Unit 1: Introduction Unit
The Long Development of Chinese Characters
- A Lengendary Origin
It is said in the Chinese ancient fairy tale stories that Chinese characters were first invented by a guy named Cang Jie, who was at the time a bureaucrat under the epoch of which was also a legendary time Yellow Emperor. This point of view is currently mostly spread among folklores, and has not yet accepted and approved by language researchers because of the lack of evidences. Another related standpoint is that Cang Jie might be just the one who collected characters used in that period.
- The Major Formative Changes during the Long Development Process
For each Chinese character, there have been different evolvement during different periods and times, some of them were changed frequently and significantly through time, while others might had only been changed a little, here we focus on the ages which the major formative changes happened.
1: Oracle Bone Script
According to current documentary research, this is so far the oldest Chinese written-form scripts. Back to thousands of years of B.C., when paper and ink had not been invented yet, people used sharp and hard stuff like stones to curve some simple strings on seashells or bones to simply recorded major incidents happened. Until today, researchers are still not able to decipher all of their meanings of them on current discovery seashells and bones.
2: Seal Script
After quite a long period of developing and evolving, till the Empire of Qin Dynasty, Chinese characters were unified and standardized for the first time, the characters of this period are also the origin prototype of pictographic part of modern Chinese characters, though they were still vulgar and complicated at some point, they had paved the early foundation for future character evolvement.
3: Clerical Script
From Empire of Han Dynasty, people started to simplified characters of Seal Script type, because they were too complicated and not easy to write, which lead to inconvenience of hand writing. Instead of quite a few curly strokes in the Seal Script, people made them much straighter in order to look more of a formal written system other than drawing pictures, and it is also from this period Chinese characters are closer and closer to traditional characters look.
Traditional Chinese Characters and Simplified Chinese Characters
In current Chinese writing system, there are two types of characters which are traditional ones and simplified ones, traditional ones are still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and sometimes Japan and Korea too because they adopt quite a few traditional Chinese characters and keep using them until today, and simplified ones are mainly used in mainland China. Lately the recent years, Chinese government has invested a big amount of effort of popularizing simplified Chinese characters for it is easier to remember and write. Debate is still continuing between people who think we should keep using the traditional Chinese characters because they are the cultural heritage and represented more Chinese elements and people who think characters as a tool of recording needs to be focus on the convenience of being written down instead of its overt form.