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Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters, including oracle bone, bronze, and seal scripts. Throughout the Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word.
Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use. Over a documented history spanning more than three millennia, the ...
Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link words that were pronounced similarly at that time.
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...
These cash coins have the character Fu (Chinese: 福; pinyin: fú) on the reverse in reference to Fuzhou. They are made of lead. Wang Shenzhi: Yonglong Tongbao: 永隆通寶: yǒnglóng tōng bǎo: These iron cash coins have the character Min (Chinese: 閩; pinyin: mǐn) on the reverse and comes from the Fujian region. There is a crescent below.
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. [2]
As pronunciation in modern varieties is different from Old Chinese as well as other historical forms such as Middle Chinese, characters that once rhymed may not any longer, or vice versa. Poetry and other rhyme-based writing thus becomes less coherent than the original reading must have been.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.