Traveling in the Kingdom of Chinese Characters——Information

Records the Chinese writing system that is still or has been used in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest writing systems in the world, with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is a Chinese character; in a broad sense, it is a unique character in the Chinese cultural circle.

Chinese characters are the most basic unit of Chinese writing. Their use began in the Shang Dynasty at the latest, and have gone through various changes in calligraphy styles such as oracle bone inscriptions, large seal scripts, small seal scripts, official scripts, and regular scripts (cursive script and running script). Qin Shihuang unified China, Li Si compiled the small seal script, and the history of "scripts with the same text" began. Although the pronunciation of Chinese dialects varies greatly, the unification of the writing system reduces the communication barriers caused by dialect differences.

Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty summarized the structure rules of Chinese characters as "six books" in "Shuowen Jiezi": pictogram, referring to things, understanding, pictophonetic, transliteration, and borrowing. 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."

For more than three thousand years, the way of writing Chinese characters has not changed much, allowing future generations to read ancient texts without any hindrance. However, after modern Western civilization entered East Asia, various countries in the entire Chinese character cultural circle have set off a trend of learning from the West. Among them, giving up the use of Chinese characters is an important aspect of this movement. The rationale for these movements was that Chinese characters were cumbersome and clumsy compared to Western pinyin writing. Many countries that use Chinese characters have made varying degrees of simplification of Chinese characters, and there are even attempts to completely pinyinize them. The emergence of the Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese kana and the various pinyin schemes of Chinese are all based on this idea. Mainland China simplified the strokes of Chinese characters with reference to cursive script, and approved the "Simplified Character List" on January 28, 1956, which is still in use in China and Singapore. Taiwan has always used Traditional Chinese.

Chinese characters are an important tool for carrying culture, and there are currently a large number of classics written in Chinese characters. Different dialects use Chinese characters as their own writing systems. Therefore, Chinese characters have historically played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization and have become an intrinsic link in the formation of the Southeast Asian cultural circle. In the process of the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures were left behind, and a unique art of Chinese calligraphy was formed.

A Chinese character generally has multiple meanings and has a strong ability to form words, and many Chinese characters can independently form words. This has led to extremely high "usage efficiency" of Chinese characters, with about 2,000 commonly used characters covering more than 98% of written expressions. Coupled with the ideographic characteristics of Chinese characters, the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high. Chinese characters have a higher information density than alphabetic characters. Therefore, on average, Chinese expressions of the same content are shorter than characters in any other alphabetic language.

Currently, in most areas where Chinese is spoken, two standardized Chinese characters are used, namely Traditional Chinese (traditional Chinese characters) and Simplified Chinese (simplified Chinese characters). The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and North America, and the latter is used in Chinese communities in mainland China, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two Chinese character writing systems, the individual differences in commonly used Chinese characters are less than 25%.

Due to the complexity of writing Chinese characters, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" has existed for a long time. It is believed that Chinese characters are a bottleneck in education and informatization, and there is a push to "Latinize Chinese characters" or even abolish them. Nowadays, it is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although the initial learning is difficult, after mastering common characters, there is no problem of continuing to learn similar to the massive English words, and its ideographic characteristics can also fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the computer input problem has been basically solved, the "theory of backwardness of Chinese characters" and the "Latinization of Chinese characters" have actually been gradually abandoned by most people.

At present, the Chinese character system has been basically stable, but the standardization of Chinese characters and the natural demise of rare characters are still going on.