The master of the Shandong accent of the "bamboo poles" into "pig liver", and quickly promised, rushed to the butcher's store, said to the owner of the store: "The new master wants to buy two pig liver, you are a person who understands,
the heart of the number it!"
The shopkeeper was a smart man and understood the situation, so he cut off two pig livers and offered a pair of pig ears.
After leaving the butcher's store, the master thought to himself: "The master asked me to buy a pig's liver, this pig's ear is of course mine ......" so he wrapped up the hunting ear and stuffed it into his pocket. Back to the county government office, to the magistrate reported: "Report to the master, pig liver to buy!"
The county magistrate saw that the master bought back the pig's liver, angry: "Your ear where to go!" Master heard, scared face like dirt, panicked and replied: "ear ...... ear ...... here ...... in my ...... my The pocket!"
Knowledge about Chinese characters
I History;
The oracle bone Chinese characters are one of the three oldest writing systems in the world. Among them, the Sacred Script of Ancient Egypt and the Cuneiform of the Sumerians of the Two River Basins have been lost, and only the Chinese characters are still in use today.
Legend has it that Chinese characters originated from Cangjie's creation of characters. Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters based on the shape of the sun and moon, and the footprints of birds and animals, shocking heaven and earth at the time of the creation of the characters -- "while the sky rained corn and the ghosts cried at night." From a historical perspective, the complex system of Chinese characters could not have been invented by a single person, and it is more likely that Cangjie made an outstanding contribution to the collection, organization and unification of Chinese characters, which is why it is recorded in Xunzi - Xiejie that "many people who are good at writing books, but Cangjie is the only person who passes them on, and that is the only person who passes them on".
There is a view that the eight trigrams in the Zhouyi have a greater impact on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.
Two primitive writing
The oral knowledge before the invention of writing had obvious shortcomings in the dissemination and accumulation of primitive humans used the knotting of ropes, carving of deeds, and drawings to assist in the memorization of things, and later used the characteristic graphic symbols to simplify and replace the drawings. When the graphic symbols were simplified to a certain extent and formed a specific correspondence with language, primitive writing was formed.
In 1994, a large number of pottery vessels were unearthed at the Daxi culture site in Yangjiwan, Hubei Province, on which some of the 170-odd kinds of symbols had greater similarities with the oracle-bone inscriptions. This discovery puts the formation of primitive Chinese characters 6,000 years ago. In addition, the hieroglyphic symbols on the pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong Province, and the geometric symbols on the Xi'an Half-slope colored pottery, etc., may be the manifestations of the different stages in the formation of the primitive characters (or before the formation of the primitive characters).
But are the Chinese characters after the Shang Dynasty and these geometric symbols in the same lineage? This question is still in dispute. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the predecessors of Chinese characters, and cannot even be absolutely sure that they are written symbols.
Three: From hieroglyphs to ideograms
The stone carved on Taishan Mountain, which is said to have been written by Li SiFrom the oracle bone inscriptions to the small seal scripts, Chinese characters underwent the development process from hieroglyphs to ideograms, with the character shapes gradually detached from the concrete images of things. The Chinese characters of this period are called ancient scripts.
The oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou periods were already a relatively complete writing system. Of the more than 4,500 single characters of oracle bone inscriptions that have been discovered, nearly 2,000 can now be recognized. During the same period as the oracle bone inscriptions, the inscriptions cast on bronzes were called Jinwen or Zhongdingwen, and the Western Zhou Dynasty's "San's Plate" and "Mao Gong Ding" possessed high historical and artistic values.
After the unification of China by Qin Shi Huang, Li Si standardized and organized the Big Seal Script and the ancient scripts of the six kingdoms, and formulated the Small Seal Script as the standard writing script of the Qin Dynasty, unifying the Chinese script. The Small Seal Script is rectangular in shape, with rounded and smooth strokes.
Small Seal Script solved the problem of a large number of different characters appearing in the scripts of different countries, and the history of "writing in the same language" began. The unification of the characters facilitated the dissemination of culture among nations and played an important role in the identification of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of writing in the world.
The development of Chinese characters has gone through many different evolutions. In the early days, the Chinese character system did not have enough characters, and a large number of things were represented by tongyongqi, which made the written expressions more ambiguous. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters went through a stage of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters. However, it was impossible to represent many things with a single character, and the excessive increase in the number of characters caused difficulties in learning the characters themselves, so that the Chinese language gradually evolved from a single-word expression to a word-expression-oriented one.
Four Character Creation and Composition
After the unification of the Chinese characters by Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the number of Chinese characters continued to increase, and many new characters continued to appear:
Yang Jian, Emperor Wen of Sui, was originally the Duke of Suiguo, but because of the unstable meaning of the Chinese character for Sui, he removed the character for Sui, which means "to walk", so that the character for Sui was not used. was used as the name of the state of Sui, but because the character "辶" in the word "Sui" meant instability, the character "辶" was dropped and the character "隋" was created as the state's name.
During the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian created the character "曌" (same as "照") as her name based on the meaning of "sun and moon in the sky".
Liu Yan (刘岩) of the Fifth Dynasty created the word "Nano" in his name with the meaning of "Flying Dragon in the Sky".
In the modern era, due to the influx of Western knowledge, many characters were created. For example, with the introduction of "Beer" into China, it was a problem to express it in Chinese characters, which was initially translated as "Pi Wine", but was later found to be inappropriate, and the character "啤" was created around 1910 - translated as "Beer" - and was then translated as "Beer". The word "beer" was created around 1910 and translated as "啤酒". In order to express imperial units, some multi-syllabic characters were created, such as li (nautical mile), 嗧 (gallon), kilowatt (kilowatt), feet (foot), etc. However, these multi-syllabic characters are very difficult to use in 1971, as they are not very useful in the English system. However, these multi-syllabic characters were eliminated on July 20, 1977, when the Chinese Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Metrology of the mainland issued the Notice on the Unification of Characters Used in the Names of Some Units of Measurement, and are no longer in use on the mainland, but can still be seen in Taiwan and other places.
Currently, due to informatization and the standardization of the use of characters, new characters are no longer added arbitrarily to Chinese characters. The only exceptions are the elements in the periodic table, such as "helium", "chlorine", "radon", "germanium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium", "chromium" and "chromium". Chromium", "Uranium" and so on. This method of characterization is still in use for the naming of new elements. Chemical elements of the word-making laws are detailed in the elements.
The Six Books, an analysis of the composition of Chinese characters, were mentioned in the Zhou Ritual, but the specifics were not stated. Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty, in his Shuo Wen Jie Zi (Explaining Characters in Chinese), elaborated on the laws of Chinese character construction of the Six Books: Xiang Xiang, Zhu Yi, Hui Yi, Shaping Sound, Transcription, and False Borrowing. Among them, the four items of pictograms, references, huiyi and xingyi are the principles of character creation, which is the "method of character creation", while the rules of transliteration and pseudo-borrowing are the rules of character usage, which is the "method of character usage". However, it should be noted that the Six Books are the organization and classification of Chinese characters, not the law of character creation.
V. Formation of Modern Chinese Characters
The strokes of the Small Seal Character were mainly curved, but gradually became more linear and easier to write. By the Han Dynasty, the official script replaced the Small Seal Script as the main calligraphic style. The appearance of the official script laid the foundation of the modern Chinese character glyph structure and became the watershed between ancient and modern writing.
After the Han Dynasty, the writing of Chinese characters gradually evolved from wooden and bamboo slips to writing with a brush on silk and paper. Cursive, Regular and Running Script fonts appeared rapidly, which not only met the needs of official documents and daily life, but also formed the art of calligraphy with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of the ancient printing press, a new font used for printing appeared Song, and in modern times has been the emergence of black, imitation Song and other fonts.
VI Language knowledge of Chinese characters
The eight methods of the character "永"[edit]
Glyphs
Chinese characters are a type of square character, where each character occupies the same amount of space. It consists of monograms, which cannot be divided, such as "文" and "中", and composite characters, which are made up of combinations of basic components and account for more than 90% of all Chinese characters. Common combinations of composite characters include the following: top-down structure, such as "笔" and "尘"; left-right structure, such as "搞" and "劉 The most common combinations are: up and down structure, such as "pen", "dust"; left and right structure, such as "mess", "Liu"; half-enclosed structure, such as "with", "tend"; full-enclosed structure, such as "regiment"; composite structure, such as "赢" (win), "斑" (spot) and so on. The basic components of a Chinese character include monograms, radicals and other unwritten components.
The smallest constituent unit of a Chinese character is the stroke.
When writing Chinese characters, the direction of the strokes and the order in which they appear, known as the "stroke order", is relatively fixed. The basic rules are: horizontal before vertical, apostrophe before stroke, top to bottom, left to right, outside before inside, outside before inside and then closed, center before both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters may vary from one writing style to another.
VII Pronunciation
Chinese characters are the ****same writing system for many dialects, with each character representing a syllable. China now uses Mandarin as its standard pronunciation, which consists of a consonant, a rhyme and a tone, and actually uses more than 1,300 syllables. Due to the large number of Chinese characters, there are obvious homophones; at the same time, there are also cases in which the same Chinese character is pronounced in many ways, which are called polyphonic characters. This situation varies somewhat from dialect to dialect, but it is common in Chinese.
While Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not devoid of phonetic components, the most common being names of people and places, followed by phonetic translations of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original epithets, such as "put out the fire" and (a life) "woo-hoo". But even so, there are still some ideograms, especially for domestic names. And even for foreign names, there are certain ideological low limits, such as "Bush" can never be translated into "immortal".
Since the Chinese characters do not seem to have undergone much change from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, they do not directly represent the changes in Chinese pronunciation. Specialized studies must be conducted to speculate on their pronunciation in Upper and Middle Chinese.
Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, a Chinese character could represent two syllables, secondary and primary. See Upper Old Chinese for more details.
The pronunciation of kanji in Japanese is divided into "phonetic reading" and "training reading", and there are often many ways to read a single character.
In Korean, however, the pronunciation of a character is more or less the same, and there is no training reading.
Influenced by Japan, other Chinese character-using countries later used multi-syllabic characters, such as li (海里), 嗧 (加仑), and kilowatt (千瓦), etc. But in mainland China, due to the official abolition of the Chinese character, the Chinese language has become more and more popular. However, in mainland China, where they have been officially abolished, they are not used, while in Taiwan they are still used occasionally, and their meanings are known to the general public.
VIII Note-taking
The earliest methods of note-taking were the Yiruo method and the Zhiqin method. Direct injection method is to use another Chinese character to indicate the pronunciation of this Chinese character, such as "the woman for the sayer of their own face", the use of "sayer said Yue" to note.
The above two methods have inherent imperfections. Some characters do not have homophones or the homophones are too remote, which makes it difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, for example, "sock-note services".
During the Wei and Jin dynasties, the inverse tangent method was developed, which is rumored to have been influenced by Sanskrit, which used pinyin. The pronunciation of Chinese characters could be marked by the inverse tangent method, i.e. by combining the consonant of the first character with the rhyme and tone of the second character, making it possible to combine the pronunciation of all Chinese characters. For example, "练，朗甸切" means that the pronunciation of "练" is formed by combining the consonant of "朗" with the rhyme and tone of "甸" (甸). The pronunciation of "练" is a combination of the consonant of "朗" and the rhyme and tone of "甸".
In recent times, the phonetic symbols in the form of Chinese characters (commonly known as BPM) as well as many Latin alphabets have been developed. While phonetic symbols are still part of teaching in Taiwan, the most widely used in China today is hanyu pinyin.
Because Chinese characters are primarily concerned with their own meanings, phonetic notation is weak. This feature has made it possible for the literature of the last thousand years not to be as disparate as the Western world, which uses pinyin, but it has also made it difficult to deduce the ancient sounds and rhythms of the characters. For example, the word "pang" is derived from "long", but in today's Beijing dialect, the former is pronounced as "pang" and the latter as "long "The difference is explained by the phonetics. How to explain such differences is the subject of phonetics.
9 Chinese Characters and Words
Characters are the smallest unit of Chinese ideograms, similar to the English "letters". However, unlike letters, Chinese characters also have ideograms, and are thus similar to individual words in an English phrase. Thus, Chinese characters are a component between "letters" and "words" in English, and this can be deduced from their number.
Words are the smallest unit of Chinese ideology, analogous to the English "vocabulary" and "phrase" in general. The vast majority of Chinese characters can form words on their own, such as "I", which is analogous to the single-letter words in English, such as "I". Most words are made up of more than two Chinese characters, but, unlike the relationship between words and letters in English, the meaning of a word is often related to the meaning of the individual Chinese characters that make up the word, thus simplifying memorization to a considerable extent.
Chinese characters have a different relationship to letters.
The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in the fact that hundreds of thousands of commonly used characters can be easily combined to form hundreds of thousands of words, but on the other hand, it is also a burden to accurately master the forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. The common Chinese vocabulary is about tens of thousands of words, and the total vocabulary is about one million words. Although it seems to be a bit prohibitive in terms of quantity (there are only 4,000 words in the fourth level of English), it is not out of reach to be mastered basically due to the ideographic nature of the composition of most Chinese characters. Therefore, in terms of vocabulary alone, it is not that difficult to learn; in contrast, the memorization of the same number of words in a foreign language is much more intense.
This high efficiency of word formation ensures the stability of the Chinese character system, i.e., the vocabulary increases and the language develops while the basic characters remain basically unchanged.
Ten Number of Chinese Characters
There is no exact figure for the number of Chinese characters, and the number of commonly used Chinese characters used in daily life is about several thousand. According to statistics, 1,000 commonly used characters can cover about 92% of written materials, and 2,000 characters can cover more than 98%, with little difference between the statistics of simplified and traditional forms.
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 also 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 Yowang during the Southern Dynasty was recorded as ****containing 16,917 characters, and the Daguangyikaiyuzhuan (Jade Chapter), which was revised on this basis, was said to contain 22,726 characters. Thereafter, the official revision of the Classical Pieces of the Song Dynasty (宋朝), which contained 31319 characters, and the official revision of the Jiyun (集韵), another book of the Song Dynasty (宋朝), which contained 53525 characters, 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 Dazhi Dictionary, which contains 54,678 characters.
The largest number of characters in the 20th century is the Zhonghua Zihai (Sea of Chinese Characters), which contains 85,000 characters.
In the 20th century, the largest number of characters was published in the Chinese Character Sea, with 85,000 characters.
In the computer coding standard for Chinese characters, GB2312 contains 6,763 simplified Chinese characters, GBK contains 20,912 simplified, traditional, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters, Big5 contains 13,053 traditional Chinese characters, and Unicode's Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Unified Character Basic Character Set contains 20,902 Chinese characters, with two extensions, for a total of 70,000 characters.
11 Influence of Chinese characters
Influence on other scripts
The Chinese character writing system is also one of the world's leading source scripts, and under the influence of Chinese characters, there have also been:
Chi Dan script
Nuzhin script
Xixia script
Ancient Zhuang script (方壮字)
古白字(方块白字)
古白字(方 白字)
古布依字(方块布依字)
字喃
But they have all died out for various reasons, and few people can read the female scripts in Chinese today. The Japanese kana (仮名) and the Korean proverbs (