英语(汉字的发展)

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. Legendary origins

According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary Yellow Emperor. Inspired by his study of the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth and the stars in the sky, Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called zì – the first Chinese characters. The legend relates that on the day the characters were created, people heard ghosts wailing and saw crops falling like rain. Early sign use

Main article: Neolithic signs in China

In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at Neolithic sites in China, including Jiahu (c. 6500 BC), Dadiwan and Damaidi from the 6th millennium BC, and Banpo (5th millennium BC). Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years. However, because these marks occur singly, without any implied context, and are made crudely and simply, Qiu Xiguiconcluded that \"we do not have any basis for stating that these constituted writing nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to Shang dynastyChinese characters.\" They do however demonstrate a history of sign use in the Yellow River valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period. Oracle bone script

The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions carved on oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200–1050 BC). In 1899, pieces of these bones were being sold as \"dragon bones\" for medicinal

purposes, when scholars identified the symbols on them as Chinese writing. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to a village near Anyang in Henan Province, which was excavated by the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. Over 150,000 fragments have been found.

Oracle bone inscriptions are records of divinations performed in communication with royal ancestral spirits. The shortest are only a few characters long, while the longest are thirty to forty characters in length. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors on topics relating to the royal family, military success, weather forecasting, ritual sacrifices, and related topics by means of scapulimancy, and the answers would be recorded on the divination material itself.

The oracle-bone script is a well-developed writing system, suggesting that the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the late second millennium BC. Although these divinatory inscriptions are the earliest surviving evidence of ancient Chinese writing, it is widely believed that writing was used for many other non-official purposes, but that the materials upon which non-divinatory writing was done – likely wood and bamboo – were less durable than bone and shell and have since decayed away.

Bronze Age: parallel script forms and gradual evolution

The traditional picture of an orderly series of scripts, each one invented suddenly and then completely displacing the previous one, has been conclusively demonstrated to be fiction by the archaeological finds and scholarly research of the later 20th and early 21st centuries.[43] Gradual evolution and the coexistence of two or more scripts was more often the case. As early as the Shang dynasty, oracle-bone script coexisted as a simplified form alongside the normal script of bamboo books (preserved in typical bronze inscriptions), as well as the extra-elaborate pictorial forms (often clan emblems) found on many bronzes.

Based on studies of these bronze inscriptions, it is clear that, from the Shang dynasty writing to that of the Western Zhouand early Eastern Zhou, the mainstream script

evolved in a slow, unbroken fashion, until assuming the form that is now known as seal script in the late Eastern Zhou in the state of Qin, without any clear line of division.[44][45] Meanwhile, other scripts had evolved, especially in the eastern and southern areas during the late Zhou dynasty, including regional forms, such as the gǔwén (\"ancient forms\") of the eastern Warring States preserved as variant forms in the Han dynasty character dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, as well as decorative forms such as bird and insect scripts.

Unification: seal script, vulgar writing and proto-clerical

Seal script, which had evolved slowly in the state of Qin during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, became standardized and adopted as the formal script for all of China in the Qin dynasty (leading to a popular misconception that it was invented at that time), and was still widely used for decorative engraving and seals (name chops, or signets) in the Han dynasty period. However, despite the Qin script standardization, more than one script remained in use at the time. For example, a little-known, rectilinear and roughly executed kind of common (vulgar) writing had for centuries coexisted with the more formal seal script in the Qin state, and the popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing itself became more widespread. By the Warring States period, an immature form of clerical script called \"early clerical\" or \"proto-clerical\" had already developed in the state of Qin based upon this vulgar writing, and with influence from seal script as well. The coexistence of the three scripts – small seal, vulgar and proto-clerical, with the latter evolving gradually in the Qin to early Han dynasties into clerical script – runs counter to the traditional belief that the Qin dynasty had one script only, and that clerical script was suddenly invented in the early Han dynasty from the small seal script. Han dynasty

Proto-clerical evolving to clerical

Proto-clerical script, which had emerged by the time of the Warring States period from vulgar Qin writing, matured gradually, and by the early Western Han period, it

was little different from that of the Qin. Recently discovered bamboo slips show the script becoming mature clerical script by the middle-to-late reign of Emperor Wu of the Western Han, who ruled from 141 to 87 BC. Clerical and clerical cursive

Contrary to the popular belief of there being only one script per period, there were in fact multiple scripts in use during the Han period.[51] Although matureclerical script, also called bafen script, was dominant at that time, an early type of cursive script was also in use by the Han by at least as early as 24 BC (during the very late Western Han period),incorporating cursive forms popular at the time, well as many elements from the vulgar writing of the Warring State of Qin. By around the time of the Eastern Jin dynasty, this Han cursive became known as zhangcao , or in English sometimes clerical cursive, ancient cursive, or draft cursive. Some believe that the name, based on zhang meaning \"orderly\[of cursive than the modern form, which emerged during the Eastern Jin dynasty and is still in use today, called jincao or \"modern cursive\". Neo-clerical

Around the mid-Eastern Han period,a simplified and easier-to-write form of clerical script appeared, which Qiu terms \"neo-clerical\" By the late Eastern Han, this had become the dominant daily script, although the formal, mature bafen clerical script remained in use for formal works such as engraved stelae. Qiu describes this neo-clerical script as a transition between clerical and regular script, and it remained in use through the Cao Wei and Jin dynasties. Semi-cursive

By the late Eastern Han period, an early form of semi-cursive script appeared, developing out of a cursively written form of neo-clerical script and simple cursive. This semi-cursive script was traditionally attributed to Liu Desheng c. 147–188 AD, although such attributions refer to early masters of a script rather than to their actual inventors, since the scripts generally evolved into being over time. Qiu gives

examples of early semi-cursive script, showing that it had popular origins rather than being purely Liu’s invention. Wei to Jin period Regular script

Regular script has been attributed to Zhong Yao, of the Eastern Han to Cao Wei period (c. 151–230 AD), who has been called the \"father of regular script\". However, some scholars postulate that one person alone could not have developed a new script which was universally adopted, but could only have been a contributor to its gradual formation. The earliest surviving pieces written in regular script are copies of Yao's works, including at least one copied by Wang Xizhi. This new script, which is the dominant modern Chinese script, developed out of a neatly written form of early semi-cursive, with addition of the pause technique to end horizontal strokes, plus heavy tails on strokes which are written to the downward-right diagonal.Thus, early regular script emerged from a neat, formal form of semi-cursive, which had itself emerged from neo-clerical (a simplified, convenient form of clerical script). It then matured further in the Eastern Jin dynasty in the hands of the \"Sage of Calligraphy\Wang Xizhi, and his son Wang Xianzhi. It was not, however, in widespread use at that time, and most writers continued using neo-clerical, or a somewhat semi-cursive form of it, for daily writing, while the conservative bafen clerical script remained in use on some stelae, alongside some semi-cursive, but primarily neo-clerical. Modern cursive

Meanwhile, modern cursive script slowly emerged from the clerical cursive script during the Cao Wei to Jin period, under the influence of both semi-cursive and the newly emerged regular script. Cursive was formalized in the hands of a few master calligraphers, the most famous and influential of whom was Wang Xizhi. Dominance and maturation of regular script

It was not until the Northern and Southern dynasties that regular script rose to dominant status. During that period, regular script continued evolving stylistically, reaching full maturity in the early Tang dynasty. Some call the writing of the early Tang calligrapher Ouyang Xun (557–641) the first mature regular script. After this point, although developments in the art of calligraphy and in character simplification still lay ahead, there were no more major stages of evolution for the mainstream script.

Modern history

Although most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today are the result of the works moderated by the government of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and 60s, character simplification predates the republic's formation in 1949. One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lufei Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China. In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place within the Kuomintang government, and many Chinese intellectuals and writers have long maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China. In many world languages, literacy has been promoted as a justification for spelling reforms. The People's Republic of China issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964. In the 1950s and 1960s, while confusion about simplified characters was still rampant, transitional characters that mixed simplified parts with yet-to-be simplified parts of characters together appeared briefly, then disappeared.

\"Han unification\" was an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the so-called CJK languages. Into a single set of unified characters and was completed for the purposes of Unicode in 1991.