The Chinese written language is a writing system that originated roughly 3,500 years ago. It employs about 5,000 commonly used characters that each represents a Chinese morpheme. Combinations of characters produce Chinese words.
How the Language Works
Unlike English words, which are composed of letters, written Chinese words are made up of characters. It is popularly believed that Chinese characters represent words; in fact, individual characters represent Chinese morphemes and their meanings are generally dependent on context. Most words are composed of two characters, though words are commonly made up of one, three, four or more. This is not unique to Chinese; for instance, the English word “undoable” is made up of three morphemes meaning “not”, “do”, and “able”. In much the same way, the Chinese (undoable) is composed of three characters or morphemes meaning “do”, “not”, and “finish”.
Context and Meaning
As an example of how a Chinese character which does not commonly exist by itself to make a word, but is a part of a multi-syllable word, consider the character which has a basic meaning of “central, middle”. A is a “center” , for example a health center. means “Sino-America”. When is placed at the end of a subordinate phrase, it can mean “during” or “in the act of”, as in”lvtu zhong”(traveling).
Common Chinese words are particularly flexible. For instance, “ke” on its own has the passive meaning “capable of being”, as in “kechi” (edible), but in conjunction with “yi” assumes the active meaning “able to”, as in (able to walk).
In many cases, Chinese characters shed their meanings because they are used to transliterate foreign words and names. is “Obama” and has no association with “” (horse) aside from its phonetic value. Nonetheless, an attempt is often made in these phonetic loans to retain some semantic value, as in “Mi Ni Qun” (miniskirt), which literally means “fascinate-you-skirt”.
A few Chinese characters represent more than one morpheme. This too is not unique to Chinese-the English word “lead” represents two different morphemes, meaning either “to guide or conduct” or “a heavy and soft metal that has a gray color”, which is pronounced differently in either case. When a Chinese character, say, represents multiple morphemes, it typically is also pronounced differently depending on its meaning. In this case, the character is pronounced “xing” when it means “acceptable” or “to walk”, but “hang” when it means “profession” or “row”. However, this need not be the case-the Chinese particle actually represents two morphemes, indicating either “change of state” or “perfection of action”, which are pronounced the same way in either case.
The Origin of Chinese Writing
The earliest examples of Chinese writing date to the late Shang period (1300-1046 BC). These are the so-called Oracle Bone Inscriptions which were found at the site of the last Shang capital near present-day Anyang, Henan Province.
Oracle Bones
The discovery of the oracle bones in China goes back to 1899, when a scholar from Beijing was prescribed a remedy containing “dragon bones” for his illness: “dragon bones” were widely used in Chinese medicine and usually refer to fossils of dead animals. The scholar noticed some carvings that looked like some kind of writing on the bones he acquired from the local pharmacy. This lucky find led eventually to the discovery of Anyang, the last capital of Shang Dynasty where archeologists have found an enormous amount of these carved bones.
The inscriptions on these bones tell us that by 1200 BC Chinese writing was already a highly developed writing system which was used to record a language fairly similar to classical Chinese. Such a complex and sophisticated script certainly has a history, but so far we found no traces of its predecessors.
The oracle bone inscriptions received their name after their content which is invariably related to divination. The ancient Chinese diviners used these bones as records of their activities, providing us with a detailed description of the topics that interested the Shang kings. Most of these divinations refer to hunting, warfare, weather, selection of auspicious days for ceremonies, etc.
Bronze Inscriptions
The next stage in the history of Chinese writing is the bronze inscriptions . These are texts either casted into bronze vessels or carved into the surface of an already carved vessel. These vessels became widely used during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770-256 BC) but there are examples from late Shang as well.
Since the inscriptions are located on ritual vessels which were used for performing sacrifices, their content usually refers to ritual ceremonies, commemorations, etc. Although most of these writings consist of only a few characters, there are some which contain quite lengthy descriptions. The language and calligraphic style at this stage is similar to that found on the oracle bones.
Beginnings of Modern Writing
Starting from about the fifth century BC, we begin to find examples of writings on bamboo strips. Before writing the characters with a hard brush or a stick on the bamboo surface, the strips were prepared in advance and tied together with strings to form a roll.
The new media also means new content: along with historical and administrative writings, the bamboo strips contain the earliest manuscripts of famous Chinese philosophical texts, such as the Laozi, Liji , and Lunyu. Beside bamboo, texts were also written on wooden tablets and silk cloth. The written language by this time is the so-called “classical Chinese”, which had remained more or less the same as late as the 19th century.
A major event in the history of Chinese script is the standardization ofwriting by the First Emperor of Qin who unified China in 221 BC. Before that time, each of the many states in China had their own style and peculiarities, which meant that, although mutually comprehensible, the scripts had many deviations. The First Emperor introduced the Qin script as the official writing and from then on all the unified states had to use it in their affairs. The calligraphic style of this period is the “clerical script” or Lishu, which is easily readable today even to the uninitiated.
