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 experienced various changes in Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Dazhuan, Xiaozhuan, Li Shu and regular script (cursive script and running script).

Before the unification of Qin Dynasty, different countries used different languages. 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.

Among them, the Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese pseudonyms and the emergence of various pinyin schemes in Chinese are all based on this idea.

Chinese mainland simplified the strokes of Chinese characters with reference to the cursive script, and revised and approved the Summary of Simplified Chinese Characters on June 28th, 1956, which is still used in China and New Zealand. Traditional Chinese has always been used in Taiwan Province Province.

But interestingly, at present, the only thing in the world that has never stopped circulating is Chinese characters. Modern people can't understand books written hundreds of years ago, let alone thousands of years ago.

At present, the Chinese character system is divided into traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese 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.

It is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although it is difficult to learn at first, there is no continuous learning problem similar to a large number of English words after mastering common words, and its ideographic characteristics can fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the problem of computer input is basically solved, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" and "Chinese character latinization" have actually been gradually abandoned by most people.

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At present, the Chinese character system has been basically stable, but the standardization of Chinese characters and the natural extinction of rare words continue.

The development history of Chinese characters-the earliest mature characters in China

Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Yin Ruins is a record of divination in Yin Dynasty and the earliest mature writing in China. Known as the earliest "archives" in ancient China. At present, there are about 6.5438+0.5 million pieces of Oracle bones with more than 4,500 words. These Oracle Bone Inscriptions records are extremely rich in content, involving many aspects of social life in Shang Dynasty, including politics.