The numbers speak for themselves

--A few things about simplified Chinese characters

1. Words written in front - Baidu and reading

The origin of this article is because of some discussions in the building where the "college entrance examination bans the oracle bone inscription" http:///thread-593814-1-1.html", I exchanged some things with a few friends, but I felt that it was not clear, neither systematic nor specific, and there was a reply that was more emotional, and it could no longer be regarded as an attitude of discussion. So, I decided to open a new pit separately to sort out the relevant things.

It should be noted that I am not an expert in writing, and the things described in this article do not have my "unique opinions" or "exclusive research results", I am just a ticket holder, a collator, and I extract them from different books and materials and organize them into a text. At the end of this article, all the cited books are also listed, and if you are interested, you can find it and take a look for yourself.

This was the first time I had tried to include the source of all the information at the end of what I had written, both out of respect for the teachers and gentlemen who had worked hard to write the book, and because of the views I had made in that building.

Baidu is very easy to use, but you can't just use Baidu, if you rely on it alone, it is difficult to avoid being brainwashed by others malicious or non-malicious. The information age is a wonderful age, but if we don't think about it, or if we just look for information to support our opinions, it will turn us into more fools than any other era.

Baidu is a good thing to gain knowledge, but in any case, physical books are better things, and several physical books put together, compared and contrasted with each other, are even better things.

…… The above is a preface.

2. Are traditional Chinese characters the root of Chinese culture? --About font changes

Debates about the superiority of traditional and simplified Chinese characters can be seen everywhere on and off the Internet, and there is a rather prominent point of view that "traditional Chinese characters are the root of Chinese culture". In this way, the policy of abolishing the complicated and simplifying is wrong.

Is that so?

In 1899, a pile of bone fragments was taken away from the Chinese medicine shop, and then we rediscovered the oracle bone inscription, which is currently known, or is recognized by the academic community as the earliest Chinese character, according to more than 3,000 years, at present, there are more than 4,000 oracle bone inscription characters found, and less than half have been identified. If we no longer focus on the depiction of pottery, then this is the oldest root system of Chinese writing now.

The inscription on the bone fragment is called "oracle bone inscription", and the inscription on the metal ware is called "golden inscription", when introducing the history of the development of Chinese characters, the golden inscription is generally placed behind the oracle bone inscription, but strictly speaking, the golden inscription actually contains multiple stages of development of the text.

The early Jin script is basically the same as the oracle bone inscription, or it can be said that it is actually the oracle bone inscription engraved on bronze, but the later Jin script has undergone great changes, and for those who are familiar with the fonts of various generations, it can be easily seen that it is similar to the small seal. At present, nearly half of the golden inscriptions have been collected than the oracle bone inscriptions, and more words have been deciphered.

Jin Wen is the Shang and Zhou periods * began to use the text, and then to the Spring and Autumn Period, and then to the Warring States Period, although "there is still Zhou Tianzi", but the cultural people are still busy "saying Liang Qi", this is a stage of the explosive development of Chinese characters, on the one hand, this is the period when the "multiplication" tendency of Chinese characters is the most obvious and the most rapid development, on the other hand, this is also the period when various regions have developed their own "Chinese characters", and it is the period when Chinese characters are most likely to be the same as the "Latin language family", and eventually become the "Chinese language family".

But Qin Shi Huang came, and brought a small seal.

The small seal, sometimes called the "Qin seal", its predecessor is the "big seal", also called "Zhouwen". When the Seven Kingdoms were fighting, the big seal was the common script of the Qin State, and after the leveling of the Six Kingdoms, the small seal became the universal script of the world.

That was the first normalization of Chinese characters that we know (maybe the merchants and the Zhou people did something similar, but we don't know it anymore), and I don't need to say more about the significance of this standardization, I just want to highlight one thing.

As mentioned earlier, in the later Jin Wen, many words can be clearly seen to be similar to Xiao Seal. In other words, the small seal did not fall from the sky, it gradually evolved on the basis of the development of Jinwen.

The small seal is not Jinwen, just as Jinwen is not an oracle bone, but the oracle bone has become Jinwen, and the golden text has become a small seal, it does not mean that any roots have been cut off, they are different parts of the same big tree, and the small seal sent Jin Wen to the second line, and Jin Wen held a retirement tea party for Oracle, but ...... They are always family.

…… In addition, it is not a very important thing, compared with the previous and contemporaneous texts, the small seal has two main points: "tidying" and "simplifying".

Collation refers to the integration of the respective characters of the six countries and the simplification of the small seal...... I don't think I can explain this word anymore.

Regarding the comparison of the glyphs from the golden text and the small seal, I have a lot of comparison drawings in my hand, both the strength of simplification and the idea of simplification, but due to the problem of technical means, I can't get it now...... However, this pit will have to be posted for a long time anyway, and by the time the full text is finished, or it has been solved. ^_^

After the "small seal", there is the "official book", which is the official text of the Han Dynasty, and until the Three Kingdoms period, it is still the official body of each family. The traces of the small seal can also be seen in the early official script, and the embryo of the regular script is obviously in the later official script.

"Regular script" ...... I'm glad I wrote this, because the subtitle of this article is in italics, because I finally managed to write in a font that we still use today.

Regular script is generally believed to have appeared in the early years of the Han Dynasty, also called "Zhengshu", because it is a kind of upright, particularly straight font, so it got this name.

However, the Han Dynasty was born, and the font that has been used to this day is not only in regular script, but also in "cursive script", which is even earlier than regular script.

The early cursive script, also known as "grass li" or "chapter grass", is a variant of the writing of the official script, roughly equivalent to the ligatures in today's hard pen calligraphy, the disadvantage is that it is not easy to see, and the advantage is that it can be written quickly. In the Tang Dynasty, it will also take a step forward and become a more wild and difficult to recognize the "wild grass", however, just like the 1977 version of the simplified characters, the reform that went too quickly was difficult to sustain after all, and the wild grass soon ended.

At the same time as the development and growth of cursive script, there are also people who are making other attempts, they feel that regular script is too slow, cursive script is too difficult to recognize, so they try to come to a harmony: use a font that is faster than regular script and easier to recognize than cursive script, this is Xingshu, and cursive script and regular script are the same, it has been circulating to this day.

Through the above introduction, it can be clearly seen that the birth of cursive and line script, are to make up for the shortcomings of regular script writing trouble, and it is precisely because of the cursive script and line script, the first batch of simplified characters in today's sense have been produced, and a considerable part of the simplified words currently used can be caught up in these two fonts.

…… That includes "love", "love" without "heart". "Love" is madly ridiculed by countless people who never read ancient books, or who don't read enough ancient books, or who don't want to read ancient books at all but just want to satisfy their sense of superiority, but really, the generation of the word "love" has a history of thousands and hundreds of years, to say the least.

After the combination of Kai, Xing, and Cao was formed, the official font did not change significantly...... Well, if that's all I have to say, I'm slapping myself in the face.

In the "college entrance examination" building, I said that "Qin characters are different from Tang characters, Tang characters are different from Qing characters...... and SICTT students also expressed his doubts, from the inscriptions and character stickers that can be seen so far, it seems that there is no difference between Tang characters and today's "traditional characters".

Is it?

The reason why I especially took out the three nodes of Qin, Tang and Qing is because these three nodes correspond to an important starting point in the history of the evolution of Chinese characters.

Qin characters, as mentioned above, are the first unification, the first standardization, the first time that the official recognition and solidification of the unofficial self-made simplification of the font, the first time to act on the power of politics, no matter what criteria are used to distinguish them, it is impossible to bypass this emperor through the ages.

Qing characters, is the last time of traditional Chinese characters, is three thousand years of great changes, since then, is wearing the hat of the Republic of China Beiyang, is the Beiyang overthrow of the Republic of Beiyang and then proclaimed itself the Republic of China Nanjing regime, is the dynasty...... Whatever the dynasty, the emperor is no more, the old times are no more.

And what about the Tang Dynasty?

The Tang Dynasty was the starting point, two starting points.

Tang is the starting point of what is known today as "traditional characters" or "orthographic characters". After the fall of Yongjia, the world was swaying, until the birth of the Second Empire of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, which ended the division of the country, and also restarted the unification and standardization of fonts and many other things.

As early as the Sui Dynasty, there was a book of "Interpretation of Words", and after that, the Tang people's "Characters", "Kuang Miao Zhengqing", "Ganlu Character Book", and "New Nine Classics" ...... A series of works are all continuing this effort, some of them are the spontaneous work of scholars, but more are the work carried out with the will and support of the unified central government, and the more typical achievement during this period is the "Sea of Words" published during the reign of Wu Zetian, and at this stage, this wave of sorting and standardizing work has been basically completed.

Most of the "traditional characters" we are accustomed to today can be traced back to the Sui and Tang dynasties, and from the perspective of readers, there is indeed no essential difference between the characters of the Tang Dynasty and the characters of the Qing Dynasty...... However, this is only from the point of view of the reader.

The Tang Dynasty was also the starting point for the common people to simplify Chinese characters on their own and force the people in the temple to accept them.

Of course, this sentence is actually a bit absolute, and there are already many simplified Chinese characters that are still in use today in Wang Youjun's stickers.

But.

We know that it was written by Wang Youjun.

And the simplified characters produced in the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, it is difficult for us to know who wrote them.

So I like it.

I like things like this, very much.

I don't know who it is, but I still have to accept it, although, the person who created these fonts and fonts is not a book saint, not a Xiangye, not a great poet and a celebrity.

That is the crystallization of the people, that is the choice of the people.

The people who grind tofu, the people who print the plates, the people who copy the scriptures, and the people who write the signs...... They failed to leave their names in the history books, but their joint efforts and common choices have become today's standards.

Judging from the historical materials that can be mastered so far, we can confirm that from the beginning of the Song Dynasty, to the Yuan, to the Ming Dynasty, to the Qing Dynasty, the folk simplification of "characters" has never stopped, has been working hard, has been advancing, although a large part of the results will become variant characters or something that no one remembers at all, but in the same way, a large part of the achievements have been handed down, to this day, become the "simplified characters" we use.

A tree, from ancient times to the present, the branches do not grow, the leaves do not stop, but the roots never change.

If replacing traditional Chinese characters with simplified Chinese characters is to cut off the roots of Chinese culture, then from official script to regular script, from Jin Wen to seal script, who cut off whose roots?

3. Love has no heart? --Complexity and simplification of Chinese characters

Let's take a look at this graph.

(Current)

This picture is all "love", the first is the golden text, followed by the seal, li, Kai, grass, the word "love" in the book. In the currently known oracle bone inscriptions, the word "love" has not been found or interpreted, and the earliest "love" is found in the Jin inscription. The part that looks like a bull's head is the way the "heart" is written in the golden text.

In addition, there is another picture (temporarily missing), this is the "heart" in the oracle bone inscription, in other words, this is really the most clear "heart" word we have ever seen.

We can see that there are seven strokes of love in Jin Wen, but the two strokes that make up the heart shape are more similar to pictures, and the strokes are not smooth, if you take the horizontal and vertical straight, it is okay to say that it is nine strokes.

It should be noted that the "love" in this picture is taken from the Jin Wen in the late Zhou Dynasty, from then on, to the Xiao Seal, during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the Jin Wen had an explosive stage of development, and various countries and regions have created a large number of characters with their own local characteristics, and the overall direction is to go towards the scheme of complexity and complexity.

The development of the small seal, the strokes of love have become eight strokes, and the most eye-catching part of it is naturally the word "heart" that bends again and again.

From the small seal to the official script, love has become eleven paintings again, and the heart character that seems to be drawn in the shape of the heart has finally been abandoned, and it is expressed with two points and a cross.

It is worth mentioning that this also reflects a very important feature of Lishu, or a very important feature of the development of Chinese characters, the characteristics of Chinese characters to reproduce the image of objects like pictures have finally disappeared, and Chinese characters have been completely symbolized. The sleek and easy-going lines from Jin Wen to Xiao Seal have disappeared since then, and "horizontal and vertical" has since become the main theme of Chinese characters.

…… At that time, there were probably some people who roared: There is no curve, is it still the heart?! Is that still a heart?! Is that still called love?!

After the official book is the regular script, love has finally become thirteen paintings, but every stroke and every fold is the pen movement technique that we are familiar with, which is completely a "word" suitable for writing, and the traces of the times have basically disappeared.

…… Is the root broken?

Above, we have seen how a Chinese character is gradually transformed and multiplied. In fact, this is also an inevitable trend in the development of civilization, because the developing civilization will always encounter new things and create new things, and will need more words and words to describe the world around them.

The carving of details is not only to define the writing of the next word more accurately and standardly, but also to adapt to the discovery of a large number of new things and the use of new nouns. Many words that were used in the past were broken down and became independent new words, (for example, love, in the earliest days, it was also the same as the word "picture is temporarily missing", but with the development, this creation failed, and was given up by everyone, so it sank into the word tomb, except for a sick man like my generation who is idle to the point of egg pain and has a research habit, it is difficult for anyone to remember their existence.) Generations of users added new details to them, some of which failed, some of which died, and some of which became recognized and eventually became officially recognized fonts.

Multiplication.

The essence of multiplication is actually the increase in the total number of words and the increase in the total amount of information.

But kanji goes more than just this path. In addition to multiplication, there is also simplification.

Above we have appreciated the love of regular script, and right next to it, the cursive "love" can be called a great reaction to the change from the golden text to the regular script of "love", only six strokes, and from the connection of the pen, we can clearly see that when writing, absolutely not six strokes.

However, this is too fierce a reaction, if we don't specifically explain, whether it is a friend who is accustomed to traditional or simplified characters, I believe that few can recognize this as a love word.

But it doesn't matter, I believe that no matter whether you are accustomed to traditional or simplified characters, you will basically not recognize the few loves from Jin Wen to Lishu, but this does not affect that we are still Chinese, and it does not mean that our roots have been cut off since the early years of the Han Dynasty.

Again, back to the topic of cursive writing, words are tools after all, no matter how efficient simplification is, but if it is simplified to the point that it is almost equal to other words, forcing people to learn from scratch, that step is too big.

So, as we have already introduced in the second section, when cursive script appeared, there was also Xingshu, a font that was easier to recognize than cursive and better to write than regular script.

The last word in the picture above is the love in the book, and at the same time, I believe everyone can easily recognize it, this is love, the love we are using today.

…… That's right, this is also a basic principle of simplifying characters in this dynasty, saying but not doing.

However, this is the focus of the next few sections, so let's continue to review the complexity and simplicity of Chinese characters.

*****

The earliest Chinese characters were pure pictographs.

But of course this is nonsense, all really old writing, in the beginning it was hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphs are the beginning of human civilization, but human beings can not stay at the beginning forever, with the development of civilization, more characters have been created, and more methods of creating characters have also been summarized.

During the Eastern Han Dynasty, there was a man named Xu Shen, who wrote a book called "Shuowen Jie Zi", which to this day is still a book that no one who studies ancient characters can bypass, and I can put it more harshly, for scholars who have not read this book, it is difficult for me to think that his views can have any value in the field of Chinese paleographic research.

Xu Shen summarized the views of his predecessors, and according to the "Zhou Li", he clarified the concept of "six books", that is, "pictographic, signifying, knowing, formal, phonetic, transferring, and borrowing", which has basically been used to this day, and the current classification of "pictographs, signifiers, huiyi characters, and morphophonetic characters" is almost completely consistent with it.

Among them, pictographs are the oldest words, such as the sun and the moon, such as mountains and water, all pictographs are monographs, and most of the monographs are also pictographs, which is the world that the ancestors first understood and summarized.

The word "referential" is a relatively controversial and vague concept, and it is the most hotly debated field among scholars throughout the ages. Here is just a brief introduction, such as "up", "down", "this", "blade", etc., and the words that look out for meaning and do not correspond to the specific shape are the words that refer to things. The words "referring to things" are also independent characters, and they, like pictographs, are the ancestors of Chinese characters, and they are the oldest batch of words. And obviously not a coincidence, this batch of characters is also the least average stroke, the easiest to write, and the smallest change in glyph in all dynasties.

Huiyi characters are the beginning of the combined character and the beginning of the multiplication of Chinese characters, using more than one single character, or the shape formed by the change of the single character, to combine to produce a new single word. A short sentence that everyone often sees in martial arts novels, "stop fighting for martial arts", is one of the earliest Huiyi words.

Morphophonetic characters are also combined words, but they are composed of morphophonetic characters and musical notes, such as rivers, lakes and seas, all of which are morphophonetic characters. Gong, Ke, Hu, and each are musical notes, while the three points of water are symbols. Morphophonetic characters are the most important component of Chinese characters now, and they are also the largest source and largest component of newly created Chinese characters, a large number of characters start from a homophone, and are added to different sides or marks by each, and form a new Chinese character, about this part, wait a minute, we will introduce it in detail in the multiplication of Chinese characters.

It should be emphasized that with the change of the times, the pronunciation of Chinese characters has been changing, and many of the past morphophonetic characters can no longer be regarded as morphophonetic characters in the strict sense today, such as special, next to its "temple", and now it has completely lost the ability to express sound.

…… Of course, this does not mean that our roots are broken.

Then there is the transfer character, which is also an extremely vague concept, and it goes further than the word referring to things, and has been so vague that it is impossible to even carry out polemics, so that later generations simply abandoned this statement, and in today's Chinese character classification, there is no longer this word. In "Shuowen Jie Zi", Xu Shen only clearly believes that "test" and "old" are transfer words. But at the same time, the test is considered to be a phonetic character, and from the earliest etymology, it is obvious that it is a word that will be meaningful. At present, it is generally accepted that "the use of the same radical or component of the same radical and the similarity of meanings can be regarded as transliteration." And my understanding is this: "All the words that cannot be clearly classified into the other five kinds should be merged into transliteration!" ”

Finally, there is a borrowed word, that is, there is no such word, and it cannot be drawn, and it cannot be understood, so it is simply found another word, and then said that this is it. For example, "order", for example, "long".

The earliest orders were issued to give orders, and the earliest long ones were long, and later, they were borrowed from the words "Ling Yin" and "Chief", and they were accepted by everyone and circulated to this day.

Another example is "west", it was the first to express the meaning of "perch", as shown in the figure (temporarily missing), which means a bird lying on the nest, and later, the west was pretended to refer to the west, because the ancestors found that when the sun was in the west, it was also the time when the birds returned to the nest, and its original meaning was borne by adding the word "perch" next to the wooden word.

*****

After talking about the six books, let's go back and sort out our thoughts, and we can clearly see that this is actually the trajectory of the development of writing.

Writing is the symbol that records language, and the richer the language, the more things you know, the more specific Zhao will be, the higher the requirements for the number and distinction of words.

First of all, the pictographs and signifiers, that is, the individual characters, the Chinese characters of this period were independent of each other, and each character had to bear either a large group of things, or simply an abstract, philosophical concept and field, such as upper and lower, such as water and fire.

But as civilization progressed and developed, the ancestors began to need more symbols, and obviously, not everything could be easily composed independently. Thus began to appear borrowed words, or polyswords, a single word, which was used to represent multiple meanings.

But if there are too many borrowed words, it is easy to get confused, so the great step has been taken, since a word can represent multiple meanings at the same time, so why not just rewrite it into multiple words?

Since then, the word will come to the stage, and the shape and sound word will come side by side. At the same time, a large number of transliteration characters appeared to make up for the shortcomings of other word-making methods.

This is a great breakthrough, the number of Chinese characters began to grow explosively, the ancestors took the trouble to give each thing an independent name, it was a pioneering era, it was an interesting era, the ancestors racked their brains to create words like "骝" and "Hua", so there was no need to bother to describe "red horse with black tail" and "red horse".

(To be continued)

By the way, here is a very interesting fact, it is true that Qin has always been considered crude and uncivilized compared to the Six Kingdoms, and comparing the various tyranny of the First Emperor with the Taizu of this dynasty has always been an extremely fashionable activity, however......

However.

However, few people know that Qin's small seal is the most orthodox Zhou style, which is really in line with the font characteristics of the "pre-Spring and Autumn Period".

Judging from the cultural relics that have been unearthed, none of them can be compared with the inheritance of the Qin people to the Jin Wen, the most extreme is simply unrecognizable, and even people can't accept that this is a text developed from the Jin Wen.

Qin is under the heavens, is there a providence? Is there a destiny?