Chinese writing: Origin, characteristics and curiosities
Contents
- 1 When and where did Chinese writing originate?
- 1.1 How was Chinese writing invented?
- 1.2 How many letters does the Chinese alphabet have and what is it called?
- 2 Typologies of Chinese characters
- 3 How is Chinese calligraphy today?
Accustomed as we are to our alphabet and our own way of writing , the people of the West seem to have as something very foreign the rest of the alphabets that are still used today in the rest of the world, some used by hundreds of millions of people . Cyrillic, Arabic, but also Chinese, which is one of the most important and fascinating of all the alphabets we can find on our planet.
The Chinese alphabet stands out for being very different from the western one, but also to others such as Cyrillic or Arabic, since it is based on pictograms and ideograms, characters that, put in common, make the whole sentence work with a special context in which every moment It is not a simple language to learn, far from it, but in this article we are going to give some of the most important keys to get to know it a little better.
When and where did the Chinese writing originate?
When talking about Chinese writing we are addressing a communication system that emerged at least three thousand years ago , since the first vestiges of this alphabet have been since that time. Obviously, the place of birth of this type of writing is China, which at the time was an even greater empire in extension of what the current country occupies today. Those first vestiges gave rise to a writing system that has evolved over time, and at the same time , has served as the basis for other Asian languages such as Korean or Japanese itself . Currently, yes, China is the only country that retains this type of writing as such.
How was Chinese writing invented?
Having such an ancient origin, it is difficult to know the true history of the invention of Chinese writing . There are numerous theories, and many of them are based on simple legends that may be real, but whose fantastic or evocative pose makes them a little less credible. The most accepted theory, surely because of its beauty, is that it was the Cang Jie, one of the advisers of the great yellow emperor Huang Di, who created the pictograms and first symbols of Chinese writing based on the footsteps that the birds left . It is a beautiful story, of course, although quite fanciful because it is something too arbitrary when, as we will see next, the symbols do have a deeper meaning .
How many letters does the Chinese alphabet have and what is it called?
When we talk about the Chinese alphabet rather than letters we should refer to characters , which are the formula to be able to write in this way, as symbols that represent whole words and that can be merged to create others. There are currently more than 50,000 characters in the Chinese alphabet, although normally only 13,000 of them are used , between the cult language and the most colloquial.
Chinese character typologies
As we said before, instead of letters the Chinese alphabet works through characters, which can also be categorized according to certain concepts, as we will see below:
- Pictograms : they are the basis of language and are based on symbols that somehow represent concepts or words such as man, sun, etc ...
- Deictograms : they serve to represent more abstract ideas and concepts, phenomena and representations as above or below.
- Ideograms : born from the conjunction of two different but related characters, to create a new concept, such as the bright word through the sun pictogram.
- Pictofonograms : they supposed a multiplication of the possibilities for this writing when getting that the union of several characters formed new independent words.
- Characters lent: it is the situation of lending from one character to another to form a different word than the one the second one had already represented.
How is Chinese calligraphy today?
At the moment the Chinese calligraphy lives a moment of renovation, for a few decades, to homogenize its format a bit and that the cultured writing, the simplified and others are a little more similar . The Chinese alphabet is still used and is still evolving in the creation of even new characters or representative words. Chinese is today one of the most used and learned languages in the world, but it is true that many opt for the "westernized" version with the usual alphabet instead of the Chinese characters.