Current location - Music Encyclopedia - Today in History - The Origin and Development of Chinese Characters
The Origin and Development of Chinese Characters
The Origin and Development of Chinese Characters

Transfer from paper net, you can have a look if you are interested.

Chinese characters are one of the characters with the longest use time, the widest space and the largest number of people in the world. The creation and application of Chinese characters not only promoted the development of China culture, but also had a far-reaching impact on the development of world culture.

I. Evolution of Chinese Characters

The origin of Chinese characters was once shrouded in mystery because of the legend of Cangjie's word-making. After the founding of New China, with a large number of archaeological discoveries, this veil was gradually uncovered, revealing its true colors. About 6000 years ago, there were more than 50 kinds of carved symbols on the outer wall of pottery in Yangshao cultural sites such as Banpo site. They are well-planned, regular and have the characteristics of simplified Chinese characters, which may be the bud of Chinese characters.

On the pottery in the late period of Dahankou cultural site and Jin Liang cultural site about four or five thousand years ago, it was found that there were relatively neat graphic descriptions, which were early graphic characters.

In the early 1980s, more complete characters were found on the pottery unearthed from the Xia cultural site in Dengfeng, Henan. This is the earliest written language with exact time confirmed by scholars in China so far. In Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the commonly used word was Oracle Bone Inscriptions. This is a mature and systematic writing, which laid the foundation for the development of Chinese characters in later generations. After that, the number of popular inscriptions on bronze inscriptions has increased, but the shape has not changed much. After the Spring and Autumn Period, due to the warlord regime, there were "different glyphs". After the reunification of the Qin Dynasty, in order to consolidate the rule, the first emperor ordered the Prime Minister Reese, the Zhongche government to order Zhao Gao, and the Taishi government to order Hu Wujing. The characters were sorted out, and based on the original characters of Qin State, the seal script was formulated as a standard font, which was widely used in the whole country. Later, according to the popular fonts at that time, Bian Cheng sorted out simpler font official scripts, which were widely circulated throughout the country as daily words. In the Cao Wei era, Zhong You created the original script (regular script). At this point, the evolution of Chinese characters has been perfected. Moreover, since the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the writing of Chinese characters has become a special art, namely calligraphy. Second, the influence of Chinese characters on neighboring countries.

1. The influence of Chinese characters on Japanese characters. Although the Japanese nation has an ancient culture, its own characters were created quite late. For a long time, its people have used Chinese characters as a carrier to spread their thoughts and express their feelings, which is called "real name". At the beginning of the fifth century, there appeared a kind of phonetic alphabet borrowed from Chinese characters in Japan, which was called "pseudonym". In the 8th century, Japanese pronunciation marked with Chinese characters was relatively fixed, and its symbol was the compilation of Ye Wan Collection, so it was called "Ye Wan's pen name". It is the basis of pure Japanese phonetic writing. The final creation of Japanese characters was completed by Kibi No Asomi Makibi and master Kong Hai. Both of them lived in the Tang Dynasty in China for a long time and had a deep study of Chinese characters. The former creates Japanese "katakana" according to the radicals of standard pinyin Chinese characters, while the latter creates Japanese "hiragana" by using Chinese characters. Although pseudonyms have been popular in Japan since the tenth century, the use of Chinese characters has not been abolished. Today, Japanese characters, which have occupied an important position in the world, still retain more than 1000 simplified characters.

2. The influence of Chinese characters on Korean characters. Korean characters are called proverbs. Its creation and application is an important achievement of ancient Korean culture. In fact, South Korea in the Middle Ages, like Japan, did not have its own characters, but used Chinese characters. Silla changed slightly after reunification. At that time, Xue Cong once created "official reading", that is, using Chinese characters to represent Korean auxiliary words and verbs to assist reading chinese books. Finally, because of different languages, it cannot be popularized. In the early years of the Li Dynasty, Sejong set up a proverb bureau in the palace to make Zheng Linzhi, Cheng Sanwen and others formulate proverbs. They studied Korean phonetics according to China's phonology, and created 1 1 vowel and 17 consonant, which were published in 1443.

In 2008, Training People to Correct Their Pronunciation was published and put into use. North Korea has its own writing since then.

3. The influence of Chinese characters on Vietnamese characters 10 Before the 20th century, Vietnam was once a county in China. Officials from Qin, Han, Sui and Tang Dou ruled here, so they were deeply influenced by China culture. After Vietnam's independence, Chinese characters have been used as a tool for upper-class communication, school education and literary works. It was not until the13rd century that Vietnam had its own word "South". Zinan is a new word based on Chinese characters, which expresses Vietnamese pronunciation by pictophonetic characters, loanwords and literacy. By the 15th century, southern characters had spread all over the country, completely replacing Chinese characters. In a word, Chinese characters are rich in vocabulary and profound. It is the carrier of Chinese civilization for thousands of years, and it is also the witness of Chinese culture with a long history. We can see that the Chinese nation not only created a long and splendid civilization with its diligence and wisdom, but also promoted the development of world civilization and made great contributions to the development of world history.