The origin of Chinese characters began from the ancient knotting notes, and gradually evolved into engraving marks on wood chips or bamboo chips, and then to gossip. But what can be expressed through yin and yang is very limited, so people express their meaning by observing things between heaven and earth and using various shapes.

That's how Oracle Bone Inscriptions came. Oracle Bone Inscriptions evolved into seal script in the pre-Qin period, which greatly increased the amount of characters, but the writing was too complicated. In the Qin dynasty, it gradually evolved into official script, which became the Chinese characters we are familiar with today.

Chinese characters with extended information have been used for the longest time in a row so far, and they are also the only Chinese characters that have been passed down to this day in various ghostwriting systems in ancient times. Chinese characters have been regarded as the main official characters in China for generations.

Chinese characters have developed to a highly complete level in ancient times. They are not only used in China, but also used as the only international communication language in East Asia for a long time. Before the 20th century, they were the official written and standardized characters of Japan, Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Ryukyu and other countries, and all East Asian countries created their own Chinese characters to some extent.

In the non-Chinese character system, some Japanese characters have been simplified into new Japanese fonts by themselves, and South Korea has also formulated an official standard for the use of Korean characters. In Vietnam, Korea, Mongolia and other countries that have used Chinese characters in history, Chinese characters no longer have the status of official norms.

Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world, with a history of at least several thousand years. The earliest existing primitive characters are ancient stone inscriptions, and the recognizable mature Chinese character system is Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty. Chinese characters gradually change from graphics to strokes, from pictographs to symbols, and from complexity to simplicity. In the principle of word formation, from ideographic, ideographic to phonological. With few exceptions, they are all one Chinese character and one syllable. ?

Chinese characters are ideographic characters, and a Chinese character usually represents a word or a morpheme in Chinese, which forms the characteristics of unity of sound, form and meaning. Chinese characters are square characters composed of strokes, so they are also called square characters.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Chinese Characters