How Chinese characters evolved | The Origin of Chinese characters | EXPLORE MODE

horse car fish eye mountain these glyphs may not seem familiar to you but you've certainly met their descendants we've all seen Chinese characters before whether on the menu of your local Chinese restaurant or on the back of a gym enthusiast that had a spiritual awakening during their last backpacking trip in Asia we can understand the appeal these logograms have Chinese writings are beautifully designed and have an air of wisdom to them but there's more to Chinese characters than aesthetics through a reflection of 3,000 years of cultural evolution but when did these symbols become part of the Chinese language and how have they evolved over the years you're watching explore mode and today we're diving into the history of Chinese characters to the unknowing eye Chinese characters may seem like a confusing collection of lines and boxes but they're not just random strokes each character carries deep meaning you just need to know how to interpret them think about Chinese characters like Lego blocks Chinese words are built part by part usually one part represents the meaning the radical and the other pronunciation there are a lot of basic characters that can stand alone like water Shui heart Sheen and mouth coal others are built from left to right like the word for good ha which depicts a mother with her child symbolizing goodness or happiness some are built from top to bottom like the word for grass saw which has the radical for grass at the top and the word for early saw at the bottom which gives it its pronunciation and others are written from the outside in like the word for stuffy which shows a heart with an adorn symbolizing a person feeling muggy and trapped behind closed doors the oldest form of Chinese writing dates back to 1200 BCE in the late years of the Song Dynasty these early inscriptions are called oracle bone scripts jaku one as you might have guessed from the name Oracle bone script known in Chinese as jakku one were used for divination purposes Enquirer's would engrave their questions on an ox scapula or tortoise shells which were then handed to a diviner the diviner would heat up the bone until it cracked and interpret an answer depending on where the fissures grew questions at the time covered a wide range of topics from military campaign strategies to hunting expeditions and dream interpretations these early chinese pictograms can still be linked to modern Chinese characters take this Oracle one question about the weather as an example the characters can still be easily translated and understood in modern Chinese the similarities are even more apparent and highly pictographic characters like water sway fire whole-person Ren and tree or wood move see what we're talking about oracle bones almost got crushed to extinction during the 19th century farmers dug out a number of Oracle bone script and confuse them with fossils from the Pleistocene that at the time were crushed and sold as Chinese medicine to treat malaria and knife wounds the story goes that in 1899 some oracle bones were sold to one mural the Chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing who happened to be a collector of Chinese bronzes which also bear ancient Chinese scriptures upon further inspection of the bones that had been sold to him he recognized these two had ancient Chinese writings on them after his death in the year 1900 his collection of oracle bones was passed on to his son who sold to a Chinese archeologist named Leo II Leo would go on to publish rubbings of several oracle bone scripts bringing the asian scripture to the attention of international scholars the rest is history [Music] Chinese scripts found on oracle bones and bronze scripts were already quite advanced and functional for their time but the characters were often inconsistent spanning through the late jo dynasty to Qin Dynasty roughly from 221 to 106 BCE the seal script Chinese form or Jones rule was developed it was much more uniform in size and style while still maintaining a pictographic essence following elongated strokes and square shapes these characters were typically carved onto stone or Jade to create Imperial seals the first Imperial seal was carved unto white jade and was commissioned by the first emperor of a unified China Qin Shi Huangdi after he defeated the other warring States the Qin Dynasty lasted just 36 years but it is one of the most culturally influential dynasties in Chinese history one of Jin Sol honks greatest projects was a construction of the Great Wall of China before his reign there were pieces of the wall built by past Emperor's in different regions but it was Chien who connected large stretches of them other dynasties after his would follow suit creating the large fortification system we know of today another of genes historical legacies is his tomb in 1974 unsuspecting farmers were digging a well in San Shi China when they unearthed the clay head of what seemed to be an ancient Chinese warrior now we know them as the Terracotta Army warriors a collection of 8,000 soldiers built specifically to guard Chin's tomb and protect him in his afterlife but it wasn't just soldiers Sheens mausoleum contains cavalry horses acrobats chariots and musicians each of which was unique in their design these sculptures helped historians and archaeologists study the craftsmanship of this time as well as military rankings and even the chemical components of the paint used to decorate the sculptures what seal script was very beautiful and it served its ornamental purpose well but it wasn't very convenient when it came to producing official documents quickly this is where the first modern version of Chinese characters began to develop beginning with clerical script clerical script or Li Shu appeared around 206 BCE to 220 ad it was a much more simplified version of a seal script replacing curves and circles with straight lines and squares clerical script would later evolved into the regular Chinese script we know today without much changes other than the simplification of strokes but the evolution of Chinese characters didn't stop there time for an express explore explanation start the clock nowadays there are two versions of modern Chinese characters traditional characters used in Taiwan Hong Kong and Macau and simplified characters used in mainland China Singapore and Malaysia the simplification of Chinese characters began in 1956 when in an effort to raise literacy rates in the country which was at 20% of the Communist Party took over Chinese officials began releasing and promoting documents containing simplified versions of Chinese characters characters were simplified by decreasing the number of strokes per character sometimes this meant removing parts of the character other times it meant rewriting it into a simpler form but the simplified versus traditional debate goes beyond education many traditional Chinese supporters feel that much of the meaning and artistry behind each character was stripped away during the simplification process take the word love or I as an example at the center of the character in traditional Chinese is the character for heart and the simplified version the heart is taken away a more drastic change can be seen in the Chinese word for listen ting the traditional version has the character for ear heart eyes and a line separating the heart and eyes to symbolize undivided attention meaning that to truly listen one's heart eyes and ears have to give undivided attention who or what we're listening to now look at the simplified version which was completely modified from the original the character on the left is mouth coal and the character on the right is gene a unit of measurement for weight no connection can be made between the pictogram and the actual meaning of the word but Chinese officials weren't just looking to simplify characters they wanted to create a romanized version of their pronunciations that would help globalize the language so Mao Zedong tasked solely alum and economist turned linguist with this mission an offer he could not refuse literally Chinese characters were almost completely eliminated by Mao Zedong in mainland China until an unlikely historical figure advised him against it before Mao rolled out the complete reformation of traditional characters he was contemplating completely romanized the Chinese language that is according to dull until he met with Joseph Stalin in 1949 Mao shared his Chinese writing reform plans with him and asked Stalin for his advice support to a memoir by miles personal secretary Stalin told me quote you're a great country and you should have your own Chinese alphabet you shouldn't simply use a Latin alphabet it took so and a team of linguists three years to develop the pronunciation guide we now know as Han opinion based on the tooling for how the original Chinese phonetic guide Joe's guide has now become the most widely used Chinese romanization system in China and around the world successfully facilitating the dissemination of Mandarin Chinese nowadays one point one one seven billion people in the world speak Mandarin Chinese and with China expanding as an economic powerhouse there's no doubt that number will increase are you up for the challenge thanks for watching explore mode if you liked this video hit the thumbs up button if you want to explore even more with us check out this video we made on tarot cards in their origin before you leave make sure to hit the subscribe and bele button so you get a notification whenever we upload a new episode see you next week and in the meantime keep your explore mode on [Music]

Channel: Explore Mode

Views: 405,843

Keywords: Chinese characters, how to read Chinese, Chinese explained, learn Chinese characters, learn hanzi, learn Chinese, learn mandarin, simplified Chinese character (language writing system), simplified characters, Chinese symbols, origins of chinese characters, formation of chinese characters, write chinese, radicals, china, Chinese, read Chinese, pictograph, logogram, chinese language, chinese characters (language writing system), how to read chinese

Id: GpUqqtE2qUo

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019