Originally invented and created by the ancestors of the Chinese people of the Yellow River Civilization in ancient China, its fonts have also undergone long-term improvements and evolutions. The current exact history can be traced back to the oracle bone inscriptions, Zhou inscriptions and bronze inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty around 1300 BC.
Chinese characters, also known as Chinese characters, Chinese characters, and Tang dialect characters, are a type of characters widely used in the Chinese character cultural circle. They are a unique system of indicating and understanding characters in the world, and they are also the only ones in the world that still use Chinese characters. A widely used and highly developed morpheme script.
Originally invented and created by the ancestors of the Chinese people of the Yellow River Civilization in ancient China, its fonts have also undergone long-term improvements and evolutions.
The current exact history can be traced back to the oracle bone inscriptions, Zhou inscriptions, and bronze inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty around 1300 BC, then to the Zhou inscriptions and small seal scripts of the Spring and Autumn Period, the Warring States, and the Qin Dynasty, and to the Han Dynasty's official reform. Official script, cursive script and regular script (and derived running script) were produced. In the Tang Dynasty, regular script became the standard handwriting font used today - block script, which is also the modern Chinese character commonly used today.
Chinese characters have been the main official script in all dynasties of China, and are now the de facto official script in the Republic of China and the Republic of China. Chinese characters have developed to a highly complete level in ancient times. They are not only used in China, but also served as the only international script in East Asia for a long time. Before the 20th century, they were the written standard scripts of countries such as the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Ryukyu, and Japan. .
Extended information:
Features
1. Graceful
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. Famous works include the Orchid Pavilion Preface, the Monument of Shence's Military Monument and the Monument of Saint Merit, the Mysterious Pagoda Monument, and the Nephew Memorial Manuscript.
2. High visibility
The human eye's field of view is always one surface, not a line, so linear arrangements are difficult to identify; arrangement in squares is clear at a glance. Pinyin text = linear text; Chinese characters = square text. Chinese characters have higher reading efficiency than Pinyin characters.
3. Easy to understand and relevant
For example, "bei" is a pictophonetic character and a knowing character. From the perspective of phonograms, the word "clothes" on the left side of the word "quilt" means meaning, indicating that quilt belongs to the category of clothing. The pronunciation of the word "pi" on the right side was similar to that of "bei" in the era when the word was created. It indicates the pronunciation of this character, but as time goes by, the pronunciations of "PI" and "BE" become different, and gradually loses its function of expressing the pronunciation.
From the perspective of knowing words, clothing made of leather is "quilt". The original meaning of quilt refers to a kind of small quilt. In later generations, based on the original meaning of quilt, it also extended the meaning of "to suffer".
4. Image, intuitive expression
Chinese characters are pictographs, 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 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.
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 the same in meaning. If they match well, they can achieve the purpose of communication concisely and concisely. These words can be combined together. This is the so-called "unity of meaning".
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.
5. Large amount of information
Research shows that Chinese characters, as a complex text symbol system, have high information entropy.
The basic method of research is: gradually expand the capacity of Chinese characters. As the capacity of Chinese characters increases, the increase in information entropy slows down; after the number of Chinese characters increases to 12370, the information entropy no longer increases significantly.
Chinese scientists pointed out that the capacity limit of Chinese characters is 12,366 Chinese characters, and the static average information entropy value (average amount of information) of Chinese characters is 9.65 bits. Calculated by the famous Zipf’s Law (ZIPF’SLAW) in mathematical linguistics, this is the text symbol system with the largest amount of information in the world today.