Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary .
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. [a] The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty.
An example of Chinese bronze inscriptions on a bronze vessel – early Western Zhou (11th century BC). The earliest known examples of Chinese writing are oracle bone inscriptions made c. 1200 BC at Yin (near modern Anyang), the site of the final capital of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – c. 1046 BC).
Chinese characters are accepted as representing one of four independent inventions of writing in human history. [b] In each instance, writing evolved from a system using two distinct types of ideographs. Ideographs could either be pictographs visually depicting objects or concepts, or fixed signs representing concepts only by shared convention.
These are other alphabets composed of something other than lines on a surface. Braille (Unified) – an embossed alphabet for the visually impaired, used with some extra letters to transcribe the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, as well as Chinese; Braille (Korean) Braille (American) (defunct)
Wang Yirong, Chinese politician and scholar, was the first to recognize the oracle bone inscriptions as ancient writing. Among the major scholars making significant contributions to the study of the oracle bone writings, especially early on, were: [26] Wang Yirong recognized the characters as being ancient Chinese writing in 1899.
The oldest known alphabetic writing has been found etched onto finger-length clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria.. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in the US dated the writing ...
The first alphabetic writing system for Chinese was created by the Tibetan Buddhist monk and Sakya school leader Drogön Chögyal Phagpa on the orders of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. His ʼPhags-pa script, promulgated in 1269, was a vertical adaptation of the Tibetan alphabet initially aimed at Mongolian but later adapted to other languages ...