Chapter 10 How are Chinese characters created in the first section?

Now, let's look at the "character" of Chinese characters.This character is composed of "baogaitou" - the "zi" of a child under 宀 (indicating a house), and its meaning is related to fertility.So when we say "character", it means to produce, breed, and grow more and more.Here we come to understand how Chinese characters are multiplied. We already know that there have been stories in Chinese history such as Cangjie's creation of characters, but those are just legends that later generations will be able to process them.Chinese characters cannot be invented by a single person, but are jointly created by the people of the past dynasties, including intellectuals.The Chinese characters created at the beginning may be chaotic, and each person creates characters according to his own method.However, in the process of use and circulation, certain rules of character creation gradually formed, and characters created not according to these rules would not be handed down if not recognized by everyone, and would soon perish.Therefore, the handed down Chinese characters basically conform to the rules of word creation.

So, what are the word-making rules for Chinese characters?In other words, how were Chinese characters created and used to record Chinese? As mentioned above, quite a few of the earliest Chinese characters were pictures-like characters, called "pictographic characters", such as "moon, rain, fish, clothing, wood" in oracle bone inscriptions, etc., all of which describe and express nature and the outside world. Pictographs of things.They each record the word they represent. Some words expressing more abstract things cannot be represented by pictures when written in characters, so some symbols have to be used, such as "up" and "down" in oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions as two, , the long horizontal line indicates the ground level or the boundary line of a certain position, and the short horizontal line indicates whether it is above or below the ground level or the boundary line.Isn't this simply expressing concepts like "up" and "down" in words?How clever our ancestors were!These two characters, written in Xiaozhuan , and later it was written as "up and down".

There are also some symbols that are added to represent things or concepts on the basis of pictographs, such as: This "fundamental" means.oracle bone inscription , " " is the pictographic character of wood (tree), and three "0" are added marks, indicating the location of "root (tree root)". The bronze inscription is written as , written in Xiaozhuan , all three dots are changed into a horizontal line, which is also a kind of mark.Later write "this". The last "end" means.written in bronze , is inA short horizontal line is used above to indicate the end of the tree; Xiaozhuan is written as , stretched the short horizontal line.Later, it was written as "the end".

Blade means "knife edge".Xiaozhuan writing It is also written in oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions and small seal script , " " is a pictographic character representing the front of a person, and the two dots "eight" represent the location of the two armpits of a person, which is an ancient character for "armpit". The shape of ancient characters can also reflect this meaning, and it was later written as "Yi". not coming out. Characters like the ones mentioned above that simply use marks, or add marks on the basis of pictographs to record words are called "Zhishi characters".To refer to something is to use a sign to indicate something.There are not many Chinese characters created by this method.

When introducing "Oracle Bone Inscriptions", we also talked about some characters that use two pictographs to represent a concept or a thing, such as Xiu, Cong, Bei (back) and so on.Like "people" leaning against "(tree) wood", one can understand at a glance that it is the word "rest" for "rest", which is called "knowing".Understanding means that you can understand the meaning at a glance. Let's look at some more examples.Many of these knowing characters can only be expressed with the help of ancient characters. A single tree; Lin and Sen are clusters of trees, that is, forests.

A person is a single person; a multitude is many people. written in mog script , is the sun (⊙) falls to the grass ( ), which means "evening". , is the pictogram of a single grass, soIndicates grass. written in oracle bone inscriptions , written in bronze , like footprints one after the other, means "walking". Ford means to cross water (river, river, etc.).oracle bone inscription , , written in bronze , , is a "step" (two footprints) across or is crossing the stream ( , ). Some ideographic characters are more complex and are composed of several parts representing pictograms, such as the character "爨" which means "cooking pan [cuan channel]", which means "cooking rice", written in Xiaozhuan. ,represents a person's hands,It is a tool for cooking (a kind of pot),It's the stove for cooking, the bottom oneIndicates the wood used as fuel, which is being produced by the hands of another person (collaborator) ( ) into the stove, lit a fire (fire) underneath, and started cooking.Look, what a vivid and delicate picture of the ancient ancestors cooking!

Comprehension is a major feature of Chinese character creation.Through understanding, it is possible to intuitively express many complex concepts or things that are difficult to express simply with pictographs or referring to things.The created characters are easy for people to comprehend and understand, so there are quite a few knowing characters in early Chinese characters. Pictograms, referring to things, and comprehension all allow people to know the meaning of a word through its shape, that is, the meaning of the word it records.Therefore, these are the three ways of creating Chinese characters, and they are also the three ways of recording Chinese words.Then, if all Chinese characters are created using these three ways of making characters, wouldn't it be easy to recognize and learn them?However, there are many complex and abstract words in Chinese, which are difficult to express intuitively from the shape of these three word-making methods. For example, some nouns indicating orientation (east, west, south, north, etc.) Adjectives (difficult, easy, arrogant, etc.), pronouns referring to people or things (I, Zhi, etc.), especially some function words that have no specific meaning and only express a certain relationship between words or the tone of a sentence (zhi, nearly, person, also etc.), all can't directly make word for them with these three kinds of word-making methods.

We also know that writing is just a tool for recording language.Chinese characters are used to record the Chinese language. Most monosyllabic words in ancient Chinese make a single Chinese character correspond to a word. The sound and meaning of the word are actually the sound and meaning of the word.The glyphs used to create characters are used to reflect the original meaning of the recorded words, which is called "the original meaning of word creation".The pictographic, referring to things, and understanding three kinds of word-making methods can generally reflect the original meaning of the word-making.However, if, according to the above, there are many words that cannot be directly expressed by these three word-making methods, and we have to record the sounds of these words, we can only borrow the existing words with the same sound, and ignore these words. The original meaning of the coinage is gone.In this way, the task of recording Chinese can also be well completed.This method of not creating new characters, but just borrowing existing Chinese characters to record Chinese is called "jiajian" (fake, also means "borrow").For example:

Eastern oracle bone inscriptions , , written in bronze , , like a bag tied at both ends, is a pictographic character; it is borrowed to record the "dong" in the east. Nanyuan is the name of a bird, borrowed to record the "difficulty" of "difficulty". Yi Jinwen written in , like a snake (lizard) with feet, under the guise of "easy" to mean "easy". I wrote in oracle bone inscriptions , , is a weapon in the shape of a Ge, under the guise of expressing the first-person pronoun "I". It was also introduced earlier that it is a reference word indicating the location of "armpit", which was later borrowed as "yi" to express the meaning of "also".

How oracle bone inscriptions were written , written in bronze , like a person carrying a burden, under the guise of "he" expressing "who" and "what". Language develops with the development of society, and there are more and more new things and new concepts, and there are more and more new words.When recording language, it is often impossible to use the pictographic, referring to things, and knowing to create new characters, or it is simply too late to create new characters, so they only borrow existing homophones, that is, use borrowed characters. In early Chinese characters, we found a large number of borrowed characters, such as a common inscription in oracle bone inscriptions: "Guimao divination, today's rain. It rains from the west? It rains from the east? It rains from the north? Its from Rain coming from the south?" A total of 13 words were used, of which nine words (gui, mao, qi, zi, xi, lai, east, north, south) were used as borrowings, which shows that there are many borrowings.

However, if our ancestors only used the method of homophony borrowing and used some limited Chinese characters to record many homonyms in Chinese, then the same Chinese character would inevitably contain many meanings, so that in a sentence, a certain Chinese character recorded It takes a lot of brainpower to decide which word it is.For example, the word "Pi" has the meaning of "criminal law" and "king", but earlier it was also responsible for recording "remote" "secluded", "avoided" to avoid, "pi" to open up, and "bi" to be used as a metaphor. task.If there are too many part-time jobs, it is not easy to distinguish, which also affects communication. So the ancients came up with a method of creating characters, which is to add parts and distinguish the Chinese characters with the same pronunciation in terms of shape and meaning.This is mainly to add parts that represent different meanings on the original characters, for example: General→Pan In oracle bone inscriptions, the "pan" of the Shang king Pangeng and the "pan" of the cup and plate in bronze inscriptions were originally written as "general". "General" is different.But in the future, Pan Geng also added "dish" to the lower part of "Ban". Stop → the function of "stop" in toe nail bone inscriptions , , like a footprint, is exactly the ancient character "toe" of the toe, and later it was also used to express "stop" and "stop". , become the toe. County→Xuanxian characters are written in bronze inscriptions , like a head (head) hanging upside down on a wooden post to show the public, is a knowing character, that is, a hanging character.But later the county word was used to represent the "county" of the prefecture and county, so the hanging "county" was added with a part "heart" in the lower part. Yi→Yi Writing of "Yi" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions , Xiaozhuan writing , which means that water overflows from the container, is a knowing word and an ancient word for "overflow".But later it was used to express the "benefit" of benefit, so the "benefit" expressing overflow was added next to the character of water. The added parts "dish", "foot", "heart" and "氵(water)" in the above character examples are used to distinguish meanings and different glyphs, or to indicate the category of meanings to which new characters belong Symbol, so it is called "meaning symbol", or "graphic symbol".However, the original "Ban", "Zhi", "Xian", and "Yi" in the new characters only become the parts that indicate the pronunciation, indicating that the new characters have the same pronunciation as the original characters, so they are called "sound symbols". Chinese characters composed of pictograms and phonetic symbols are called "pictophonetic characters". On the other hand, in order to record the language more precisely and accurately, parts representing pronunciation are sometimes added to the original glyphs, so that people can know the pronunciation of the words it records by looking at the glyphs.For example: The different shapes in the tooth oracle bone inscriptions (see above) all just represent the shape of the tooth, which is a pictographic character; the sound character "zhi" was added later. oracle bone inscriptions , like there are shells and jade in the house, is a knowing character; when it comes to bronze inscriptions, a consonant "輶" is added to become "bao", which was later simplified to "bao". 耤〔ji病〕 writing on oracle bone inscriptions In this way, the original shape becomes the pictograph (meaning symbol) of the new character, which also constitutes the pictophonetic character. The invention of pictophonetic characters is really wonderful!Because on the one hand, when Chinese characters are recorded in Chinese, it can mark the pronunciation of words, so that people can read the sound by looking at the shape; and glyph, even if the words have the same pronunciation, there is no need to worry about possible confusion. Therefore, phonograms have become the most popular and vital word-making method in the evolution history of Chinese characters.Among today's Chinese characters, pictophonetic characters account for more than 90%.It can be considered that the invention of pictophonetic characters is also a major factor in the reason why Chinese characters have not followed the path of phonetic writing in history. By the way, there are already many pictophonetic characters in oracle bone inscriptions, and some people count as many as 20%.From the above description, we can know that the generation of pictophonetic characters should come after pictographs, referring to things, understanding, and borrowing. Therefore, oracle bone inscriptions are already a fairly mature Chinese character.From this, it is not difficult to infer that Chinese characters must have a relatively primitive stage before oracle bone inscriptions, but we have not found enough evidence today.