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Character is a symbol system used by human beings to record language. It is generally believed that writing is the symbol of civilized society. Marxist view holds that writing is produced after the emergence of class society. Chinese characters are ideograms (hieroglyphs) in the form of pictures in the early stage of development, but in the later stage, except Chinese characters, they have all become phonography for recording sounds.

The word wénzì is a visual formal system for recording oral language. The combination of written and spoken language forms written language.

Basic meaning

Linguistically, writing refers to the visual form of written language. In ancient times, letter combinations were called "Wen" and combined characters were called "Zi". Now they are collectively called "Zi", and the basic individual of a word is called "Zi". In daily life, "writing" can also refer to written language, language, articles, words and so on. (1)[ character; Script]: record the visual symbol form of spoken language and break through the time and space limitation of spoken language. Such as Chinese characters and Latin letters. (2) [written language]: written language, such as Chinese and Russian (3) [text]: article (4) [document]: document; Official Document (5) [Secret Letter]: Secret Letter 1 Example Description. The word Han Xu Shen's preface to explaining words: "Gai Yi is an pictographic character, so it is called a text; After the shape and sound are mutually beneficial, that is, the word, "press, according to the class pictograph, that is, the monomer, for the text; Form and sound complement each other, that is, they are combined into words. Historical Records of the First Qin Emperor: "A stone is weighed by one device, the car is on the same track, and the book is the same." Yan Zhitui's "Yan Family Instructions Mianxue" in the Northern Qi Dynasty: "The husband who writes has a fundamental grave, and he is a disciple of the world, but he does not know how to write." Tang Hanyu read Guo Guanzi: "The words are ridiculous, so there are five words in the right thirty." Li Qingchen's "Shu Dong Reading Secretary Primary School": "The voice is like a person who announces what he wants, but the voice cannot spread to other places and stays in different times, so the book is a text." The first article of Lu Xun's Outline of the History of China Literature: "Important literary achievements, which were popular when young, are all multi-handed metaphors. It is extremely difficult to determine who the author is, thanks to a saint and by guessing. " 2. The written language of the word records Tang Meng Jiao's poem "Old Hate": "No children copy the text, old songs fall." Liu Yuanqi's Gui Volume 8: "The pen of thunder is unsystematic, powerless and disorganized." "Wake up to the world, Qian Xiucai mistakenly occupied the Phoenix": "There are several examiners who read their parents' words, all of which make him a talent in Beijing." Wen Xin San by Xia Mianzun and Ye Shengtao: "The title of an article is often decided after the article is written." 3. Sentence-by-sentence recording of Tang Hanyu's "Chorus in Jingtan and Preface to Poetry": "Look for strange words and carve words, with Weber's haggard and single-minded, and be more measured." 4. Official documents; Song Zhongyan's case file "Yaozhou Xie Shangbiao": "In the future, thieves will send people to Wen. If they violate the former, they will be sent out of the country immediately and will not accept it." Previously on the legacy of Xuanhe: "Song Jiang, the escort, went to Shi Jiecun at night to report to Chao Gai." The volume of "Qin Six Kingdoms Pinghua" said: "When the States and counties answered the words, they learned that the King of Korea was captured and all the generals died, so they surrendered." "Ancient and modern novels, simple posts, and monks cleverly bullied Mrs. Huangfu": "When the money was read, I immediately taught him where to go and told him to settle in the mountains. At that time, Ding Shan accepted this writing. " 5. Play with Shu or Zazi. Song Zhu compiled "Old News of Quyi", Volume 8: "Ning Chu discussed the new law, which frightened China and foreign countries. Han and Wei Gongyan went to court, and Yuling's meaning was slightly doubtful. " Feng Ming Menglong's "Think Tank Supplement, Wisdom and Han Qi": "One day, I entered Zazi, asked for things in the mountains, begged for the night, and then went to the temple alone, saying that the government should not be surprised. I had to present a word, saying that I just needed to vent."

Edit the basic properties of this paragraph

1. Visual attribute: Words are simple visual patterns that reproduce spoken sounds, so they are clearer, can be read repeatedly, and can break through the limitations of time and space. 2. Agreed attribute: Characters are visual forms created by human agreement. If necessary, we can make a new agreement and form a text reform. 3. System attribute: No matter morpheme, syllable or phoneme, words have their own strict system, so we can't expect words to be meaningful, and the reform will also affect the whole body.

Value and function

Humans have only spoken English for a long time, and the written language formed by recording spoken English in words has a short history. Systematic language has become an important tool to distinguish between human beings and animals, and writing has enabled human beings to enter a civilized society with historical records. The breakthrough of written language in spoken language is limited by time and space, which enables human beings to inherit human wisdom and spiritual wealth completely on the basis of written language, and enables human beings to improve their education system, improve their wisdom, develop science and technology and enter a civilized society.

Normal text and code text

Ordinary characters are composed of simple figures, which were closer to pictures in the early days and are now closer to geometric lines. For example, Latin letters are simple lines, arcs and dots. Chinese characters are mainly composed of straight lines, so they are called "square Chinese characters". The ancient Chinese characters in Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan scripts are more graphic. Due to the limitation of special people's visual ability, we can also invent mutated visual symbols or tactile correspondence to replace ordinary words. Braille is a tactile symbol invented to adapt to the blind who have no visual ability. Sign language is a dynamic visual symbol invented by dumb people who have no vocal ability. The semaphore is a dynamic visual symbol, which dances with the flag to adapt to the long-distance hearing and visual limitations, such as navigation. These codes and characters are based on phonography's pinyin scheme. Traditional Chinese characters can't use this code because there are too many characters. In the early days of electronic information transmission, people also used Arabic numerals instead of Chinese characters to transmit written language. This digital code can encode any text. However, due to the huge number of Chinese characters, special code translators are needed to use them. Some people divide characters into linear characters and nonlinear characters. This is unscientific, because both common words and codewords have visual elements such as lines and dots.

Edit the writing direction of this paragraph.

When recording words in spoken language, the order of spoken language must be followed. However, there are many options when converting the specific time sequence of spoken language into spatial order. The writing direction of early characters, such as Egyptian holy books, is uncertain. Generally speaking, you can continue to write from where you wrote, which is called Niu Geng writing. Start from the horizontal direction, and then start from the end of one line and write directly to the next line in the opposite direction. At present, most characters are written in Greek letters: letters are written from left to right and lines are written from top to bottom. Modern Chinese characters are basically written like this. But Arabic characters and Hebrew letters are written from right to left. The Uyghur alphabet in China and Xinjiang comes from Arabic alphabet, and so does it. In ancient times, Chinese characters were written from top to bottom and the lines were from right to left. I still use this writing occasionally.

Edit the text history of this paragraph.

In the past, it was thought that the history of human characters could be divided into three stages: hieroglyphics, logotypes and pinyin. However, the current view is that focusing on ideography or phonology is the different development direction of writing.

Text type

The most primitive words can't record the language systematically, so they probably just write some keywords such as poems. Mature early writing is ideographic writing, that is, using graphics to record a meaningful language unit word or morpheme. Ancient Chinese characters are written words, for example, "learning while remembering" recorded five words. Modern Chinese characters are morphemes. For example, Regular Learning and Review uses 9 words, and 5 words record 9 morphemes. Because of the huge number of words and morphemes, the number of words in ideographs and the complex structure of words, it is cumbersome and gradually eliminated. Phonology uses simpler graphics to record an abstract phonetic unit syllable or phoneme. Japanese pseudonyms are syllabic characters, and each word is written with a syllable. English words are phonemes, such as "learning" to write five phonemes with five words (letters). Because syllables and phonemes are very limited, especially only dozens of phonemes, this writing method has become a common writing method in the modern world and is very portable. Syllable words are divided into full-syllable words and non-full-syllable words. Japanese pseudonym is a full syllable word. Non-syllabic words are divided into semi-phoneme syllabic words and whole phoneme syllabic words. For semi-phoneme syllables such as Arabic, the main part of each word (letter) is written in syllables, and the vowel phoneme can be written without writing or with additional parts. Phoneme syllable characters, such as Korean characters, and the components inside each word (letter) correspond to all phonemes in the syllable respectively. Of course, no matter what words, the whole should record the sound and meaning of spoken language. The classification of characters is only considered from the function of a single word (letter). For this reason, we can't call all words "logograms".

There are many ethnic groups in China, most of which have their own languages and scripts. However, due to sinicization, the spoken and written languages of some ethnic groups such as Manchu have been lost.

Mongolian, Tibetan, Uygur, Zhuang and Korean all have their own languages and literature.

Chinese is the common language of Hui people. In daily communication and religious activities, the Hui people keep some Arabic and Persian words. In border ethnic areas, Hui people often use the languages of local ethnic minorities.

Miao nationality has its own language, belonging to the Miao branch of Miao Yao language family of Sino-Tibetan language family. Originally, there was no national script, and the Latin phonetic alphabet was founded in the late 1950s. Nowadays, most people use Chinese.

Judging from the relationship between Chinese characters and Chinese, Chinese characters are a kind of morpheme words. As far as the structure of Chinese characters is concerned, Chinese characters are a writing system composed of ideographic, phonetic (pictographic and phonetic) and symbols that neither ideographic nor phonetic.

Chinese characters originated from pictures. In the early stage of Chinese characters, the shape of pictographic characters is directly related to the meaning of morphemes it represents. Although each word has its own fixed pronunciation, the glyph itself is not a phonetic symbol, which is different from the pinyin letters. The pronunciation of hieroglyphics is transmitted to it through the morphemes it represents. With the evolution of glyphs, pictographs are becoming less and less pictographs. As a result, the glyph loses its original connection with the morpheme it represents. At this time, the glyph itself is neither phonetic nor semantic, and becomes an abstract symbol. If all morphemes in Chinese are represented by such symbols that neither express sound nor meaning, then Chinese characters can be said to be pure symbolic characters. But this is not the case. Chinese characters can be divided into single words and combined words. Only letter combinations are purely symbolic characters. Combination characters are composed of single characters. Structurally speaking, compound words are one level higher than single words. Because a single word that constitutes a combined word is itself a symbol, when it is a part of a combined word, it participates as a meaningful "word". Combination characters can be divided into the following three categories:

① pictophonetic characters. Pictophonetic characters are composed of two parts: pictophonetic characters representing meaning and phonetic characters representing pronunciation. For pictophonetic characters with the simplest structure, pictophonetic characters and homophonic characters are used as characters. As an integral part of pictophonetic characters, these letter combinations are phonetic and meaningful characters. But the shape only takes its meaning, not its sound, such as the "bird" next to the word "pigeon"; The phonetic side only takes the sound, but does not take the meaning. For example, due to the evolution of the meaning and pronunciation of the radical "nine" of the word "pigeon", some pictophonetic characters have lost the function of expressing meaning or pronunciation. For example, "ball" was originally the name of a jade, so it was shaped with "jade". Now the word "ball" doesn't refer to jade, and this shape has no function. Another example is the word "sea", which originally used "every" as the sound. Due to the change of pronunciation, the pronunciation of "sea" and "plum" is far from each other now, and the "plum" beside the sound is useless. Sometimes, the form and sound have lost their original functions, such as "giving, waiting, short". This kind of characters can no longer be regarded as pictophonetic characters.

There is no clear boundary between pictophonetic characters and non-pictophonetic characters. At the beginning of word-making, pictophonetic characters are not necessarily close to their pronunciation. With the development of modern Chinese characters, this difference is even greater. Some people take more than 7500 modern combined Chinese characters for statistics. As far as the pronunciation of Putonghua is concerned, less than 5% of compound words are completely homophonic (initials, finals and tones are the same). About 10% initials have the same vowel but different tones. Only one vowel is the same, accounting for about 20%. If only the first two categories are regarded as pictophonetic characters, then pictophonetic characters only account for 15% of commonly used Chinese characters. If the above three categories are regarded as pictophonetic characters, pictophonetic characters will probably account for 35% of popular Chinese characters. If the standard is relaxed, or the pictophonetic characters are determined completely according to their origins, the percentage of pictophonetic characters in popular Chinese characters will be much higher.

2 Fit and understand words. The ancients said, "Military strategists must contend" and "people keep their word." This explanation is wrong for the words "nothing" and "letter". However, there are indeed such words in the Chinese character system, such as "incorrect is crooked" and "bad is bad". This kind of words is characterized by combining the meaning of radicals to express the meaning of the whole combined word. There are few such words, only a few examples.

The radicals in the above two types of combined words have ideographic function and phonetic function. The following situation is different. (3) Combined marker words. The radicals of this compound word are neither ideographic nor phonological. There are two main situations. First, due to the changes in pronunciation and meaning of words, the original phonetic and pictographic characters no longer express pronunciation and meaning. For example, the words "give, wait and be short" mentioned above. Another situation can take the word "Zhang" as an example. According to Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi in Han Dynasty, the word "Zhang" changed from "sound" to "ten". However, when people say "establish an early chapter" (to distinguish it from "bow long"), they analyze it into two parts: "establish" and "early". In fact, from the perspective of ancient Chinese characters, "Zhang" is a unique hieroglyph, which has nothing to do with "sound, ten, standing and morning".

Chinese characters have been used to record Chinese for more than 3000 years, and they have been used until today without interruption. In such a long historical period, Chinese characters not only serve people's real life, but also record extremely rich cultural materials; Even across national boundaries, it was borrowed by neighboring countries such as Japan, North Korea and Vietnam to record non-Chinese languages.

On the other hand, people have been criticizing the shortcomings of Chinese characters for a long time, mainly saying that Chinese characters are difficult to recognize, write and mechanize (printing, typesetting, typing, etc. Therefore, it is not as efficient as pinyin in literacy, children's literacy education and cultural communication.

Compared with Pinyin, Chinese characters have their shortcomings, but they also have their advantages. The biggest advantage of Chinese characters is that they can be beyond space and limited by time. There are great differences in pronunciation between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese. However, since 2000, the font has been quite stable and the meaning of words has not changed much, so the ancient books of the pre-Qin and Han dynasties can still be partially understood by ordinary people today. If ancient books are written in pinyin, modern people simply can't understand some dialects with different pronunciations, so they can't communicate with each other, but if they are written in Chinese characters, they can understand each other, and the reason is the same.

The work of simplifying Chinese characters began in the 1950s. 1986 republished Summary of Simplified Chinese Characters stipulates more than 2,200 simplified Chinese characters (including words analogized by simplified Chinese radicals). At present, this work has come to an end and will remain stable for some time to come, and will not continue to simplify. Because continuous simplification will destroy the stability of characters, and after simplifying a batch of characters, the original traditional Chinese characters cannot be abolished. Therefore, the total number of Chinese characters is increasing, which increases the burden on people who study and use Chinese characters.

The debate about pinyin of Chinese characters has a long history. Theoretically, any natural language can be recorded in Pinyin. However, due to the differences of Chinese dialects, it will bring great difficulties to people in dialect areas before the work of popularizing Putonghua has achieved extensive and practical results. In addition, due to the long history of Chinese characters, a large number of documents are recorded in Chinese characters. Once you change your tune, it will inevitably lead to certain difficulties in the wide use of literature, and may also cause fluctuations in social psychology and national feelings.

Characters are divided into hieroglyphics and window-shaped characters.

Hieroglyphs refer to writing with pure graphics, which are similar in shape to what they represent. Generally speaking, hieroglyphics are the earliest characters. Outline the shape characteristics of the object to be expressed with lines or strokes of words. For example, the word "moon" looks like the shape of a curved moon, and the word "turtle" (especially the traditional [turtle]) looks like the side shape of a turtle. The word "horse" is a horse with four legs, and the word "fish" is a swimming fish with a head, a body and a tail. The word "sun" is like a circle with a little bit in the middle, much like the shape people see when they look directly at the sun.

Ideographic characters come from picture characters, but they weaken the nature of pictures and enhance the symbolism. Is the most primitive word formation. It has great limitations, because some physical abstract things can't be drawn. Therefore, on the basis of hieroglyphics, Chinese characters have developed into ideographic characters, and other word-forming methods have been added, such as understanding, referring to things, pictophonetic characters and so on. However, these new word-making methods still need to be based on the original hieroglyphics, based on hieroglyphics, by splicing, omitting or adding or deleting symbols.

At present, the most widely known hieroglyph in the world is the hieroglyph of ancient Egypt-the holy book. About 5000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians invented a graphic writing called hieroglyphics. This writing is slow and difficult to understand. About 3400 years ago, the Egyptians evolved a faster and easier font. In addition, Dongba script and Shuishu script adopted by Naxi people in southwest China are the only hieroglyphic systems still in use. As time went on, even the Egyptians themselves finally forgot how to explain the early hieroglyphics. If it weren't for the discovery of French ancient philologists when Napoleon invaded Egypt, it is very likely that archaeologists can't recognize this kind of writing so far.

1799, these French ancient philologists unearthed a black stone tablet engraved with words. The inscription was written in three languages, namely Greek, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and later Egyptian characters. French archaeologist gene paul champollion studied these characters and tried to explain the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt.

Champollion's method of interpreting ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics is: comparing the words on stone tablets, first trying to pick out the hieroglyphics of Ptolemy, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, and then trying to identify the meanings of other hieroglyphics. Champollion published his findings in 1822.

Rosetta stone recorded the same content in three languages, so it became the key to interpret ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Napoléon Bonaparte, a famous French soldier, fought a great battle in Egypt. In order to study Egyptian culture, historians sent by Napoleon excavated many ancient sites.

It is worth mentioning that China's original characters belong to hieroglyphics. Although Chinese characters still retain the characteristics of pictographs, there are other ways to create characters besides pictographs. After thousands of years of evolution, Chinese characters have been far away from the original image, so they are not hieroglyphics, but ideograms. However, Oracle Bone Inscriptions and inscriptions on bronze are also hieroglyphics. In addition, the "head font" and "geometry" of Mayan characters are also.

Wen Zi

trait

writing

The written symbol of language is an established visual signal system for information exchange between people. These symbols should be able to flexibly write a language composed of sounds, so as to send information to distant places and pass it on to future generations.

The pioneers of writing originated from pictures. The original painting developed in two aspects, on the one hand, it became the art of painting, on the other hand, it became the writing. Primitive people used graphics to express their meaning, which is usually called "graphic writing". Although this kind of graphics can communicate information, it has nothing to do with language. For example, drawing an arrow means "March from here" and drawing a person holding his hands in the air means "welcome", which is understandable to everyone, but if the meaning in the picture is expressed in words, it is different. You can speak English and he can speak French. Such graphics can be said to be the pioneers of writing, and have not yet become real writing. (Figure 1 [The pioneer of writing, for example, the fishing king led five boats, each with several people, which lasted for three days] [Crossing the lake and reaching the other side safely]]

Pictures that express meaning should be developed to combine with language and be able to write the language completely, which will become an effective record of language, that is, mature words. Many ethnic groups have created primitive scripts, but only minority groups have developed their scripts to a mature level. Some words can only be realistic words, not function words, so readers should supplement them when reading. This is an incomplete text. Most ethnic groups borrow mature symbol systems from other ethnic groups, and then modify and supplement them to write their own languages.

There are three types of words worthy of the name: syllabic words, syllabic words and alphabetic words. These three types represent three stages of writing development.

If each word is represented by a symbol, many symbols are needed, but abstract words are still difficult to write, so such words are not practical. The solution is to change some word symbols into words that only express sounds but not meanings, and put them in the middle of word symbols, which will become a text with both word symbols and syllable symbols. This is the earliest mature text type.

Chinese written in Chinese characters basically belongs to the type of using both word symbols and syllable symbols. In ancient Chinese, most Chinese characters representing content words are word symbols, while Chinese characters representing function words, onomatopoeia and transliteration are syllable symbols. For example, the word "Qi", which originally represented a dustpan, was a kind of literal symbol, and later it was borrowed to represent function words and became a syllable symbol. For another example, "jingle" and "ke" are syllabic symbols. Some Chinese characters are only syllable symbols in polysyllabic notional words, not word symbols. For example, "grape" is a word composed of two syllables and should be written in two syllables.

[Text development schematic table]

Japanese is a mixture of Chinese characters and pseudonyms, which are typical characters with both written symbols and syllabic symbols. Among them, Chinese characters are mostly written symbols of roots, while pseudonyms are syllabic symbols of suffix auxiliary words. , and pseudonyms are changed from Chinese characters (Figure 2 [Example of Japanese pseudonyms]).

A word that uses both syllables is a "syllable word". If a word is lost, all syllables are used. In any language, the number of words is large and increasing. The number of syllables is much less and relatively stable. As long as a limited number of symbols are used in syllable characters, the language can be written completely.

There is a "pseudonym writing movement" in Japan, which advocates using all pseudonyms instead of Chinese characters. If this idea comes true, Japanese will become syllables.

Ethiopian script (called Amharic script in modern times) is an existing syllable script. It uses roughly the same symbols to represent the same consonants, and uses subtle stroke changes to represent vowels, which becomes syllable symbols. (Figure 3[ Example of Amhara Speech Festival])

Comparing Japanese pseudonyms with Amharic phonetic symbols, we can see that the main difference between them is that pseudonyms use different symbols to represent the same consonants, and Amharic characters use basically the same symbols to represent the same consonants (compare Figure 2 and Figure 3).

In some syllabic characters, no matter how different vowels are, syllables with the same consonants are represented by the same symbols. For example, ka, ki and ku are all written as K, which produces the so-called "consonant letters". Although this kind of letter is called consonant, it has unwritten vowels and still has the nature of syllable symbol, which is the intermediate form of the evolution from syllable symbol to phoneme symbol.

The Biblus alphabet in the 1 1 century BC (the inscription of Ashram, discovered in Biblus, now called Jubail, Lebanon) is the earliest existing consonant alphabet, which can be said to be the ancestor of the alphabet. (Figure 4[ double letters])

Arabic letters indirectly passed down from the ancestors of letters are consonants widely used today. Arabic characters write the same letters together, which requires readers to read different words according to different contexts. It's a lot like using letters to abbreviate language. For example, the letters D and P are written together to become d P, but in one place you should read dipu“floor "and in another place you should read dapo“broken". In this way, although writing is easy, reading is too inconvenient. So later, a few dots were added to the consonants to represent vowels. (Figure 5[ Arabic alphabet example])

There are three ways to express vowels by letters: ① Use independent symbols to express vowels, such as Greek letters and Latin letters. ② Use unconnected radicals to express vowels, such as Aramaic letters, Hebrew letters and Arabic letters. (3) Use letters to connect radicals to express vowels, such as Indian letters and Amharic letters. The third letter is considered a syllable symbol. The second type is a syllable letter if it is masculine without vowel symbols.

In a strict sense, "phonetic writing" includes both consonants and vowels. The creation of vowels is the contribution of the Greeks. In the 8th century BC, they introduced consonants, changed some of them to express vowels, and the rest still expressed consonants, but no vowels were attached. It's like the original K can represent the sounds of ka, ki and ku, and now it is written as K-A, K-I and K-U with the letters K, A, I and U respectively. In this way, "phoneme (phoneme) letters" are produced. Phoneme alphabet should analyze syllables into consonants and vowels when writing, and combine consonants and vowels into syllables when reading. This is a complete pinyin system. (Figure 6[ Greek classical letters])

The appearance of a complete pinyin system has brought the history of Chinese characters into a new stage. If the sounds of all languages are analyzed into phonemes, there are only dozens of basic consonants and vowels, which can be written in dozens of letters. Compared with syllable letters, phoneme letters not only have fewer symbols, but also have more flexible pronunciation. But there are always omissions in written records and pronunciation. Such as stress, sentence tone, rhythm, etc. The alphabet is still not expressed.

As far as a single symbol is concerned, there are three basic ways to express words: ideographic (pictographic characters), ideographic (knowing and referring to things) and ideographic (borrowing and homophonic). Specific words are often mixed with several expressions, mainly in one or two ways.

The original graphic characters mainly used ideographic methods, but also used ideographic methods, such as dots or short lines to represent numbers, so they were also called "ideographic characters" (Figure 1). Characters with both word symbols and syllable symbols use both ideographic and phonetic methods, so they are also called "linguistic signs". In logograms, there are generally so-called "attributes", which are neither ideographic nor phonological, but have different functions. Broadly speaking, the distinguishing function is also an ideographic function.

In addition to the newly designed characters, syllable characters and phoneme alphabetic characters are ideographic characters sandwiched between phonetic symbols. For example, in English or French, some words have the same pronunciation but different spellings, and some words are accompanied by silent letters. These features, which were formed due to historical or other reasons, have become spellings with different meanings today. Arabic numerals are ideographic symbols, but they are often used in the middle of pinyin letters, which is also a mixture of expressions.

Judging from the content of language, the "language unit" written by a character symbol can be large or small. From small to large, it can be divided into five grades: ① phonemes or phonemes, using phonemes or phoneme letters. (2) syllables, using syllable symbols. 3 words, use words. 4 phrases, using phrase symbols. ⑤ Paragraph, paragraph symbol. Today, most of the written symbols in various countries represent phonemes or phonemes, and a few represent syllables. Some Chinese characters are syllable symbols, while others are word symbols. Words representing phrases and paragraphs are not available now. But Arabic numerals and scientific symbols are sandwiched between words, and words, phrases or paragraphs can also be expressed.

The style change of words is the shape of words. The style of any writing is constantly changing, but the mature writing is slowly changing. The existing materials began with ancient Egyptian characters 5,500 years ago. In the early days, most of them were graphic symbols, which were mainly used for inscriptions and were called "sacred writing methods". Most of these graphic symbols have lost the nature of tables and become ideographic symbols or phonetic symbols. In the middle period, due to writing on papyrus with soft pen, the style was changed to cursive strokes, which lost the appearance of graphics, and was mainly used to write scriptures, called "monk body". The later strokes were greatly simplified, mainly used for writing letters and keeping accounts, and were called "popular style". The three postures are quite different, but the basic structure is the same.