There is an urgent need for information about Chinese homophonic allegorical sayings, jokes and riddles, and the origin of Chinese characters.

There is a legend about the origin of Chinese characters. China ancient books all say that Chinese characters were created by Cang Xie. It is said that Cang Xie saw a strange-looking god, and the cave looked like a painted picture. Cang Xie painted his own image and created words. Some ancient books say that after Cang Xie created the characters, he let the cat out of the bag, the sky fell, and ghosts and gods cried every night. There is also a legend that Cang Xie observed the footprints of birds and animals printed on the mud, which aroused his paranormal feeling of reading ci. This rumor is not reliable. Literary figures are the needs of the broad masses of the people according to the facts, and they are gradually enriched and developed after a long period of social practice.

1autumn of 954 to1summer of 957, ancient laborers in China excavated Banpo site (now north of banpo village, the eastern suburb of Xi city) for many times, and found that as early as 6,000 years ago, people in the left and right Banpo created illegal symbols, paintings, sculptures and decorations with literary nature in their long-term life and production practice. The carved symbols of Banpo people are mostly left on painted pottery, which can be regarded as original Chinese characters.

In recent years, a number of tombs and tombs (more than 4,500 years ago) have been found in a site in the late Dawenkou culture of Lingyang River in Juxian County, Shandong Province, and a large number of cultural relics have been unearthed. On some pottery statues, a word like a picture is engraved, and more than one word 10 has been published. These characters are drawn according to the shape of objects, so they are called "hieroglyphics". The structure of characters is similar to hieroglyphics in Oracle Bone Inscriptions, but it predates Oracle Bone Inscriptions by 1000 years. So "Pictograph" is the earliest written language in China, which has the characteristics of written language.

There are three forms of Chinese characters:

method of images

This is the earliest way to form Chinese characters, creating the most primitive characters, such as "day", "month", "water" and "cow". After gradual evolution, these hieroglyphics all changed the form of the original characters and later became regular characters. Some strokes have been reduced, and some strokes have been added, from irregular characters to regular characters.

Default method

Compared with pictographic characters, pictographic characters are easier to see the principle of word-making, but they can't express the idea of drawing. The ancients created another word-formation method-the method of knowing meaning. It is to use different symbols or "hieroglyphics" plus some symbols to express the idea of drawing an image. Example: Write the word "bright", which means that "day" and "month" bring light and brightness. The word "Dan" is written as (meaning that the sun rises on the horizon.

Shape-sound method

Both pictographic characters and cognitive characters can see the meaning of words from their shapes, but they can't read the sound. Therefore, the pictophonetic method was created to create Chinese characters. Match sounds representing sounds with meanings representing shapes to form many new words. Example: the word "dad" is a combination of the phonetic word "ba" and the phenotypic word "father"; The word "Ba" is a combination of "Ba" and "++". There are more and more such figures. On the whole, pictophonetic characters account for 90% of Chinese characters. The formation and development of Chinese characters have become an important tool for people to think about each other and meet the needs of human society.