Chapter 2 Section 2. Chinese characters are a kind of autologous characters

What is "self-sourced text"? From the perspective of character genetics, characters can be divided into two categories: autologous and borrowed.The so-called autologous characters refer to the characters that have developed independently since the generation of characters. They are original in terms of the shape and system of characters, and have a relatively long history, such as: Chinese characters, Sumerian cuneiform characters in western Asia, and Mesoamerican characters. Mayan text.Among these original characters, only the Chinese character Fushoulong is still alive today, and the rest are dead, or only descendants remain.Borrowing characters refer to characters that borrow or refer to other characters or systems. For example, Japanese is borrowed from Chinese characters, English and French are borrowed from Latin and Greek letters, and Greek letters are borrowed from ancient Egyptian. .

How can it be seen that Chinese characters are self-originating characters? Earlier, there was a saying in the international archaeological community that the birthplace of Chinese civilization was in the West.Some sinologists compare Chinese characters with cuneiform and believe that Chinese civilization is related to Babylonian civilization.Some people even think that the descendants of Noah traveled eastward and came to China.These views are, of course, very ignorant and ridiculous.According to the archaeological excavations in mainland China in the past hundred years, especially in the past 30 years, this kind of statement can be completely overturned.Therefore, the famous Dutch archaeologist H. Frankfort pointed out in the early 1950s that there may be only three civilizations that originated and developed independently in the world—the Near East (Egypt, Mesopotamia), China and Central and South America (Mexico, Peru).

Since Chinese civilization originated and developed independently, there is absolutely no problem with Chinese characters being the original characters.As for its similarity to cuneiform (to be discussed below), it is not so much a kinship relationship, but rather a common feature of the origin of human writing.