The process by which the ancients created Chinese characters was a bit like a game of Scrabble played by children. They spelled out all the Chinese characters we use now with ready-made radicals and a few individual characters. So no matter how complex the Chinese characters are, we can disassemble them into very simple "Chinese character parts", which are the basic elements that make up Chinese characters. According to statistics, there are about 190 of these basic "kanji parts". They range from the "mountains, rocks, grasses, and trees" of nature to the "hands, feet, eyes, and ears" of human organs, and then from the tools and utensils commonly used by people to the houses they live in and the animals they raise. Most of these Chinese character components are pictographs, which are the building blocks of the complex structure of Chinese characters.
Many Chinese characters have changed in the long years, such as the sun, the moon, grass, wood, bamboo, stone and other pictographs, from the current block script we can hardly see its pictographic characteristics, but these characters are also evolved from the stick figures of the ancients, and the main reason for the disappearance of their pictographic features is related to writing. For example: the words "day" and "month". The sun and moon are celestial bodies that ancient people would see every day, and they are also indispensable and important subjects in ancient rock paintings. The oracle bone inscriptions of the words "day" and "moon" still vaguely show the shape of the sun and the moon, so why did they later change their writing from a round pen to a square pen?In fact, the reason is very simple, that is, the square pen is more conducive to writing than the round pen, and it is easier to form a standardized writing style. In ancient times, because there were no good writing tools, it was not as easy to draw a standard circle as it was to draw a box, so many round pens and curved pens in oracle bone inscriptions, golden inscriptions and small seals were changed to square pens and straight pens to the stage of official script and regular script. This seemingly simple change is a huge leap in the transformation of Chinese characters from pictographic patterns to abstract symbols, and it is an important change in the history of the development of Chinese characters.
There are some hieroglyphs that are written in a way that is very different from their archaic glyphs for another reason. For example, the oracle bone inscription of "grass" and "bamboo" are very similar, the oracle bone inscription of the word "grass" is the appearance of two small grasses growing upward, and the oracle bone inscription of the character "bamboo" is the appearance of two bamboo leaves growing downward. Through observation, the ancients found that most of the grass leaves grew upward, while most of the bamboo leaves drooped, so when creating the words "grass" and "bamboo", two completely different states were adopted, one facing up and the other facing down.
The character "bamboo" of the small seal still retains the appearance of the oracle bone inscription and the golden inscription, while the character "grass" of the small seal has undergone great changes. The reason is that the ancients adopted a new method of word-making when creating the word "grass" - "fake borrowing method". Borrowing is the borrowing of existing words with similar or identical pronunciation to represent the word or a new meaning you want to express. The character "grass" in Xiao Seal is a borrowed word, which was originally the original character for "soap", which originally referred to the fruit of the oak (lì) tree (which could be used to make black dye), also known as "grass bucket". So the ancients took the word "grass" to replace the original word "艸", and "艸" became the radical we commonly use now - "艹".
There are many other pretended words, such as "use" was originally an ancient character for the word "bucket", and later borrowed to refer to the "use" of "use". The word "noon" was originally an ancient word for "pestle", referring to the wooden pestle of Chung rice, and later borrowed as "noon" for "noon". The most considered in the borrowing method is pronunciation, which requires that the borrowed words and the words to be expressed must be the same or similar in pronunciation, and secondly, it is necessary to consider whether the writing is simple, and the meaning of the words is not in the scope of consideration, so when encountering fake borrowed words, it is difficult for us to restore them to graphic words, because the meaning of these words has changed.
Some pictographs not only simply draw the outline of an object, but also indicate a certain meaning, which plays a role in explaining the meaning of the word. The picture below shows the evolution of the words "wood" and "he". As can be seen from the oracle bone inscription of the character "木", there are two branches growing upwards on the top, and the roots of the tree that are deeply rooted in the soil below, and the vertical painting in the middle is undoubtedly the trunk of the tree. The ancients used a few brushstrokes to outline the shape of the roots, branches and trunks of trees, which is really a concise stick figure. And "He" is to add a stroke on the "wood", because the original meaning of "He" is to refer to all cereal plants, the shape is similar to "wood", so the ancients added a curved pen to the word "wood", indicating the "grain ear" bent to one side, the ancients created the word "He" on the basis of the word "wood", and this finishing touch just pointed out the difference between "wood" and "he", which can be said to be both simple and vivid.
The word "stone" is a very special pictograph, which is actually formed by the merger of two characters, and the evolution process is shown in the figure below. From the oracle bone inscription and small seal writing of the word "stone", it can be clearly distinguished that it is composed of the words "factory" and "mouth", the word "factory" in the upper left indicates a steep cliff, and the word "kou" in the lower right originally refers to the opening of the animal's mouth or utensils, and here it represents the stone on the ground. Because the shape of the stone is not easy to express in the form of stick figures, the ancients added a "mouth" under the word "factory" to create the word "stone", which clearly tells us in this combination: the square thing under the cliff wall is the stone.
Through these interesting and vivid Chinese characters, we can feel that the ancient man-made characters are as meticulous as painting. Moreover, in order to make Chinese characters more concise and easier to recognize and write, the ancients can be said to have tried all kinds of methods, which is really painstaking. Now, when we look back at these vibrant hieroglyphs, do you feel the wisdom and creativity of the ancients?