英语(汉字的发展).doc

The Development of Chinese Characters Chinese characters?are?logograms?used in the?writing?of?Chinese?and some other Asian languages. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. Chinese characters are among the most?widely adopted?writing systems in the world by number of users. Legendary origins According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by?Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary?Yellow Emperor. Inspired by his study of the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth and the stars in the sky, Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called?zì?– the first Chinese characters. The legend relates that on the day the characters were created, people heard ghosts wailing and saw crops falling like rain. Early sign use Main article:?Neolithic signs in China In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at?Neolithic?sites in China, including?Jiahu?(c. 6500 BC),?Dadiwan?and?Damaidi?from the 6th millennium BC, and?Banpo?(5th millennium BC). Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years.?However, because these marks occur singly, without any implied context, and are made crudely and simply,?Qiu Xiguiconcluded that we do not have any basis for stating that these constituted writing nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to?Shang dynastyChinese characters. They do however demonstrate a history of sign use in the?Yellow River?valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period. Oracle bone script The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions carved on?oracle bones?from the late?Shang dynasty?(c. 1200–1050 BC). In 1899, pieces of these bones were being sold as dragon bones for medicinal purposes, when scholars identified the symbols on them as Chinese writing. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to a village near?Any