When did Chinese characters begin to have simplified characters?

Chinese characters are unique to our Chinese nation and a symbol of Chinese civilization. In our daily life, we can see it anytime and anywhere. It can be said that where there are China people, there are Chinese characters. However, do you know how Chinese characters developed? Here, I will introduce the history of Chinese characters.

There is a legend that in the period of the Yellow Emperor a long time ago, the Yellow Emperor ordered his courtier Cang Xie to create characters. Cang Xie is a strange man with eight eyes. He observed all directions with his eight eyes and saw all kinds of things. He simplified the shapes of these things and carved them on tortoise shells and animal bones, which became the earliest writing. This myth is of course absurd, but it also shows the fact that Chinese characters evolved from hieroglyphics.

In the primitive times tens of thousands of years ago, the ancients learned to express themselves in words, and later learned to use gestures, but some things are difficult to express in words and gestures, so someone came up with a method of marking, but there are too many marks and it is easy to forget. Later, they used graphics to express their meaning, such as "the sun" was painted as a circle and "the tree" was painted as a tree. This is how the earliest hieroglyphs were produced.

With the passage of time, mankind entered the slave society. At this time, there are more things that need to be recorded in words, and it is too cumbersome to express them with some graphic symbols. So people simplified some pictographs and combined some pictographs into a new text, making it easier for people to understand. For example, combining "man" and "wood" into the word "Hugh" means a person sleeping against a tree. In this way, many Chinese characters have been created, and a new type of Chinese characters-knowing characters has been formed.

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, many vassal states appeared on the land of China, and the characters of these vassal states were different, so there was a situation of polysemy, which brought difficulties to cultural exchanges between countries. After Qin Shihuang unified the six countries, he ordered the unified use of a script-Xiao Zhuan. This kind of writing is much simpler than the previous writing, but it is still a bit cumbersome, so an emergency folk style-official script has gradually emerged. During the Three Kingdoms period, Zhong You of Wei created a simpler and more beautiful script-regular script. From then on, Chinese characters established its square shape and began to have a shelf structure. Since then, people have created cursive script, running script and other fonts, and world-famous calligraphers such as Zhong, Wang, Yan, Liu, Su, Huang, Mi and Cai have also appeared. The development of Chinese characters has gradually entered a higher level.

With the development of Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters is increasing, so there are tools for people to find Chinese characters, such as Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Kangxi Dictionary and so on.

After 1949, with the establishment of New China, Chinese characters ushered in the spring of its development. In the early 1950s, the central government issued a series of notices on the reform of Chinese characters, boldly simplifying some Chinese characters with complicated strokes, so that everyone can read and use Chinese characters, which is undoubtedly a great innovation in the history of Chinese character development.

In modern society, with the rapid development of science, some new changes have taken place in Chinese characters. For example, Chinese characters represent chemical elements and some new things, and many Chinese characters have been given some new meanings. With the emergence of computer technology, how to input Chinese characters into computers has become a new topic. Since 1980s, China has developed a series of Chinese character input methods, such as Pinyin, Wu Bi font, ideographic code and natural code. In order to adapt to the changes of the times, Chinese characters are constantly improving themselves and making great contributions to the development and spread of Chinese culture.

In recent years, some people think that Chinese characters are too complicated, and put forward the plan of "Latinization of Chinese characters", thinking that Chinese characters should take the road of pinyin. But I don't think so, because Chinese characters have stood the test of history for thousands of years and have become the symbol of the Chinese nation and China people. We should not abandon Chinese characters, but develop and improve them so that they will continue to exist in the 2 1 century.