On the origin of Chinese characters

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

According to the pre-Qin legend, Cang Xie was the lyricist, and Xunzi Jiemu recorded: "Although there are many good books, Cang Xie is the only one handed down from generation to generation." "Lu's Spring and Autumn Annals" records: "Xi Zhong made cars and books". According to legend, Cang Xie is a historian of the Yellow Emperor and a representative of ancient Chinese characters in China. According to Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Cang Xie was a historian of word-making in the period of the Yellow Emperor, and was known as the "sage of word-making". Historian Xu Xu believes that the appearance of writing should be related to Cang Xie. At that time, writing was needed to make calendars, and writing was also needed to make Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Therefore, Cang Xie should come from Zhuan Xu tribe. He was "born in Sri Lanka and buried in Sri Lanka", so there is Cangjieling in Taipei. He lived in the 26th century BC. Based on this, it is speculated that Chinese characters were relatively mature four or five thousand years ago.

In modern times, some people recognized Cang Xie, and at the same time expanded the team of word-makers. For example, Mr. Lu Xun thinks, "... Cang Xie is not the only one in society. Someone carved a small picture on the hilt, and someone drew some pictures on the portal. As a result, word of mouth adds words, and historians can perfunctory notes as soon as they collect them. I'm afraid the origin of China characters can't escape this example. "Lu Xun. On foreign languages. That is to say, of course, Chinese characters can't be created by Cang Xie alone, but gradually enriched by many people like Cang Xie, among whom Cang Xie is only more important and has a greater role. Our concern is not whether Cang Xie created Chinese characters, but the significance of creating Chinese characters. The appearance of Chinese characters indicates that the history of China has entered the era of written records, which is a major event in the long history and has had an important impact on later generations.

Changji's creation

Cang Xie, surnamed Hou, the historian of the Yellow Emperor and the founder of Chinese characters, is known as the "sage of word-making". Today, in wucun, 35 miles northwest of Nanle County, there are Cang Xie Ridge, Cangjie Temple and Bookstores. Historians believe that Cang Xie was born in Sri Lanka and was buried there.

It is said that Cang Xie "began to change the book contract into a rope". Before that, people tied knots and kept records, that is, big knots were tied for big events, small ones were summarized, and connected things were linked. Later, it was developed to carve symbols on wood and bamboo with a knife as notes. With the development of history, civilization is gradual, things are complicated and there are many famous things. The knotting and carving methods of wood are far from meeting the needs. There is an urgent need to create words. The Yellow Emperor was a period of numerous inventions in ancient times. At that time, not only sericulture was invented, but also boats, carts, bows, mirrors, cooking pots and retort were invented. Under the influence of these inventions, Cang Xie was determined to create a kind of writing.

Legend of Cang Xie; Four eyes and heavy pupils, very clever. One year, Cang Xie made a southern tour, climbed a mountain with Yang Que (now Luonan County, Shaanxi Province) and confronted Xuan Huluo? In the water, I suddenly saw a chinemys reevesii with many blue patterns on his back. Cang Xie looked surprised, so he picked it up and studied it carefully. He looked around and found that the pattern on the turtle's back was meaningful. He believes that patterns can not only express meaning, but if a rule is made, isn't it used by everyone to convey their feelings and record things?

Cang Xie thought about it day and night, observed everywhere, and saw the distribution of stars in the sky, the appearance of mountains and rivers on the ground, the traces of birds, animals, insects and fish, the shapes of plants and tools, described and painted, created various symbols, and set the meaning represented by each symbol. According to his own mind, he pieced together several paragraphs with symbols and showed them to people. After his explanation, he also understood. Cang Xie called this symbol "Zi".

Cang Xie succeeded in coining words, and strange things happened. On that day, it rained like millet during the day, and I heard ghosts crying and wolves howling at night. Why does it rain like rain? Because Cang Xie created words, words can be used to convey ideas and record things, which is naturally worth celebrating. But why do ghosts cry? Some people say that because of writing, people's wisdom is growing, people's morality is dividing, and deception and cunning are born. The world will never be peaceful, and even ghosts will not be at peace, so ghosts will cry.

There is another saying:

On one occasion, Cang Xie made a mistake in providing the historical records recorded in these knots to the Yellow Emperor, which led to the defeat of the Yellow Emperor in the border negotiations with Yan Di. Later, it was a good way for Cang Xie to resign, travel around the world, visit and record historical events. Three years later, he returned to his hometown, Baishui Wu Yang Village, and lived alone in a deep ditch, "watching the joy of Kuixing and the traces of birds and animals' hooves", sorting out all kinds of materials and creating all kinds of symbols representing everything in the world. He gave these symbols a name, called Zi.

Cang Xie's words are made according to the shape of everything. For example, Japanese characters are marked according to the red circle of the sun; The word "moon" is painted in imitation of the shape of the new moon. The herringbone is looking at the silhouette painting of people ... The first article that the Yellow Emperor learned was very moved, so he was named Cang. It means that a gentleman is better than one person and a villain is better than a gentleman. Later, when God knew this, he sent down millet to reward Cang Xie. This is the origin of Grain Rain Festival on Earth.

Starting from Baishui County, get off the Luohe River along Wei (South) Qing (Jian) Highway, and then transfer to Bai (Shui) Luo (Chuan) Highway. The jeep ran for about an hour between the ditches and forks on the plateau before it came to Shiguan Village, where Cang Xie Temple is located. This Cang Xie Temple, with a history of over 1800 years, has been officially listed as a national key cultural relic protection unit by the State Council.

Cang Xie Ridge is on the west side of wucun, facing the west and east of Cang Xie Temple. This is a big mound five meters high. There are ancient cultural relics from Yangshao to Longshan under the mausoleum. There is a stone lion in Weng Zhong in front of the tomb, and there is a stone square with the word "Cang Xie" written on it. Cang Xie Temple, whose construction date is unknown. According to the existing inscriptions in the temple, "it has not been replaced since the Han and Tang Dynasties". Today's Cang Xie Temple was built in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, covering an area of about 2,700 square meters, with a pair of stone pillars facing south, beautifully carved and elegant; The gate and the second gate are hard mountain buildings, and the worship hall, the main hall and the sleeping pavilion are generous and beautiful. There are inscriptions on the seals of famous people in Ming Dynasty and stone carvings of Cang Xie and his wife. There are many steles in the temple, pines and cypresses, willows and pavilions, and the whole building is magnificent.

A writing system used to record Chinese is still or was used in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is the writing of Han nationality; Broadly speaking, it is the same word in the cultural circle of Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are the most basic unit of China characters, which have been used since Shang Dynasty at the latest, and have undergone many changes in writing methods such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Da Zhuan, Xiao Zhuan, Li Shu and Kai Shu (cursive script and running script). Qin Shihuang unified China, and Lisi sorted out Xiao Zhuan, so the history of "the same name but no name" began. Although the pronunciation of Chinese dialects is very different, the unity of writing system reduces the communication obstacles caused by dialect differences.

In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty summarized the structural rules of Chinese characters as "six books": pictographic characters, ideographic characters, knowing characters, pictophonetic characters, transliteration characters and loanwords. Among them, pictographic characters, fingering, knowing characters and pictophonetic characters are the principles of word formation, which is the "word formation method"; Annotation and borrowing are the rules of using words, and they are "methods of using words".

For more than 3,000 years, the writing style of Chinese characters has not changed much, enabling future generations to read ancient Chinese without obstacles. However, after modern western civilization entered East Asia, countries in the whole Chinese character cultural circle set off a trend of learning from the West, and giving up using Chinese characters was an important aspect of this movement. The argument of these movements is that Chinese characters are clumsy compared with western pinyin characters. Many countries that use Chinese characters have simplified Chinese characters to varying degrees and even tried to completely pinyin them. The Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese pseudonyms and the emergence of various pinyin schemes in Chinese are all based on this idea. Chinese mainland simplified the strokes of Chinese characters with reference to the cursive script, and revised and approved the Summary of Simplified Chinese Characters on June 28th, 1956, which is still used in China and New Zealand. Traditional Chinese has always been used in Taiwan Province Province.

Chinese characters are an important tool to carry culture. At present, there are a large number of ancient books written in Chinese characters. Different dialects use Chinese characters as the writing system of * * * *, so Chinese characters have played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization in history and become an internal link in the formation of Southeast Asian cultural circles. In the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures have been left behind, forming a unique art of calligraphy in China.

A Chinese character generally has many meanings and strong word-formation ability, and many Chinese characters can form words independently. This leads to the extremely high "use efficiency" of Chinese characters, and about 2,000 commonly used words can cover more than 98% of written expressions. Coupled with the characteristics of ideographic characters, the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high. The information density of Chinese characters is higher than that of letters, so on average, the Chinese expression of the same content is shorter than that of any other letter language.

At present, most areas where Chinese is used use two standardized Chinese characters, namely, traditional Chinese characters (traditional Chinese characters) and simplified Chinese characters (simplified Chinese characters). The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong, Macau and North America, while the latter is used in Chinese communities in Chinese mainland, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two writing systems, the individual differences of commonly used Chinese characters are within 25%.

Because of the complexity of Chinese character writing, the theory of Chinese character backwardness has a long history, which holds that Chinese characters are the bottleneck of education and informatization, and there is a trend to promote the "Latinization" of Chinese characters or even abolish them. It is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although it is difficult to learn at first, there is no continuous learning problem similar to a large number of English words after mastering common words, and its ideographic characteristics can fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the problem of computer input is basically solved, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" and "Chinese character latinization" have actually been gradually abandoned by most people.