China script is one of the oldest scripts in history. It is the oldest writing in the world today, and it is still widely used by Chinese all over the world. Chinese characters are the only ideographic characters in various writing systems in the world today. I'm afraid it's four or five thousand years old, because it was a fairly developed writing system as early as14th century BC. On the earth, only a few scripts are earlier than China scripts. The most famous are the sacred script of ancient Egypt and the cuneiform script of two river basins, which were born from two other ancient cultural origins. Ancient Egyptian characters and cuneiform characters were developed as early as around 3000 BC. They recorded the colorful historical stories of the ancient Egyptian Empire, the ancient Sumerian Dynasty, the Babylonian Dynasty and the ancient Persian Dynasty. However, these two ancient characters were buried under the rolling yellow sand and broken walls as early as AD, and it was the archaeological excavation of modern archaeologists that brought them to light. They are all words lying in the history museum, and they are all fossils of words.

About a century ago, there was an important archaeological discovery in Anyang, China, which was the discovery of Yin Ruins and Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Since then, China's research on the history of Yin and Shang Dynasties has entered a new era. According to Chinese ancient philologists, Oracle Bone Inscriptions is "the earliest and relatively complete writing that can be seen at present". It is very complicated, and more than 3000 words have been found, including nouns, pronouns, verbs, auxiliary verbs,

Adjectives and other categories, you can also form a narrative with more than 170 words. Therefore, scholars affirm that Oracle Bone Inscriptions is by no means the primary stage of my China writing, and it must have developed for a long time before it.

Guo Moruo and Yu, historians and ancient philologists of the older generation in China, once thought that the generation of China characters can be traced back to the Yangshao culture in Banpo 6000 years ago. Guo Moruo thinks that twenty or thirty kinds of inscriptions on the edge of Banpo pottery bowl "should be the primitive stage of Chinese characters". Yu also believes that "these are some simple words produced in the origin stage of words." However, according to some scholars' re-research, it is considered that the Banpo symbol and the carved symbol of Tao Zun in the late Dawenkou culture in Shandong Province "probably have nothing to do with the formation of Chinese characters", and China's "formation process of Chinese characters" is "in the middle of 3000 BC". A eclectic view holds that China characters "germinated among the people" in the late primitive society 6,000 years ago, and "formed a relatively complete writing system" in the middle and late Xia Dynasty 4,000 years ago.

It has been more than 3,000 years since Chinese characters evolved from Oracle Bone Inscriptions to today. The development of Chinese characters has gone through several stages, such as inscriptions on bronze, big seal script, small seal script, official script, cursive script, regular script and running script. The passage time of these fonts is sometimes not completely divided, but parallel or cross.

Bronze inscriptions, also known as Zhong Dingwen and inscriptions, are written on bronzes. It appeared on bronzes in the late Shang Dynasty and developed in the Western Zhou Dynasty. Generally speaking, the inscriptions on bronzes in the late Shang Dynasty are no more than 50 words, and the characters cast on Mao in the late Western Zhou Dynasty are as long as 497 words. At present, there are more than 10000 pieces of Shang and Zhou bronzes unearthed. According to the statistics of the Collection of Jinwen compiled by Rong Geng, an ancient philologist, there are more than 3,000 words * * *, of which more than 2,000 words have been recognized. The shape of bronze inscriptions is very similar to that of Oracle Bone Inscriptions, which is basically a glyph.

By the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, great changes had taken place in China's society, the economy and culture flourished, and the application of characters became more and more extensive. At this time, the characters tend to be simplified, and the various vassal States have formed a situation of "different sounds and different characters" because of disunity. Generally speaking, the State of Qin uses the big seal script, and the six countries use the "ancient prose of the six countries". The ancient prose of the Six Kingdoms is also a kind of "seal script", which is more closely related to the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty than the Qin script. The meaning of seal script is to lengthen the strokes and become a soft long line. In 22 1 year BC, Qin Shihuang unified China, unified the national writing, currency and weights and measures, and stipulated the national standard font. Qin Shihuang ordered Li Si and others to sort out the characters and change the fonts. Li Si wrote the standard font Cang Zhuan Pian, Zhao Gao wrote Love Calendar and Hu Wujing wrote Bo Xue Pian, so that the whole country can write in their simplified fonts. This is Xiao Zhuan.

Xiao Zhuan was gradually replaced by a more convenient and simplified official script. It is said that official script was originally used by the lowly people at the lower level. At that time, "official script" meant "apprentice". Originally, the simple official script was written for them. Later, it was widely used among the people and became popular. Even the ruling class had to write in this language, which became the official writing method of the whole country in the Han Dynasty. The Han tablet handed down now is written in this kind of official script.

Official script later evolved into cursive script. This is a fast style of official script, which has developed into an independent font since the Eastern Han Dynasty. At the same time, cursive script appeared in regular script, also known as "official script" or "original script", which matured in the Eastern Han Dynasty and prevailed in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. A font that finally appeared at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty is running script, which basically looks like regular script and can be said to be a tribe of regular script. Regular script, running script and cursive script have been handed down to this day.

Characteristic Chinese characters originated from pictures and evolved from the original pictures. Like painting, not painting, like personality, so we call it portrait. After more than 3,000 years of gradual evolution, hieroglyphics have evolved from hieroglyphics to Oracle Bone Inscriptions → Dazhuan → Xiaozhuan → Lishu … to regular script, and now to computer fonts. Picture characters have become large-scale Chinese characters with simplified strokes.

Chinese characters were created by the ancient working people in China in the long-term social practice. Chinese characters have a unique and lofty position in the world writing system. First of all, Chinese characters are the most widely used characters in the world. The popularity of a written language depends on the size of the area it passes through and the number of people who use it. China has the third largest territory in the world with a population of more than one billion, of which more than 80% is Chinese, which is unmatched by any written language in the world.

Secondly, Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world. Historians tell us that there are two kinds of the oldest characters in the world, one is cuneiform, which is more than 5,500 years ago, and the other is Egyptian hieroglyphics, which is about 4 100 years ago. As for our Chinese characters, we can see from the archaeological data in recent years that the history of Chinese characters can be traced back to five or six thousand years ago, and the life span of Chinese characters is the longest, and we still use them today.

Another notable feature of Chinese characters is their independent creation and development. We can know that most of them are transformed from the pinyin of other nationalities. On the other hand, Chinese characters are hieroglyphs developed from pictures. In the course of its development, Egyptian hieroglyphics took a different road from Egyptian characters, and eventually became phonetic letters and developed into phonetic symbols. Chinese characters, on the other hand, are based on hieroglyphics, which combine sound, line and meaning in an original way and become a colorful writing system.

Because Chinese characters are widely used and have a long history, the precious heritage of our nation has been preserved by them. Including philosophy, science, history and literature, represents all the crystallization of our national culture. Through Chinese characters, we can see the situation more than 3000 years ago and hear a hundred schools of thought contend more than 2000 years ago. In a word, Chinese characters have made great contributions to the inheritance of our national culture. At the same time, Chinese characters are the only characters that can become works of art. Chinese characters are developed from pictures and become a kind of line characters. The structure of lines can express a kind of composition beauty. Therefore, Chinese characters can not only record Chinese, but also become high-level works of art. There are famous calligraphers throughout the ages, such as Cai Yong's stereotyped writing in Han Dynasty, Wang Xizhi's cursive writing in Jin Dynasty and Zhang Xu's crazy writing in Tang Dynasty. In the history of our country, calligraphy and painting are equally famous. Although the scripts of other nationalities also pay attention to the handwork of calligraphy, no nation lists calligraphy as a work of art.