Looking for some homophonic idioms, some homophonic jokes, and the origin of Chinese characters. quick! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

The newly appointed county magistrate was from Shandong. Because he had to hang up accounts, he said to the master: "Go and buy me two bamboo poles."

The master spoke with a Shandong accent. Hearing "bamboo pole" as "pork liver", he quickly agreed and hurried to the butcher shop and said to the shopkeeper: "The new county magistrate wants to buy two pig livers. You are a sensible person."

The shop owner is a smart man, he understood it as soon as he heard it, and immediately cut off two pig livers and gave him a pair of pig ears as a gift.

Leave Behind the butcher's shop, the master thought to himself: "What the master asked me to buy was pork liver. Of course these pig ears are mine..." So he wrapped the ears and stuffed them into his pocket. He returned to the county office and reported to the magistrate. He said: "Report to the Master, we have bought pork liver!"

The county magistrate saw that the master bought pork liver, and said angrily: "Where are your ears!" When the master heard this, his face turned pale with fright. He hurriedly replied: "Ears... ears... here... in me... in my pocket!"

Knowledge about Chinese characters

History;

Oracle bone Chinese characters are one of the three oldest writing systems in the world. Among them, the ancient Egyptian holy book characters and the cuneiform characters of the Sumerians in the Mesopotamia have been lost, and only Chinese characters are still in use today.

According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters by Cangjie. Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters based on the shapes of the sun and moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created the characters, the world was shocked - "The sky rained millet, and the ghosts cried at night." From a historical perspective, the complex Chinese character system cannot be invented by one person. Cangjie is more likely to have made outstanding contributions in the collection, arrangement, and unification of Chinese characters. Therefore, "Xunzi: Uncovering" records that "there are many good calligraphers." , and Cangjie is the only one who passed it on."

There is a view that the gossip in "The Book of Changes" has a greater impact on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.

2 Primitive Writing

The oral knowledge before the invention of writing had obvious shortcomings in the transmission and accumulation. Primitive humans used knotting, engraving, and drawing methods to assist in recording events, and later used characteristics Graphics are used to simplify and replace pictures. Primitive writing is formed when graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form specific correspondences with language.

In 1994, a large number of pottery vessels were unearthed from the Daxi Cultural Site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the more than 170 symbols on them, some of the features are quite similar to oracle bone inscriptions. This discovery estimates the formation process of original Chinese characters to 6,000 years ago. In addition, the pictographic symbols on the pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong, and the geometric symbols on the Banpo painted pottery in Xi'an may be manifestations of different stages in the formation of original writing (or before it was formed).

However, do Chinese characters after the Shang Dynasty and these geometric symbols have the same origin? This issue is still controversial. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the predecessors of Chinese characters, or even absolutely certain that they are text symbols.

Three from pictograms to ideograms

It is said that the stone carvings on Mount Tai were written by Li Si. Detached from the concrete image of things. The Chinese characters of this period are called ancient characters.

The oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou dynasties are already a relatively complete writing system. Among the more than 4,500 oracle bone inscriptions that have been discovered, nearly 2,000 words can be recognized so far. At the same time as the oracle bone inscriptions, the characters cast on bronze vessels were called bronze inscriptions or bell and tripod inscriptions. The "Sanshi Pan" and "Maogong Ding" of the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical data and artistic value.

After Qin Shihuang unified China, Li Si standardized and organized the large seal script and the ancient texts of the Six Kingdoms, and formulated the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, unifying Chinese characters. The small seal script is rectangular and the strokes are round and smooth.

The Xiaozhuan script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters among the scripts of various countries, and the history of "scripts with the same script" began. The unification of writing has powerfully promoted the spread of culture among ethnic groups and played an important role in the identity of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of world writing.

The development of Chinese characters has gone through many different evolutions. In the early days, the number of characters in the Chinese character system was insufficient, and a large number of things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the written expressions. 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.

However, there are so many things that it is impossible to express them all with a single Chinese character, and the excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters themselves. Chinese has gradually evolved from single-character ideograms to word-based ideograms.

Four created characters and their composition

After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters continued to increase, and many newly created characters continued to appear:

Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty Yang Jian was originally the Duke of Sui, but because the word "辶" in the word "Sui" meant instability, the word "辶" was removed and the character "Sui" was created as the name of the country.

During the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian coined the word "曌" (the same as the word "zhao") as her name based on the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".

Liu Yan of the Five Dynasties took the meaning of "flying dragon in the sky" and created the word "龑" in his name.

In modern times, due to the influx of a large amount of Western knowledge, many characters were also created. For example, with the introduction of "Beer" into China, how to express it in Chinese characters was a problem. It was originally translated as skin wine, but later felt that it was inappropriate, so around 1910, the word "beer" was created - translated as "beer". In order to express the imperial units, some polysyllabic words were also created, such as miles (nautical miles), 嗧 (gallons), 瓩 (kilowatts), feet (feet), etc. However, these multi-syllabic characters were eliminated in the "Notice on the Unified Use of Characters in the Names of Some Measurement Units" issued by the Chinese Character Reform Committee and the National Bureau of Standards and Measures on July 20, 1977, and are no longer used in the mainland, but in Taiwan It can still be seen in other places.

At present, due to informatization and standardization of word usage, new characters are no longer added arbitrarily to Chinese characters. The only exceptions are the various elements in the periodic table, such as "helium", "chlorine", "radon", "germanium", "chromium", "uranium", etc. This method of character creation is still used to name new elements. For details on the rules of word formation for chemical elements, see Elements.

The Six Books is an analysis of the composition of Chinese characters. The Six Books were mentioned in Zhou Rites, but the specific content was not explained. In "Shuowen Jiezi" of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the structure rules of Chinese characters in the "Six Books": pictograms, meanings, meanings, pictophonetics, annotations, and borrowings. 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." However, it should be noted that the "Six Books" are the arrangement and classification of Chinese characters, not the rules for character creation.

5 The formation of modern Chinese characters

Xiaozhuan strokes were mainly curved, and later gradually became more straight-line features, making it easier to write. By the Han Dynasty, official script had replaced Xiaozhuan as the main calligraphy style. The emergence of official script laid the foundation for the glyph structure of modern Chinese characters and became a watershed between ancient and modern writing.

After the Han Dynasty, the way of writing Chinese characters gradually developed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to calligraphy on silk and paper. Cursive script, regular script, running script and other fonts appeared rapidly, which not only met official documents and daily needs, but also formed a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of printing in ancient times, a new font called Song font appeared for printing. In modern times, fonts such as Heilong and imitation Song fonts have appeared one after another.

Chinese knowledge of six Chinese characters

Eight methods of the character "Yong"[edit]

Glyphs

Chinese characters are square characters. characters occupy the same space. Chinese characters include single characters and combined characters. Single characters cannot be separated, such as "文", "中", etc.; combined characters are composed of basic components and account for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of combined characters include: upper and lower structures, such as "bi" and "chen"; left and right structures, such as "Go" and "Liu"; semi-enclosed structures, such as "同" and "成"; full-enclosed structures, such as "Tuan"; compound structure, such as "Win", "Ban", etc. The basic components of Chinese characters include single characters, radicals and other uncharacterized components.

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.

7 Pronunciation

Chinese characters are a unique writing system for many dialects, and each character represents a syllable. China now uses Mandarin as the standard pronunciation. The syllables of Mandarin are determined by an initial consonant, a final and a tone. More than 1,300 syllables are actually used.

Due to the large number of Chinese characters, there is an obvious phenomenon of homophones; at the same time, there are also cases where the same Chinese character has multiple pronunciations, which is called polyphones. This situation has certain differences in different dialects, but it is common in Chinese.

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 "fire" and "wuhu" (one life). But even so, there are still certain ideographic elements, especially domestic names of people and places. Even foreign names of people and places have certain lower limits of meaning. For example, "Bush" can never be transliterated into "immortal".

Since Chinese characters do not seem to have undergone much change from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, Chinese characters do not directly represent the changes in Chinese pronunciation. Special research is necessary to speculate on their pronunciation in Old and Middle Chinese.

Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, one Chinese character could represent two syllables, a minor syllable and a major syllable. See Ancient Chinese for details.

The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic pronunciation" and "training pronunciation". A word often has many pronunciations.

In Korean, it is roughly one word for one sound, and there is no training in reading.

Influenced by Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters later also used some polysyllabic characters, such as 里 (sea mile), 嗧 (gallon), 瓩 (kilowatt), etc. However, it is basically not used in mainland China due to official abolishment. It is still used occasionally in Taiwan, and ordinary people understand its meaning.

8. Phonetic notation

The earliest phonetic notation methods are the Duruo method and the direct injection 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 China is Hanyu Pinyin.

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

Nine Chinese Characters and Words

Chinese characters are the smallest units of Chinese shapes, similar to the "letters" in English. However, unlike "letters", Chinese characters also have ideographic components and are therefore similar to individual "words" in "English phrases". Therefore, Chinese characters are a component between "letters" and "words" in English. This can also be derived from the quantity.

Word is the smallest unit of meaning in Chinese, which is analogous to the general term of "vocabulary" and "phrase" in English. The vast majority of Chinese characters can independently form words, such as "我", which is analogous to single-letter words in English, such as "I". Most words are composed of more than two Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "words" and "letters" in English, the meaning of a word is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it independently forms a word, so it is quite Simplifies memory to some extent.

The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in the fact that hundreds of thousands of words can be easily combined with thousands of commonly used words. However, on the other hand, it is necessary to accurately grasp the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. It has also become a burden.

There are about tens of thousands of commonly used Chinese words, and the total vocabulary is about one million words. Although the number seems a bit prohibitive (there are only 4,000 words for English Level 4), due to the ideographic nature of the word formation of most Chinese characters, it is necessary to basically Mastery is not out of reach. Therefore, as far as vocabulary is concerned, the learning difficulty is not high; in contrast, the memory intensity of mastering the same number of foreign vocabulary is much greater.

This high efficiency of word combination ensures the stability of the Chinese character system, that is, the vocabulary increases, the language develops, and the basic Chinese characters remain basically unchanged.

Ten Number of Chinese Characters

There is no precise figure for the number of Chinese characters. The number of Chinese characters commonly used in daily use is about several thousand. According to statistics, 1,000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, and 2,000 words can cover more than 98%. 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.

In the Chinese character computer coding standard, GB2312 contains 6,763 simplified Chinese characters, GBK contains 20,912 simplified, traditional, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters, Big5 contains 13,053 traditional Chinese characters, and Unicode’s unified Chinese characters for China, Japan, and North Korea The collection contains 20,902 Chinese characters and two expansion areas, totaling up to 70,000 characters.

The influence of eleven Chinese characters

The influence on other writing systems

The Chinese writing system is also one of the most important source texts in the world. Under the influence of Chinese characters , also produced:

Khitan script

Jurchen script

Xixia script

Old Zhuang characters (square Zhuang characters)

Gubai characters (square white characters)

Gu Buyi characters (square Buyi characters)

Zi Nan

But they all died out due to various reasons , Nvshu in Chinese, few people can recognize it nowadays. Japanese kana (仮名), and Korean proverb (