Chinese character

Chinese characters or Han characters (??/??) are logograms used in the written forms of the Chinese language, and to varying degrees in the Japanese and Korean languages (though the latter only in South Korea). Use of Chinese characters has disappeared from the Vietnamese language ? in which they were used until the 20th century ? and from North Korea, where in normal writing they have been completely replaced by Hangul.

Origin

The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are clearly writing are the poorly understood Oracle Script (甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén) of the late Shang Dynasty (or Yin (殷) Dynasty), attested from about 1200 BC. Only about 1400 of the 2500 known Oracle Script glyphs can be identified with later Chinese characters and can therefore be easily read.

Related Topics:
Oracle Script - Late Shang Dynasty - 1200 BC

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There have been suggestions that this was not designed for the Chinese language, or even for a Sino-Tibetan language, because it does not seem to reflect Chinese morphology accurately. An analogy would be if English were written with a script that had a single character for die and kill, but two separate characters for warm in "it's a warm day" and "please warm the bath". Although the succeeding Zhou Dynasty was clearly Han Chinese, it's not clear which ethnic group the Shang were. One possibility is Miao (苗 Miáo). The first recorded Miao kingdom was Jiuli. The ancestors of the Jiuli are thought to be the Liangzhu people, and it is these who are credited with creating the Oracle Script. According to Chinese legend, Jiuli was defeated by the military unification of Huang Di (黃帝 Huángdì) and Yandi, leaders of the Huaxia (華夏 Huáxià) tribe (the ancestors of the Han Chinese) as they struggled for supremacy of the Huang He valley. After their defeat, the Jiuli people who were not absorbed into the new Zhou state moved south, splitting into the Miao and the Li (黎 lí) peoples.

Related Topics:
Sino-Tibetan - Morphology - Zhou Dynasty - Han Chinese - Miao - Jiuli - Liangzhu people - Huang Di - Yandi - Huaxia - Huang He - Li

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The Yi script is quite old and is superficially similar to Chinese, but does not seem to be derived from it. It's perhaps likely that it was inspired by the example of Chinese, but the possibility cannot be discounted that it and the Chinese script both descend from a common source such as the Oracle Script.

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