called "square characters". It evolved from hieroglyphics (graphic characters) into phonetic characters that also represent phonetic and meaning sounds, but the overall system is still ideographic. Therefore, Chinese characters have the characteristics of integrating image, sound and meaning. This feature is unique among world texts, so it has a unique charm. Chinese characters are the treasure of the Chinese nation’s thousands of years of culture, our lifelong mentors and helpful friends, and everyone’s spiritual home. Chinese characters can often evoke wonderful and bold associations in us, giving people a beautiful enjoyment. Wang Xizhi’s calligraphy
1. Non-Pinyin scripts. Among the scripts used in the world today, Chinese characters and Shuishi scripts are non-Pinyin scripts.
In the history of mankind, writings earlier than Chinese characters include the nail-head writings of Mesopotamia and the holy writings of Egypt. However, they have long since become extinct, so Chinese characters are currently the oldest writings. The scripts used in various countries around the world are divided into two categories, namely non-pinyin scripts (Chinese characters) and Shuishi and pinyin scripts (other scripts). Some people say that Chinese characters are China's five great inventions and a miracle. Among today's writings, only Chinese characters were directly created by our ancestors. Legend has it that the Sanskrit alphabet was created and given to humans by the god Brahma, but other characters were borrowed from other nations. The Sanskrit alphabet is used to spell ancient Sanskrit and many modern Indian languages ??and Nepali. The Latin alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Arabic alphabet are known as the three major alphabet systems in the world. English, French, Italian, etc. use Latin letters, which can be seen as borrowing from Latin letters; Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. use Kirill letters (or Slavic letters), which are modified from Greek letters; Latin letters are also Greek It is formed by transforming letters. The ancestor of the Arabic alphabet, the Aramaic alphabet, and the ancestor of the Greek alphabet, the Canaanite alphabet, were not directly created by their ancestors, but borrowed from the writing of the Semites (small square Semites). Square Semitic alphabet). According to research by mainland linguist Zhou Youguang, the earliest human alphabet is the small square Semitic alphabet. However, this alphabet was not directly created by them, but was borrowed from the nail-head writing of the Sumerians and modified. The nail-head writing was originally in the shape of a pictographic book, but later evolved into the shape of a nail-head due to the limitations of the writing tools - a small stick and a clay tablet. The nail-head script was created by the Sumerians, the holy book script was created by the Egyptians, the Chinese characters were created by the Chinese, and the water script created by Chinese ethnic minorities are not pinyin scripts. Now among the four, only Chinese characters and water scripts remain, and the other two have disappeared. Another unique feature of Chinese is its supra-dialect and supra-language features. Linguists divide the dialects in various parts of China into eight major dialect areas. Some people say that without Chinese characters, China would have split into dozens of countries. The differences between Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian in Europe are much smaller than the differences between Chinese dialects, but they are never willing to admit that their respective languages ??are different dialects of "Romance languages" because they are all independent country. Chinese characters can also transcend national boundaries. Historically, Vietnam, Korea and Japan all used Chinese characters to record their languages. The Japanese still use a mixture of kanji and kana. The Japanese use Chinese characters and have another major invention, which is to write Chinese characters and read Japanese words. Other countries can do the same if they want to. If this is really done, Chinese characters will become internationally accepted language symbols, just like mathematical symbols, which only represent meaning, not pronunciation. 2. Advantages Chinese characters are the most widely used characters in the world. According to statistics, the number of people using Chinese characters and Chinese language has reached more than 1.5 billion. Chinese characters are the oldest script still in use today. The earliest Chinese characters that can be seen and read now are oracle bone inscriptions more than 3,000 years ago. This is already quite mature and systematic Chinese characters. Chinese characters
There is no writing in the world that has gone through many vicissitudes of life and stays young forever like Chinese characters. The ancient Egyptian holy script written 5,000 years ago is one of the earliest human writings. But it later died out, and the recorded ancient Egyptian culture was deeply buried. Sumerian cuneiform is also 5,000 years old. But after 330 AD, it also died. Famous scripts that have declined in history include Maya, Boromi and so on. Not only have Chinese characters been flourishing for a long time and stand alone among the world's writing systems, they have also continued to develop and their influence has become greater and greater. 1. Chinese characters are one of the most beautiful words in pronunciation. Chinese characters have one sound, and each sound is divided into four tones. Therefore, it is read loud and clear, melodious, rhythmic, and musical. It is the most beautiful language in the world. Poems written in this language have a sonorous, sharp, ups and downs beauty, especially poetry, which pays attention to level and contrast, so the poems can be particularly neat, rhythmic and catchy.
Because the pronunciation of Chinese characters is loud and clear, and there are no light consonants, Chinese characters have obvious advantages in "human-machine dialogue". Some people predict that the 21st century will be the "century of Chinese characters." 2. Chinese characters are also one of the most beautiful characters. How beautiful is it? It has become an art - the art of calligraphy. The art of calligraphy of Chinese characters is unmatched by any other characters. The following ancient calligraphy works have become priceless treasures. 3. Chinese characters are easy to recognize. The human eye's field of view is always a surface, not a line, so the linear arrangement is not easy to identify; the square arrangement is clear at a glance. Pinyin text = linear text; Chinese characters = block text. Chinese characters have higher reading efficiency than Pinyin characters. 4. The meaning of Chinese characters is easy to understand and relevant. Please compare the following set of Chinese and English words: Chinese words, English words, ox, bull, cow, calf, milk. Although the meanings of these six English words are related to cows, when written and pronounced, they sound like "wind, horse, cow". To understand them, one must learn them one by one and memorize them one by one. There is no rule at all. As for Chinese words, as long as you know the word "cow", you will know that all words with "cow" are related to cattle. And because Chinese characters have a strong ability to form words, once you know a certain number of Chinese characters, you will know countless words. Even if new words are generated, they are based on the old characters, and the meanings of the words are easy to understand. The disadvantage is that in science subjects such as mathematics and physics, the expression is very weak and cumbersome. For example, calculations can only be done with the help of Arabic numerals and symbols. In terms of mechanical construction drawings, symbols can only be used. More than seventy years ago, Mr. Lu Xun said: Square Chinese characters "are a nodule on the working people of China" and "a sharp tool for the policy of obscuring the people" ("Qiejieting Essays/About New Characters - Questions and Answers"). Therefore, "China does not have written characters. Only when the proposal of Latinization appeared did we grasp the key to solving the problem." "If we don't want everyone to sacrifice for the old written characters, we have to sacrifice the old written characters." ("Qie Jie Ting's Essays/The Rebirth of Chinese Language"). The weakness in China's modern history has caused Chinese people to be unconfident in their own traditional culture. Even people like Lu Xun and Hu Shi are not immune to this. 5. Characteristics of Chinese characters, intuitive expression of meaning. Chinese characters are pictographic characters, and their distinctive feature is that the shape and meaning of the characters are closely related, and they are obviously intuitive and expressive. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes them the only characters in the world that can transcend time and space. Only Chinese children can still read the "Book of Songs" written 2,500 years ago and recite "Guan Guan Jiu Jiu, on the continent of the river, a graceful lady, a gentleman likes to fight"; only Chinese teaching materials can regard Tang poetry and Song poetry as compulsory reading for children. Enlightenment materials for reading. The English of three or four hundred years ago was difficult for anyone except experts to understand. It can be seen that Chinese characters are more conducive for readers to form a direct connection between "form and meaning". The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes them the characters with the largest amount of information per unit character in the world. Therefore, they are easy to identify and are conducive to association. This also brings great convenience to speed up reading. The modern speed reading method was first produced and developed in European and American countries. Their texts have one unique feature - they are all phonetic pinyin texts. A single letter has no meaning, and only a combination of several letters can make a person read. form words. In this way, when reading, it conforms to the chunking principle of cognitive psychology. So it is conducive to fast reading. But our characters are ideographic characters that are completely different from pinyin characters. So, can reading materials composed of Chinese and Chinese characters be read quickly? The answer is of course a resounding yes: Chinese and Chinese characters are not only suitable for fast reading, but are even better for fast reading.
Specifically speaking, there are the following major aspects: First, the ideographic nature of Chinese characters facilitates the mutual understanding of form and meaning, which provides natural advantages for quick reading; secondly, as morpheme characters, Chinese characters have strong word-formation abilities and are concentrated in commonly used characters, which provide good conditions for quick reading. Convenience; Thirdly, Chinese characters are orthographic characters with obvious differences in homophones and synonyms, which are also favorable conditions for fast reading; Fourthly, the writing form of Chinese characters facilitates overall recognition and is also conducive to fast reading; Fifthly, Chinese characters are complex Brain text recognition and reading give full play to the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain; finally, the syntactic characteristics of Chinese grammar make it concise and concise, easy to comprehend, easy to read quickly, and intuitive to express ideas. Chinese characters have fundamental characteristics that are different from other languages ??in the world. This is the particularity of Chinese grammar itself, that is, meaning combination. Whether words are combined into sentences or single sentences are combined into complex sentences, the first factor to consider is often the coordination of semantics rather than the use of grammatical forms. As long as a few key words carrying important information are roughly matched in meaning, the statement can be concise and comprehensive. To achieve the purpose of communication, these words can be combined together. This is the so-called "ideal combination". This characteristic of Chinese grammar makes it unique in structure, flexible and changeable, with many implications and emphasis on ideas. Its consistency, flexibility and simplicity are unmatched by other languages. The above-mentioned characteristics of Chinese grammar are conducive to our use of cognitive methods to perceive and understand during reading, which is very convenient for speeding up reading. The characteristics of the above six aspects of Chinese characters will undoubtedly give them considerable advantages in reading psychology compared with Pinyin characters, making the written language of Chinese characters have higher speed and efficiency in all aspects of perception and understanding, and can achieve reading speed. , coordinated development of understanding speed and memory speed, and fast reading. Therefore, based on the advantages and disadvantages, I think that Chinese characters will have branches. 1. Based on ancient Chinese, appropriately simplify the writing of some characters, and also restore some simplified and bad traditional writing (such as Han, Ai, Dong). All characters appearing in the future will be pictophonetic characters. Used for expression, especially in areas with strong literary nature. This is the subject. 2. The branch is to absorb numerical and alphabetic symbols to facilitate the development of science subjects, make the expression of operations concise and clear, and avoid the lack of expression of Chinese characters in this aspect. Of course, these cannot be regarded as Chinese characters in the traditional sense, but they are very necessary as an auxiliary. 3. Limitations Chinese information processing Since typewriter keyboards are not designed with Chinese character input in mind, inputting Chinese characters is often more difficult than inputting pinyin text. Chinese characters did not go through the popularization of Chinese typewriters and directly entered the stage of computer Chinese information processing. In the early days of the invention of computers, the question arose of whether Chinese characters could adapt to the computer age. Scholars who supported the Latinization of Chinese characters even used this as an argument. With the emergence of various Chinese input methods, computer input, storage, and output technologies for Chinese characters have been basically solved, greatly improving the efficiency of Chinese writing, publishing, and information retrieval. There are currently thousands of Chinese input methods, which mainly include phonetic input and graphic input, and there are also a combination of both. Speech input of Chinese characters, handwriting recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) technology have also been widely used. For example, GB 2312 (Mainland China), Big5 and CNS 11643 (Taiwan), HKSCS (Hong Kong), JIS (Japan), which contains thousands of words, and GBK (Mainland China), which contains more than 20,000 words, international standards Unicode, ISO 10646 etc. During this process, due to technical and other factors, adjustments may be made at different levels in terms of the number of words included and the fonts included. In order to solve the urgent need for characters in postal services, household registration and other fields, the Chinese government implemented a new national standard for Chinese character encoding in 2000, "Chinese Character Encoding Character Set - Expansion of the Basic Set" GB 18030-2000, which accepts Chinese characters. 27484. And it is mandatory for all computer products sold in mainland China to use this new official standard. Chinese character encoding system In order to exchange information, each region where Chinese characters are used has developed a series of Chinese character set standards. The national standard code ("national standard" is the abbreviation of the National Standard of the People's Republic of China) is used in mainland China.
GB2312 contains 6763 Chinese characters, GBK contains 20912 Chinese characters, and the latest GB18030 contains 27533 Chinese characters. BIG5 code. Contains 13053 Chinese characters. One-byte or two-byte encoding used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Unicode is not well accepted by the Chinese government. The Chinese government requires that software sold in mainland China must support GB18030 encoding. In the field of international communication and software design, CJK encoding collects Chinese character sets in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. 4. Dissemination 1. The influence of Chinese characters on Japanese characters Although the Japanese nation has an ancient culture, the creation of its own characters was quite late. For a long time, its people have used Chinese characters as a carrier to spread their thoughts and express their emotions, calling Chinese characters their "real names". In the early fifth century, phonetic symbols borrowed from Chinese characters called "kana" appeared in Japan. By the eighth century, the use of Chinese characters to mark Japanese pronunciation had become relatively stable, and its symbol was the compilation of the "Man'yoshu", so it was called "Man'yo Kana". It is the basis for pure Japanese phonetic characters. Foreign Friends Tattoo
The final creation of Japanese characters was completed by Kibi Shinbe and Kobo Daishi (Kukai). Both of them had lived in Tang Dynasty China for a long time and had in-depth research on Chinese characters. The former creates Japanese "katakana" based on the phonetic radicals of Chinese characters in regular script, while the latter creates Japanese "hiragana" by using kanji characters in karate script. Although kana writing has been prevalent in Japan since the tenth century, the use of kanji has not ceased. To this day, Japanese writing, which has occupied an important position in the world, still retains more than a thousand simplified Chinese characters. 2． The influence of Chinese characters on Korean characters. Korean characters are called Hangul. Its creation and application is an important achievement of ancient Korean culture. In fact, Korea in the Middle Ages, like Japan, did not have its own writing, but used Chinese characters. After the unification of Silla, there was a slight change. Xue Cong, a contemporary, created "Lidu", which used Chinese characters to represent Korean particles and auxiliary verbs to assist in reading Chinese books. In the end, because the languages ????are different, it cannot be popularized. In the early days of the Li Dynasty, Sejong set up a proverb bureau in the palace and ordered Zheng Linzhi, Cheng Sanwen and others to formulate proverbs. They studied Korean pronunciation based on Chinese phonology and created 11 vowel letters and 17 consonant letters. In 1443 AD, "Hunminzhengyin" was announced for use. North Korea has its own written language since then. 3. The influence of Chinese characters on Vietnamese writing Before the tenth century, Vietnam was once a Chinese county. In the Qin, Han, Sui and Tang dynasties, officials were all here to rule the area, so it was deeply influenced by Chinese culture. After Vietnam became independent, Chinese characters were used as a tool for communication among the upper class, as well as in school education and the creation of literary works. It was not until the 13th century that Vietnam had its own written language, Zi Nan. The word Nom is a new word that expresses Vietnamese pronunciation created based on Chinese characters and using methods such as pictophonetics, pretense, and meaning. In the 15th century, the word Nan became popular throughout the country and completely replaced the Chinese characters.
Number of characters
There is no accurate figure for the number of Chinese characters. It is about nearly 100,000 (the Chinese character library of Beijing Guoan Information Equipment Company contains 91,251 Chinese characters). The number of Chinese characters used daily is only Thousands of 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 few 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 also include more characters, such as the Qing Dynasty's "Kangxi Dictionary" with 47,035 characters; Japan's "Dahanwa Dictionary" with 48,902 characters and 1,062 appendices; Taiwan's "Chinese Dictionary" with 49,905 characters ; "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.