Why Chinese Characters are so Beautiful

Chinese characters, also known as Zhongwen (中字), 中国字 (中国字), and Guozi (国字), are a type of writing widely used in the Chinese character culture circle, belonging to the ideographic grapheme-syllable writing system, which was invented and improved upon by the Chinese people of the Ancient Age, and which can be traced back to the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty (商朝, Shang Dynasty) in about 1300 BCE. It was then developed into the Small Seal Script of the Qin Dynasty, and then into the Han Dynasty, when it was named "Chinese Characters", and then into the Regular Script of the Tang Dynasty, which is the standard for handwriting fonts used today. Chinese characters have been in continuous use for the longest period of time, and are the only major writing system from the ancient times that has been passed down to the present day. Some scholars believe that Chinese characters are one of the key elements that have kept China's north and south united for a long period of time, and some scholars rank Chinese characters as the fifth most important invention in China. Some scholars consider Chinese characters to be one of the key elements in maintaining the unity of China over time, while others rank them as the fifth greatest invention of China.

Characteristics

Chinese characters are one of the oldest scripts in the world, and they are written symbols for recording the Chinese language. It has gradually changed from a graphic form to a square-shaped symbol made up of strokes, which is why Chinese characters are generally called "square characters". It has evolved from a pictogram (ideogram) to a phonetic script that also expresses sound and meaning, but the overall system is still ideographic. Therefore, Chinese characters are characterized by the combination of image, sound and meaning. This characteristic is unique among the world's scripts, and therefore it has a unique charm. Chinese characters are the treasures of thousands of years of Chinese culture, our lifelong mentors and friends, and everyone's spiritual home. Chinese characters can often cause us wonderful and bold associations, giving people the enjoyment of beauty. Wang Xizhi's Calligraphy

1. Non-Pinyin Scripts Among the scripts in use in the world today, Chinese characters and Shuishu belong to the non-Pinyin scripts. In the history of mankind, scripts older than Chinese characters include the nail-head script of the Two River Basin and the sacred script of Egypt, but they have long been extinct, so at present Chinese characters are the oldest script. The scripts used around the world are divided into two main categories, namely, non-phonetic scripts (Chinese characters) and Shuishu and pinyin scripts (other scripts). It has been said that Chinese characters are one of China's five greatest inventions, a miracle. Among the existing scripts, only Chinese characters were directly created by our ancestors. While the Sanskrit alphabet is said to have been created and granted to mankind by the heavenly god Mahatma, all other scripts were borrowed from other peoples. The Sanskrit alphabet is used to spell ancient Sanskrit and many modern Indian and Nepali languages. The Latin, Slavic and Arabic alphabets are known as the three major alphabetic systems of the world. English, French, Italian, etc. use the Latin alphabet, which can be seen as borrowed from the Latin alphabet; Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. use the Kirill alphabet (or Slavic alphabet), which is adapted from the Greek alphabet; the Latin alphabet is also adapted from the Greek alphabet and formed. The Aramaic, the ancestor of the Arabic alphabet, and the Canaanite, the ancestor of the Greek alphabet, were not created directly by their ancestors, but were borrowed from the Semites. It was borrowed from the Semites (the small square Semitic alphabet) and adapted. The alphabet was borrowed and adapted from the Sumerian (Sume) Nailhead Script. The Sume script was created by the Sumerians, the Sacred Script was created by the Egyptians, and the Chinese characters were created by the Chinese, and the Shui Shu, created by the Chinese minority, were not phonetic scripts. Now only Chinese characters and Shuishu remain of the four, the other two having died out. Another peculiarity of the Chinese language is its super-dialectal and super-linguistic character. Linguists have divided the dialects of different parts of China into eight major dialect areas. It has been said that without Chinese characters, China would have split into dozens of countries long ago. The differences between Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian in Europe are much smaller than the differences between the Chinese dialects, but they are by no means willing to recognize their respective languages as different dialects of "Romance languages" because they are all separate countries. Chinese characters can also transcend national boundaries. Historically, Vietnam, Korea and Japan have all used kanji to record their languages. The Japanese still use a mixture of kanji and kana. The Japanese use kanji, and another major invention, to write Chinese characters and read Japanese words. Other countries could do the same if they wanted to. If this is really done, kanji will become an internationally used language symbol, just like the mathematical symbols, which are only ideograms, not sounds. 2. Advantages Chinese characters are the most used script in the world. According to statistics, the number of people using Chinese characters and Chinese language reaches more than 1.5 billion. Chinese characters are the oldest script still in use. The earliest Chinese character that can be seen and recognized is the oracle bone inscriptions written more than 3,000 years ago. This is already quite a mature and systematic Chinese character. Chinese Characters

No other script in the world has survived the vicissitudes of life and youth like Chinese characters. The 5,000-year-old sacred script of ancient Egypt was one of the earliest human writings. But it has since died out, and the documented culture of ancient Egypt has been y buried. The Sumerian cuneiform script was also 5,000 years old. But it too died out after 330 AD. Other famous scripts that died out in history include Mayan, Borromean and so on. However, Chinese characters have not only been flourishing for a long time, standing alone in the forest of world scripts, but also being developed continuously and becoming more and more influential. 1. Chinese characters are one of the most beautiful characters in terms of pronunciation. Chinese characters have one character and one tone, and each tone is divided into four tones, making them loud, clear, melodious, rhythmic, musical, and the most beautiful language in the world. Poetry written in this language has the beauty of resonance and sharpness, rhythm and staccato, especially poetry, which is concerned with leveling and counterpoint, so verses can be especially neat, rhythmic and catchy. Because Chinese characters are loud and clear, with no light consonants, they have an obvious advantage in "human-computer dialog". It has been predicted that the 21st century will be "the century of Chinese characters". 2. Chinese characters are also one of the most beautiful characters. How beautiful is it? It has become an art - the art of calligraphy. The art of calligraphy in Chinese characters is unmatched by any other script. The following ancient works of calligraphy have become priceless treasures. 3. Chinese characters are easy to recognize. The human eye's field of vision is always a surface, not a line, so a linear arrangement is not easy to recognize; a square arrangement is easy to see at a glance. Pinyin = linear script; Chinese characters = square script. Chinese characters are more efficient to read than Pinyin characters. 4. Chinese characters are easy to understand and are related. Compare the following set of words in Chinese and English: Chinese words English words ox ox bull cow cow calf milk milk These six English words, although their meanings are all related to ox, but they are written and read out but they are not related to each other, so in order to recognize them, you have to learn them one by one and memorize them one by one, with no rules to speak of. To recognize them, one has to learn them one by one and memorize them one by one, without any pattern. On the other hand, as long as you know the character "牛", you will know that all the words with "牛" are related to ox. Since Chinese characters have a strong ability to form words, if you know a certain number of Chinese characters, you will know countless words, and even if there are new words, they will be based on the old ones, and their meanings will be easy to understand. The disadvantage is that in mathematics, physics and other science subjects, the expression is very weak and cumbersome, for example, arithmetic, only with the help of Arabic numerals and symbols. For example, in arithmetic, only Arabic numerals and symbols can be used. In mechanical and architectural drawing, only symbols can be used. More than seventy years ago, Mr. Lu Xun said that the Chinese characters "are a tuberculosis on the Chinese toiling masses" and "a sharp instrument for the policy of fooling the people" ("且介亭杂文／关于新文字--答问"). Answers to Questions" ("且介亭杂文／关于新文字--答问》). Therefore, "China did not have a script, and it was only when the proposal of Latinization appeared that the key to the problem was grasped", and "if you don't want people to make sacrifices for the old script, you have to sacrifice the old script" (并介亭杂文／关于新文字-答问》). ("And Jie Ting Miscellaneous Writings / The New Birth of the Chinese Language"). The weakness of China's modern history has created a lack of confidence in its own traditional culture, and even the likes of Lu Xun and Hu Shi are not exempt from this. 5. Characteristics of Chinese Characters, Intuition and Meaning Chinese characters are hieroglyphics, and their distinctive feature is the very close connection between the shape of a character and its meaning, which is obviously intuitive and ideographic. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes them the only characters in the world that can transcend time and space. Only Chinese children can still read and understand the 2500-year-old book of poems and recite "Guan Guan Ju Ju, on the river's continent, My Fair Lady, Gentleman's Good Quarters"; and only Chinese textbooks can make Tang poems and Song Lyrics compulsory reading material for children's enlightenment. And it is difficult to read English of three or four hundred years ago to anyone other than experts. It can be seen that Chinese characters are more conducive to the formation of a direct "form-meaning" connection between readers. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes them the most informative characters in the world, and therefore easy to recognize and associate with, which also brings great convenience in speeding up reading. Modern fast reading methods were first developed in Europe and the United States, where the characters have the same characteristics - they are phonetic scripts, where individual letters do not have any meaning, and only the combination of several letters constitutes a word. In this way, when reading, due to the principle of cognitive psychology in line with the group block. So it is conducive to fast reading. Our characters, however, are ideographs that are very different from pinyin characters. So, can the reading materials composed of Chinese and Chinese characters be read quickly? The answer is of course very affirmative: Chinese language and Chinese characters are not only good for fast reading, but also more suitable for fast reading. Firstly, the ideographic nature of Chinese characters facilitates the mutual recognition of form and meaning, which provides a natural favorable condition for fast reading; secondly, Chinese characters, as morphemic characters, have a strong ability to form words and a concentration of commonly-used words, which facilitates fast reading; thirdly, Chinese characters, as spelling characters, have a clear difference between homophones and heterophones, which is also a favorable condition for fast reading; fourthly, Chinese characters, as the writing form, facilitate the cognition of the whole and are favorable for fast reading; and fifthly, Chinese characters and Chinese characters are not only suitable for fast reading, but also more suitable for fast reading. Fourthly, the writing form of Chinese characters facilitates overall cognition, which is also conducive to fast reading. Fifthly, Chinese characters are multi-brain characters, so reading them gives full play to the functions of both hemispheres of the brain. Finally, the synthetic features of Chinese grammar make them concise and easy to understand and visualize, which makes it easy to read them quickly and reach their meanings intuitively. Chinese characters have a fundamental feature that distinguishes them from other languages in the world, which is the special feature of Chinese grammar itself, i.e., the meaning of meaning. Whether it is a phrase that is synthesized into a sentence or a single sentence that is combined into a compound sentence, the first factor to be considered is often the semantic meaning of the words, not the use of grammatical forms. As long as several key words loaded with important information are roughly matched with each other in terms of meaning, they can be used to achieve the purpose of communication in a concise way, and the words can be combined together. This is the so-called "meaning harmony". This feature of Chinese grammar makes it unique in structure, flexible and changeable, with a lot of implied meaning and emphasis on ideas, and its compatibility, flexibility and simplicity are incomparable with other languages. The above features of Chinese grammar are conducive to our perception and comprehension in reading by means of ideograms, which is very convenient for speeding up the speed of reading. The above six features of Chinese characters will undoubtedly give them a considerable advantage over Pinyin characters in terms of reading psychology, so that the written language of Chinese characters will have higher speed and efficiency in all aspects of perception and comprehension, and will be able to realize the coordinated development of reading speed, comprehension speed, and memorization speed, and fast reading. 3. Limitations Chinese information processing is often more difficult to input Chinese characters than Pinyin characters due to the fact that typewriter keyboards are not designed with the input of Chinese characters in mind per se. Chinese characters did not go through the popularization of Chinese typewriters, directly into the computer Chinese information processing stage. In the early days of computer invention, the question of whether Chinese characters could be adapted to the computer age was raised, and scholars who supported the Latinization of Chinese characters even used it as a justification. With the emergence of various Chinese input methods, the computerized input, storage and output technologies of Chinese characters have been basically solved, which greatly improved the efficiency of Chinese writing, publishing and information retrieval. At present, there are thousands of Chinese input methods, mainly including phonetic input and form input, or both. Speech input of Chinese characters, handwriting recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) technology have also been widely used. For example, GB 2312 (Mainland China), Big5 and CNS 11643 (Taiwan), HKSCS (Hong Kong), JIS (Japan), which contains thousands of characters, and GBK (Mainland China), the international standard Unicode, ISO 10646, etc., which contains more than 20,000 characters. In the process, because of technical and other factors, the number of words included, and the inclusion of fonts, etc. or make different levels of adjustment. In order to solve the urgent needs of postal service, household registration and other fields, the Chinese government implemented a new national standard of Chinese character coding in 2000, "Chinese Character Code Character Set - Expansion of the Basic Set" GB 18030-2000, which contains 27,484 Chinese characters. It is mandatory for all computer products sold in mainland China to use this new official standard. Chinese Character Coding System For the purpose of information exchange, a series of Chinese character set standards have been developed in each Chinese character-using region. The GB code ("GB" is the abbreviation for the National Standard of the People's Republic of China) is used in mainland China. GB2312 contains 6,763 Chinese characters, GBK contains 20,912 Chinese characters, and the latest GB18030 contains 27,533 Chinese characters. BIG5 code. Includes 13053 characters. A one- or two-byte code used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Unicode is not well accepted by the Chinese government. The Chinese government requires software sold in mainland China to support the GB18030 encoding. In the field of international communicationization and software design, CJK encoding collects the set of Chinese characters in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. 4. Diffusion 1. Influence of Chinese characters on Japanese writing Although the Japanese nation has an ancient culture, the creation of its own writing was quite late. For a long time, the people of Japan used kanji as a vehicle for spreading their thoughts and expressing their feelings, and called kanji their "true name". At the beginning of the fifth century, a phonetic script called "kana" appeared in Japan, which borrowed Chinese characters. In the eighth century, the use of kanji to mark Japanese speech became more fixed, marked by the compilation of the Manyoshu, which is called "Manyoshu Kana". It is the basis of pure Japanese phonetic script. Tattoos of foreign friends

The final creation of the Japanese script was accomplished by Jibi Zenji and Master Kōbō (Kōkai). Both of them had stayed in China for a long time during the Tang Dynasty and had a deep knowledge of Chinese characters. The former created the Japanese "katakana" based on the regular radicals of the phonetic kanji, and the latter created the Japanese "hiragana" using the radicals of the kanji. Although kana characters have been prevalent in Japan since the 10th century, the use of kanji has not ceased. Today, there are more than 1,000 simplified kanji characters in the Japanese writing system, which has become an important part of the world. Influence of Chinese Characters on the Korean Script The Korean script is called Proverbs. Its creation and application was an important achievement of ancient Korean culture. In fact, in the Middle Ages, Joseon, like Japan, did not have its own script, but used Chinese characters. After the unification of Silla, there was a slight change in the situation, and a man of the time, Seol Chung, created the "mandarin reading", i.e., the use of Chinese characters to represent Korean auxiliary words and auxiliary verbs, to assist in the reading of books written in Chinese. In the end, it could not be popularized because of the different languages. At the beginning of the Joseon Dynasty, King Sejong set up the Proverbs Bureau in the palace, and had Jung Lin-toe and Sung Sam-wan formulate proverbs. They researched Joseon phonetics according to Chinese phonetics and created 11 vowel letters and 17 sub-letters, which were publicized in 1443 A.D. as "the correct pronunciation of the people". From then on, Joseon had its own script. 3. Influence of Chinese characters on Vietnamese writing Before the tenth century, Vietnam was a county of China. The Qin, Han, Sui and Tang dynasties were all under the jurisdiction of Chinese officials, so they were y influenced by Chinese culture. After the independence of Vietnam, Chinese characters were used as a tool for communication among the upper classes, for school education and for the creation of literary works. It was not until the thirteenth century that Vietnam had its own script, Zi Man, which was based on Chinese characters. Zi Man is a new character based on Chinese characters, which was created to express Vietnamese phonetics by using the methods of morphology, pseudo-syntax, and syncretism. In the fifteenth century, Zi Man became widespread throughout the country, completely replacing Chinese characters.

Number of Characters

There is no exact figure for the number of Chinese characters, which is close to 100,000 (91,251 Chinese characters with provenance are included in the Chinese character database of Beijing Guoan Consulting Equipment Company), while there are only a few thousands of Chinese characters used in daily life. According to statistics, 1,000 commonly used characters can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 characters can cover more than 98%, and at 3,000 characters it is already 99%, and there is not much difference between the statistics of simplified and traditional Chinese. The total number of Chinese characters that have appeared in history is more than 80,000 (there are also claims of more than 60,000), most of which are variant and rare characters. The vast majority of these characters have either died out naturally or have been standardized, and generally appear only occasionally in personal names and place names, except in ancient languages. In addition, after the first batch of simplified characters, there were a number of "second simplified characters", which have been abolished, but a few characters are still popular in the society. The first count of the number of Chinese characters was made by Xu Shen in his Shuo Wen Jie Zi (Explaining Characters in Chinese) during the Han Dynasty, which included 9,353 characters. Subsequently, the Jade Chapter compiled by Gu Ye Wang during the Southern Dynasty was recorded as containing 16,917 characters, and the Daguangyi Hui Yu Chuan, which was revised on this basis, was said to contain 22,726 characters. After that, the official book of the Song Dynasty, the Class Book, contained 31319 characters, and the official book of the Song Dynasty, the Jiyun, contained 53525 characters, which used to be the book with the largest number of characters. Some other dictionaries also contain more characters, such as the Kangxi Dictionary of the Qing Dynasty, which contains 47,035 characters; the Dahan and Dictionary of Japan, which contains 48,902 characters, with 1,062 appendices; the Chinese Dictionary of Taiwan, which contains 49,905 characters; and the Hanyu Dazidian, which contains 54,678. The largest number of characters published in the 20th century is the Zhonghua Zihai (Sea of Chinese Characters), which contains 85,000 characters. Among the computer coding standards for Chinese characters, the largest Chinese character code is Taiwan's "National Standard" CNS11643, which currently (4.0)*** contains 76,067 verifiable traditional and simplified, Japanese and Korean characters***, but it is not widely used, and is only used in a few environments, such as in the Household Administration System. The Big Five code, which is commonly used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, contains 13,053 traditional Chinese characters. GB18030 is the latest Chinese character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC), GBK contains 20,912 simplified, traditional, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters, while the earlier GB2312 contains 6,763 simplified Chinese characters. The Unicode Chinese-Japanese-Korean Unified Ideographs Basic Character Set (CJK UICS) contains 20,902 Chinese characters, with two extensions, totaling more than 70,000 characters. In the early days, the number of characters in the Chinese character system was insufficient, and many things were expressed in the form of tongyong (通假字), which made the expression of the characters more ambiguous. In order to improve the clarity of expression, the Chinese characters went through a phase of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters. The excessive increase in the number of characters in turn led to difficulties in learning Chinese characters, and the limited meanings that could be represented by a single character led to many single Chinese meanings being represented by Chinese words, such as the common double-character words. Currently, the development of Chinese writing is oriented more towards the creation of new words than towards the creation of new characters.

500 Commonly Used Characters

The, one, is, in, not, had, have, and, people, this, in, big, for, on, country, I, to, to, him, time, come, with, we, born, to, made, ground, in, out, on, minute, right, into, will, can, main, send, year, move, with, work, also, can, under, over, sub, say, produce, kind, face, while, side, after, much, fixed, line, learning, method, and so on. The following are some of the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are, in fact, the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life: they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life, and they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life, and they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life, and they are the most important things that can be said about a person's life. The following is a list of the most important things that you can do to help you understand how to make your life better. The, topic, party, program, development, five, fruit, material, image, member, reform, position, into, often, text, total, second, product, style, live, set, and, tube, special, piece, long, seek, old, head, base, capital, side, flow, road, level, less, figure, mountain, unity, receive, know, compare, will, group, see, plan, don't, her, hand, angle, period, root, on, transport, agriculture, finger, several, nine, district, strong, put, decide, west, be, dry, do The following is a list of the most important things that you can do to make your life better. The following is a list of the most important things that you can do to help you get the most out of your life. The following is a list of the most important things that you can do to help you get the most out of your life.

Editing this paragraph Character Creation

Origin

From Cangjie's creation of characters to the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions by Wang Yirong during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty, Chinese scholars of all generations have been committed to unraveling the mystery of the origin of the Chinese character oracle bone

. On the origin of Chinese characters, ancient Chinese literature has all sorts of sayings, such as "the language of things", "knotted rope", "gossip", "drawings", "books and paintings", "the name of the Chinese character", "the name of the Chinese character", "the name of the Chinese character", and "the name of the Chinese character". ", "book deed" and so on, the ancient books are also commonly recorded in the Yellow Emperor historian Cangjie create words. Modern scholars believe that the systematic writing tools can not be created entirely by a person, Cangjie if indeed there is a person, should be the text organizer or promulgator. In recent decades, the Chinese archaeological community has released a series of excavated materials related to the origin of Chinese characters that are older than the oracle bones from Anyang Yinxu. These materials mainly refer to the engraved or painted symbols that appeared on top of pottery in the late primitive and early historical societies, in addition to a small number of symbols engraved on top of oracle bones, jade, stone tools, and so on. It can be said that they ****together provide a new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters. Through systematic investigation and comparison of the engraved symbols on pottery shards unearthed from more than 100 sites of 19 archaeological cultures throughout China, Wang Yunzhi, a doctoral supervisor at Zhengzhou University, believes that the earliest engraved symbols in China appeared at the site of Jahu in Wuyang, Henan Province, which is more than 8,000 years old. These original materials to do a comprehensive organization, so as to climb the comb compared to the Shang Dynasty text before the occurrence of Chinese characters, the development of some of the clues. However, the situation is not so simple, in addition to the Zhengzhou Mall site, small double bridge site (the site has been found in recent years more than 10 cases of early Shang dynasty Zhu Shu pottery) of the small amount of material can be directly compared with the order of the Yinxu text, the other pre-Shanghai symbols are scattered, each other lack of ring more, most of the symbols and with the Shang dynasty text configuration does not fit. There are also some symbols with heavy regional colors and complex backgrounds. Formally formed in the Central Plains, Wang Yunzhi believes that the formal formation of the Chinese character system should have taken place in the Central Plains. Chinese characters are a writing system of independent origin, not dependent on any kind of foreign characters, but its origin is not a single one, after a pluralistic, long-term integration, probably at the time of entering the Xia Era, the ancestors, on the basis of the experience of widely absorbing and utilizing the early symbols, creatively invented a system of written symbols used to record language, and the Chinese character system matured relatively quickly in that era. It is reported that, from the point of view of the excavated text data of the archaeological excavation, China has already had a formal text at least in the Yu Xia period, such as the archaeologists in recent years in Shanxi Xiangfen Taosi site of a flat ceramic pots, found on the brush Zhu Shu's "Wen" character. These symbols belong to the early writing system in the basic form, but unfortunately such excavated text information is still rare. About 6,000 years ago in the Hanpo site and other sites of the Yangshao culture sites on the outside of the pottery, has appeared in the incised symbols, *** up to more than 50 kinds of. They are neatly planned and have a certain regularity, possessing the characteristics of simple writing, and may be the germ of writing in China. In about four or five thousand years ago, the late Dahankou culture site and Liangjin culture site pottery, found on the more neatly regular graphic incised, is an early graphic script. In the early 1980s, a more complete script was found on pottery excavated at the Xia Culture site in Dengfeng, Henan Province. This is the earliest writing confirmed by scholars as having an exact age in China so far. During the Shang and Zhou periods, the common script was oracle bone writing. This was a mature and systematic script that laid the foundation for the development of Chinese characters in later generations. After that, the popular bronze inscriptions (jinwen) increased the number of characters, but there was no major change in the shape. After the Spring and Autumn Period, due to the division of the feudal lords, "the characters had different shapes". After the unification of Qin, in order to consolidate his rule, Emperor Shi Huangdi ordered his prime minister Li Si, Zhao Gao and Hu Shaojing to organize the script, and based on the original Qin characters, developed the Small Seal Script (小篆), which was used as the standard script and ordered to be used all over the country. Later on, Cheng Buen organized a simpler script, Li Shu, based on the popular scripts of the time, which was widely spread throughout the country as the daily script. During the Cao Wei Dynasty, Zhong Yao created the Zhenshu (Regular Script). By this time, the evolution of Chinese characters had been perfected. Not only that, but since the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the writing of Chinese characters has become a specialized art known as calligraphy. At present, it is widely believed in Chinese historiography that the origin of Chinese writing began with the Yin and Shang dynasties. In fact, the oracle bone inscriptions of the Yin-Shang era have been very mature, before that, there should be a process from the occurrence, development to the gradual maturity of the process, so some people advocate that it is pushed to the end of the Xia; some people advocate that it is pushed to the Xia before, each with his own opinion. Guo Moruo pointed out in "The Dialectical Development of Ancient Writing" that: "When did Chinese characters originate? In my opinion, this can be indicated by the age of the ruins of Xi'an's Half-Po Village from the present day." "The Half-Po site is dated to about 6,000 years ago." "The Hanpo site is typical of the Yangshao culture of the Neolithic period," and "Every time there are simple incisions on the colored pottery of Hanpo that resemble words, they are different from the patterns on the vessels." "Although the significance of the inscriptions has not yet been elucidated, they are undoubtedly symbols of a written nature." "It can be said with certainty to be the origin of Chinese writing, or the remnants of primitive Chinese writing." According to this statement, Chinese civilization should be counted as nearly six thousand years. When was the origin of Chinese writing? In what era were the oldest characters created? What do they mean? So far still in a hundred schools of thought, it seems to be a lot of material to support the description! Currently recognized as the world's earliest writing, is the appearance of the ancient Middle East cuneiform, 5000 to 6000 years ago, however, some of the symbols engraved on the tortoise shell found in Jiahu, Henan Province, but up to 8000 years ago [2].

The Six Books

The Six Books are the basic principles of Chinese character construction. The Six Books were mentioned in the Zhou Rites, only the specifics were not stated. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen, in his Shuo Wen Jie Zi (Explaining Characters in Chinese), elaborated on the principles of the Six Books: Xiang Xiang (Pictogram), Zhu Yi (Referring to Things), Hui Yi (Converging to Meaning), Xing Xing (Shape and Sound), Zhu Yin (Translating to Meaning), and Zhu Yi (Borrowing). Pictograms: This character creation method is based on the external features of the object to depict, the so-called "painting into the object, with the body of the micro-questioning" is also. Such as the sun, the moon, mountains, water and other four words, the earliest is to depict the sun, the moon, mountains, water patterns, and then gradually evolved into the current shape. Gua is a hieroglyphic character. In the character "melon", the two apostrophes represent the vine, the vertical hook in the center represents the melon, and the downward stroke represents the leaf. The word "melon" is the original meaning of the word "cucurbitaceae". "In real life, there are many things that look like melons, for example, "melon hat" is a kind of hat; "melon boat" is a kind of boat. The meaning of "like cutting a melon" is derived from the fact that a melon's fate is to be cut into pieces. People use the word "gua dian" to mean to divide or distribute. It also refers to a number of powerful countries joining together to divide up the land of a weak or underdeveloped country. The word "fool", meaning unintelligent, comes from the ancient "Guazi tribe", the Jiang people who lived in Guazhou (Dunhuang, Gansu) during the Spring and Autumn Period were called the "Guazi tribe". They were very hardworking and always worked non-stop when they were hired, but some people regarded this honest custom as "stupid", so there was the word "fool". Referring to things: This refers to the method of expressing abstract things, using symbols or adding symbols to pictograms to represent a certain word. It is also called "to point to the matter as it is". For example, if a person writes "up" in its upper part, or "down" in its lower part, or "blade" in the mouth of a knife, it means that this is the sharpest part of the blade, and so on. Shape and Sound: This means that a specific shape (character root) is used within a text to represent a unique sound. For example, Hu. This character can also be a root, combined with different attribute roots, can be synthesized as: 蝴, 蝴, 湖, 葫, 瑚, 醐, etc., and with the same pronunciation (or in some cases, only the same consonant), expresses different things. Form and sound is the most common method and charm in Chinese characters, which is "stinking", "rich" is a person who owns a field, "poor" is a person who relies on "force" to work, "poor" is a person who relies on "force" to work, "poor" is a person who relies on "force" to work, "poor" is a person who relies on "force" to work. The traditional form of "贱" is "贱", and the two "戈" on the right side are "贱", which means "cheap" when one fights for money. The two "gos" on the right are "贱", which means "cheap" in Chinese. There are three ways of combining the form and sound of a form-sounding character: left form and right sound: finger, poem, estimate, gram left sound and right form: save, apologize, sword, Chin up form and down sound: empty, dew, flower, brand-new up form and down form: pel, cargo, marry, base