Who knows the knowledge of Chinese characters? I need it urgently! ! !

According to the literary knowledge in middle school Chinese textbooks, the font changes of Chinese characters are: oracle bone inscriptions - bronze inscriptions (inscriptions, bells and tripods) - seal script (large and small seal script) - official script - cursive script - Regular script - running script.

Chinese character

Chinese characters are an indispensable part of Chinese civilization. They not only carry our history for thousands of years, but also are how people communicate from ancient times to the present. important means. The art of calligraphy derived from Chinese characters is a treasure of Chinese civilization. But, how are Chinese characters created?

The study of the origin of Chinese characters has a history of more than 2,500 years in China.

It is said in Pre-Qin Dynasty that Cangjie was the creator of calligraphy. "Xunzi·Jieye" records: "There are many good calligraphers, but Cangjie is the only one who wrote it." "Lu's Spring and Autumn Annals" records: "Xi Zhong wrote Che, Cangjie wrote the book." According to legend, Cangjie was the historian of the Yellow Emperor and a representative of ancient texts. "Shuowen Jiezi" records: Cangjie was the historian who created characters during the Yellow Emperor's period, and was revered as the "Sage of Characters". Historian Xu Xu believes that the emergence of writing should be related to Cangjie. At that time, the formulation of the calendar required written records, and the formulation of the oracles also required writing. Therefore, Cangjie should be a member of the Zhuanxu tribe. He was "born here and buried here", so there is a Cangjie mausoleum in Taipei. He lived in about the 26th century BC. Based on this, it is speculated that four or five thousand years ago, our country's writing was relatively mature.

In modern times, some people recognized Cangjie and at the same time expanded the team of character creators. For example, Mr. Lu Xun, he believed that "...in society, Cangjie is not the same. Some carve a few pictures on the hilt of the knife, some draw some pictures on the door. They are in harmony with each other and pass on word of mouth, so there are many words. Once the historian collects it, he can make a perfunctory note. I am afraid that the origin of Chinese characters cannot escape this example." "Lu Xun. Literary Talk Outside the Door". In other words, Chinese characters certainly could not have been created by Cangjie alone, but were gradually enriched by many people like Cangjie. Cangjie was just more important and played a larger role among these people. . What we pay attention to is not whether Cangjie created the Chinese characters, but the meaning of the creation itself. The emergence of Chinese characters marks that Chinese history has entered the era of written records. It is a major event in the long history of history and has an important impact on future generations.

Cangjie invented Chinese characters

Cangjie, surnamed Hou Gang and named Shihuang, was a historian during the Yellow Emperor and the founder of Chinese characters. He was revered as the "Sage of Chinese Characters". There are Cangjie Mausoleum, Cangjie Temple and Book Making Platform in Wu Village, 35 miles northwest of present-day Nanle County. Historians believe that Cangjie was born and buried here.

According to legend, Cangjie "began to make written deeds in lieu of knotting ropes." Before that, people tied knots to remember events, that is, big knots were tied in one big knot, small things were tied in small knots, and connected things were tied in a series of knots. Later, it was developed to use a knife to carve symbols on the wood and bamboo as a record. With the development of history and the gradual progress of civilization, things are complicated and there are many famous things. The methods of knotting and carving wood are far from meeting the needs. , which creates an urgent need to create words. The time of the Yellow Emperor was a period of many inventions and creations in ancient times. At that time, not only silkworm breeding was invented, but also boats, carts, bows and slaves, mirrors, pots and steamers for cooking, etc. Under the influence of these inventions, Cangjie also determined to create Come up with a text.

Legend has it that Cangjie had four double-pupiled eyes and was very smart. One year, Cangjie went on a hunting tour in the south and climbed a Yangxu Mountain (now Luonan County, Shaanxi Province) to visit Xuanhuluo? In the water, I suddenly saw a big turtle with many blue patterns on its back. Cangjie found it strange, so he took it and studied it carefully. He looked around and found that the patterns on the turtle's back actually had meaning. He thought that since patterns could represent meanings, if a rule was set, wouldn't everyone be able to use them to express their feelings and record things?

Cangjie thought about it day and night, observing everywhere, seeing the distribution of stars in the sky, the appearance of mountains and rivers on the ground, the traces of birds, animals, insects and fish, and the shapes of vegetation and utensils, tracing and writing, and creating various Different symbols, and the meaning of each symbol is determined. He put together several paragraphs using symbols according to his own ideas and showed them to others. After he explained them, they could understand them clearly.

Cangjie called this symbol "zi".

Cangjie succeeded in making characters, but something strange happened. It rained like millet during the day, and ghosts howled at night. Why does it rain like millet? Because Cangjie invented writing, which can be used to convey feelings and record things, it is certainly worthy of celebration. But why do ghosts cry? Some people say that because of writing, the people's wisdom has become increasingly enlightened, and the people's virtues have gradually faded. Deception, cunning, competition and killing have arisen from this. The world will never have peace from now on, and even the ghosts will not be at peace, so the ghosts will cry.

Another theory is:

On one occasion, Cangjie provided historical facts to Huangdi from the history books recorded in these knots, which caused Huangdi to make mistakes in the border negotiations with Yandi. Lose. Afterwards, Cangjie resigned in shame and traveled around the world, visiting and recording history and events. Three years later, he returned to his hometown of Yangwu Village, Baishui, and lived alone in a deep ditch to "observe the circular curves of Kuixing and observe the traces of hooves and claws of birds and beasts." He sorted out various materials and created various symbols representing all things in the world. He gave these symbols a name, called words.

Cangjie’s characters are all made according to the shapes of all things. For example: the character "日" is drawn according to the red and round shape of the sun; the character "月" is drawn to imitate the shape of the crescent moon; the character "human" is drawn based on the silhouette of a person... Cangjie's creation of writing was later known by Huangdi He was so moved that he gave him the surname Cang. The meaning is that one person is above the king, and one king is above everyone. Later, God found out about this and rewarded Cangjie with a rain of millet. This is the origin of the Grain Rain Festival in the world.

Cangjie Mausoleum is located on the west side of Wu Village, facing the Cangjie Temple from the west to the east. It is a large mound five meters high. Below the mausoleum are ancient cultural relics from the Yangshao to Longshan periods. In front of Weng Zhong's mausoleum, there are stone lions and a stone square with the word "Cangjie" written on it. Cangjie Temple was built in an unknown year. According to the existing inscriptions in the temple, "it has never been replaced since the Han and Tang dynasties." The Cangjie Temple we see today is a building from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It covers an area of ??about 2,700 square meters and faces south. It has a pair of stone pillars with exquisite and elegant carvings. The main gate and the second gate are both hard mountain-style buildings. The worship hall, The main hall and sleeping pavilion are generous and beautiful. There are also seal script couplets and stone carvings of Cangjie and his wife from the Ming Dynasty. The temple is lined with inscriptions, green pines and cypresses, willows and pavilions, and the whole building is majestic.

The Chinese writing system is recorded and 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 resulted in extremely high “usage efficiency” of Chinese characters, with around 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.

Principles of character creation

The Six Books are the basic principles of Chinese character composition. The Six Books were mentioned in Zhou Rites, but the specific content was not explained. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the construction principles of Chinese characters of "Six Books" in "Shuowen Jiezi": pictogram, referring to things, understanding, pictophonetic, transliteration, and pretense.

Pictographic: This method of making characters is to depict the object according to its appearance characteristics. The so-called painting is to follow the object. The four characters such as sun, moon, mountain, and water were originally used to depict the sun, moon, mountain, and water, and later gradually evolved into the current shape.

Referring to things: This refers to the method of expressing abstract things. It is the so-called "everyone refers to his own thing and thinks of it". Ru Bu writes "Shang" above it, and Ren writes "Xia" below it.

Phonetic: This is a unique sound represented by a specific shape (root) in the text. For example: Hu, this character can also be a root. Combined with different attribute roots, it can be synthesized into: butterfly, butterfly, lake, gourd, hu, 鐐, etc., with the same pronunciation (some only have the same initial consonants) , expressing different things. However, due to changes in the phonology of ancient and modern languages, many pictophonetic characters of the same type in ancient times no longer have the same phonemes in today's Mandarin.

Knowing: This word-making method is to combine two radicals to derive new meanings. For example, when "sun" and "moon" are combined, sunlight plus moonlight becomes "bright". The word "人" and the word "言" combine to form the word "信", which means what a person has said in the past; "faith" means that this person always abides by what he has said.

Annotation: This is used when two words are annotations for each other, which are synonymous with each other but have different shapes. Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty explained: "To build a similar poem, we agree to accept each other, and it is always the same as Kao and Lao Shi." , how do you say this? These two words, "kao" in ancient times, can be used as "longevity". "Lao" and "kao" are connected and have the same meaning. That is to say, the old person is Kao, and the person who is Kao is old. The Book of Songs' "Daya? Chupu" also says: "The longevity test of the king of Zhou.". Su Shi's "Poetry on Qu Yuan Pagoda" also has ancients who are immortal, so why bother to test it. One word. The words "kao" and "kao" all mean "old". It is particularly noteworthy that later generations of philologists also made a lot of explanations for Xu Shen's aforementioned definitions. These include "Xing Zhuo theory, Sheng Zhuo theory, and Yi Zhuo theory." "Three categories, but some people think that these three views are not comprehensive enough. Mr. Lin Yu, a contemporary ancient calligrapher, also explained that "zhuanzhu" is a form (root) that records two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings.

For example, "broom and woman" and "mother and daughter" in oracle bone inscriptions, etc.

Borrowing: In short, this method is to borrow a word to express something else. Generally speaking, when there is a new thing that cannot be described, a root with similar pronunciation or similar attributes is used to express this new thing. For example: "And" originally refers to the right hand (first seen in oracle bone inscriptions), but was later used as the meaning of "also". Smell means to listen to something with your ears. For example, in "University·Chapter 7" there is "turn a blind eye, hear but not hear, eat without knowing the taste", but it was later used as a verb for smell (although some people think this is a misuse).

To summarize the above six books, the first two are "methods of creating characters"; the second two are "methods of forming characters"; the last two are "methods of using characters". These six principles are the theories of calligraphy summarized by ancient philology scholars. The composition rules of Chinese characters contained in it have evolved over a long period of time and are not the original creation of any one person.

The structure of Chinese characters

Chinese characters are composed of one or more radicals arranged in a two-dimensional manner (European languages ??are one-dimensional characters) in a specific space and arranged in a square. , so they are also called square characters. From a structural point of view, Chinese characters have the following characteristics:

A single character has a high information density. When expressing the same thing, shorter characters can be used than phonetic characters. The length expresses the same message, so the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high.

A Chinese character is composed of more than 400 ideographic letters as basic radicals, such as gold, wood, water, fire, earth, etc., which are combined like building blocks.

The meaning of an unknown text can be split into words, and its meaning can be inferred from the composition of the root and the arrangement of spaces. When the times evolve and new things appear that are difficult to express in words, new words can also be synthesized based on the principle of root combination. For example, the Chinese word uranium is a newly created word in modern times to express a newly discovered chemical element. .

The spatial arrangement of Chinese character roots has an impact on the meaning of the characters: for example, it is also a combination of "心与死", the left and right rows are "busy", and the upper and lower rows are "forget". Different arrangements lead to different meanings. ; There is a component of the character "乂" on the right side of the text, which means that the right hand (the left radical of the hand represents the left hand) is holding something and doing something to the root of the left character (discovered by archeology of bronze inscriptions and oracle bone inscriptions). If you hold something on the right hand, it becomes "攵", with this root, is almost always aggressive or using violence to achieve something, such as attacking, defeating, knocking, collecting, scattering, politics, animal husbandry, edict, etc.

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.

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 (one life) "woohoo", "haha" and so on. But even so, there are still certain ideographic elements, especially the names of people and places in the country. Even for foreign names of people and places, there are certain bottom lines of meaning. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated into "immortal".

Because Chinese characters themselves do not represent sounds, although the number and writing methods of Chinese characters have changed from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, the changes in pronunciation cannot be seen. Special research is necessary to speculate on their pronunciation in Old and Middle Chinese. Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, a Chinese character was pronounced as two syllables, a minor syllable and a major syllable, similar to today's Korean and Japanese.

The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic pronunciation" and "training pronunciation". One character often has many pronunciations, which comes from the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China in different periods.

In addition to Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters also use some polysyllabic characters, such as "里" (nautical mile), "嗧" (gallon), "瓩" (kilowatt), etc. However, it is basically no longer used in mainland China due to official abolishment. It is still used in Taiwan, and ordinary people understand its meaning.

Phonetic notation

The earliest phonetic notation methods are Duruo method and Zhizhu method. To pronounce Ruofa is to use words with similar pronunciation 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 through 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 composed 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 mainland China is Hanyu Pinyin.

Since Chinese characters mainly express their own meanings, their 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 "páng" and the latter is pronounced "lóng". How to explain such differences is a topic discussed in phonology.

Morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in Chinese, which is analogous to the general term of "vocabulary" and "phrase" in English. Most Chinese characters can independently form morphemes, such as "I", which is analogous to words composed of single letters in English, such as "I". Most words in modern vernacular texts are composed of two or more Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "vocabulary" and "letter" in English, the meaning of a morpheme is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it independently forms a morpheme. , thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent.

Words include morphemes and phrases formed by several morphemes.

The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in the fact that hundreds of basic pictograms can be combined into tens of thousands of Chinese characters representing various things in the sky and on earth; thousands of commonly used characters can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words. .

However, on the other hand, accurately mastering the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words has become a burden. There are tens of thousands of commonly used Chinese words, and the total vocabulary is about one million words. Although the number seems a bit prohibitive, due to the ideographic nature of the word formation of most Chinese characters, it is not out of reach to basically master it. Therefore, in terms of vocabulary alone, learning difficulty is not high; in contrast, the memory intensity of mastering the same number of foreign vocabulary is much greater.

From the perspective of classical Chinese, using the original meaning of characters is more accurate and efficient than over-reliance on words since the May 4th Vernacular Movement. For example, Mr. Zhu Bangfu proposed a retro approach to accurately using Chinese characters. .

The number of Chinese characters

There is no exact number of Chinese characters, but the number of Chinese characters used daily is about several thousand. According to statistics, 1,000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 words can cover more than 98%, and 3,000 words have reached 99%. 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.

Among the Chinese character computer coding standards, the current largest Chinese character coding is Taiwan’s national standard CNS11643. Currently (4.0) *** includes 76,067 verifiable traditional, simplified, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters. However, it is not popular and is only used in a few environments such as household registration systems. The Big Five code commonly used by Taiwan and Hong Kong contains 13,053 traditional Chinese characters. GB18030 is the latest internal code character set of the People's Republic of China. GBK contains 20,912 simplified, traditional, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters, while the early GB2312 contains 6,763 simplified Chinese characters. Unicode's basic Chinese, Japanese and Korean unified ideographic character set contains 20,902 Chinese characters, and there are two extension areas, with a total of more than 70,000 characters.

The initial Chinese character system did not have enough characters, and many things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the expression of the characters. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through stages of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters. The meaning that a single Chinese character can represent is limited, so many single Chinese meanings are represented by Chinese words, such as common two-character words. The current development of Chinese writing is mostly directed towards the creation of new words rather than new characters.

Chinese character encoding system

In order to exchange information, each region where Chinese characters are used has developed a series of Chinese character set standards.

The national standard code ("national standard" is the abbreviation of the National Standard of the People's Republic of China) is used in mainland China. GB2312 contains 6763 Chinese characters, GBK contains 20912 Chinese characters, and the latest GB18030 contains 27533 Chinese characters.

BIG5 code. Contains 13053 Chinese characters. One-byte or two-byte encoding used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Unicode is not well accepted by the Chinese government. The Chinese government requires that software sold in mainland China must support GB18030 encoding.

In the field of international communication and software design, CJK encoding collects Chinese character sets in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Chinese characters [Chinese characters] record Chinese characters. The Chinese characters currently in use evolved from oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, seal scripts, and official scripts:

In terms of form, they gradually changed from graphics to strokes, pictograms to symbols, and complexity to simplicity; in terms of the principle of character creation, From form to form, meaning to phonetic sound.

One word has one syllable, and most of them are pictophonetic characters. North Korea, Vietnam, and Japan have used Chinese characters for more than a thousand years. [Japan] Kana (Japanese letters, simplified from Chinese characters) [Kana] The letters used in Japanese are mostly borrowed from the radicals of Chinese characters. The regular script is called "Pian~~" and the cursive script is called "Ping~~".

Later on, the Japanese characters were reformed. In addition to Traditional Chinese, the Chinese characters (Sinico-Japanese) now used in Japan also include Chinese characters used in ancient China, such as 竜気 and so on.

There are also some special Japanese kanji formed by the typos and typos that I have modified.

The Chinese character with the most strokes

The Chinese character biang with the most strokes is the Chinese character with the most strokes. There are 57 strokes in total.

The word biangbiang comes from A kind of noodle from Shaanxi is now also a noodle shop brand. This word is still used, but the word biang cannot be found in the dictionary

http://image.space.rakuten.co. jp/lg01/00/0000100800/05/img6f3a9af21ye78c.jpeg

The Chinese character with the most strokes in modern Chinese is 鉉nàng

It means that the nose is blocked and the explanation is unclear. This character "only" 36 Painting

In addition, there are 64 paintings for characters such as "?" (composed of four "dragons"), but they are not commonly used. (sound zhé, same as "蟟")

The miracle of Chinese characters

Among the characters used in the world today, Chinese characters are the only non-pinyin characters. In the history of mankind, writings earlier than Chinese characters include the nail-head writings of Mesopotamia and the holy writings of Egypt. However, they have long since become extinct, so Chinese characters are currently the oldest writings. The scripts used in countries around the world are divided into two categories, namely non-pinyin scripts (Chinese characters) and pinyin scripts (other scripts). Isn't this phenomenon very strange? Some people say that Chinese characters are China’s five greatest inventions, and this is not an exaggeration. I also want to say that Chinese characters are a miracle!

Among today’s writings, only Chinese characters were directly created by our ancestors, while other writings were borrowed from other ethnic groups. The Latin alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Arabic alphabet are known as the three major alphabet systems in the world. English, French, Italian, etc. use Latin letters, which can be seen as borrowed from Latin letters; Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. use Kirill letters (or Slavic letters), which are modified from Greek letters; Latin letters are also Greek Formed by transforming letters. The ancestor of the Arabic alphabet, the Aramaic alphabet, and the ancestor of the Greek alphabet, the Canaanite alphabet, were not directly created by their ancestors, but borrowed from the writing of the Semites (small square Semites). Square Semitic alphabet). According to research by mainland linguist Zhou Youguang, the earliest human alphabet is the small square Semitic alphabet. However, this alphabet was not directly created by them, but was borrowed from the nail-head writing of the Sumerians and modified. The nail-head writing was originally in the shape of a pictographic book, but later evolved into the shape of a nail-head due to the limitations of the writing tools - a small stick and a clay tablet. Nail-head writing was created by the Sumerians, holy book writing was created by the Egyptians, and Chinese characters were created by the Chinese. None of them are pinyin writing. Now among the three, only Chinese characters remain, and the other two have died out.

Another unique feature of Chinese is its supra-dialect and supra-language features. Linguists divide the dialects in various parts of China into eight major dialect areas. Some people say that without Chinese characters, China would have split into dozens of countries. The differences between Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian in Europe are much greater than the differences between Chinese dialects, but they are never willing to admit that their respective languages ??are different dialects of "Romance languages" because they are all independent country.

In addition, Chinese characters can also transcend national boundaries. Historically, Vietnam, Korea and Japan all used Chinese characters to record their languages. The Japanese still use a mixture of kanji and kana. The Japanese use Chinese characters and have another major invention, which is to write Chinese characters and read Japanese words. Other countries can do the same if they want to. If this is really done, Chinese characters will become internationally accepted language symbols, just like mathematical symbols, which only represent meaning, not pronunciation.

From the perspective of the history of human language, especially from the perspective of non-pinyin characters, this function of Chinese characters should be said to be a miracle!

The Development of Chinese Characters

In Chinese characters, various fonts formed in various historical periods have their own distinctive artistic characteristics.

The origin of Chinese characters is well-documented. It was in the late Yin and Shang Dynasties around the 14th century BC. At this time, the preliminary fonts, namely oracle bone inscriptions, were formed. Oracle bone inscriptions are inscriptions written on tortoise shells and animal bones during the Yin and Shang Dynasties. Because it is inscribed on oracle bone tablets of different shapes, it is difficult to change after inscription, so the ancestors followed the instructions and completed them in one go. The overall effect can be neat and well-proportioned, or varied and random, reflecting the human nature of pursuing balance, symmetry, harmony and stability. Oracle bone inscriptions are both pictograms and phonetic characters. There are still some pictographs in Chinese characters that are the same as pictures, which are very vivid.

In the late Western Zhou Dynasty, Chinese characters developed into large seal scripts. The development of large seal script resulted in two characteristics: first, linearization. The uneven thickness of the early lines became even and soft, and the lines they drew with the actual objects were very concise and vivid; second, standardization, the glyph structure tended to be neat, and gradually left the The original form of the picture laid the foundation for the square characters.

Later, Li Si, the prime minister of the Qin Dynasty, simplified the large seal script and changed it to small seal script. In addition to simplifying the shape of the large seal script, the small seal script also perfected the lines and standardization. It was almost completely separated from the pictorial characters and became a neat, harmonious and very beautiful basically rectangular block font. However, Xiaozhuan also has its own fundamental shortcomings, that is, its lines are very inconvenient to write with a pen, so almost at the same time, the shape of the official script was stretched to both sides to become a flat square.

In the Han Dynasty, the Han Dynasty inherited the Qin system, and the centralized system was further developed and strengthened. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, with his great talent and broad strategy, conquered the east and west, constantly expanded the territory of the central empire, and established a military garrison system to protect the eternal peace of the border areas. This garrison system allowed Chinese culture to spread and take root rapidly in the border areas. At the same time, there were higher requirements for the quality, speed, and quantity of information dissemination. At this time, Xiaozhuan was gradually simplified and evolved into official script, which is known as the "official change" in history. This change is not only because Xiaozhuan is complicated and difficult to write, but also requires reform. The most important essential reason is closely related to the invention and popularization of the Chinese writing tool, the brush. It was the writing form of the brush that transformed the pictorial nature of seal script into a square and straight one, turning the pictorial Chinese characters into abstractions, and preliminarily formed the basic elements of Chinese characters: dot, horizontal stroke, stroke, stroke, vertical stroke, lift, and hook. , folded stroke characteristics and square shape characteristics. Later, official script evolved into Zhangcao, and then Jincao. In the Tang Dynasty, there was Kuangcao, which expresses the writer's thoughts and expresses his feelings on the pen. Subsequently, regular script (also known as real script), which was a blend of official script and cursive script, became popular in the Tang Dynasty. The printing style we use today evolved from regular script. Between regular script and cursive script is running script, which is smooth in writing and flexible in use. It is said to have been made by Liu Desheng in the Han Dynasty. It has been passed down to this day and is still the font we are accustomed to using in daily writing.

Chinese character fonts

Currently, various types of Chinese character fonts can be divided into three major types. The first category is Song fonts and Hei fonts (including thick and thin line fonts) developed from the movable type printing in the Song Dynasty; the second category is fonts evolved from calligraphy, such as regular script, imitation Song script, Xingkai, Li script, and Wei script , Shu body, Yan body, thin gold body and pen writing fonts, etc.; the third category is art fonts, such as variety show, tanning, amber, water column, etc. Most other fonts are variations of the above three types of fonts, such as: Dabiao Song, Xiaobiao Song, Bao Song, Chang Song, Zhong Song, Yao Ti, etc. that evolved from Song Ti; Da Hei and Ping Hei evolved from Hei Ti. , thick black, isoline (including thick, medium, thin and other linear fonts, and later evolved into thick, accurate, thin round fonts), etc.; Zhongkai and fine imitation Song fonts evolved from regular script, imitation Song style, etc.; Meihean evolved from Hengti and Songti; Li variant evolved from Li type, etc.