Chapter 19 Section 2 Ancient and Modern Characters

Chinese characters are the collective creation of our ancestors.At the beginning, it may be disorganized, and many of them are only used by one person at one time and one place, and perish without being able to pass.So far, more than 4,000 oracle bone inscriptions have been discovered, but less than 2,000 can be recognized; there are nearly 4,000 bronze inscriptions, and only about 2,000 can be recognized.These more than 2,000 Chinese characters should have been recognized by the society at that time, passed on and passed on to future generations.From this point of view, the number of Chinese characters commonly used in ancient times was not large.The same is true for the use of characters in some existing pre-Qin ancient books.For example, a book that records Confucius' words and deeds has a total of about 20,000 words and only uses more than 1,500 single characters; a book "Mencius" that records Mencius' words and deeds has a total number of about 35,000 words and uses more than 1,800 single characters; The Spring and Autumn Annals, together with the annotations of Zuo Shizhuan, Gongyang Zhuan, and Guliang Zhuan, have a total of more than 250,000 words, and only about 4,000 single characters are used.If get rid of a large number of special characters such as names of people and places, the number of Chinese characters that are common and record general words is even less.

We know that language is produced along with the production of human beings.The Peking Man has a history of 500,000 years, and the Upper Cave Man has a history of 18,000 years; by the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods more than 2,000 years ago, the language must have been highly developed, and the words and the concepts they reflected were also very rich. More than three or four thousand.So why is the number of Chinese characters used so limited? It turns out that, as we said in Chapter 4 when we talked about "Six Books·Phonetic", the common Chinese characters in ancient times often have several roles.The same character is not only used to record the original meaning of the word (i.e. the original meaning of the coinage), but also used to record the extended meaning of the word.Certainly, often also will record the word (that is " under the pretense of borrowing ") of other sounds that have nothing to do with the original meaning of its coinage.In order to facilitate identification and distinction, people added various parts to the original characters, such as seeing-present, accepting-teaching, stopping-toe, address, 沚, pi- secluded, avoiding, pi, 依, 嬖, etc.; Some are parts that change the original characters, such as Shuo-Yue, Go-Obituary, Chen-Zhen and so on.In this way, many new words were created.The new characters are different from the original ones in terms of time, so they are called ancient and modern characters.And because these new characters are enough to distinguish the meanings recorded in the ancient characters, they are also called different characters.

Since it is just a difference, after the modern characters are produced, the ancient characters will not die because of this, but will become members of the Chinese character system together.Naturally, the number of Chinese characters increases accordingly. The idea of ​​dividing characters into ancient and modern ones can be said to have been first put forward by Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty.In "Shuowen Jiezi", he often discusses how the "ancient text" is and how the "modern text" is.Of course, the ancient texts and modern texts he mentioned also have specific meanings. For example, the ancient texts include the characters of the Six Kingdoms during the Warring States Period, and the modern texts include the vulgar characters at that time.However, "Shuowen" did include some ancient and modern characters in the current sense, such as knowing-wisdom, faint-marriage, anti-return, wrong-measure, etc.This also shows that many of the so-called "Jinzi" have a long history.

As mentioned earlier, many modern characters (new characters) add components to ancient characters, thereby forming phonetic characters, and the original ancient characters become the phonetic symbols of modern characters, which is the most common situation.Also have a lot of transformation parts, become new pictograms, but the phonetic symbols generally remain unchanged.Therefore, most of the ancient and modern characters have both pronunciation and physical connections.This distinguishes them from most "Tongjia characters" that only have a phonetic connection (same or close in pronunciation). characters, not ancient and modern characters.