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Raigen l 《Outline of Character Studies》
Author l Joo Seok-gyu
分享 El 书艺公社(ID:Schuffaorg)
Even from the late Shang Dynasty, Chinese characters have a history of about 3,300 years. During this long period of time, the essence of the phonetic characters of Chinese characters has not changed, but some important changes have taken place in both form and structure.
From the perspective of form, Chinese characters have mainly undergone changes from complex to simplified. This change manifests itself in both fonts and glyphs. Glyph change refers to the change in the shape of a character. Font variation refers to the general change in the character characteristics and writing style of the text, and usually refers to a more obvious and large change. Of course, these two changes are often intertwined and difficult to separate.
The evolution of Chinese characters can be divided into two major stages, namely the ancient script stage and the subordinate and Kai stage. The former period began in the Shang Dynasty and ended in the Qin Dynasty (late 3rd century BC), and the latter period began in the Han Dynasty and continued into modern times.
The change from pictographic to non-pictographic is the most imperceptible change in the evolution of fonts. Throughout the paleographic stage, the pictographic degree of Chinese characters has been decreasing. Most of the characters used in ancient writing resemble graphics. For the convenience of writing, the ancients gradually changed them into symbols with a lower degree of pictogram composed of relatively straight lines. This can be referred to as "linearization". In the process of evolving from ancient characters to official scripts, the way characters are written has undergone greater changes. Most of them have become symbols that have completely lost their pictographic meaning, and are composed of strokes such as dots, paintings, apostrophes, and strokes. This can be referred to as "strokeization". The following is a simple example of the evolution of the fonts of the characters "馬 (馬)" and "魚 (鱼)" (the original horizontal writing of the character "horse" in the registered golden text):
Lishu is much more convenient to write than ancient script. The change from ancient characters to official scripts should be regarded as the most important simplification of the form of Chinese characters. On the surface, the regular script does not seem to have changed much from the official script. However, the strokes of regular script are more convenient to write than official script, so changing from official script to regular script is also an important simplification.
Font changes are often accompanied by glyph simplifications. This can be seen from the words "馬" and "魚" cited above. This can be seen more clearly from the following two examples of the transformation from ancient characters to official scripts:
In the absence of significant changes in the font, the simplification of the glyphs is also continuous. Many examples of this can be seen in oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty. As:
After the evolution of Chinese characters into regular script, the glyphs continued to be simplified. Since the 50s of the 20th century, a large-scale simplification of Chinese characters has also been carried out under the leadership of the government. The "horse" and "fish" mentioned above are simplified to "horse" and "fish".
On the other hand, in the process of the development of Chinese characters, there is also the phenomenon of glyph multiplication. Glyph multiplication can be divided into two categories. One is purely the complexity of the appearance, and the other is the complexity caused by the change of the structure of the text.
The former type of multiplication is sometimes done in order to clarify the glyphs to avoid confusion. For example, the words "up" and "down" were originally written in ancient characters
、
。 In order to avoid confusion with each other, and to avoid confusion with the word "two", each was later written with a vertical one
。 "Yu" and "Wang" are written in the ancient script (i.e., seal script) from which Lishu evolved
and
The only difference is that the position of the horizontal drawing in the middle is slightly high, and it is easy to mix. Lishu followed this glyph in the early days, and later in order to make a more obvious difference between the two, the method of adding dots to the word "jade" was used. The character "meat" is written in the ancient script from which Lishu evolved
。 In Li, Kaili, in order to avoid confusion with the "moon", it is multiplied
, "meat" and the like.
But in most cases, the sheer complexity of appearance seems to be a change in writing habits and serves no meaningful purpose. For example
Into
、
(Xin),
become
(Angle),
Into
(Hou) and so on. Most of the meaningless multiplication occurred in the paleographic stage. For example, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the characters "Tian" and "Zheng" had appeared with short and horizontal strokes
、
and other writing methods, these writing methods became extinct in the Qin and Han dynasties.
Generally speaking, the complexity of these two forms involves only a small part of all Chinese characters, and the degree of complexity is also very slight, usually only one or two additions.
The most common result of changes in the structure of the text is the addition of a side, as in the example of the pictogram of "鳳 (凤)" with the note "fan". and like a deep pool"
"Add attention to the character "water" and make "abyss (abyss)" (this work
), like an axe weapon of the "戉" (this work
Add attention to the character "gold" and make "钺 (钺)" and so on.
There are a large number of side characters in Chinese characters, but most of the side characters and the original characters without side are divided into two characters, such as: "wandering" from "Shang Yang", "centipede" from "Wu Gong", and "partridge" from "Canggeng" are examples. There are not too many words like the words "phoenix", "yuan", and "钺" mentioned above, which are used in no different way from the original characters. Therefore, most of the phenomenon of adding to the side can be explained as the differentiation of characters or the increase in the number of words, and do not have to be regarded as the multiplication of glyphs. However, if the word is the standard, the appearance of the differentiated word with the addition of the side should be regarded as the complexity of the glyph. For example, for {Centipede}, the change from writing "Wu Gong" to writing "Centipede" is indeed a multiplication of glyphs. For example, in the 50s of the 20th century, when Chinese characters were simplified, the phonetic character "dou" was used to replace the "fight" of "鬥爭", which is a phenomenon of merging characters or reducing the number of words, and from the perspective of words, {鬥} changed from writing "鬥" to writing "dou", which is a simplification of the glyphs.
Even for the words "phoenix", "yuan", and "钺", if we look at the side of their composition, the main trend of glyph change is still simplification. In the process of the evolution of Chinese characters, the vast majority of partial writing methods are constantly changing from complex to simplified. Some of the sides have also undergone a more drastic simplification than the general glyph evolution. For example, in Lishu, when "water" is used as the left side, it becomes three short and horizontal, which is much simpler to write than when it is written independently. Some scholars believe that "there is no tendency to multiply Chinese characters in terms of individual symbols. (Zhou Youguang, A Brief History of the World's Alphabet) This makes sense. Of course, there are a few exceptions, such as the aforementioned "jade", "meat" and so on.
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