This problem is complicated, it is my graduation thesis.
To put it simply, it is pictures - picture text (paragraph text) - mature text. Cangjie's creation of characters is just a legend, and Chinese characters were not created by one person. So it is normal for it to evolve into many ways of writing.
Let’s get some other information:
1: Overview of the development history of Chinese characters
The Chinese nation is a great nation. Among all countries in the world, Only our Chinese culture has been passed down without interruption, and only our "Chinese characters" are the only writing form in the world that has been evolved from ancient times without interruption. Chinese civilization is also the most unique civilization.
China has said that "calligraphy and painting have the same origin" since ancient times. This is because the earliest source of writing is pictures. Calligraphy and painting are like brothers, born from the same root, and have many internal connections. The origin of Chinese characters is primitive pictures, the "picture" form that primitive people used to express themselves in life. Slowly it changed from the original picture into an "ideographic symbol".
It was around the 14th century BC, the late Yin and Shang Dynasties. "Ideographic symbols" evolved into the more stereotyped "oracle bones". This is considered the first form of "kanji". The characters carved on the bones of animals and the tortoise plates of turtles, and the characters found in the Yin Ruins, are considered to be the direct ancestors of "modern Chinese characters". This can prove the continuity of Chinese civilization. For thousands of years, the Middle East has No one can decipher the hieroglyphics of their ancestors. Only modern Chinese can understand some "oracle bone inscriptions" from the Yin and Shang Dynasties. The characters on these turtle boards were first used to predict good and bad luck. Ancient people believed that questions about diseases, dreams, hunting, weather, etc. were carved on the turtle boards, and then burned with fire to burn the turtle boards and animals. Bones, and the cracks they produce, can be used by diviners to judge the fortune or misfortune of the fortune-telling based on the shape and direction of these cracks. This is the ancestor of modern Chinese characters called "Oracle Bone Inscriptions". There are more than 5,000 kinds of "oracle bone inscriptions" discovered so far. And there are more than a thousand that can be interpreted.
In the Western Zhou Dynasty, bronze vessels were widely used, and the words engraved on bronze bells, tripods and stone drums were "big seal script". It is also known as Zhongdingwen and Shiguwen. According to legend, it was created by Taishi during the reign of King Xuan of Zhou Dynasty. There are now ten stone drums from the Zhou Dynasty in the Palace Museum, with ten four-character poems engraved on them. Because of the feudal separatist rule, they were divided into different parts and their writings were not the same. Until the Qin Dynasty. Qin Shihuang unified China. Only then can the words be unified.
During the Qin Dynasty, Qin Shihuang unified writing and measurement. The person whose achievements were remarkable was Li Si, the prime minister at that time. After Li Si collected and sorted out the writing at that time and then deleted the complex and simplified it and beautified it, this unified writing was called "Xiao Zhuan", also known as "Qin Zhuan". The writing at this time has almost no trace of hieroglyphics.
The "Xiaozhuan" writing during the Qin Dynasty was too standardized and the writing speed was very slow, so many simple fonts appeared among the people. The characteristic of this font is that the original "Xiaozhuan" is changed to square. The curvature of "Xiaozhuan" was changed to straight, and some radicals were separated, which was called "Qin Li".
In the Han Dynasty, official script was very popular. "Qin Li" did not completely get rid of the structural characteristics of "Xiaozhuan" and was basically square, while "Han Li" fully utilized the characteristics of the brush and appeared. The twists and turns of "silkworm head and swallow tail" make it easy to write. This kind of official script was popular during the Western Han Dynasty. It's called "Han Li".
While "Han Li" was popular in the Han Dynasty, "regular script" was in its infancy. It was already very popular in the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. Wang Xizhi and Wang Xian of the Jin Dynasty were the real founders of regular script. They absorbed the round strokes of seal script and retained the squareness and straightness of official script, removing the "silkworm head and swallow tail". The structure of Chinese characters has been generally fixed. At that time, it was called "real script". Later generations used this font as a model for learning calligraphy, so they changed it to "regular script".
During the Tang Dynasty, "regular script" was particularly popular. Calligraphers such as Sheng Zhenqing, Liu Gongquan, and Ouyang Xun were all outstanding calligraphers at that time, and their calligraphy works are still studied as examples by people today.
Due to the neatness of regular script and the need for fast writing, the calligrapher expresses his or her own feelings and puts his affection on the creation of the pen, resulting in a smooth flow, one go, and extremely rhythmic and artistic appeal. The font - "cursive script".
Between regular script and cursive script is "running script". Running script is not as formal and serious as regular script, nor is it as unrestrained and difficult to identify as cursive script. Instead, it is elegant and cheerful, and the handwriting is flexible and thorough. It is also the most popular and commonly used font. Before I knew fonts, I was asked to practice running calligraphy as a child.
In the Song Dynasty, one of China's four great inventions, woodblock printing and movable type printing, was invented, and "Song Ti" was also produced. It was first produced in the Northern Song Dynasty and evolved from regular script. There are fat bodies and thin bodies, but regardless of whether they are fat or thin, they are thin horizontally, thick vertically, and square. It looks simple and dignified.
"Imitation Song Ti" is also a font that imitates "Song Ti". This font has only been around for seventy or eighty years, but it has developed very rapidly. It is a standard font that people like to use the most, and it has been widely used in printed matter and various occasions.
At the same time, "black body" was also born. This kind of font is eye-catching and generous, with all handwritings of the same thickness, eye-catching and tight structure, thick and powerful strokes, and strokes such as strokes are not sharp, making it easy to read. Due to its eye-catching characteristics, it is often used in titles, blurbs, logos, etc. It enriches the expression forms of Chinese characters.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, various fonts were born one after another, including variety fonts, monolithic fonts, floating cloud fonts, variants, etc. This is a concrete manifestation of the cultural prosperity of the motherland and an inevitable result of the development of Chinese characters.