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How old are Chinese characters?
Chinese characters have changed for more than 6,000 years, and the evolution process is as follows: Oracle Bone Inscriptions → bronze inscription → seal script → official script → regular script → running script (Shang) (Zhou) (Qin) (Han) (Wei and Jin Dynasties). The seven fonts of "Jin Jia seal, Cao Li and Xing Kai" on the cursive script are called "seven Chinese characters"? It is well documented that China script, Chinese characters, came into being in the late Shang Dynasty, about14th century BC, when a preliminary stereotyped script, namely Oracle Bone Inscriptions, was formed.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions is both a hieroglyph and a phonography. Until now, there are still some pictographs in Chinese characters, which are very vivid. In the late Western Zhou Dynasty, Chinese characters developed into Da Zhuan. Later, Li Si, the prime minister of Qin Dynasty, simplified Da Zhuan and changed it to Xiao Zhuan. By the Han Dynasty, the official script had developed to a mature stage, and the readability and writing speed of Chinese characters had been greatly improved.

After Li Shu, it evolved into Cao Zhang, and now it is grass. In the Tang dynasty, there was Weeds, which expressed the writer's thoughts and feelings with a pen. Subsequently, regular script (also known as original script), a combination of official script and cursive script, became popular in the Tang Dynasty.

The print used now is changed from regular script. Between regular script and cursive script is a running script, which is fluent in writing and flexible in using a pen. It is said that it was invented by Liu Desheng in Han Dynasty, and it is still the font used in our daily writing today.

Extended data:

It used to be said that Chinese characters began in Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty, but in fact, Oracle Bone Inscriptions is already a mature writing. Before this, Chinese characters should have a development process from generation to maturity, so some people advocate pushing it to the end of summer; Others think that we have our own opinions before promoting Zhixia. China civilization should be nearly six thousand years old.

The number of Chinese characters is inaccurate, about100000 (the Chinese character library of Beijing Guoan Consulting Equipment Company has 9 125 1), and only a few thousand Chinese characters are used every day. According to statistics, 1000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 words can cover more than 98%, and 3,000 words have reached 99%. Simplified statistics are not much different from traditional statistics.

There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters in history (there are also more than 60,000 sayings), most of which are variant characters and rare words. The vast majority of variants and uncommon words have been standardized, except for ancient Chinese, which generally only occasionally appears in names and places. In addition, after the first batch of simplified characters, there are a number of "two simplified characters", which have been abolished, but a few numbers are still popular in society.

If learning and using Chinese characters really need to master the sounds, shapes and meanings of 70,000 to 80,000 Chinese characters, then Chinese characters will be the characters that no one in the world can and will not learn and use. However, most of the Chinese characters included in the Chinese Dictionary are "dead words", that is, words that have existed in history and are abandoned in today's written language.

According to statistics, there are 589,283 words in the Thirteen Classics (I Ching, Shangshu, Biography of Ram, Analects of Confucius, Mencius, etc. 13 ancient books), including 6,544 variants. Therefore, in fact, people only use more than 6 thousand Chinese characters every day.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Chinese Characters