Jokes, sayings and origins of Chinese characters with homophones

The newly appointed county magistrate was from Shandong. Because he had to hang up accounts, he said to the master: "Go and buy me two bamboo poles."

The master spoke with a Shandong accent. Hearing "bamboo pole" as "pork liver", he quickly agreed and hurried to the butcher shop and said to the shopkeeper: "The new county magistrate wants to buy two pig livers. You are a sensible person."

< p>You should know it by heart!"

The shop owner is a smart man, he understood it as soon as he heard it, and immediately cut off two pig livers and gave him a pair of pig ears as a gift.

Leave Behind the butcher's shop, the master thought to himself: "What the master asked me to buy was pork liver. Of course these pig ears are mine..." So he wrapped the ears and stuffed them into his pocket. He returned to the county office and reported to the magistrate. He said: "Report to the Master, we have bought pork liver!"

The county magistrate saw that the master bought pork liver, and said angrily: "Where are your ears!" When the master heard this, his face turned pale with fright. He hurriedly replied: "Ears... ears... here... in me... in my pocket!"

Knowledge about Chinese characters

History;

Oracle bone Chinese characters are one of the three oldest writing systems in the world. Among them, the ancient Egyptian holy book characters and the cuneiform characters of the Sumerians in the Mesopotamia have been lost, and only Chinese characters are still in use today.

According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters by Cangjie. Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters based on the shapes of the sun and moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created the characters, the world was shocked - "The sky rained millet, and the ghosts cried at night." From a historical perspective, the complex Chinese character system cannot be invented by one person. Cangjie is more likely to have made outstanding contributions to the collection, arrangement, and unification of Chinese characters. Therefore, "Xunzi: Uncovering" records that "there are many good calligraphers." , and Cangjie is the only one who passed it on."

There is a view that the gossip in "The Book of Changes" has a greater impact on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.

2 Primitive Writing

The oral knowledge before the invention of writing had obvious shortcomings in the transmission and accumulation. Primitive humans used knotting, engraving, and drawing methods to assist in recording events, and later used characteristics Graphics are used to simplify and replace pictures. Primitive writing is formed when graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific correspondence with language.

In 1994, a large number of pottery vessels were unearthed from the Daxi Cultural Site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the more than 170 symbols on them, some of the features are quite similar to oracle bone inscriptions. This discovery estimates the formation process of original Chinese characters to 6,000 years ago. In addition, the pictographic symbols on the pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong, and the geometric symbols on the Banpo painted pottery in Xi'an may all be manifestations of different stages in the formation of primitive writing (or before it was formed).

However, do Chinese characters after the Shang Dynasty and these geometric symbols have the same origin? This issue is still controversial. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the predecessors of Chinese characters, or even absolutely certain that they are written symbols.

Three from pictograms to ideograms

It is said that the stone carvings on the Mount Tai were written by Li Si. Detached from the concrete image of things. The Chinese characters of this period are called ancient characters.

The oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou dynasties are already a relatively complete writing system. Among the more than 4,500 oracle bone inscriptions that have been discovered, nearly 2,000 words can be recognized so far. At the same time as the oracle bone inscriptions, the characters cast on bronze vessels were called bronze inscriptions or bell and tripod inscriptions. The "Sanshi Pan" and "Maogong Ding" of the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical data and artistic value.

After Qin Shihuang unified China, Li Si standardized and organized the large seal script and the ancient texts of the Six Kingdoms, and formulated the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, unifying Chinese characters. The small seal script is rectangular and the strokes are round and smooth.

The Xiaozhuan script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters among the scripts of various countries, and the history of "scripts with the same script" began. The unification of writing has powerfully promoted the spread of culture among ethnic groups and played an important role in the identity of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of world writing.

The development of Chinese characters has gone through many different evolutions. In the early days, the number of characters in the Chinese character system was insufficient, and a large number of things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the written expressions. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters.

However, there are so many things that it is impossible to express them all with a single Chinese character, and the excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters themselves. Chinese has gradually evolved from single-character ideograms to word-based ideograms.

Four created characters and their composition

After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters continued to increase, and many newly created characters continued to appear:

Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty Yang Jian was originally the Duke of Sui, but because the word "辶" in the word "Sui" meant instability, the word "辶" was removed and the character "Sui" was created as the name of the country.

During the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian coined the word "曌" (the same as the word "zhao") as her name based on the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".

Liu Yan of the Five Dynasties created the word "龑" in his name, which means "flying dragon in the sky".

In modern times, due to the influx of a large amount of Western knowledge, many characters were also created. For example, with the introduction of "Beer" into China, how to express it in Chinese characters was a problem. It was originally translated as skin wine, but later felt that it was inappropriate, so around 1910, the word "beer" was created - translated as "beer". In order to express the imperial units, some polysyllabic words were also created, such as miles (nautical miles), 嗧 (gallons), 瓩 (kilowatts), feet (feet), etc. However, these multi-syllabic characters were eliminated in the "Notice on the Unified Use of Characters in the Names of Some Measurement Units" issued by the Chinese Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Measures on July 20, 1977, and are no longer used in the mainland, but in Taiwan It can still be seen in other places.

At present, due to informatization and standardization of word usage, new characters are no longer added arbitrarily to Chinese characters. The only exceptions are the various elements in the periodic table, such as "helium", "chlorine", "radon", "germanium", "chromium", "uranium", etc. This method of forming characters is still used to name new elements. For details on the rules of word formation for chemical elements, see Elements.

The Six Books is an analysis of the composition of Chinese characters. The Six Books were mentioned in Zhou Rites, but the specific content was not explained. In "Shuowen Jiezi" of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the structure rules of Chinese characters in the "Six Books": pictograms, meanings, meanings, pictophonetics, annotations, and borrowings. Among them, the four items of pictography, reference, meaning, and pictophonetic sound are the principles of character creation, which are the "methods of creating characters"; while transfers and borrowings are the rules of word usage, which are the "methods of using characters." However, it should be noted that the "Six Books" are the arrangement and classification of Chinese characters, not the rules for character creation.

5 The formation of modern Chinese characters

Xiaozhuan strokes were mainly curved, and later gradually became more straight-line features, making it easier to write. By the Han Dynasty, official script had replaced Xiaozhuan as the main calligraphy style. The emergence of official script laid the foundation for the glyph structure of modern Chinese characters and became a watershed between ancient and modern writing.

After the Han Dynasty, the way of writing Chinese characters gradually developed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to calligraphy on silk and paper. Cursive script, regular script, running script and other fonts appeared rapidly, which not only met official documents and daily needs, but also formed a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of printing in ancient times, a new font called Song font appeared for printing. In modern times, fonts such as black body and imitation Song fonts have appeared one after another.

Chinese knowledge of six Chinese characters

Eight methods of the character "Yong"[edit]

Glyphs

Chinese characters are square characters. characters occupy the same space. Chinese characters include single characters and combined characters. Single characters cannot be separated, such as "文", "中", etc.; combined characters are composed of basic components and account for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of combined characters include: upper and lower structures, such as "bi" and "chen"; left and right structures, such as "Go" and "Liu"; semi-enclosed structures, such as "同" and "成"; full-enclosed structures, such as "Tuan"; compound structure, such as "Win", "Ban", etc. The basic components of Chinese characters include single characters, radicals and other uncharacterized components.

The smallest unit of Chinese characters is the stroke.

When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the "stroke order", are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontally and then vertically, first left and then flattened, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside then inside, first outside then inside before sealing, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters in different writing styles may be different.

7 Pronunciation

Chinese characters are a unique writing system for many dialects, and each character represents a syllable. China now uses Mandarin as the standard pronunciation. The syllables of Mandarin are determined by an initial consonant, a final and a tone. More than 1,300 syllables are actually used.

Due to the large number of Chinese characters, there is an obvious phenomenon of homophones; at the same time, there are also situations where the same Chinese character has multiple pronunciations, which is called polyphones. This situation has certain differences in different dialects, but it is common in Chinese.

Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common ones are names of people and places, followed by transliterations of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original phonetic words, such as "fire" and "wuhu" (one life). But even so, there are still certain ideographic elements, especially domestic names of people and places. Even foreign names of people and places have certain lower limits of meaning. For example, "Bush" cannot be transliterated into "immortal".

Since Chinese characters do not seem to have undergone much change from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, Chinese characters do not directly represent the changes in Chinese pronunciation. Special research is necessary to speculate on their pronunciation in Old and Middle Chinese.

Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, one Chinese character could represent two syllables, a minor syllable and a major syllable. See Ancient Chinese for details.

The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic pronunciation" and "training pronunciation". A word often has many pronunciations.

In Korean, it is roughly one word for one sound, and there is no training in reading.

Influenced by Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters later also used some polysyllabic characters, such as 里 (sea mile), 嗧 (gallon), 瓩 (kilowatt), etc. However, it is basically not used in mainland China due to official abolishment. It is still used occasionally in Taiwan, and ordinary people understand its meaning.

8. Phonetic notation

The earliest phonetic notation methods are the Duruo method and the direct injection method. To read Ruofa is to use words with similar sounds to notate the pronunciation. Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi uses this phonetic notation method, such as "廻, she is also a pronunciation, and the pronunciation is accurate". The direct annotation method is to use another Chinese character to indicate the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, in "The woman is the one who talks about herself," the phonetic notation is done with "the speaker is Yue".

The above two methods have inherent imperfections. Some words do not have homophones or the homophones are too rare, which makes it difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "Socks Yinshao" and so on.

Fanqie method was developed during the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit using pinyin script. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be annotated by the fanqie method, that is, the initial consonant of the first character and the final and tone of the second character are combined to notate the pronunciation, making it possible to combine the pronunciations of all Chinese characters. For example, "Lian, Langdianqie" means that the pronunciation of "Lian" is made up of the initial consonant of "Lang" and the final and tone of "Dian".

In modern times, phonetic symbols in the form of Chinese characters (commonly known as ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) and many Latin alphabet phonetic notation methods have been developed. Phonetic notation is still part of teaching in Taiwan, but currently the most widely used in China is Hanyu Pinyin.

Since Chinese characters mainly express their own meanings, the phonetic notation is relatively weak. This feature prevents documents dating back thousands of years from being too disparate in wording and phrasing like the Western world that uses pinyin writing, but it also makes it difficult to infer ancient pronunciation. For example, "Pang" derives its sound from "龙", but in today's Beijing dialect, the former is pronounced "pang" and the latter is pronounced "long". How to explain such differences is a topic discussed in phonology.

Nine Chinese Characters and Words

Chinese characters are the smallest units of Chinese shapes, similar to the "letters" in English. However, unlike "letters", Chinese characters also have ideographic components and are therefore similar to individual "words" in "English phrases". Therefore, Chinese characters are a component between "letters" and "words" in English. This can also be derived from the quantity.

Word is the smallest unit of meaning in Chinese, which is analogous to the general term of "vocabulary" and "phrase" in English. The vast majority of Chinese characters can independently form words, such as "I", which is analogous to words formed by a single letter in English, such as "I". Most words are composed of two or more Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "vocabulary" and "letter" in English, the meaning of a word is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it independently forms a word, so it is quite Simplifies memory to some extent.

The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in the fact that thousands of commonly used characters can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words. However, on the other hand, it is necessary to accurately master the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. It has also become a burden.

There are about tens of thousands of commonly used Chinese words, and the total vocabulary is about one million words. Although the number seems a bit prohibitive (there are only 4,000 words for English Level 4), due to the ideographic nature of the word formation of most Chinese characters, it is necessary to basically Mastery is not out of reach. Therefore, as far as vocabulary is concerned, the learning difficulty is not high; in contrast, the memory intensity of mastering the same number of foreign vocabulary is much greater.

This high efficiency of word combination ensures the stability of the Chinese character system, that is, the vocabulary increases, the language develops, and the basic Chinese characters remain basically unchanged.

Ten Number of Chinese Characters

There is no precise figure for the number of Chinese characters. The number of Chinese characters commonly used in daily use is about several thousand. According to statistics, 1,000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, and 2,000 words can cover more than 98%. The statistical results of simplified and traditional Chinese are not much different.

The total number of Chinese characters that have appeared in history is more than 80,000 (some say there are more than 60,000), most of which are variant characters and rare characters. The vast majority of variant characters and rare characters have died out naturally or been standardized. Except for ancient Chinese characters, they generally only appear occasionally in names of people and places. In addition, following the first batch of simplified characters, there are also a batch of "two simplified characters" that have been abolished, but there are still a small number of characters that are popular in society.

The first statistics on the number of Chinese characters was conducted by Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty in "Shuowen Jiezi", which included 9353 characters. Later, the "Yupian" written by King Gu Ye of the Southern Dynasties was recorded to contain 16,917 words, and the "Daguangyihui Yupian" revised on this basis was said to have 22,726 words. After that, Lei Pian, compiled by officials of the Song Dynasty, contained more characters, with 31,319 characters; Ji Yun, another book compiled by officials of the Song Dynasty, contained 53,525 characters, which was once the book with the most characters.

In addition, some dictionaries include more characters, such as the "Kangxi Dictionary" of the Qing Dynasty, which contains 47,035 characters; Japan's "Dahanwa Dictionary", which contains 48,902 characters, and 1,062 appendixes; Taiwan's "Chinese Dictionary" "Big Dictionary" contains 49,905 characters; "Big Chinese Dictionary" contains 54,678 characters. The book with the largest number of published words in the 20th century was "Chinese Character Ocean", containing 85,000 words.

In the Chinese character computer coding standard, GB2312 contains 6763 simplified Chinese characters, GBK contains 20912 simplified, traditional, Japanese and Korean Chinese characters, Big5 contains 13053 traditional Chinese characters, and Unicode’s unified basic Chinese characters for China, Japan and North Korea The collection contains 20,902 Chinese characters and two expansion areas, totaling up to 70,000 characters.

The influence of eleven Chinese characters

The influence on other writing systems

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

Khitan script

Jurchen script

Xixia script

Old Zhuang characters (square Zhuang characters)

Gubai characters (square white characters)

Gu Buyi characters (square Buyi characters)

Zi Nan

But they all died out due to various reasons , Nvshu in Chinese, few people can recognize it nowadays. Japanese kana (仮名) and Korean proverb (?) were also greatly influenced by the glyphs of Chinese characters when they were created.

In addition, Mongolian, Manchu, Xibe, etc. are also under the influence of Chinese writing methods and writing tools. The writing method derived from Aramaic writing from right to left has been changed from top to top. As you write down, the structure of the text changes accordingly.

Twelve regions and countries that currently or have used Chinese characters but not the Chinese language

Since the connection between Chinese characters and pronunciation is not very close, it is easy to be borrowed by other ethnic groups, such as Japan. North Korea and Vietnam both had a historical stage when they could not speak Chinese and simply wrote in Chinese characters. This characteristic of Chinese characters plays a major role in maintaining a unified Han nationality - a nation filled with various dialect groups that cannot communicate with each other.

Chinese characters have had a huge impact on the culture of surrounding countries, forming a Chinese character cultural circle that uses Chinese characters uniformly. In Japan and the Korean Peninsula, Chinese characters are integrated into the characters of their languages ????"Chinese characters (Chinese characters)". かんじ)" and "kanji (?)". Until now, the Japanese language still considers Chinese characters to be part of their writing system. In North Korea, Chinese characters are no longer used at all; in South Korea, the use of Chinese characters is likely to decrease.

However, because Korean uses a large number of Chinese characters and has severe stress, Chinese characters are still used when precise expression is required. Most names of people, companies and organizations also use Chinese characters.

Chinese characters were introduced to Japan via the Korean Peninsula in the 3rd century AD. Today, Japan has restricted the use of Chinese characters. After World War II, some Chinese characters were simplified and a list of commonly used Chinese characters and personal names were promulgated, but Chinese characters were used. They also created And simplified some Chinese characters, such as "tsuji" (crossroads), "栃", "堠" (mountain road) and "広" (wide), "転" (turn), "働" (labor), etc. See: Kanji for details.

Korean Peninsula

Around the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced to the Korean Peninsula, and Korean was once entirely written in Chinese characters. In 1444, King Sejong of Joseon promulgated the "Hunminjeongeum" and invented the use of proverbs and Chinese characters. The Republic of Korea still uses Chinese characters, and people can write according to personal habits, but now fewer and fewer Koreans can write beautiful Chinese characters. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea abolished Chinese characters and retained only a dozen Chinese characters. For details, see: Korean and Chinese characters.

Vietnam

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam in the 1st century AD. Vietnamese also completely used Chinese characters as writing characters, and created the character Nan based on Chinese characters. However, Due to the inconvenience of writing, Chinese characters are still the main writing method. In 1945, after the founding of Vietnam, Chinese characters were abolished and Pinyin characters called "Guoyu characters" were used. There are no traces of Chinese characters in Vietnamese today. For details, see: Zi Nan, Zi Ru

The impact of the Thirteen on folk customs

Many Chinese folk customs are related to Chinese characters, for example:

Shooting a tiger: just guessing Lantern riddles, also called lantern tigers, are closely related to Chinese characters. The ancient Shehu riddles can be roughly divided into two categories. One is the literati Shehu riddles, which have profound riddles and complex and diverse riddles, and the answers are mostly original sentences from the Four Books and Five Classics; the other is the market lantern riddles, which have very popular riddles and answers. Shooting the tiger is an important activity during the Lantern Festival.

Combined characters: Chinese folk often combine some phrases with auspicious meanings into one character to pray for good luck. Common combined characters such as "luck in wealth", "double happiness", etc.

The homophonic words for "Study Confucius and Mencius" are homophones: Chinese people like to take advantage of the homophonic characteristics of Chinese characters to use homophonic words to convey auspicious meanings. For example, the homophone of "bat" for bat is the homophone of "福" for happiness, and the homophone of "bat" for animals is "福". "Beast" is homophonic to "Shou" which means longevity.

Nine-Nine Cold-Resisting Picture: A folk custom in northern China writes "Weeping willows in front of the garden cherish the spring breeze" in nine double-hook characters each year during the nine-month season. Each of these nine characters has nine strokes. Starting from the winter solstice, a stroke is filled with color according to the weather every day, and by the end of the count to nine, a picture of ninety-nine to relieve the cold is completed

Flower and bird characters: Some folk artists use some patterns of flowers and birds to spell them into Chinese characters. Looking at the details, they are some paintings of flowers and birds, but from a distance, the whole is a calligraphy. This art form of combining calligraphy and painting is called flower and bird calligraphy, which is a kind of calligraphy combining colorful flowers, birds, insects and fish. In China, it can only be seen in Spring Festival temple fairs and some festival gatherings. Flower and bird characters have also become a kind of street art in Western countries such as Britain and the United States. Most of the early bird calligraphy paintings were written with some auspicious words to pray for good luck. Nowadays, the bird calligraphy paintings seen at temple fairs mainly write the names of customers. The purpose of the buyers has gradually changed from praying for good luck to hunting for novelties.

The influence of the Fourteenth Period on art

Liang Qichao’s calligraphy works have a unique and beautiful structure of Chinese characters, and the main tool for writing - the brush has a variety of expressive powers, resulting in a unique shape of Chinese characters Art - calligraphy. Seal cutting is an art related to calligraphy, using a knife to carve seal characters on stone as a seal.

The Latinization of Fifteen Chinese Characters

In the past four hundred years, Westerners and the Chinese themselves have proposed many Latinization plans for Chinese characters, mainly including:

Waitman Pinyin (1867)

Postal Pinyin (1906)

Mandarin Romaji (1928)

Northern dialect Latinized new script (1931)

Hanyu Pinyin Plan (1958)

Cantonese Pinyin (1993)

Tongyong Pinyin (1998)

Now, the Chinese Pinyin scheme is the most widely used Chinese character Latinization scheme accepted by the United Nations.

Simplified Sixteen Chinese Characters

Ouyang Xun's "Jiucheng Palace Liquan Ming" in regular script. In modern times, Western civilization, which was in a strong position, began to enter East Asia, and various countries in the entire Chinese character cultural circle began to It set off a trend of learning from the West. Some of them adhere to the tradition of Chinese characters, but many others advocate giving up the use of Chinese characters. The argument for those advocating the abandonment of Chinese characters is that compared with Western pinyin writing, Chinese characters are cumbersome and cumbersome because Chinese characters cannot be written with typewriters and must use giant typesetting rooms. In this regard, many countries that use Chinese characters have made varying degrees of simplification of Chinese characters, and even attempted complete pinyinization. The emergence of the Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese kana and the various pinyin schemes of Chinese are all based on this idea.

Japanese: After World War II, Japan also planned to completely abandon Chinese characters. However, because Japanese kana could only represent sounds, it was very inconvenient to abolish Chinese characters. In the end, Chinese characters were retained, but the "List of Chinese Characters to be Used" was published ( 1850 words), which restricted the use of Chinese characters in publications, but caused many inconveniences in expression, so the "List of Commonly Used Chinese Characters" (1945 words) was later published in 1981.

Vietnamese: Under the compulsion of French colonists, Vietnam largely abandoned Chinese characters as early as the end of the 19th century and used Latinized Vietnamese instead. After World War II, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (later renamed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam) officially and completely abandoned Chinese characters in order to popularize education.

Korean: In 1444, North Korea promulgated and implemented the "Hunminzhengyin", using the Chinese stroke-style pinyin alphabet, that is, the Hangul alphabet. Since the letters of Hangul alphabet can be written together when printing and spelling, they can be easily regarded as one word (although this will also produce a lot of accents), so the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948 The Republic of Korea completely abandoned Chinese characters in 1970 and announced that it would stop teaching Chinese characters in schools in 1970. Since 1976, fewer and fewer people use Chinese characters. But in recent years, there have been calls to restore Chinese characters.