Chinese charactors

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The written languages of various nations?in the world, according to their natures, can be classified into three categories: Alphabetic Writing, Ideographic Writing and Pictographic Writing. The extensively?accepted evolution?sequence of various written languages?in the world?is: Pictographic ---- Ideographic ---- Alphabetic writing, but it doesn’t mean, only when a written language develops to alphabetic writing, can it be the most advanced one, such as Chinese characters.

Chinese characters belong to ideographic writing, accurately speaking, it is based on pictograph, stemmed by ideograph and occasionally mixed with alphabetic writings. Generally speaking, most of the written languages in the world evolved from pictographic to ideographic to alphabetic writings at last, but only Chinese is an exception, Chinese?characters still maintain the features of the second phase ---- ideographic writing, who can tell me why?

The reasons lie chiefly in 4 aspects:

1. Chinese writings are the most advanced characters, maybe they developed extremely rapidly during the primitive phase. Before the appearance of written language, the originally existing transformations of the genders, numbers and tenses had already disappeared. After Chinese characters emerged, it is unnecessary to change the styles and suffixes of the characters. So Chinese characters are too stable to use alphabetic writings.

2. There were many monosyllables and homonyms?in ancient Chinese, this reality still exists even in modern Chinese, so it’s hard to use alphabetic writings.

3. There are many dialects in Chinese, which are much different (For example: Cantonese), if Chinese people spell and write alphabetic writing, they will find it’s difficult to communicate.

4. Chinese calligraphy is an extremely wonderful art which is so extensively popular?among Chinese users. It is such an enjoyment of beauty to write the ideographic square characters that Chinese character users cannot bear to abandon?them.

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In one word, that why Chinese characters haven’t developed into alphabetic ones is closely associated with the particularity of the development of the Chinese nation and the special features of Chinese characters.

But how is the origin of Chinese characters? There are three major traditional statements: Keeping records by tying knots; Cangjie invented Chinese characters and Bagua (or Eight Diagrams) Theory.

1. In ancient times, Chinese people really used to keep records by tying knots, but our ancestors used it only to express the numbers, relative sizes or importance of a thing, you can imagine, how did our forefathers express the detailed process of one incident only by tying knots?

2. According to legends, Cangjie was a man with four eyes and a dragon-like face, enlightened by the footprints of birds and beasts, he created characters. It sounds even more absurd, as we know, character is the tool for recording languages, it is the result of and accepted by the whole society through common practices, it should have come from the multitude and must have experienced a long process of selecting and accepting, one single man is not competent at all. Perhaps Cangjie was a talented man who used to arrange characters and promote the development of Chinese characters, people esteemed him so highly and he was mistaken by the later generations for the creator of Chinese characters; Or maybe Cangjie was only a legendary people who had never existed at all.

3. Bagua Theory：Bagua or Eight Diagrams originated from Iching or the Classic?of Changes, which was created by Fuxi in remote antiquity, Bagua is composed of two basic symbols ＿ and ＿＿ which stand for Yin and Yang respectively, it symbolizes nothing more than the nature, none of the eight diagrams is a character, or a stroke. Scholars only believe that Bagua is the base of the Iching System, it plays a very important role in the science of prediction, but has nothing to do with the origin of Chinese characters.

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Then how did Chinese characters originate? Scholars tend to believe that

they originated from primitive drawings and carvings, to be more specific, pictographic characters occupied the great majority in earlier Chinese written language, undoubtedly?they were the foundation of Chinese characters, this point can be proved that the earlier the pictographic characters were, the closer they were to pictures. While linguists consider that Chinese numerals came from carvings. All the primitive peoples in the world used to record figures by tying knots and carvings, but carvings have the characteristics of writing while knots tying don’t?have, so carved lines might evolve into proto-numerals.

????Proto-Chinese characters probably emerged during the end of Chinese primitive society dating back 6000 years ago. Systematic Chinese characters came into being not later than 4000 years ago. The Oracle Bone Inscriptions discovered in the Yin Ruins in Anyang belong to the late Shang Dynasty, they are extremely matured Chinese characters, so we can infer, the establishment of the whole system of Chinese characters should be not later than 3500 years ago.

????Many foreigners find that maybe Chinese is the most difficult language to learn, and Chinese characters are the hardest to write, it’s so complicated for beginners to study, but if you master the rules of Chinese characters, it’ll be much easier. So let me tell you something about the structure of Chinese characters.

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