What are Chinese characters?

The Origin of Chinese Characters

From the ancient legend of Cangjie’s creation of characters to the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions more than 100 years ago, Chinese scholars of all ages have been committed to uncovering the mystery of the origin of Chinese characters.

As for the origin of Chinese characters, there are various theories in ancient Chinese documents, such as "knot ropes", "gossip", "pictures", "book deeds", etc. Ancient books also generally record that the Yellow Emperor historian Cangjie made word legend. Modern scholars believe that a systematic writing tool cannot be completely created by one person. If Cangjie does exist, he should be the organizer or promulgator of writing.

The earliest carved symbols are more than 8,000 years ago

In recent decades, the Chinese archaeological community has released a series of unearthed materials that are earlier than the Yin Ruins oracle bone inscriptions and related to the origin of Chinese characters. These materials mainly refer to the engraved or painted symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and early historical society. They also include a small amount of symbols engraved on oracle bones, jades, stone tools, etc. It can be said that they all provide new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters.

By systematically examining and comparing the engraved symbols on pottery shards unearthed from more than 100 sites of 19 archaeological cultures across China, Wang Yunzhi, a doctoral supervisor at Zhengzhou University, believes that the earliest engraved symbols in China are Appeared at the Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan, it has a history of more than 8,000 years.

As a professional worker, he tried to further analyze these original materials through scientific means, such as the comprehensive use of some basic methods such as archeology, ancient writing morphology, comparative philology, technological archeology, and high-tech means. After a comprehensive sorting, some clues about the occurrence and development of Chinese characters before the writing of the Shang Dynasty were revealed.

However, the situation is not that simple. In addition to the existing small materials from the Zhengzhou Shangcheng site and the Xiaoshuangqiao site (more than 10 examples of early Shang Dynasty Zhu Shu and pottery inscriptions have been discovered at this site in recent years), they can be directly compared with the Yin Ruins inscriptions. Compared with the sequence, other pre-Shang symbols are scattered and scattered, with many missing links from each other, and most of the symbols are inconsistent with the characters of the Shang Dynasty. There are also some symbols with strong regional colors and complex backgrounds.

The Chinese character system was formally formed in the Central Plains region

Wang Yunzhi believes that the formal formation of the Chinese character system should be in the Central Plains region. Chinese characters are a writing system with independent origin. It does not depend on any foreign characters for its existence. However, its origin is not single. It has gone through multiple and long-term development. About the time of entering the Xia Dynasty, the ancestors began to write Chinese characters. Based on the extensive experience of absorbing and using early symbols, he creatively invented a text symbol system for recording language. At that time, the Chinese character system matured relatively quickly.

It is reported that judging from the written materials unearthed from archaeological excavations, China already had formal writing at least during the Yu and Xia Dynasties. For example, in recent years, archaeologists have discovered the word "文" written in calligraphy on a flat pottery pot from the Tao Temple site in Xiangfen, Shanxi. These symbols all belong to the basic configuration of early writing systems. Unfortunately, such unearthed writing information is still scarce.

Writing first matured in the Shang Dynasty

As far as the Yin and Shang written materials currently known and seen, there are many categories of writing carriers. In addition to writing on slips with brushes, the other main means of writing at that time were inscriptions on turtle shells and animal bones, pottery, jade, and pottery casting on bronzes. The written materials of the Shang Dynasty are mainly based on the oracle bones and bronze ritual vessels used for divination in the Yin Ruins. They are the earliest mature texts discovered in China so far.

The characters of the Shang Dynasty reflected in the Yinxu period are not only reflected in the large number of characters and rich materials, but also in the way of character creation that has formed its own characteristics and rules. The structural characteristics of the basic characters of the Shang Dynasty can be divided into four categories: taking the physical characteristics of the human body and a certain part of the human body as the basis for character construction; taking the creations and objects of labor as the basis for character construction; taking the images of animals and livestock as the basis for character construction; take natural objects as the basis for character construction. From the perspective of the cultural connotation of the configuration, we can see that the objects chosen by these earlier and more mature glyphs are quite close to the social life of our ancestors, and have strong realistic characteristics. At the same time, the content described by these glyphs involves all aspects of human and nature, so it also has the characteristics of a wide range of sources of configuration.