It is said that there are 264 pure picto-gram characters, about 4% of Chinese characters. Even though the Picto-gram characters are not much, but they are the fundamental base of Chinese characters because most of other characters are formed by combining them or have partial of them.
Some Americans asked me if Chinese has “letters”, some thing like ABCDE….. to build Chinese characters according to the pronunciation. The answer is NO. Chinese characters have nothing to do with pronunciation, each character has its own structure. Then I was asked another question “ How many are there Chinese characters?”, my answer is “I don’t know exactly, but there may be close to 100,000. The common used characters are about 3,000 , which is enough for daily life”. People think that 3,000 is still too much. How do Chinese remember so many characters? The ancient Chinese made about 200+ pictogram characters, then used them to create most other characters. So if you know the 200+, you will understand most other characters. It is not as difficult as people think. However, Chinese have gradually ignored the pictogram in the characters, they learnt Chinese by memorizing, which makes learning Chinese to be very boring and difficult.
This article is not teaching you Chinese but revealing the beauty of calligraphy. Let us take some pictogram characters.
Door, a traditional Chinese character.
Character 門 has not changed for at least 3000 years. It is still used in Tai Wan, and most of the world except mainland China, where simplified characters are used, door is 门, which is less pictgram.
The simplified Chinese was created orinigal in cursive script because calligraphists wanted to write fast, so they simplified the characters. But since 1919, many Chinese thought that Chinese is too complicated, has disadvantage in comparison with English or other spelling languages. So Chinese needed to be simplified. 1950s China simplified some characters. It is said total about 400+, most accepted the characters in cursive script. Because as I mentioned above, most Characters are combination of pictogram or contain pictogram, thousands characters have been influenced.
Many experts feel that the simplified Chinese created more problems than benefits. One argument is that simplified Characters lost the pictogram. So more and more people use traditional Chinese.
The above is a briefly discussion about traditional/simplified Chinese or characters. Because calligraphy is rooted in traditional Chinese, shell-bone, clerical, standard scripts are all traditional characters; running script has some simplified characters, cursive script uses simplified characters most.
Water, from top to bottom: shell-bone script, small seal script, clerical script (there is no simplified, or simplified and traditional are same)
Sun, from left to right: shell-bone script, small seal script, clerical script (there is no simplified too)
Fish the order is same as above: shell-bone, small seal, clerical.
Child order is same as above
We can see, all character above, Water, Sun, Moon and Fish, are from very pictography(shell bone and small seal script) to not much pictography(clerical script) as time past.
I was asked "Why did Chinese change the characters away from pictography?". Very good question. I will answer it in next post.
I was asked "Why did Chinese change the characters away from pictography?". Very good question. I will answer it in next post.
(to be continued)
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