Understanding Chinese Characters

Most of the current modern Chinese characters were evolved from hieroglyphs. However, they are different from the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian hieroglyphs are logographic and alphabetic elements, while Chinese characters are graphical elements. A basic Chinese character can present a physical object, instead of the spelling of pronunciation. Some Chinese characters are also "spelled" by other existed character, which has the same pronunciation of a new object that people used to tell.

Take the Chinese character, "cattle(s)", for example, it looks like:

A Chinese character which means "cattle"

This character was simulated by the appearance of the front view of a cattle. By the features of horns and ears, the hieroglyph looks like the first drawing of the below figure. The ancient Chinese hieroglyphs were typically sculptured on hard bones or turtle shells, and recorded the prophecies of divination from the fissures on these material, after burned on the fire.

Evolution of The Chinese Character "Cattle"

Sculpturing a character on a hard shell is relative difficult, so, a Chinese hieroglyph is typically composed of straight lines in this period. After the casting technology is invited, some round lines can be found on the bronze ancient items, and the character of cattle was evolved to the second one in the figure. And it was easier to sculpturing these improved characters on a bamboo or a softer casting mold.

After writing brushes were invited, the characters were improved to square shapes. This way, when different characters were written together horizontally (or vertically) with similar width and height on the clothes or papers, it helps in reading speed, and the later movable typing technologies.

To a student, one has to learn at least 2000 Chinese characters, better 3000, before he/she is capable to read newspapers. You may wonder how it can be possible to learn and remember so many characters and how 3000 characters are enough for reading a newspaper, compare to English words? By several thousand years evolution, the creation of new Chinese characters are not only from the appearance of objects. The new characters can be rearranged from some basic characters, and a word which is combined from several characters can also define various meanings.

I will spend some time to introduce these interesting topics in the future.

有人說，中文是世界上最「牛」的語言。