Conch joke

The new magistrate is from Shandong. He said to the master, "buy me two bamboo poles."

Inquired that the "bamboo pole" in Shandong dialect was "pig liver", and quickly agreed, ran to the butcher's shop and said, "Master Xinxian wants to buy two pieces of pig liver. You are a clever man.

You should know it! "

The shopkeeper, a clever man, immediately cut off two pieces of pig liver and presented a pair of pig ears.

Out of the butcher's shop, the master thought, "My master told me to buy pig liver, and this pig ear is of course mine …" So he wrapped the hunting ear and stuffed it into his pocket. Go back to the county government and report to the magistrate: "Report back to Grandpa, I bought pig liver!" "

The magistrate was very angry when he saw that the master had bought pig liver, and said, "Where are your ears!" " Hearing this, the master turned pale with fear and quickly replied, "Ear … Ear … here … in my … pocket!" "

Knowledge about Chinese characters

1. History;

Chinese characters in Oracle Bone Inscriptions are one of the three oldest Chinese character systems in the world. Among them, the sacred script of ancient Egypt and the cuneiform script of Sumerians in the two river basins have been lost, and only China's Chinese characters are still in use today.

According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters in Cangjie. Cang Xie, a historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters according to the shapes of the sun and the moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created characters, the world was shocked-"When it rains, ghosts cry at night". From a historical point of view, the complicated Chinese character system can't be invented by one person. More likely, Cang Xie has made outstanding contributions to the collection, arrangement and unification of Chinese characters. Therefore, Xunzi Jiemu records that "there are many good books, but one is Cang Xie's solo biography".

Some people think that the Eight Diagrams in Zhouyi have a great influence on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.

2. Original script

Before the invention of writing, oral knowledge had obvious shortcomings in dissemination and accumulation. Primitive people used knotting, carving and drawing to assist in taking notes, and later simplified and replaced pictures with characteristic graphics. When the graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific corresponding relationship with the language, the original text is formed.

1994, a large number of pottery were unearthed at the Daxi cultural site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the symbols of 170, some features are quite similar to those of Oracle Bone Inscriptions. This discovery infers the formation process of the original Chinese characters to 6000 years ago. In addition, pictographic symbols on pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong Province, geometric symbols on painted pottery in Banpo, Xi, etc. , may be in the process of forming the original text (or before) at different stages of performance.

However, after the Shang Dynasty, are Chinese characters and these geometric symbols in the same strain? This issue is still controversial. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the precursors of Chinese characters, or even the writing symbols.

From hieroglyphics to ideographs

Stone Carving on Mount Tai is said to have been written by Li Si. From Oracle Bone Inscriptions to Xiao Zhuan, Chinese characters have experienced the development process from pictograph to ideograph, and the glyphs have gradually separated from the concrete images of things. Chinese characters in this period are called ancient Chinese characters.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang and Zhou Dynasties was a relatively complete writing system. Among the more than 4,500 Oracle characters found, nearly 2,000 can be recognized at present. At the same time when Oracle Bone Inscriptions appeared, the words cast on bronze ware were called inscriptions on bronze or Zhong Dingwen. Pan and Mao in the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical and artistic value.

After Qin Shihuang unified China, Lisi standardized and sorted out the big seal script and the ancient prose of six countries, formulated the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, and unified the characters of China. The seal script is rectangular, and the strokes are round and smooth.

Small seal script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters between languages of various countries, and the history of "the same book" began. The unification of written language has effectively promoted the spread of inter-ethnic culture and played an important role in the identification of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of written language in the world.

The development of Chinese characters has undergone many different evolutions. In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was insufficient, and a large number of things were represented by interchangeable words, which made the expression of words vague. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large number of words. However, there are so many things that it is impossible to express them in one Chinese character. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has made it difficult to learn Chinese characters themselves, and Chinese has gradually evolved from a single word to a word.

Four word-making and composition

After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters also increased, and many new words appeared constantly:

Emperor Wendi of the Sui Dynasty was originally a vassal, but because the word "Sui" meant instability, the word "Sui" was removed and created as the national title.

In the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian created the word "Qi" (the same as "Zhao") as her name according to the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".

In the Five Dynasties, the word "Chen" was created in its name, taking the meaning of "flying dragon in the sky".

In modern times, due to the influx of western knowledge, many words have also been created. For example, when beer was introduced into China, how to express it in Chinese characters was a problem. At first, it was translated into skin wine, but later it was inappropriate. About 19 10, the word "beer" was created-translated as "beer". In order to express English units, some disyllabic words have been created, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon), Kui (kilowatt) and Chi (ruler). However, these disyllabic words have been eliminated in the Notice on the Unified Use of Chinese Characters in the Names of Some Units of Measurement issued by the China Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Metrology on June 20th 1977, and are no longer used in Chinese mainland, but they can still be seen in Taiwan Province Province and other places.

At present, due to the informationization and standardization of Chinese characters, Chinese characters no longer add new words at will. The only exceptions are various elements in the periodic table, such as helium, chlorine, radon, germanium, chromium and uranium. This word-making method is still used to name new elements. Word-formation rules of chemical elements can be found in Elements.

Liu Shu analyzed the composition of Chinese characters. Zhou Li mentioned Liu Shu, but did not specify the specific content. In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty elaborated in detail the rules of Chinese character construction of Liushu: pictographic, referential, comprehending, pictophonetic, transliteration and borrowing. Among them, pictographic characters, fingering, knowing characters and pictophonetic characters are the principles of word formation, which is the "word formation method"; Annotation and borrowing are the rules of using words, and they are "methods of using words". However, it should be noted that the "six books" are the sorting and classification of Chinese characters, not the rules of word formation.

The formation of modern Chinese characters

The strokes of Xiao Zhuan are mainly curved, and then gradually become more linear and easier to write. In the Han Dynasty, official script replaced Xiao Zhuan as the main script. The appearance of official script laid the foundation of modern Chinese character glyph structure and became the watershed of ancient and modern characters.

After the Han Dynasty, the writing style of Chinese characters gradually changed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to writing on silk paper with a brush. The rapid appearance of cursive script, regular script and running script not only meets the official documents and daily needs, but also forms a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of ancient printing, a new font, Song Ti, appeared, which was used for printing. In modern times, fonts such as bold and imitation Song appeared one after another.

Chinese knowledge of Chinese characters

Eight methods of "forever" [Edit]

Forms of Chinese characters

Chinese characters are square characters, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters include letter combination words and combination words, and letter combination words can't be separated, such as "Wen" and "Zhong". Combined Chinese characters are composed of basic components, accounting for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of compound words are: upper and lower structures, such as "pen" and "dust"; Left and right structures, such as "engage" and "Liu"; Semi-closed structure, such as "similarity" and "inclination"; Fully enclosed structure, such as "group"; Composite structure, such as "win" and "point". The basic components of Chinese characters include single words, radicals and other non-word-forming components.

The smallest constituent unit of Chinese characters is strokes.

When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the order of strokes, are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontal and then vertical, first left and then down, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside and then inside, then sealed, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters with different writing styles may be different.

Seven pronunciations

Chinese characters are a common writing system in many dialects, and each character represents a syllable. Now, Mandarin is used as the standard pronunciation in China. The syllables of Putonghua are determined by one initial, one vowel and tone, and there are more than 65,438+0,300 syllables actually used. Because of the huge number of Chinese characters, there are obvious homophones; At the same time, it also exists in the case that the same Chinese character has multiple pronunciations, which is called polyphonic characters. This situation is different in different dialects, but it is common in Chinese.

Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common are names and places, followed by transliteration of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original words, such as "fire fighting" and "death". But even so, there are still some ideographic elements, especially the place names in China. Even foreign names and place names have some low ideographic restrictions, such as "Bush" can never be transliterated as "immortal".

Because Chinese characters don't seem to have changed much from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, they didn't directly show the changes of Chinese pronunciation. Special research is needed to infer their pronunciations in ancient Chinese and middle Chinese.

Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, a Chinese character could represent two syllables, a small syllable and a large syllable. See ancient Chinese for details.

The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic reading" and "training reading", and there are often many ways to pronounce a word.

In Korean, it is roughly a word and a sound, without training.

Influenced by Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters later used some disyllabic characters, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon) and Kui (kilowatt). However, due to the official abolition, it is basically not used in Chinese mainland, but it is still used occasionally in Taiwan Province Province, and most people understand its meaning.

Eight notes

The earliest phonetic notation methods are reading if and direct notation. The reading method is to use words with similar pronunciations as phonetic notation, which is what Xu Shen used to explain Chinese characters, such as "shooting, shooting and reading accurately". Direct notation is to use another Chinese character to express the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, a woman speaks for herself, and the speaker says "Yue" is used for phonetic notation.

Both of the above methods have inherent defects. Some words have no homophones or homophones are so uncommon that it is difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "socks".

The anti-tangent method was developed in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit, which used pinyin characters. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be marked by backcutting, that is, the initial consonant of the first word and the vowel and tone of the second word are combined to make phonetic notation, so that all Chinese characters can be combined. For example, the pronunciation of "Lian" is the combination of the initial of "Lang" and the vowel and tone of "Dian".

Since modern times, Chinese phonetic symbols (commonly known as ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) and phonetic notation methods of many Latin letters have been developed. In Taiwan Province Province, phonetic symbols are still a part of teaching, but at present, Chinese Pinyin is the most widely used in China.

Because Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, the phonetic notation is weak. This feature makes the literature of the last 1000 years, like the western world that uses pinyin, have no big difference in wording, but it also makes it difficult for people to infer the ancient phonology. For example, the pronunciation of "Pang" comes from "Dragon", but today the former is pronounced as "Pang" and the latter as "Dragon" in Beijing dialect. How to explain this difference is a subject of phonology.

Nine Chinese characters and words

Chinese characters are the smallest unit of Chinese form, similar to English "letters". However, unlike letters, Chinese characters also have ideographic elements, so they are similar to words in English phrases. Therefore, Chinese characters are a component between "letters" and "words" in English, and they can also be obtained quantitatively.

Words are the smallest ideographic unit in Chinese, similar to English words and phrases. Most Chinese characters can be independently formed into words, such as "I", which is similar to words made up of single letters in English, such as "I". Most words consist of more than two Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "words" and "letters" in English, the meaning of words is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it is independently formed, thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent.

The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in thousands of commonly used words, and hundreds of thousands of words can be easily combined. However, on the other hand, it has become a burden to accurately grasp the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. There are about tens of thousands of commonly used words in Chinese, with a total vocabulary of about one million. Although it seems daunting in quantity (only 4000 words in CET-4), due to the ideographic nature of most Chinese word formation, it is not out of reach to master it basically. Therefore, as far as vocabulary is concerned, its learning difficulty is not high; In contrast, mastering the same number of foreign words has a much greater memory intensity.

The high efficiency of this word formation ensures the stability of the Chinese character system, that is, under the condition that the basic Chinese characters are basically unchanged, the vocabulary increases and the language develops.

The number of ten Chinese characters

There is no exact number of Chinese characters, and the number of Chinese characters commonly used in daily life is probably several thousand. According to statistics, 1000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, and 2000 words can cover more than 98%. 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 variant characters and uncommon words have naturally disappeared or been standardized, and generally only occasionally appear in names and places other than ancient Chinese. 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.

Xu Shen counted the number of Chinese characters for the first time in Shuo Wen Jie Zi in Han Dynasty, with a total of 9,353 characters. Later, the jade tablets written by Gu in the Southern Dynasties recorded the words 169 17. On this basis, the jade tablets of Daguangyihui were revised, which is said to have 22,726 words. After that, Lei Pian, which was officially edited by the Song Dynasty, received 3 13 19 words. Another book, Ji Yun, compiled by the Song Dynasty authorities, received 53,525 words, which was once the book with the largest number of words.

In addition, some dictionaries have more words, such as Kangxi Dictionary in Qing Dynasty, with 47,035 words. There are 48,902 words in the Japanese dictionary of dahanhe, with 1062 words in the appendix. The Chinese Dictionary in Taiwan Province Province has 49,905 words; The Chinese Dictionary has 54,678 words. In the 20th century, the ocean of Chinese characters has the largest number of published words, with 85,000 words.

In the computer coding standard for Chinese characters, GB23 12 contains 6763 simplified characters, GBK contains 209 12 simplified characters, traditional characters and Japanese and Korean characters, Big5 contains 13053 traditional characters, and the Unicode unified Chinese character set contains 20902 Chinese characters with two extended areas, totaling 70,000 characters.

The influence of Chinese characters

Impact on other roles

The writing system of Chinese characters is also one of the most important source characters in the world. Under the influence of Chinese characters, it also produced:

Qidanwen

Jurchen language

Xixiawen

Gu Zhuangzi

Ancient white characters (square white characters)

Ancient Buyi characters (square Buyi characters)

Word nan

But they all died out for various reasons, and now few people can recognize Chinese female books. Japanese pseudonyms (names) and Korean proverbs (