Review Highlights on Chinese Characters: Five Millennia

Four Ancient Scripts

The Chinese Script

One of the world’s oldest scripts, Chinese characters are the logograms of the Chinese language. There is a legend that a man named Cangjie, an official of the Huangdi, the legendary ruler of the Chinese ancestors, got the idea from the footprints of birds and animals and created the earliest written Chi- nese characters. The gods were so upset that the secret of writing had been discovered by man that millet rained from heaven and spirits howled for days and days.

Despite their transformation from pic- tograms to phono-semantic compounds, Chinese characters are generally ideographs. So a Chinese character is an integration of form, sound and meaning. This is a unique charm of Chinese characters. The origin of the Chinese script can be traced back at least to the Shang Dynasty (17th-11th century BC). In terms of written style, Chinese characters underwent several changes: oracle bone script, large seal script, small seal script, cleri- cal script, regular script, cursive script, semi- cursive script. In terms of form and structure, Chinese characters transformed gradually from pictograms into Square-Block Characters. There are six categories of Chinese characters in terms of formation: pictograms, ideograms, ideogrammic compounds, phono-semantic compounds, transformed cognates and rebus. Chinese characters played a key role in the dissemination of Chi- nese civilization. They have been an internal bond of Southeast Asian culture. At present, two standard Chinese scripts coexist: tradi- tional characters and simplified characters.

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Egyptian Hieroglyphs came into being in 3,500 BC and survived until the 2nd century AD. The Egyptians created 24 phonetic sym- bols, the earliest known system of its kind in the world. Drawing on these symbols, the Phoenician invented the earliest alphabet consisting of 22 letters which were all con- sonants. However, the Greek incorporated vowels in their alphabet, a descendant of Phoenician. The fact that the present-day European alphabets all derive from the Greek alphabet gives testimony to the importance of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the history of world civilizations. Egyptian hieroglyphs were not rediscovered until 1799 when Napoleon’s army dug ditches at Rosetta and discovered the Rosetta Stone with a text in hieroglyphic, Demotic and classical Greek. The successful deciphering of the hieroglyph writing by the French scholar Jean-Fran?ois Champollion marked the birth of Egyptology.

Cuneiform in Ancient

Babylon The cuneiform script is a great invention by the Sumerians. The word “cuneiform” itself gives hints on the basic appearance of the ancient language of Mesopotamia. With cultural dissemination, other ethnic groups in west and southwest Asia adopted cuneiform. By 1500 BC or so, it had become a common writing system in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Diplomatic correspondences and agree- ments were often written in cuneiform.

Harappan Script in Ancient India

The Harappan script was used by the Indians from 1000 BC to the 8th century AD. It was primarily found on unearthed artifacts or carved stones. Before the Harappan period, the Indus Valley had witnessed pic- tograms which became extinct with the emergence of Harappan culture. In 1000 BC, the Aryans set up a country and an alphabetic system came into being, indicating the com- mencement of the ancient Indian script, which was mainly recorded in two Aryan languages: Sanskrit and Prakrit. When papermaking technol- ogy was introduced into Southeast Asia from China in the 8th and 9th century, more texts were written on paper. The ancient Aryan language evolved into the Hindi language and the ancient alphabet was replaced by a new system. Hence the Harap- pan script faded into obscurity.