Chinese characters are the most ancient type of writing on our planet, which not only has survived to this day, but also occupies one of the leading places among the most widespread languages in the world. The emergence and evolution of Chinese writing became the impetus for the development of the civilization of the ancient Chinese, and also had an active influence on the formation of the cultural values of the country and even the whole world. A unique complex of graphic signs and drawings was created more than 6000 years ago. This is what I understand as the test of time.
Ancient finds
Carrying out regular archaeological excavations at the ruins of Banpo, scientists found more than five thousand different inscriptions, drawings and signs that were meaningless at that time. These graphic symbols had a certain pattern; scientists also noted the fact that many inscriptions had basic features similar to Chinese characters. Having carried out extensive work comparing and contrasting the finds with modern Chinese writing, archaeologists came to the conclusion that they had obtained evidence of the existence of hieroglyphs at that time, or rather proto-hieroglyphs.
Hieratic and its features
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared with the emergence of the First Dynasty of Pharaohs. The language of the ancient Egyptians itself, in its phonetics, has something in common with Semitic dialects, but to the same extent it is similar to the Cushitic and Berber-Libyan linguistic branches. Throughout the existence of Ancient Egypt, only hieroglyphs were used for writing. Previously, they were carved exclusively on stones, on the walls of temples and houses. Later, papyrus was used to write laws, other documents and simple letters. Interestingly, the older the recording, the easier it is to decipher. This is due to the fact that the most ancient records of the Egyptians were created thanks to miniature pictures that accurately depicted objects or actions. Later, much more complex hieroglyphs began to be used, which were deciphered by both European and Asian scientists. The main discoverer in this area is the Frenchman Chapmollion. But in fact, a much greater contribution to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian writing was made by the Persian Ibn Wahshiyya an-Nabati, who translated hundreds of spells and state texts into Arabic.
"Turtle" ritual
Scientists have managed to find many turtle shells with the first written language. And this is quite understandable. The fact is that during the reign of the Shang dynasty there was a certain tradition, one might say a ritual, which was used immediately before making an extremely important decision in the sphere of governing the people and the state as a whole. Before starting the ritual, the turtle shell had to be carefully processed: cleaned, washed and polished. Next, the person responsible for carrying out the ancient ritual had to apply several blows to a specially prepared turtle shell in a strictly defined order, which left indentations, as well as an inscription consisting of several symbols, which later turned into Chinese characters.
This inscription contained a specific question to which a clear answer could be obtained. After the question was formulated and applied, the fortuneteller set fire to the indentations in the shell with a stick made of bronze. After such a ritual, cracks formed on the back side of the shell, using which the ancient Chinese determined the result of fortune telling and the answer to the question that concerned them. When the ritual was over, all the turtle shells were placed in a certain place and kept as official government documents. It was some kind of ancient archive.
At the moment, scientists have discovered about 160 shells - sources of information about ancient writing. About four thousand characters have been identified that resemble Chinese characters. The finds are still being studied to this day, because out of this huge number, only a thousand have been commented on. All the rest either cannot be commented on at all, or there are heated debates about their meaning and use. Despite the fact that they were not able to decipher as much as they would like, historians were able to learn about the features of economic, political and cultural life in China during the reign of the Shang Dynasty.
Writing on turtle shells is considered an already established and mature system of ancient writing, and it was they that became the basis for the subsequent development of hieroglyphs in China.
The origin of Chinese writing in the era of Shen Nong and Fu Xi
The history of writing in China began 1500 BC. e. Ancient myths connect its origin with the names of the ancient emperors Shen Nong and Fu Xi. Then, to convey important messages, a system of trigrams was invented, which were a combination of lines of different lengths. This is how the first symbols appeared, denoting individual objects. In fact, there were only two symbols - a whole line and a broken line. Their different unique combinations were linked together into trigrams.
There were eight trigrams that had a specific meaning and varied depending on what needed to be reflected in the letter. They could be combined in pairs and form 64 hexagrams, which formed a couplet expressing a specific event. The meaning of these couplets was deciphered by the seer. This was the first character encoding system, which laid the foundations for Chinese writing and made the Chinese understand that combinations of different characters could be used to record messages. It was important to create a system so that each symbol had a specific meaning.
Hieroglyphic styles
After the invention of writing, inscriptions began to appear on tortoise shells on objects cast in bronze. Sometimes Chinese characters were found scratched out, and sometimes they were found cast in bronze. Then various hieroglyphic styles began to appear, this was directly related to the development of Chinese hieroglyphs. There were quite a few different hieroglyphic styles. For example, the “Xiaozhuan” style was distinguished by the fact that it fixed only the number of strokes for each character; the type of ancient script called “Lishu” became the beginning of a new graphic with which Chinese characters were depicted. To be specific, the symbols became square and flat in shape. Also, it was during the development of the “Lishu” style, which is also called the “Charter Seal,” that the main features of the hieroglyphs and the order of their writing were determined. The Chinese still use it today, for more than a thousand years.
Writing instruments
The first writing tool in ancient China was a sharp object used to make lines. In order for them to appear on the material on which they are applied, its surface had to be smooth and soft enough. In pottery production, clay was used for these purposes. Animal bones and turtle shells were also used. For better visibility, the scratched lines were filled with black dye. All of the above components are a certain stage in the development of writing and form the environment for the emergence of real linguistic units.
What is a hieroglyph?
Chinese characters are some kind of ideographs, that is, symbols that contain an idea or meaning; they are the basis of Chinese writing and oral speech. At this stage of development, there are up to 10 thousand hieroglyphs, among them the number of the most common and most frequently used is 3 thousand. These symbols are enough to make up many different phrases and sentences.
Chinese characters are life, they, like people, age, they may be forgotten, new ones are found to replace outdated characters, some disappear from use forever. They carry deep meaning and even the wisdom of centuries. This explains the use of many hieroglyphs as symbols in the teachings of Feng Shui. You will find them on souvenirs, figurines, cars, clothes; many people get tattoos depicting beneficial hieroglyphs. If you sincerely believe in the power of hieroglyphs, they will definitely help in the fulfillment of your most cherished desires.
Chinese hieroglyphs became the basis and had a significant influence on the formation of writing in neighboring countries, such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Many Chinese characters are used in their speech.
Dmitry Ornatsky Views: 12624
Katakana
This native Japanese second alphabet is also used as an auxiliary alphabet. However, it does not overlap with kanji, unlike hiragana. If you do not know what a character borrowed into Japanese from other Asian (except Chinese) languages means, you can use one of the characters related to the katakana alphabet to convey it semantically. We also note that the written signs of this alphabet are used only as hints, and are much less common in colloquial speech than hiragana.
Interview with lecturer
— What attracts you, a specialist in historical linguistics, specifically in the Chinese language?
— First of all, the historical aspect. In its features, the Chinese language is extremely different from typical European languages, but at the same time it is also terribly lucky compared to its neighbors in Southeast Asia. It has a three-thousand-year written history, recorded in such a gigantic array of texts that there will be enough complex, contradictory, unresolved issues for another hundred years to come, if not more. Consider, for example, the question of how to restore the sound of ancient Chinese texts, which in hieroglyphs was never directly reflected in writing!
— How did you start studying hieroglyphs?
— In addition to purely theoretical reasons, there were also personal ones: I owe a lot to at least three wonderful people, two of whom, unfortunately, are no longer alive, that I teach classical Chinese today and practice it professionally. This is my father and teacher Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin, who himself was engaged in Chinese reconstruction and etymology; my Chinese teacher Grigory Aleksandrovich Tkachenko is a man with a completely unique scientific vision, the author of numerous studies and translations in the field of Chinese culture and philosophy. Both of them taught by personal example the most important thing - how to overcome the abstract fear of such a gigantic monster as Chinese civilization, and calmly approach its study from a modern, logical, methodologically correct position. And finally, of course, the director of the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity, where I work, had and continues to have a great influence on me, Ilya Sergeevich Smirnov - an excellent expert on Chinese culture and poetry, who knows how to speak in lectures, in books, and in personal conversations. bring this culture to life like no other.
— What place does the subject of your scientific interest occupy in the modern world?
— Hundreds of millions of Chinese and Japanese today use hieroglyphic writing in their daily lives - what’s more, the very word “hieroglyph” (wen) in the Chinese language long ago acquired such secondary meanings as “written text”, “literature”, “culture” ", "civilization", that is, the main thing that distinguishes a cultured, civilized person from a barbarian.
But at the same time, the deeper you dig, the more you solve old questions, the more new ones arise. Almost every few years, Chinese archaeologists excavating ancient burials discover more and more written monuments, so today we know much more about hieroglyphics than the most famous medieval Chinese sages knew.
— If you needed to quickly interest a stranger in Chinese characters, how would you do it?
- , no action from the outside is required here: the Far Eastern written culture, be it in the form of a sign on a Japanese restaurant, or even in the form of a manga comic (by the way, in terms of popularizing hieroglyphic culture, Japan is, of course, far ahead of China), today in the public eye with very early age. And the task of a professional is to prevent a person from becoming confused, confused, or afraid of the excessive complexity of hieroglyphic culture. It is important to show very quickly that this culture actually obeys certain, completely natural and logical laws; that in order to master it, you do not need to memorize fifty thousand independent pictures-hieroglyphs, but you only need to understand the simple principles by which the complex in this culture is built from the simple.
— Can you tell us about the strangest thing you encountered while reading sources?
“Many stories are connected with individual private absurdities that have been passed down from teacher to student for centuries only because they mistakenly put one hieroglyph in the text instead of another. The Chinese, by the way, understood this themselves for a very long time. In another text written before our era, there is an anecdote about how he spent a long time agonizing over a manuscript, trying to understand the sentence “The general crossed the river with three pigs,” until it was pointed out to him that in this place it was actually written illegibly “ The commander crossed the river on the day of the Ji-hai calendar.” The authority of the elder in traditional (and also in modern) China is an almost impenetrable thing. Alas, it is human nature to make mistakes, and for a researcher of Far Eastern culture the most important thing today is to learn to combine respect for tradition with a competent critical attitude.
Meaning of symbols
Egyptian writing is difficult for modern understanding. It has many features. The same symbol could have different meanings. At the same time, the same definition was denoted by different hieroglyphs or even components. You can consider the system using the example of writing the word “Ra”:
- “Mouth” + “Arm bent at the elbow.” The phonetic meaning of the signs is p+a.
- Image of a man with a special headdress. Usually this is how kings or pharaohs were celebrated. In rare cases, such designations were used when depicting deities.
- "Sun". It was used provided that the sentence reflected the metaphorical context. Ra was the sun god.
- "Eye". More often applied to the god Horus, who, according to mythology, monitored the actions of the Egyptians. But sometimes it was used to mean that Ra is watching over everyone.
Egyptian hieroglyphs and their meanings were used in the design of jewelry.
Very often, images of the sun or the all-seeing eye were found on amulets and talismans. Moreover, they were worn by both ordinary people and representatives of the supreme power, including pharaohs. For the latter, they were applied to gold jewelry; for the former, they were applied to wooden or stone flat washers.
Where to find out more
Olga Zavyalova. "The Big World of Chinese" (2014)
There are practically no publications in Russian that seriously and clearly talk about how the Chinese language works, its history, dialects and writing - all the more significant for the reader will be this publication, prepared by one of the best domestic specialists in Chinese dialectology. From it you can learn about how literary Chinese differs from spoken Chinese, and about why hieroglyph dictionaries were compiled in traditional China, and a lot of other useful information. The book will be useful not only to those who are already learning the language, but also to those who are still wondering whether it is worth learning it.
Mikhail Sofronov. "Chinese language and Chinese writing" (2007)
Mikhail Viktorovich Sofronov is the largest Russian specialist in the history of the Chinese language and the Southeast Asian linguistic area. The book is a revised course of lectures, somewhat more specialized than Zavyalova’s work, but still, in my opinion, understandable to a person who has never studied Chinese. There is a lot of information here not only about the Chinese language itself, but also about other languages spoken both in China and in neighboring territories.
Lyudmila Fedorova. "History and Theory of Writing" (2015)
Any object is understood only in the context of similar ones - therefore, in order to better understand the specifics of Chinese and Japanese hieroglyphic writing, basic information about them should be obtained along with information about other writing systems. From Lyudmila Fedorova’s textbook, which contains the most relevant and modern information about the written systems of the world’s languages, you can, for example, find out how Chinese characters are similar to Egyptian ones (from which almost all European writing systems known to us ultimately developed), and how, on the contrary, , are radically different from them.
Zhou letter
The first material sources of evidence of the existence of Zhou writing are vessels and bells made of bronze for sacrifices and other rituals. The inscriptions on these sources explained the essence of the process and were a kind of document confirming certain rights and powers. The inscriptions on the bells and vessels were made in the same language as the inscriptions on the bones. However, subsequently, during the millennium of the reign of the Zhou Empire, the language and writing changed greatly. Territorial dialects and different variants of denoting the same object in different localities became noticeable. The development of writing proceeded at an intensive pace at this time, as competition appeared between individual provinces. The most convenient and progressive forms of signs survived and became imperial. It was at this time that correspondence became widespread.
The appearance of the work “The Book of the Historiographer Zhou” dates back to this period. It contained 15 chapters with sequential hieroglyphs. Perhaps already in those days the foundations of future reference books and dictionaries were born.
Ancient Chinese poetry
Chinese poetry is the oldest on earth. It arose at the turn of the 12th-7th centuries. BC e. Poems were considered a combination of words and emotional impulse. Man sought to turn his feelings, experiences, delights and fears into words and, releasing them into the world, purify his soul.
The first collection of poetry in Ancient China is the Book of Songs. It contains songs of various genres. Along with spells and totemic ones, there are funeral and even labor ones. In total, the collection contains about 300 different poems, songs and hymns collected by Confucius. Forbidden topics, according to Confucian censorship, were songs about death, old age and illness, as well as divine beings. The songs contain repeated expressions and parallelisms.
Another unusual southern Chinese collection of poetry is “Chu Stanzas”. On the contrary, it contains poems with elements of fantasy, about magic, unusual creatures, unearthly worlds.
The Tang era is the time of great ancient Chinese poets such as Li Bo, Meng Haoran, Du Fu and Wang Wei. Overall, there were about 2,000 famous poets in Ancient China during this period. The characteristic features of Tang poetry were the clarity and transparency of images, the lightness and clarity of presentation of thoughts. In his lyrics, Wang Wei focused on the beauty of nature; his inspiration was the boundless expanses of the sea and mountain valleys. Li Bo promoted the theme of solitude, inner freedom, and lack of restrictions.
Ci poetry is a genre of the Song era in which lines and words were selected to a specific melody and performed to music. These poems became a separate literary genre only after some time.
