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The development of Chinese characters The Chinese language differs from Western languages in that, instead of an alphabet, it uses characters which stand for ideas, objects or deeds. Chinese words are formed by putting together different characters. In many cases, a single character can also make up a word. The history of the Chinese language can be examined by looking at how these characters developed. Chinese writing began thousands of years ago. According to an ancient story, a man named Cang Jie invented Chinese writing. One winter day while he was hunting, he saw the tracks of animals in the snow and observed that the appearance of each one was different. Then he had the idea that he could use different shapes to represent different objects. The first Chinese characters were drawings of physical objects. Some characters have been simplified and others have been made more difficult over time. However, as a whole, the characters have developed from drawings into standard forms. The character for a mountain was at first three mountaintops together. This became one mountaintop and three lines, and over time turned into the character used nowadays. Not all characters were developed from drawings of objects. Sometimes to express ideas, some characters were made by combining two or more characters together. For example, ‘rest’ was made up of the characters for a man and a tree. The character ‘prisoner’ was formed with a ‘man’ inside a square. Other characters were developed for directions and numbers. It is easy to distinguish their meanings by looking at them, for example, the characters for ‘up’ and ‘down’, which are opposites of each other. Though these kinds of characters indicate meanings, one of their shortcomings is that they do not show how they should be pronounced. Therefore, a method was developed to have one part of a character indicate the meaning and the other suggest the pronunciation. Many Chinese characters used today were made this way. In the 1950s the Chinese government introduced simplified Chinese characters and now they have widespread use in China’s mainland. 汉字的发展 汉语与西方语言不同，区别在于它不使用字母，而是用汉字表示思想、物体和行为。中文的词语是通过把不同的汉字放在一起而组成的。在许多情况下，一个单字也能构成一个词。通过研究这些汉字是如何发展的就可以考察汉语的历史了。 汉字起源于数千年前。根据古代传说，一位名叫仓颉的人发明了汉字。他在某个冬日打猎时，看到各种动物留在雪中的足迹，他发现足迹的形状各不相同。于是他想到可以用不同的形状来代表不同物体。最初的汉字只是表现有形物体的图画。随着时间的推移，一些汉字被简化了，而另一些则变得更加复杂。不过总的来说，汉字从图画发展成了标准形式。表示“山”的汉字最初是三座山峰并列，继而变成了一座山峰和三条线，随着时间的推移，最终演变成了现在使用的字形。 并非所有的汉字都从物体的图画演变而来。有时候为了表达概念，某些汉字由两个或多个汉字组合而成。比如，“休”是由表示“人”和“树”的汉字组合而成的，“因”字则是由人字位于框中构成的。另一些汉字则用于表示方向和数字。只要看它们的字形，就可以很容易区别它们的意思，比如汉字“上”和“下”，其字形恰好相反。 虽然这几种类型的汉字能够表意，但是它们的缺点之一是其字形不具有表音的功能。因此便出现了一种应对之策，即汉字的一部分表意，另一部分表音。今天使用的许多汉字便是用这种方式创造出来的。 20世纪50年代，中国政府推广简化汉字，现在它们已在中国大陆全面普及。 |
