There are hundreds of countries and regions in the world, hundreds of languages, and dozens of languages. Throughout the ages, why is it only China that has produced the wonder of oriental art - the art of calligraphy? The two factors of writing instrument and text structure play a crucial role.
1. Writing instruments. Archaeological evidence shows that China was the first and only country to use animal hair as a writing tool. Ancient pottery inscriptions (about 7,000 years ago) can already show traces of the use of elastic animal brushes. It is characterized by large elasticity, a large amount of water (ink), and can express changes in the thickness or length of lines at will, so it can form glyphs of different sizes, and can also express the effects of ink such as the shade and wetness, so that it can express the feelings and emotions of the author.
Writing tools also appeared in foreign countries very early, but they used thin wooden strips, which lacked elasticity and had little water content, so they could only write small characters; Later, he switched to goose feather tubes, and then used fountain pens, but he was always limited in elasticity and insufficient water content, so he could only write small print.
2. Text structure. Taking Chinese characters as an example, they also started with pictographic drawings in the early days, and later moved towards ideograms with symbols. As a result, there are monolithic characters with only one symbol (a small number) and compound characters composed of two or more symbols (majority). At the beginning, each character was limited to a certain area, and since then Chinese characters have their own characteristics:
1) Square words. Regardless of the complexity of the characters, they all occupy the same approximate square-shaped area, and the whole character is presented to give people a sense of square;
2) A compound character composed of multiple glyphs, with the order of stroke order when writing. How to properly arrange the characters in this limited approximate square area will cause the problem of stroke order and borrowing between characters.
It can be seen that Chinese characters are the use of elastic animal brushes to write square characters with collocation relationships between characters. This is how the art of Chinese calligraphy began, and it contains infinite connotation and charm.
You may have to ask: Aren't German Huati, Hebrew, Shui and Yi scripts, etc., also calligraphy? There is also the word caligraphy, which may not necessarily find a corresponding meaning when translating. The so-called ca-ligraphy, cali beautiful, graphy record, literal translation is "beautiful writing", and the Chinese word "calligraphy", its connotation is very different. For example, it is also very inappropriate to translate Chinese brushes as brush, ink, inkstone, etc.
So, is it possible to write Indo-European characters or Tibeto-Burman or other scripts with animal brushes? The answer is no. Because these characters are phonetic, they are spelled with phonetic letters. A word can be a letter, occupies a small area, some words can be more than 20 letters, the area occupied is a long strip, always a letter after a letter to form a straight bar up and down or left and right arranged horizontal bars, there is no stroke order, borrowing and collocation and other problems, so there can not be like Chinese calligraphy art.
However, there are also excellent manuscripts in various countries, especially those written with goose feather tubes or pens, which are beautiful and fluent, and make people love to read them. However, it is always small and can never be compared with Chinese calligraphy. Due to the characteristics of each ethnic group and the different conditions of each region, in addition to the different structure of the pen, the matching paper, ink, seals, etc., are increasingly showing their own cultural characteristics, and they are getting farther and farther away from each other.