The Chinese is the oldest known existing civilization. Archaeological evidence shows that the earliest humans in China date back to about more than two million years to 250,000 years. There are also some evidence that shows the earliest dynasty named Xia that is considered as the earliest dynasty in China.
The Chinese writing system is one of the oldest, most intriguing, and beautiful writing systems known today. The Chinese writing systems make use of characters or symbols to represent a words or ideas. Over the years of their existence, the Chinese have developed several writing systems.
Pictographs is considered as the earliest writing system developed by the Chinese. These pictographs were found engraved or written on tortoise shells and animal bones. Pictographs are basically pictures of concrete objects. This type is the basic forming units of the other Chinese characters.
Soon there was a need to express rather vague ideas that simple characters could not represent. More complex ideas and concepts that could not be expressed by only pictographs so the system was expanded to create ideographs. This type of writing system aimed to represent those abstract ideas. Ideographs combined two or more pictograph characters to create one or more ideograph characters to express an idea.
But still there are other objects and ideas that pictographs and ideographs cannot describe or express. Because of that, the Chinese created another system which uses phonetic-semantic compounds. Phonetic-semantic characters is composed of a semantic radical which indicates the relationship or the idea of the object or idea, and the phonetic radical which indicates how the character is supposed to be pronounced. The phonetic radical at the least contains a part of the sound of its pronunciation.
Another system used is the phonetic loans. This type borrows internally from other characters, and using it to form another meaning without creating a new character.
Because of the Chinese character's richness in symbolism, it is being used even by non-Chinese people today for many purposes. An example of this is Chinese character tattoos.
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