Chapter 4 Chapter 2 Chinese Characters Embark on a Unique Development Path

Nowadays, most linguists believe that language is a tool for people to think and communicate ideas, and words are a tool for recording language.This statement is generally good.But in our opinion, text is a carrier used by people to store information given by the universe and nature.When human beings were just born, the first thing they perceived was the boundless universe and the mysterious nature.They describe and express all kinds of feelings and unknown questions they get from the outside world in the form of pictures, and preserve them for their offspring.Such pictures often become the predecessor and embryonic form of characters, such as the graphic symbols on the pottery of the Longshan Culture period mentioned above.

Therefore, the characters of most ethnic groups come from pictures—various images in nature.The initial forms of writing are pictographic and ideographic, because only in this way can the ancestors' perception and views on nature be most directly expressed. Figure 7 is a comparison of several characters selected by us from ancient Egyptian holy scripts, Sumerian cuneiform characters, ancient Greek Cretan phenotypes and early Chinese characters, as proof of the above statement.From the chart, we can see the pictographic and ideographic properties shared by the original characters.These characters were produced at different times, and some glyphs have different modeling angles, but they are surprisingly similar in terms of cool images!This only shows that their common source is the same universe and nature.

Of course, it would be extremely inconvenient if the text only stayed at the stage of visual and pictorial symbols. It would take time to write (draw) and it would be difficult to express complex thoughts.Therefore, it is necessary to further simplify and abstract the text symbols in order to better record the language.Therefore, soon, the writing forms of various nations "divided their ways". There is a story about "The Tower of Babel" in Chapter 11 of "Genesis" in the "Bible Old Testament". People migrated to the east and came to a place called "Shinar". When they encountered a plain, they decided to stay and settle down. They planned to burn bricks to build a city and a tower, the top of which could reach the sky.Seeing this, God said, "Look, they have become the same people, and they all speak the same language. Now that they have done this, they will be able to do anything they want to do in the future." So God came down Mess up the language of the people so they can't understand each other, they can't cooperate to build towers, and scatter them all over the world.So there are different languages ​​in the world.This tower is called the Bebel Tower, and "Bebel" means "chaos".

We cannot determine whether human beings have a common ancestor and a common original language, but it is a basic fact in the history of the world's writing that the form of writing adapts to the characteristics of each language. Language is expressed by sound.Words, as written symbols of language, can only be said to record speech.Speech can be broken down into different syllables, and syllables can be broken down into different vowels and consonants.No matter how complex the sound of a language is, its syllables are always limited, and the number of vowels and consonants that make up a syllable is also limited.That being the case, people only need to create corresponding written symbols for syllables or vowels and consonants, and use the permutations and combinations of these symbols to express speech and record language.Like Sumerian cuneiform and Japanese pseudonyms, they are written in syllables, called syllables; while most of the languages ​​like Latin, English, French, Russian, and German are written in vowels. , Consonant as the writing unit, called phoneme writing.These two kinds of characters are collectively referred to as "Pinyin characters".

The writing unit of Pinyin is called a letter.The shapes of the letters are relatively simple and easy to write.The most widely used alphabet in the world today is the Latin alphabet.Its shape can be traced back to ancient Egyptian writing.Around the 15th century BC or earlier, the Semites in West Asia and North Africa who were influenced by Egyptian writing created 26 letters, which are the letters used in the ancient inscriptions found in the Sinai Peninsula (ie, the Sinai alphabet).About a century or two later, one of them, the Phoenicians, developed the Phoenician alphabet on this basis, which became the predecessor of the later Greek and Latin alphabets (Figure 8).

Chinese syllables are also very limited. If they are broken down into vowels and consonants, the number will be much smaller.Then, why didn't Chinese characters——Chinese characters follow the path of phonetic writing? It turns out that Chinese has a very important feature, that is, most of its words are monosyllabic.Although the two-syllable and multi-syllable words tend to increase during the development of Chinese, in ancient times, monosyllable words dominated.In this way, each limited syllable will inevitably bear the task of expressing many monosyllabic words, that is to say, there must be a large number of homophones.For example, the syllable "yi" in modern Chinese has more than 170 homonyms, and there were even more in ancient times.This monosyllable feature can be said to be unique to Chinese.Most of the words in other languages ​​are polysyllabic, represented by a series of syllables or alphabetic symbols, which is not easy to be confused, because it is rare that the composition, number and order of syllables are exactly the same.However, Chinese monosyllabic words (a large number of homophones) can only be distinguished in appearance, and are written as different characters in different shapes.Each character is a syllable and represents a word.This feature of Chinese characters being adapted to the Chinese language is repeatedly emphasized and explained in this book.

Therefore, Chinese characters are a kind of text that directly expresses words, that is, words that express words. There is another feature of the Chinese language that facilitates the use of Chinese characters as predicative characters, that is: its words have no internal morphological changes, and at the same time, there are very few structural components such as affixes.This allows all words in Chinese—substantial words and function words—to be written with symbols of relatively fixed shape and basically the same size and length, without using additional symbols below various words.This also determines the nature of the direct expression of Chinese characters and the unique appearance of Chinese characters.

The ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Cretan and other characters are also prescriptive characters.But they are all dead.There are only Chinese characters in the world that are still alive and widely used. Therefore, among the existing world characters, only Chinese characters are unique in nature, and its development path must also be unique.