A History of Chinese Writing

Chinese writing has its origins in ancient history and its evolution can be associated with the need for China's emperors to conduct their affairs. They needed some way to express and record their achievements, successes and triumphs, not to mention the more mundane matters of state, so requested a method of writing be developed to document these feats. The writing was changed to the more flowing script of modern China so that it would be easier and faster to write. The earliest written symbols were discovered on pieces of shell and bone, called the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and date from about ca. 1200 B.C., the Shang Dynasty. Since the writing at this time was already established, it indicates that the language was already well developed and probably dated many at least a thousand years prior. With the discoveries of the bone and shell inscriptions, scientists have been able to reconstruct some of the lost Shang civilization.

Inscriptions on bronze materials have been found and date from ca. 1150-771 B.C. when the Eastern Zhou dynasty was in power. Containers had the writing cast directly to their surface or carved onto them after production. This writing is similar in style to the Oracle Bone Inscriptions and is thought to have been used on ritualistic vessels. The stylistic representations probably arrived from ideograms or pictures that stand for an idea or thing that the depiction suggests. Some tombs dating about 4,500 ago have been unearthed and contain wine vessels with a pictographic symbol inscribed on them. These inscriptions are also very similar to the Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Over time, the pictures became more abstract until they changed into the Chinese characters we see today. Even some of these symbols hold a slight resemblance to the ancient picture characters, even though its less obvious.

For more than 25,000 years, early people have used symbols as a way to record events or ideas, but the Sumerians were the first civilization to develop an actual system of pictographic writing, followed by the Egyptians, the Chinese and the Indus Valley cultures. These three major civilizations contributed to all the future writing that most likely had their beginnings with the pictographic styles. Egyptian hieroglyphics is a familiar example of this method of writing. Written language branched into several divisions, the pictographic systems, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and the alphabets based on Greek and Roman alphabets. Over time, the writing evolved and specialized depending on the country and culture, ending with our modern languages.

The modern Chinese written language consists of many characters, with each symbol having its own meaning and representing a syllable. Knowledge of around 3,000 characters will allow someone to read Modern Standard Chinese, but to understand Classical Chinese, someone would have to learn about 6,000 characters. The most inclusive dictionary contained about 56,000 characters, with many of them being unused and ancient symbols. Writing based on the Greek and Roman alphabets is composed of a set of a few dozen letters that combine to form individual words. But even with the large amount of Chinese symbols, studies have shown that children apparently don't exhibit any hardship with learning the characters.