The Development Of Chinese Characters

China has been on earth for about 5000 years of history. Its language has been created and developed for more than 4000 years. So it is very interesting to say something about it.

To Chinese characters, people need to know something about Chinese history. About 5000 years ago there was a emperor called Yellow Emperor who is always considered the ancestor of Chinese people. He had a smart official who looked very frightening. Maybe so many people thought he was a monster or something. It was he who created Chinese characters. Certainly there are some mythological stuff in it. But probably Chinese characters come from that time.

But that time the Chinese characters were all like hieroglyph. The reason is that people created them by observing all the things in nature. But people had not created characters as many as those people in China use today.

Then coming to Xia, Shang, Zhou such dynasties, people began inscribed Chinese hieroglyph on some shells of animals, on the enormous bronze tripods, or on the bamboo slips. And certainly the characters began changing although not too much.

As time moved on, people in China used another form of Chinese characters named seal characters. Certainly this kind of form had been created before. You must konw Confucius. It was in his period that this form had been widely used. We call this period Spring and Autumn and Warring States. Indeed people in Qin Dynasty still used this language written form. Yes, they inscribed them on bamboo slips as well.

When Qin Dynasty was totally destroyed by Hai Dynasty, another language form came into being: clerical script.

This kind of language written form is really graceful. When you see it, you will most probably think you have seen a carefree Chinese scholar. But writing it is hard even for the Chinese calligraphist.

Then after hundreds of years people chose another form that has been used until today. This one named regular script, or standard script. This form is the easist one compared with those before. And of course the characters are relatively easy to tell.

In fact, these things are but a small part of Chinese characters. If you learners hope to learn more about them, you need to learn standard Chinese first. When you learn deep enough, you will learn them without doubt.

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