Need information about the homophonic idioms, jokes and crossword puzzles of Chinese characters, and the origin of Chinese characters

Buy a camel at Huguo Temple--Nothing like that (city)

Open the drawer in the drug store--Look for toys (pills)

The tree fell-- No shadow (shade)

Under the salty meat soup - no need to say (salt)

Eat too much salt - even if it is free (salty) matter

Pickled vegetables Burning tofu - no need to say more (salt)

Pickled vegetables and boiling tofu - no need to say more (salt)

Word puzzle

6. Ten drops of water (typing) 1) juice

7. Ten to ten (typing one) Hui

8. Twelve inches (typing one) jin

From the ancient Chinese character creation by Cangjie Legend has it that until the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions more than 100 years ago, Chinese scholars of all generations 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 symbols from before the Shang Dynasty 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 tortoise 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. It is the earliest mature writing 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 labor creations and labor objects 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 configuration sources. "Hanzi" is a ideographic character that records Chinese (Chinese). Chinese characters are also among the oldest and only pictorial characters in the world that have been handed down to this day, and are estimated to date back to more than 4,000 years. Chinese characters have also been borrowed by many East Asian languages ​​such as Japanese, Korean, and ancient Vietnamese.

The word kanji itself may be a return word from Japanese to Chinese, but it has been a long time.

In the early Qing Dynasty, the official language of the government was Manchu. At that time, the term Hanzi was used to refer to traditional Chinese writing. In ancient China, there was no need to distinguish it from other countries, so it was mostly called "zi" or "character". Until now, Taiwan's Ministry of Education, which is responsible for writing policy, still does not use the term Chinese characters, but calls them "national characters", such as the "National Character Standard Form Table" and so on. However, the term kanji has been gradually used among the private sector and other non-governmental organizations that are not in charge of written policy. In addition, there are also titles such as "Chinese characters".

The characteristics of Chinese characters are as follows:

Character root combination: 869 initial consonants and 265 pictographic characters that are meaningful in themselves are used as the root (mainland name) components) to form various Chinese characters. Refer to the third page of the glyphs and coding of Chinese characters

Meaning: Continuing from the above, the root itself represents the meaning, multiple roots form new meanings, and the configuration of space has an impact on the meaning of the word. (Mr. Zhu Bangfu’s Zi Yi discusses this)

Inclusive and inclusive: For applications in various languages ​​and fields, six basic rules can be used to compose the required characters according to the needs of their own fields and regions.

Books in the same text: Chinese characters themselves are not completely phonetic, and people with different dialects or even languages ​​can still write in the same text to understand each other based on the meaning of the text and the meaning of the characters.

Unique culture such as poetry, couplets, calligraphy, etc.

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 rains millet, and the ghosts cry 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 to 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 down."

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.

Original 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 Use graphics to simplify and replace drawings. Primitive writing is formed when graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific correspondence 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, the geometric symbols on the Banpo painted pottery in Xi'an, and the geometric symbols on the tortoise shells in Jiahu, Henan, dating back 8,000 years ago, may all be during the formation of primitive writing (or before it was formed). performance at different stages.

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 written symbols.

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. Of the more than 4,500 oracle-bone inscriptions that have been discovered, nearly 2,000 have been 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. The number of characters in the early Chinese character system was very small, and a large number of things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the written expressions. In order to express it more accurately and to cope with the increasing number of new affairs with the development of history, a large number of characters were refined and composed by combining character roots, so that the documents could be recorded more and more accurately. For example, the earliest means of transportation on the sea was only the "boat"; but now, in addition to the boat, there are also "boats" of different sizes and shapes such as "squan, boat, boat, ship", etc. When writing a word, we only need to look at one word to know which kind of "boat" it refers to, which makes identification and understanding very efficient; conversely, to compose words, we also need to read the context (or short sentence) Or often) to determine the correct meaning, which lacks recognition efficiency, but is convenient for oral communication (there are too many homophones in Chinese characters and it is difficult to distinguish by hearing. The first solution is to form a word, and the second is to use the pronunciation of "ri" as in Korean and Japanese) For the sea

miles).

Created characters

After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters continued to increase in response to the needs of the times, and newly created characters continued to appear:

Emperor Yang Jian of Sui Dynasty was originally Sui Guogong, but because the word "辶" in the word "Sui" has the meaning of instability, the "辶" was removed and the character "Sui" was created as the country's name.

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 leather 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), 哧 (gallons), 瓩 (kilowatts), feet (feet), etc. However, these polysyllabic 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 Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Measures on July 20, 1977, and are no longer used in the mainland, but in Hong Kong It can still be seen in , Australia, Taiwan and other places.

The formation of modern Chinese characters

The 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 Hengti and imitation Song font have appeared one after another.

Principles of character creation

The Six Books are the basic principles for composing Chinese characters. 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 borrowing.

Pictographic

This method of making characters is to depict the object according to its appearance characteristics. The so-called painting is the same as 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 "上" above it, and Ren writes "下" 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, coral, Hu, etc., with the same pronunciation (some only have the same initial consonants) ), express 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.

Annotation

This is used when two words are annotations for each other, synonymous with each other but different shapes. Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty explained: "Jian Lei Yi Yi, agree to accept each other, test "Always." 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. "Daya Pu" in the Book of Songs 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 definition. It includes three categories: "Xing Zhuo Shuo, Sound Zhuo Shuo, and Yi Zhuo Shu". However, some people think that these three theories are not comprehensive enough. Mr. Lin Yun, a contemporary ancient calligrapher, also explained that "Zhuan Zhu" means one form (root) recording two Two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. For example, "broom and woman" and "mother and daughter" in oracle bone inscriptions, etc.

Borrowing

This method is simply 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 later it was 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 its 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 four items are "methods of making characters"; the last two items 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 square in a specific space, 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, it can express the same message in a shorter length than phonetic characters, 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 divided 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 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 the radicals composed of Chinese characters 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 Cheng "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.

Glyphs (Chinese calligraphy)

Chinese characters have various writing methods, that is, different fonts; different fonts have different glyphs of Chinese characters.

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", laughter, etc. 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 in meaning. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated into "immortal".

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 no longer used in mainland China due to official abolishment. It is still used in Taiwan, and ordinary people understand its meaning.

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.

Chinese characters and words

Chinese characters are the smallest unit of Chinese characters.

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 single-letter words in English, such as "I". Most words in the modern vernacular 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, 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.

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 precise figure for the number of Chinese characters. 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 a small number of characters are still 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 in the Song Dynasty, contained more characters, with 31,319 characters; Ji Yun, another book compiled by officials in the Song Dynasty, contained 53,525 characters, which was once the book with the most characters.

In addition, some dictionaries also include more characters, such as the Qing Dynasty's "Kangxi Dictionary" with 47,035 characters; Japan's "Dahanwa Dictionary" with 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, which currently (4.0) contains ***76,067 verifiable Chinese characters in Traditional and Simplified, Japanese and Korean languages. But 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. GB

18030 is the latest internal code character set of the People's Republic of China. GBK contains 20,912 Chinese characters in simplified, traditional, Japanese and Korean. The early GB

2312 Contains 6763 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 text. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage 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.

The influence of Chinese characters

Derivative characters

The Chinese writing system is also one of the most important source texts in the world. Under the influence of Chinese characters, Khitan was also produced Wen, Jurchen script, Xixia script, ancient Zhuang characters (square Zhuang characters), ancient Bai characters (square white characters), ancient Buyi characters (square Buyi characters), Zi Nan and other characters. But they all died out due to various reasons, and not many people can recognize Nüshu in Chinese today. Japanese kana (仮名) were also largely influenced by the glyphs of Chinese characters when they were created.

In addition, Mongolian, Manchu, Xibe, etc. are also under the influence of Chinese writing methods and writing tools. The writing method derived from Aramaic writing from right to left has been changed from top to top. As you write, the structure of the text changes accordingly.

Chinese Character Cultural Circle

Chinese characters are an important tool for carrying culture, and there are currently a large number of classics written in Chinese characters. Different dialects and even languages ​​use Chinese characters as their own writing system. In ancient Japan, Korea and Vietnam, Chinese characters were the only system for official documents in the country. Therefore, Chinese characters played an important role in the spread and sharing of civilization in history.

Since the connection between Chinese characters and sounds is not very close, it is easier to be borrowed by other ethnic groups. For example, Japan, Korea and Vietnam all had a historical stage when they could not speak Chinese and simply wrote in Chinese characters. This characteristic of Chinese characters plays a major role in maintaining a unified Han nationality - a nation filled with various dialect groups that cannot communicate with each other.

Chinese characters have had a huge impact on the culture of surrounding countries, forming a Chinese character cultural circle in which all Chinese characters are used. In Japan and the Korean Peninsula, Chinese characters are integrated into the characters of their languages ​​​​"Chinese characters ( かんじ)" and "kanji (?)". Until now, the Japanese language still considers Chinese characters to be part of their writing system. In North Korea, the use of Chinese characters has completely stopped; in South Korea, the use of Chinese characters has become less and less in recent decades. However, because Korean uses a large number of Chinese characters and has severe stress, Chinese characters are still used when precise expression is required. Although under normal circumstances, personal names, company names, etc. are written in Korean, most personal names, company names, etc. have their corresponding Chinese character names.

Japan

Chinese characters were introduced to Japan via the Korean Peninsula in the 3rd century AD. After World War II, Japan began to restrict the number and use of Chinese characters, and promulgated the "List of Chinese Characters in Use" and "List of Personal Names", which simplified some Chinese characters (new Japanese fonts), but the Chinese characters used in literary creation were not subject to the restrictions. List. In addition to the Chinese characters introduced from Chinese, Japan also created and simplified some Chinese characters, such as "tsuji" (crossroads), "栃", "堠" (mountain road) and "広" (wide), "転" ( (turn), "卍" (labor), etc. See: Kanji for details.

Korean Peninsula

Around the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced to the Korean Peninsula, and Korean was once entirely written in Chinese characters. In 1444, King Sejong of Joseon promulgated the "Hunminjeongeum" and invented the use of proverbs and Chinese characters. Although the current Republic of Korea prohibits the use of Chinese characters in formal occasions and has stopped teaching Chinese characters in primary and secondary schools, Chinese characters continue to be used among the people and can be written according to personal habits. However, the number of Koreans who can write beautiful Chinese characters is now increasing. Come less and less.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea abolished Chinese characters in 1948, leaving only a dozen Chinese characters. For details, see: Korean and Chinese characters.

Vietnam

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam in the 1st century AD. Vietnamese also completely used Chinese characters as writing characters, and created the character Nan based on Chinese characters. However, Due to the inconvenience of writing, Chinese characters are still the main writing method. After the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, Chinese characters were abolished and pinyin characters called "Guoyu characters" were used. There are no traces of Chinese characters in Vietnamese today. For details, see: Zi Nan, Zi Ru

Chinese Character Folklore

Many Chinese folk customs are related to Chinese characters, for example:

Shooting the Tiger: Guessing lantern riddles, also known as The lantern tiger is closely related to Chinese characters. The ancient Shehu riddles can be roughly divided into two categories. One is the literati Shehu riddles, which have profound riddles and complex and diverse riddles, and the answers are mostly original sentences from the Four Books and Five Classics; the other is the market lantern riddles, which have very popular riddles and answers. Shooting the tiger is an important activity during the Lantern Festival.

Combined characters: Chinese folk often combine some phrases with auspicious meanings into one character to pray for good luck. Common combined characters include "luck and treasure", "double happiness", etc.

The homophonic words for "Confucius and Mencius love to learn" are homophones: Chinese people like to take advantage of the homophonic characteristics of Chinese characters to use homophones to mean auspiciousness. For example, the homophony of "bat" for bat is "Fu" for happiness, and the homophone for "Zhou" for animals is "福". "The homophonic word is "Shou" which means longevity.

Nine-Nine Cold-repelling Picture: A folk custom in northern China writes nine double-hook characters for "Weeping willows in front of the garden, cherishing the spring breeze" during the nine-month season. Each of these nine characters has nine strokes. Starting from the winter solstice, one stroke is filled with color according to the weather every day, and the whole picture is completed by the end of the number nine.

Flower and Bird Characters: Some folk artists use some patterns of flowers and birds to spell Chinese characters. The details are some flower and bird drawings when viewed close up, but the whole is a character when viewed from a distance. This art form combines characters and strokes. Known as flower and bird calligraphy, it is a colorful combination of flowers, birds, insects and fish calligraphy. In China, it can only be seen in Spring Festival temple fairs and some festival gatherings. Flower and bird characters have also become a kind of street art in Western countries such as Britain and the United States. Most of the early bird-shaped paintings were written with some auspicious words to pray for good luck. Nowadays, the bird-shaped paintings seen at temple fairs are mainly written with the names of customers. The purpose of the buyers has gradually changed from praying for good luck to hunting for novelties.

Chinese Character Art

Liang Qichao's calligraphy works The unique and beautiful structure of Chinese characters and the diverse expressive power of the brush, the main tool for writing, gave rise to the unique Chinese plastic art - calligraphy. . Seal cutting is an art related to calligraphy, using a knife to carve seal characters on stone as a seal.

In addition, different industries have different wording requirements and therefore formulate words. For example, traditional Chinese music uses reduced-character notation and Gong-zi notation. Each specialized agency of the Taiwanese government also has its own unique characters: such as household administration characters, etc.

Combining words is often more efficient in expressing meaning than combining words, but if the word combination is too complex and happens to become commonly used words, efforts to simplify will be derived. The People's Republic of China issued the "Chinese Character Simplification Plan" on January 28, 1956. In May 1964, the "Simplified Character List" was approved and republished in 1986 after minor revisions. It has been used in mainland China to this day. In 1977, the "Second Batch of Chinese Character Simplification Plan (Draft)" was announced and the "Two Simplified Chinese Characters" were released. After a period of trial (about eight years), they were officially abolished in 1986 because the glyphs were too simple and confusing. Singapore and Malaysia have respectively released simplified character lists that are identical to the "Simplified Character List".

Japanese and Korean also have their own simplified Chinese characters.

Latinization

In the past four hundred years, Westerners and the Chinese themselves have proposed many Latinization plans for Chinese characters, mainly including:

Waitoma Postal Pinyin (1867)

Postal Pinyin (1906)

Mandarin Romaji (1928)

New Latinized Northern Dialect (1931)

Hanyu Pinyin Plan (1958)

Cantonese Pinyin (1993)

Tongyong Pinyin (1998)

Now, Chinese The Pinyin scheme is the most widely used Chinese character Latinization scheme accepted by the United Nations.

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 problem of computer input 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.

Organization of variant characters

In addition to coined characters, there are also many variant characters. They are words with the same meaning and pronunciation, but different writing methods. Some are for historical reasons, and some are made-up words by famous people, such as "和" and "和", "秋" and "秌" and "羝", etc.