Chinese characters are the most basic unit of Chinese writing. Their use started in Shang Dynasty at the latest, and they have undergone various changes in writing styles 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 "writing with the same language" 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 rules of Chinese character construction as "six books": pictographic, indicative, knowing, pictophonetic, phonetic, annotation and borrowing. Among them, pictographic, pointing, knowing and pictophonetic are the principles of word-making, which is the "word-making method"; The transfer of notes and borrowing are the rules of using words, which is the "method of using words".
Over the past 3, years, the writing style of Chinese characters has not changed much, which enables future generations to read ancient Chinese without hindrance. 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, among which giving up using Chinese characters is an important aspect of this movement. The argument of these movements is that Chinese characters are cumbersome and 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 by referring to the cursive script of running script. On January 28th, 1956, he reviewed and approved the Summary of Simplified Chinese Characters, which has been used in China and Singapore ever since. Taiwan Province has always used traditional Chinese.
Chinese characters are an important tool to carry culture, and there are a large number of ancient books written in Chinese characters. Different dialects all 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. During the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures have been left behind, and a unique art of Chinese calligraphy has been formed.
Generally, a Chinese character has a variety of meanings, and it also has a strong ability to form words, and many Chinese characters can form words independently. This leads to the extremely high "use efficiency" of Chinese characters, and about 2 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. Chinese characters have higher information density than alphabetic characters, so on average, the Chinese expression of the same content is shorter than that of any other alphabetic language.
At present, in areas where Chinese is used, most of them use two standardized Chinese characters, namely, traditional Chinese (traditional Chinese characters) and simplified Chinese (simplified Chinese characters). The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan 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 Chinese writing systems, the individual differences of commonly used Chinese characters are less than 25%.
Because of the complexity of writing Chinese characters, the view that Chinese characters are backward has existed for a long time, which holds that Chinese characters are the bottleneck of education and informatization, and there is a push to "Latinize" or even abolish Chinese characters. Nowadays, 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 their 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.
At present, the Chinese character system has been basically stable, but the standardization of Chinese characters and the natural extinction of rare words are still going on.