Chapter 24 Section 3 Changes in the nature of Chinese characters caused by the development of word forms

All of the above is the case of a Chinese character recording a Chinese word.These words are monosyllabic.We know that monosyllabic words are relatively large in Chinese, which is one of the important characteristics of Chinese, especially ancient Chinese.However, with the development of social life, monosyllabic words are not enough, and they are easily confused by homonyms. Words such as Shi, Shi, Shi, Shi, Shi, Shi, Shi, and Decoration can be used alone in ancient times. But they all pronounce the sound of shi today, and it is difficult to distinguish them in oral communication.In fact, they have long been compounded in Chinese, forming some two-syllable words such as examination, soldier, city, classroom, world, situation, fit, and decoration, and the distinction is clear.Because a single Chinese character only represents one syllable of Chinese, two Chinese characters just record a two-syllable word of Chinese. Like this, the relationship between Chinese characters and Chinese words is not one-to-one.

Later, more and more words with two syllables were used in Chinese.In addition, many foreign words absorbed by Chinese are more often two-syllable or above, such as nicotine, brandy, hysteria, Coca-Cola, Bolshevik, Internaxonel, etc.Chinese characters can continue to play a good role in recording Chinese because two or more Chinese characters can be used to record Chinese disyllabic words and polysyllabic words. When we introduced the nature of Chinese characters earlier in this book, we said that Chinese characters are a kind of "word writing", and it is this characteristic that makes it take a completely different path from other ancient writing in the world.However, in the above cases, a single Chinese character does not stand alone and directly form a word, that is to say, a Chinese character has partially changed its own nature during the historical process of serving the Chinese language.However, at this time, Chinese characters have matured, and its direction of progress has been irreversible.Moreover, as far as the basic aspect is concerned, in most cases it can be considered as a kind of word.

All in all, although Chinese is constantly developing and changing due to social and historical reasons, Chinese characters can also change accordingly to adapt to the development of Chinese.Throughout the entire history of the relationship between Chinese characters and the Chinese language, the two are basically harmonious.