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甲骨文，古汉字一种书体的名称。殷代人用龟甲、兽骨（主要是牛肩胛骨）占卜。在占卜后把占卜日期、占卜者的名字、所占卜的事情用刀刻在卜兆的旁边，有的还把过若干日后的吉凶应验也刻上去，最详细的一条将近100字。学者称这种记录为卜辞，这种文字为甲骨文。甲骨文发现于安阳小屯村一带，是商王般庚迁殷以后到纣王亡国时的遗物（公元前14世纪中期～前11世纪中期），距今已3000多年。 甲骨文是中国最早的成熟文字，其与埃及的纸草文、巴比伦的泥版文书等同为人类社会最珍贵的文化遗产。纸草文字和泥板文书都已失传，而中国的甲骨文几经变异，一脉相承，终于成为现在中国通行的文字。从甲骨文到现代汉字，不仅对中华民族的发展具有巨大的凝聚力，而且记录了中华民族灿烂的５千年文明史。让我们共同努力，使更多的人认识这“千年神甲、文字始祖”，共同留住我们的文化之根 There have been various stories about the origin of the Chinese script, with nearly all ancient writers attributing it to a man named Cangjie. Cangjie, according to one legend, saw a divine being whose face had unusual features which looked like a picture of writings. In imitation of his image, Cangjie created the earliest written characters. After that, certain ancient accounts go on to say, millet rained from heaven and the spirits howled every night to lament the leakage of the divine secret of writing. Another story says that Cangjie saw the footprints of birds and beasts, which inspired him to create written characters. Evidently these stories cannot be accepted as the truth, for any script can only be a creation developed by the masses of the people to meet the needs of social life over a long period of trial and experiment. Cangjie, if there ever was such a man, must have been a prehistoric wise man who sorted out and standardized the characters that had already been in use.
The pictographs, the earliest forms of Chinese written characters, already possessed the characteristics of a script. As is well-known, written Chinese is not an alphabetic language, but a script of ideograms. Their formation follows three principles: Hieroglyphics or the drawing of pictographs As explained before, this was the earliest method by which Chinese
characters were designed and from which the other methods were subsequently
developed. For instance, the sun was written as The principle of forming characters by drawing pictures is easy to
understand, but pictographs cannot express abstract ideas. So the ancients
invented the "associative compounds," i. e., characters formed
by combining two or more elements, each with a meaning of its own, to
express new ideas. Thus, the sun and the moon written together became
the character Though pictographs and associative compounds indicate the meanings of characters by their forms, yet neither of the two categories gives any hint as to pronunciation. The pictophonetic method was developed to create new characters by combining one element indicating meaning and the other sound. For instance, 爸 (ba) the Chinese character for "papa" is formed by the element 巴 (ba) which represents the sound and the element 父 (fu) which represents the meaning (father). Likewise the character 芭 (ba) is formed by 巴 (the sound) and ++, indicating a plant. In this way, more and more characters were made until such pictophonetics constitute today about 90 percent of all Chinese characters. |
A
group of ancient tombs have been discovered in recent years at Yanghe
in Luxian County, Shandong Province. They date back 4,500 years
and belong to a late period of the Dawenkou Culture. Among the large
numbers of relics unearthed are about a dozen pottery wine vessels
(called zun), which bear a character each. These characters
are found to be stylized pictures of some physical objects. They
are therefore called pictographs and, in style and structure, are
already quite close to the inscriptions on the oracle bones and
shells, though they antedate the latter by more than a thousand
years. 
, the moon as 
, water as 
, the cow as 
and so on. These picture-words
underwent a gradual evolution over the centuries until the pictographs
changed into "square characters," some simplified by losing
certain strokes and others made more complicated but, as a whole, from
irregular drawings they became stylized forms. 
(ming), which means "bright";
the sun placed over a line representing the horizon formed the ideogram
(dan) which means "sunrise" or
"morning". 