The newly appointed magistrate of a county is from Shandong province. He said to the master, "Buy me two bamboo poles."

The tout listened to the "bamboo pole" of Shandong dialect as "pig liver", and quickly agreed, ran to the butcher's shop and said to the shopkeeper, "The new county grandfather wants to buy two pig livers. You are a wise man.

You should know it in your heart! "

The shopkeeper, a clever man, immediately cut off two pig livers and gave away a pair of pig ears.

After leaving the butcher's shop, the master thought, "My master told me to buy pig liver, and this pig ear is of course mine ..." So he wrapped the hunting ear and stuffed it into his pocket. When he returned to the county government, he reported to the magistrate: "Report back, Grandpa, I bought pig liver!"

When the magistrate saw that the master bought pig liver, he was angry and said, "Where are your ears!" Hearing this, the master turned pale with fear and hurriedly replied, "Ear … Ear … here … in my … pocket!"

Knowledge about Chinese characters

1. history;

Oracle Bone Inscriptions Chinese characters are one of the oldest three-Daimonji systems in the world. Among them, the sacred script of ancient Egypt and the cuneiform script of Sumerians in the two river basins have been lost, and only the Chinese characters of China are still in use today.

According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters in Cangjie. Cang Xie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters according to the shapes of the sun and the moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created the characters, the world was shocked-"When it rains, the ghosts cry at night". From a historical point of view, it is impossible for a complicated Chinese character system to be invented by one person. It is more likely that Cang Xie has made outstanding contributions to the collection, collation and unification of Chinese characters. Therefore, it is recorded in Xunzi Jiemu that "there are many good books, but one is Cang Xie's solo biography".

Some people think that the gossip in Zhouyi has a great influence on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.

2. Original script

Before the invention of writing, oral knowledge had obvious shortcomings in the dissemination and accumulation. Primitive humans used the methods of knotting, engraving and drawing to assist in recording notes, and later simplified and replaced pictures with characteristic graphics. When the graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific correspondence with the language, the original text is formed.

1994, a large number of pottery were unearthed at the Daxi cultural site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the more than 70 symbols on it, some features are quite similar to those of Oracle Bone Inscriptions. This discovery infers the formation process of the original Chinese characters to 6000 years ago. In addition, pictographic symbols on pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong Province, geometric symbols on painted pottery in Banpo, Xi 'an, etc., may all be the manifestations of different stages in the formation of the original characters (or before their formation).

However, after the Shang Dynasty, are Chinese characters and these geometric symbols in the same strain? This issue is still in dispute. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the precursors of Chinese characters, and they are not even absolutely certain to be written symbols.

From pictograph to ideograph

Carving stone in Mount Tai is said to be written by Li Si. From Oracle Bone Inscriptions to Xiao Zhuan, Chinese characters have experienced the development process from hieroglyphics to ideographs, and the glyphs are gradually separated from the concrete images of things. Chinese characters in this period are called ancient Chinese characters.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang and Zhou Dynasties was a relatively complete writing system. Of the more than 4,500 Oracle Bone Inscriptions words that have been discovered, nearly 2,000 words can be recognized at present. At the same time as Oracle Bone Inscriptions, the words cast on bronzes were called inscriptions on bronze or Zhong Dingwen. The San Shi Pan and Mao Gong Ding in the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical data and artistic value.

After Qin Shihuang unified China, Lisi standardized and sorted out the big seal script and the ancient prose of six countries, and worked out the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, which unified the characters of China. The seal script is rectangular, and the strokes are round and smooth.

Small seal script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters between languages in various countries, and the history of "the same book" began. The unification of written language has effectively promoted the spread of inter-ethnic culture, and played an important role in the recognition of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of written language in the world.

The development of Chinese characters has undergone many different evolutions. In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was insufficient, and a large number of things were represented by interchangeable characters, which made the text expression ambiguous. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have experienced a stage of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of words. However, there are so many things that it is impossible to express them in a single Chinese character, and the excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters themselves, and Chinese has gradually evolved from single-word ideographic to word ideographic dominant.

Four word-making and composition

After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters also increased constantly, and many new words appeared constantly:

Emperor Wen of Sui, Emperor Wendi of the Sui Dynasty, was originally a vassal, but because the word "Sui" meant instability, he removed the word "Sui" and created the word "Sui" as the title of the country.

In the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian created the word "Qi" (the same as "Zhao") as her name according to the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".

In the Five Dynasties, Liu Yan took the meaning of "flying dragon in the sky" and created the word "Chen" in his name.

In modern times, due to the influx of western knowledge, many words were also created. For example, with the introduction of "Beer" into China, how to express it in Chinese characters is a problem. At first, it was translated into Pijiu, but later it was inappropriate. The word "beer" was created around 19 10. In order to express English units, some polysyllabic words were also made, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon), Kui (kilowatt), ruler (foot) and so on. However, on July 20th, 1977, 1977, the China Chinese Character Reform Committee and the National Bureau of Standards and Metrology issued the Notice on the Unified Use of Characters in the Names of Some Units of Measurement, which was eliminated, and was no longer used in mainland China, but it can still be seen in Taiwan Province and other places.

At present, due to the informationization and standardization of Chinese characters, Chinese characters are no longer arbitrarily added with new words. The only exceptions are various elements in the periodic table, such as helium, chlorine, radon, germanium, chromium and uranium. This word-making method is still in use for naming new elements. The rules of word formation of chemical elements can be found in elements.

Liushu is an analysis of the composition of Chinese characters. Liushu was mentioned in Zhou Li, but the specific content was not explained. In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty elaborated in detail the rules of Chinese character construction of "Six Books": pictographic, referential, comprehending, pictophonetic, transliteration 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". However, it should be noted that the "six books" are the sorting and classification of Chinese characters, not the rules of word-making.

The formation of modern Chinese characters

Xiao Zhuan's strokes are mainly curved, and then gradually become more linear and easier to write. In the Han Dynasty, official script replaced Xiao Zhuan as the main script. The appearance of official script has laid the foundation for the glyph structure of modern Chinese characters and become a watershed for ancient and modern characters.

After the Han Dynasty, the writing style of Chinese characters gradually changed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to writing with brush on silk and paper. The rapid emergence of cursive script, regular script, running script and other fonts not only meets the official documents and daily needs, but also forms a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of printing in ancient times, a new typeface, Song Style, appeared for printing, and in modern times, fonts such as bold and imitation of Song appeared one after another.

Chinese knowledge of Chinese characters

Eight methods of "forever" [edit]

form of a Chinese character

Chinese characters are square characters, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters include monograms and compound characters, and monograms cannot be divided, such as "Wen" and "Zhong". Combined Chinese characters are composed of basic components, accounting for more than 90% of Chinese characters. The common combinations of compound characters are: upper and lower structures, such as "pen" and "dust"; Left and right structures, such as "engage" and "Liu"; Semi-enclosed structure, such as "similarity" and "tendency"; Fully enclosed structure, such as "group"; Composite structure, such as "win" and "spot". The basic components of Chinese characters include single characters, radicals and other non-word-forming components.

The smallest constituent unit of Chinese characters is strokes.

When writing Chinese characters, the direction of strokes and the order of their appearance, that is, the order of strokes, are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontal and then vertical, first left and then pressed, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside and then inside, first outside and then inside, then sealed, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters in different writing styles may be different.

Seven pronunciations

Chinese characters are the same writing system of many dialects, and each word represents a syllable. Nowadays, Mandarin is used as the standard pronunciation in China. The syllables of Mandarin are determined by an initial, a vowel and tone, and more than 1300 syllables are actually used. Because of the huge number of Chinese characters, there are obvious homophones; At the same time, it also exists in the case that the same Chinese character has multiple pronunciations, which is called polyphonic characters. This situation is different in different dialects, but it is common in Chinese.

Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common ones are names and places, followed by transliteration of foreign words, such as sofas. In addition, there are some original phonetic words, such as "fire fighting" and "death". But even so, there are still some ideographic elements, especially the names and places in China. Even foreign names and place names have some low ideographic limits, such as "Bush" can never be transliterated as "immortal".

Because Chinese characters don't seem to have changed much from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, Chinese characters don't directly show the changes of Chinese pronunciation. It is necessary to conduct special research to infer their pronunciations in ancient Chinese and middle Chinese.

Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, a Chinese character could represent two syllables, a minor syllable and a major syllable. See ancient Chinese for details.

The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic reading" and "training reading", and there are often many ways to read a word.

In Korean, it is roughly one word and one sound, and there is no training.

Influenced by Japan, other Chinese characters-using countries later used some polysyllabic characters, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon) and Kui (kilowatt). However, it is basically not used in mainland China because of the official abolition, and it is still used occasionally in Taiwan Province, and most people understand its meaning.

Eight notes

The earliest phonetic notation methods are reading if method and direct note method. Reading if the method is to use words with close pronunciation to make phonetic notation, which is used in Xu Shen's interpretation of Chinese characters, such as "shooting, shooting, and reading if accurate". The direct note method is to use another Chinese character to indicate the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, in "A woman speaks for herself", the speaker says "Yue" is used for phonetic notation.

Both of the above methods are inherently imperfect. Some words have no homophones or homophones are too uncommon, which makes it difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "socks".

The anti-tangent method was developed in Wei and Jin Dynasties, which is said to be influenced by Sanskrit, which uses pinyin characters. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be marked by backcutting method, that is, the initial consonant of the first word and the vowel and tone of the second word are combined to make phonetic notation, which makes it possible to combine all Chinese character pronunciations. For example, the pronunciation of "Lian" is a combination of the initials of "Lang" and the finals and tones of "Dian".

Since modern times, Chinese phonetic symbols (commonly known as ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) and many phonetic notation methods for Latin letters have been developed. The phonetic symbols are still a part of teaching in Taiwan Province, but at present, Chinese Pinyin is the most widely used in China.

Because Chinese characters mainly express their meanings, they are weak in phonetic notation. This feature makes the literature of the last thousand years, as in the western world where pinyin is used, not too wide a gap in wording, but it also makes it difficult to infer ancient phonology. For example, "pang" got its sound from "Dragon", but today the former is pronounced "Pang" and the latter is "long" in Beijing dialect. How to explain this difference is the subject of phonology.

Nine Chinese characters and words

Chinese characters are the smallest unit of Chinese form, similar to English "letters". However, unlike letters, Chinese characters also have ideographic elements, so they are similar to single words in English phrases. Therefore, Chinese characters are a component between "letters" and "words" in English, which can also be obtained quantitatively.

Words are the smallest ideographic unit in Chinese, and are analogous to English words and phrases. The vast majority of Chinese characters can form words independently, such as "I", which is analogous to words formed by single letters in English, such as "I". Most words are composed of more than two Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "words" and "letters" in English, the meaning of words is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it forms a word independently, thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent.

The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in thousands of commonly used words, and hundreds of thousands of words can be easily combined. However, on the other hand, it has become a burden to accurately master the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. There are about tens of thousands of commonly used words in Chinese, with a total vocabulary of about one million. Although it seems daunting in terms of quantity (there are only 4,000 words in CET-4), due to the ideographic nature of most Chinese word formation, it is not out of reach to master it basically. Therefore, as far as vocabulary is concerned, its learning difficulty is not high; In contrast, the memory intensity of mastering the same number of foreign words is much greater.

The high efficiency of this word formation ensures the stability of the Chinese character system, that is, the vocabulary increases and the language develops while the basic Chinese characters remain basically unchanged.

Number of ten Chinese characters

There is no exact number of Chinese characters, and the number of Chinese characters commonly used in daily use is about several thousand. According to statistics, 1000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, and 2,000 words can cover more than 98%. There is little difference between simplified and traditional statistics.

There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters in history (there are also more than 60,000 sayings), most of which are variant characters and rare characters. The vast majority of variant characters and rare words have naturally died out or been standardized, and generally only occasionally appear in names and places except ancient Chinese. In addition, after the first batch of simplified characters, there are still a number of "two simplified characters", which have been abolished, but there are still a few numbers popular in society.

The first statistic of the number of Chinese characters was made by Xu Shen in Shuo Wen Jie Zi in the Han Dynasty, and * * * included 9353 characters. Later, in the Southern Dynasties, the Jade Piece written by Gu Yewang was recorded as * * * receipt 169 17, and the revised Jade Piece of Daguangyihui was said to have 22,726 words. After that, Lei Pian, which was officially edited by the Song Dynasty, received 3 13 19 words. Another book, Ji Yun, which was officially edited by the Song Dynasty, received 53,525 words, which was once the book with the most words.

In addition, some dictionaries have more words, such as Kangxi Dictionary in Qing Dynasty, which has 47,035 words. Japan's Dahanhe Dictionary has 48,902 words, with an appendix 1062; Taiwan Province's Chinese Dictionary has 49,905 words; The Chinese Dictionary has 54,678 words. In the 20th century, The Sea of Chinese Characters has the largest number of words published, with 85,000 words.

In the computer coding standard of Chinese characters, GB23 12 contains 6763 simplified Chinese characters, GBK contains 209 12 simplified Chinese characters, Japanese and Korean Chinese characters, Big5 contains 13053 traditional Chinese characters, and the Unicode unified Chinese character set of China, Japan and Korea contains 20902 Chinese characters, and there are two extension areas.

The influence of Chinese characters

Influence on other characters

The writing system of Chinese characters is also one of the most important source characters in the world. Under the influence of Chinese characters, it has also produced:

Qidanwen

Jurchen language

Xixiawen

Guzhuangzi (sawndip)

Ancient white characters (square white characters)

Ancient Buyi characters (square Buyi characters)

Word nan

However, they all died out for various reasons, and few people can recognize the female scripts in Chinese now. Japanese pseudonyms (names) and Korean proverbs (? ) were also greatly influenced by the Chinese font when they were created.

In addition, Mongolian, Manchu, Xibo, etc. are also under the influence of Chinese writing methods and writing tools, and the writing method from right to left is changed to top-down writing, and the structure of the characters has also changed.

12. Regions and countries that use or used Chinese characters but not Chinese.

Because the connection between Chinese characters and pronunciation is not very close, it is easy to be borrowed by other nationalities, such as Japan, North Korea and Vietnam. This feature of Chinese characters plays a major role in maintaining a unified Han nationality, a nation full of various dialect groups that cannot communicate with each other.

Chinese characters have had a great influence on the cultures of neighboring countries, forming a cultural circle of Chinese characters. In Japan and the Korean Peninsula, Chinese characters have been merged into their language characters "Chinese characters (かんじ)" and "Chinese characters (? ）”。 Until now, Chinese characters are still regarded as part of their writing system in Japanese. In North Korea, Chinese characters are no longer used at all; In Korea, the use of Chinese characters is likely to decrease. However, because a large number of Chinese words are used in Korean, and the stress phenomenon is serious, Chinese characters will still be used when strict expression is needed. Most names of people and companies also use Chinese characters.

Chinese characters were introduced to Japan through the Korean Peninsula in the 3rd century AD. Now, the use of Chinese characters has been restricted in Japan. After World War II, some Chinese characters have been simplified, and a list of commonly used Chinese characters and names have been promulgated, but Chinese characters have been used. Some Chinese characters have also been created and simplified, such as "Ji" (crossroads), "Ji", "Ji" (mountain road) and "Yi". See: Japanese characters.

Korean peninsula

Around the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced into the Korean peninsula, and Korean was once written entirely in Chinese characters. 1444, King Sejong of Korea promulgated "Correcting the Voice of the People" and invented the use of proverbs and Chinese characters together. Nowadays, Chinese characters are still used in the Republic of Korea, and people can write according to their personal habits, but now fewer and fewer Koreans can write a beautiful Chinese character. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea abolished Chinese characters and only kept a dozen. See: Korean characters.

Viet Nam

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam in the 1 century, and Vietnamese once used Chinese characters as writing characters completely, and created word-nan on the basis of Chinese characters. However, due to the inconvenience of writing, Chinese characters are still the main writing method. 1945, after the founding of Vietnam, Chinese characters were abolished and pinyin characters called "Mandarin characters" were used. There are no traces of Chinese characters in Vietnamese now. See: Zi Nan and Zi Ru for details.

The influence of thirteen on folk customs

Many folk customs in China are related to Chinese characters, such as:

Shooting Tiger: solve riddles on the lanterns, also known as the Tiger with Lights, is closely related to Chinese characters. In the old days, shooting tigers can be roughly divided into two categories: one is shooting tigers by literati, and the riddles are complex and diverse, and the answers are mostly the original sentences in the Four Books and Five Classics; One kind is street lantern riddles, and the riddles are very popular. Shooting tigers is an important activity in the Lantern Festival.

Combined characters: China people often combine some auspicious phrases into one word to pray for good luck. Common combined characters are "Lucky for Wealth" and "Double Happiness".

The homonym of the combined Chinese character "Learn Confucius and Mencius": People in China like to use homonyms of Chinese characters to mean auspiciousness. For example, the homonym of bat means happiness, and the homonym of beast means longevity.

Nine-Nine Cold Relieving Pictures: A folk custom in the northern part of China writes nine double-hook characters of "weeping willows in front of the court and cherishing the spring breeze" every year. These nine characters are nine strokes each. From the winter solstice, one stroke is filled with color according to the weather every day, and a nine-nine cold relieving picture is completed by the end of the nine-year period.

Flower-and-bird characters: Some folk artists spell Chinese characters with some patterns of flowers and birds. At close range, the details are some flower-and-bird paintings, but at a distance, it is a word. This art form of combining calligraphy and painting is called flower-and-bird characters, which is a colorful combination of flowers, birds, insects and fish calligraphy. In China, it can only be seen in temple fairs during the Spring Festival and some festival gatherings. Flower-and-bird characters have also become a street art in western countries such as Britain and the United States. Most of the early bird calligraphy and painting were written with auspicious words to pray for good luck. Now the bird calligraphy and painting seen in the temple fair mainly writes the customer's name, and the buyer's purpose has gradually changed from praying for good luck to seeking novelty.

Fourteen influences on art

Liang Qichao's calligraphy works have a unique and beautiful structure of Chinese characters, and the main writing tool-brush has a variety of expressive force, thus producing a unique plastic art of Chinese-calligraphy. Seal cutting is an art related to calligraphy. It uses a knife to carve seal characters on stone as seals.

Latinization of fifteen Chinese characters

In the past 400 years, westerners and Chinese themselves have put forward many Latin schemes for Chinese characters, mainly including:

Witomar Pinyin (1867)

Postal Pinyin (1906)

Mandarin Roman characters (1928)

New Latin Characters in Northern Dialect (193 1 year)

Chinese Pinyin Scheme (1958)

Cantonese Pinyin (1993)

Universal Pinyin (1998)

At present, the Chinese Pinyin scheme is the most widely used and accepted by the United Nations for the Latinization of Chinese characters.

Sixteen Chinese characters simplification

In modern times, western civilization, which is in a strong position, began to enter East Asia, and various countries in the whole Chinese character cultural circle set off the trend of learning from the West. Some people insist on the tradition of Chinese characters, but many people advocate giving up the use of Chinese characters. These arguments that advocate giving up the Chinese character movement are: compared with western pinyin, Chinese characters are cumbersome and clumsy, because Chinese characters can't be written by typewriter, but must use the type of huge typesetting room. In this regard, 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.

Japanese: After World War II, Japan also intended to give up Chinese characters completely. However, because Japanese pseudonyms can only express sounds, it was inconvenient to abolish Chinese characters, and finally Chinese characters were preserved. However, the List of Chinese Characters to be Used was published (1850 characters), which restricted the use of Chinese characters in publications, but caused many inconvenience in expression, so it was later published on198/kloc-0.

Vietnamese: Forced by French colonialists, Vietnam abandoned Chinese characters to a great extent as early as the end of19th century, and used Latin Vietnamese instead. After World War II, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (later renamed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam) formally and completely abandoned Chinese characters in order to popularize education.

Korean: 1444, North Korea promulgated and implemented "Xunmin Zhengyin", which uses Chinese character stroke pinyin letters, that is, proverbs. Because the letters of proverbs can be spelled together when they are printed, they can be easily regarded as a word (although this will also produce a lot of stress), so the Democratic People's Republic of Korea completely gave up Chinese characters in 1948; The Republic of Korea announced from 1970 that it would stop teaching Chinese characters in schools. Since 1976, fewer and fewer people have used Chinese characters. However, in recent years, there have been calls to restore Chinese characters.