Talk about the origin of Chinese characters

There are various legends about the origin of Chinese characters. Ancient Chinese books all say that characters were created by Cangjie. It is said that Cangjie saw a god with a strange appearance, and his face looked like a painting with words on it. Cangjie then traced his image and created words. Some ancient books say that after Cangjie created writing, millet fell from the sky and ghosts and gods cried every night because of leaked secrets. There is also a legend that Cangjie observed the footprints of birds and animals imprinted on the soil, which inspired him to invent writing. All these legends are unreliable. Writing is slowly enriched and developed by the working people based on the needs of real life and through long-term social practice.

From the autumn of 1954 to the summer of 1957, Chinese archaeologists excavated the Banpo site (today's north of Banpo Village in the eastern suburbs of Xi'an City) many times and discovered that the Banpo people lived for a long time as early as around 6000 years ago. In his life and production practice, he created literal symbols and artistic works such as paintings, sculptures, and decorations. Most of the Banpo people's engraved symbols are preserved on painted pottery, which can be regarded as primitive Chinese characters. In recent years, China has discovered a group of tombs at a site of the late Dawenkou culture in Lingyang River, Ju County, Shandong Province (more than 4,500 years ago), and a large number of cultural relics have been unearthed. Some pottery statues are each engraved with an image and text, and *** discovered more than 10 single characters. These characters are depicted according to the shapes of real objects, so they are called "pictographs". The structure of the font is very similar to the pictographic characters on the oracle bone inscriptions, but it is more than 1,000 years earlier than the oracle bone inscriptions. Therefore, "pictographic characters" are the earliest characters in China, and they already have the characteristics of characters.

There are three main ways to form Chinese characters:

Pictographic method This is the earliest method of forming Chinese characters, thus creating the most primitive characters. For example: "日" is written, "月" It is written as water, it is written as cow, and so on. After gradual evolution, these pictographic characters later changed the shape of the original characters and became the later square fonts. Some strokes were reduced, and some strokes were added, from irregular to regular fonts.

It is easier to see the rationale behind the creation of pictographic characters if you know the meaning of them, but they cannot express abstract meanings. The ancients created another method of making characters - the method of understanding meaning.

That is to use different symbols or borrow "pictographs" and add some symbols to express an abstract meaning. Example: The word "明" is written as , which means "sun" and "moon" bring light. The word "Dan" is written, (meaning the sun rises above the horizon.

The meaning of the pictographic characters and ideographic characters can be seen from the glyphs, but the sound cannot be read. Therefore, He invented the phonetic method to create characters. He combined the phonetic characters that represent sounds with the shape characters that represent meanings to form many new characters. For example: the word "ba" is the phonetic character "ba" and the graphic character "father". The word "Ba" is made up of the combination of "Ba" and ". In this way, more and more characters are created. According to statistics, pictophonetic characters account for about 90% of Chinese characters. The formation and development of Chinese characters have become an important tool for people to communicate ideas. Adapted to the needs of human social life