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Origin Of Chinese Script
If you are interested in the Chinese language, you may be interested to know about the origin of the Chinese script. While, there has been no definitive answer to that question, nearly all ancient writers attribute it to a man named Cangjie.
Cangjie, according to one legend, saw a divine being whose face had unusual features which looked like a picture of writings. In imitation of what he saw, Cangjie created the earliest written characters. Cangjie’s deed, however, resulted in millet raining from heaven as the spirits howled every night to lament the leakage of the divine secret of writing.
Another version of the story relates that Cangjie saw the footprints of birds and beasts, which inspired him to create written characters.
Of course, these legends are simply stories that can’t be seriously considered true. However, such legends may have semblance to the truth. For instance, Cangjie, if there was ever such a man, could be a wise man who collected and standardized characters that had already been in use.
On the archaeological front, certain discoveries show that Chinese characters might have developed from pictographs. At Yanghe in Luxian County, Shandong Province, a group of ancient tombs, dating back 4,500 years and belonging to a late period of the Dawenkou Culture, have been discovered. Among the large amount of relics unearthed are about a dozen pottery wine vessels (called zun). Each of these vessels bears a character each. The characters look like stylized pictures of some physical objects. Specialists therefore call them pictographs. Both in style and structure, these pictographs are quite close to the inscriptions on oracle bones and shells. The latter were used to interpret the wills of divinity by the ancient Chinese.
As is now well-known, written Chinese does not compose of an alphabet. Rather, a script of ideograms is used. The formation of this script follows three principles:
(1) Hieroglyphics or the pictographs
Probably, the earliest Chinese writing, pictographs are pictures of some physical objects. These pictures are used as words for communication. (2) Associative compounds
Associative compounds are characters formed by combining two or more elements, each with a meaning of its own, to express new ideas. They are probably developed to represent abstract ideas as it is not easy to use pictographs to refer to such ideas. For example: the sun and the moon are combined together to form the character (míng), which means "bright".
(3) Pictophonetics
Pictophonetics are developed to create characters by combining one element indicating the meaning of the character and the other indicating the sound. Using this method, many more characters could be developed from existing pictographs and associative compounds. Today, about 90% of all Chinese characters are Pictophonetics.
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