When Chinese characters originated, they were actually realistic pictures. Each tribe or even individual may write these words or draw these pictures in different ways, so there are many ways to write each word. This phenomenon is still very obvious in Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty. For example, there are at least 20 ways to write the word "Zun" and at least 45 ways to write the word "Yang" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Various ways of writing a word are called variants.
In the process of structural transformation of Chinese characters, new fonts have replaced old fonts, and various writing methods in the old fonts are often abolished at the same time, that is, many variant characters have been eliminated. As for new fonts, through natural evolution, there are phenomena, requirements and trends of simplification, cursive writing, quick writing and essays among the people. Because there are no uniform rules for simplified characters, cursive scripts, sketches and essays in various places, times and nationalities, and the state has not formulated the norms for writing Chinese characters, a Chinese character has produced many ways of writing and new variants have appeared.
In addition, because people's understanding of society and nature is growing, the existing words are often not enough. Therefore, some new words will be created, because all kinds of artificial words in different periods often spread without the examination of special institutions, and some words actually have the same meaning, which increases the chances of variant forms.
In terms of fonts, Chinese characters have also undergone great changes. For example, shortly after Lishu entered the historical stage, its strokes naturally changed, forming regular script. Printing was invented in the Song Dynasty. In order to meet the needs of printing, especially the printing of books and periodicals, the strokes naturally changed further, and a horizontal, vertical and square printing font-Song Style appeared. With the development of culture, science and technology, under the influence of western fonts, many new fonts have appeared in Chinese characters, such as bold and artistic fonts, such as poster style, comprehensive artistic style, pavilion style, girl style, imitation song style and flat song style. These fonts are generally written by computers instead of by hand, so they can be collectively called "computer fonts".
In addition, for the convenience of writing and the development of calligraphy art, people have also created various writing methods such as running script and cursive script. The structure of running script is basically similar to regular script. Although the structure of cursive script is far from regular script, cursive script is generally only used as a kind of calligraphy or as a shorthand method, which is rarely used in information exchange and is often rejected.
Chinese characters are a recording tool invented by our ancient ancestors and one of the oldest characters in the world. It has a history of more than 4500 years. Its use began in Shang Dynasty at the latest, and it has undergone many changes such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Dazhuan, Xiaozhuan, Lishu, regular script, cursive script and running script.
Before the unification of Qin dynasty, the characters used by the vassal States were different. Qin Shihuang unified China, and Li Si compiled seal script, so the history of "the same language is unknown" began. Although the pronunciation of Chinese dialects is very different, the unity of writing system reduces the communication obstacles caused by dialect differences.
For more than 3,000 years, the writing style of Chinese characters has not changed much, enabling future generations to read ancient Chinese without obstacles. However, after modern western civilization entered East Asia, countries in the whole Chinese character cultural circle set off a trend of learning from the West, and giving up using Chinese characters was an important aspect of this movement.
Due to the complexity of writing Chinese characters, this theory of "Chinese characters are backward" has a long history. It is believed that Chinese characters are the bottleneck of education and informatization, and there is a trend to promote the "Latinization" of Chinese characters or even abolish them. The argument of these movements is that Chinese characters are clumsy compared with western pinyin characters. Many countries that use Chinese characters have simplified Chinese characters to varying degrees and even tried to completely pinyin them.
In the world, only Chinese characters are the only words that never stop. Modern people can't understand books written hundreds of years ago, let alone thousands of years ago.
Chinese character system can be divided into traditional characters and simplified characters. The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong, Macau and North America, while the latter is used in Chinese communities in Chinese mainland, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two writing systems of Chinese characters, the individual differences of commonly used Chinese characters are within 25%, and there are rules to follow in the conversion of simple and complicated characters, especially through computer software, which is very convenient and has few communication obstacles. If the natural evolution of the above Chinese characters is not restricted, standardized and cleaned up, it will bring serious confusion. The legendary "Cang Xie" who created Chinese characters may be a great Chinese character organizer in ancient times. Shi Cheng, a historian of the Zhou Dynasty, may also be an outstanding Chinese character classifier. Shi Shuan Pian, a textbook for children's literacy compiled by him, objectively played a role in standardizing Chinese characters. The Qin Dynasty unified China Chinese characters with Xiao Zhuan, which was also a vigorous movement to standardize Chinese characters. Shortly thereafter, the appearance of official script further standardized and simplified Chinese characters. Since then, Xu Shen in the Han Dynasty, Yan in the Tang Dynasty and Guo Zhongshu and He in the Song Dynasty have all done some work to correct their mistakes. In addition, the Wei and Jin Dynasties, which started at the end of the Han Dynasty, reversed Chinese phonetic notation and rhyme calligraphy, which also made great contributions to the unification of Chinese pronunciation.
The May 4th New Culture Movement is also a large-scale process of sorting out and standardizing Chinese characters. In terms of word meaning, with the popularization of the vernacular movement during the May 4th New Culture Movement, that is, advocating writing articles in spoken language and opposing writing articles in classical Chinese, the unique meaning of many Chinese characters in classical Chinese has been abandoned, and the number of commonly used Chinese characters has at least decreased a lot.
After the founding of New China, the movement of simplifying Chinese characters was carried out, and at the same time, the movement of standardizing Chinese characters was attached great importance, which was mainly manifested in: ① cleaning up and abolishing variant characters; (2) Unify and standardize the font, strokes and stroke order of Chinese characters; ③ Unify and standardize the pronunciation of Chinese characters. For the history of this aspect, readers can refer to the book "Current Standardization of Chinese Characters" written by Mr. Gao Gengsheng.
After the founding of New China, especially after the reform and opening-up, the mobility of social population has increased rapidly, culture, education, radio and television have flourished, and the people's Putonghua level has improved rapidly. Although many elderly people in remote villages cannot speak Mandarin, they can understand it. This shows that the people of China have unified and standardized the pronunciation of Chinese characters and entered a new period of development. From the development history of Chinese characters mentioned above, we can draw two inspirations:
(1) The structure of Chinese characters can change greatly in a short time.
This is reflected in the transformation from big seal to small seal, from small seal to official script, and from traditional Chinese characters to simplified Chinese characters.
(2) The reform of Chinese characters corresponds to the great development of productive forces.
This is reflected in the fact that the two active periods of Chinese character reform (Qin Dynasty and 20th century) both occurred in the period of great development of productive forces. This phenomenon can be explained by Marx's historical materialism: Chinese characters are essentially a production tool, and the great development of productive forces provides a technical and humanistic basis for the innovation of production tools, which will promote the improvement of production efficiency, thus meeting the requirements of further development of productive forces. In addition, the great development of productive forces and the reform of Chinese characters require China to be in a relatively unified and stable political situation. This is also one of the reasons.