Chinese Characters – Traditional Chinese

Traditional Chinese is one of the Chinese fonts used by the Chinese nation and has a history of more than 2000 years. From the beginning of the 1950s, Chinese mainland officials on the basis of traditional Chinese characters was a simplified form of Chinese writing new standard, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese characters before simplifying called traditional characters.

Basic introduction

At present, Traditional Chinese, mainly in China Taiwan region, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Macao Special Administrative Region, and North America use other overseas Chinese communities section.

The Chinese nation is an ancient nation with a long history and cultural tradition, with a glorious page in her past, and her past glory (such as the textual research of history, music, clothing, architecture, and food) is mainly passed down by Chinese characters. , Traditional Chinese characters are closely linked with historical and cultural traditions and cannot be separated.

This unbreakable combination also gives traditional characters a special meaning, making it a synonym for ancient Chinese civilization to some extent, symbolizing the ancient civilization of five thousand years, symbolizing the unity of the country, and symbolizing the unity of the nation. Symbolizes a long and splendid culture.

Chinese characters are one of the three oldest writing systems in the world. Among them, the ancient Egyptian holy book of the word, Mesopotamia Sumerian the cuneiform has been lost, only characters still in use. And Chinese characters are currently the most widely used characters in the world.

At the same time, Chinese characters and is the object of aesthetics, in the development of the Chinese nation for thousands of years have been created in Oracle, inscriptions, seal character, official script, regular script, cursive, running script multiple fonts, developed the art of calligraphy, seal cutting art, explain words game It promoted the art of traditional Chinese painting and made people obtain great aesthetic and spiritual enjoyment.

Therefore, it left a tall aesthetic image in people’s minds and formed aesthetic psychology that other writings could not match.

The mutualization of simplified and traditional Chinese characters is the evolutionary law of Chinese characters. The oldest Chinese character we know is the oracle bone inscriptions. Its strokes are relatively simple, but when the inscriptions of the Shang, Zhou, and Zhou Dynasties were reached, many characters were complicated; Qin Xiaozhuan was simplified than the inscriptions, but the later official scripts were complicated. The trend gradually stabilized until the later Tang Kai’s complexity and simple.

Text evolution

The evolution of text is a continuous process that almost never really stops:

1. At the beginning of the creation of oracle bone inscriptions, the multiple forms were characters, and the characters were mostly pictures, also called pictographs;

2. The evolution of inscriptions in bronze has the following characteristics:

1) Metallurgy has become developed, and there are many Chinese characters next to gold characters

2) The application of Chinese characters has become wider, the total number of Chinese characters has increased, and pictophonetic characters and understanding characters have begun to appear

3) At this time, Chinese characters are still mainly pictographic characters

3. The big seal characters began to become somewhat symbolic, and the method of making characters became regular;

4. Xiao Zhuan Qin Dynasty uniformly promoted Xiao Zhuan, and the larger seal style became more standardized and unified, and it began to become abstract;

5. Official script The official script became popular in the Han Dynasty. Compared with the Xiaozhuan, the strokes tended to be more straight, more symbolic, and easier to write and remember;

There are two directions for the evolution of official script:

1) In the Sui and Tang Dynasties, regular script further developed and regular script gradually became the mainstream font. Regular script for some tedious strokes

It is appropriately simplified, but basically maintains the overall style of the official script (mainly straight strokes).

2) Cursive script This is a kind of calligraphy font and the predecessor of modern simplified. Many simplified characters are formed by the regularization of cursive script.

For example: “Wei, after the cursive script is italicized, the word “wei” is gradually formed.”

6. Simplified characters are mainly derived from cursive italicized Chinese characters, with simple strokes, which are convenient for writing and remembering.

Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese are generally considered to have differences in vocabulary in addition to the differences in the Chinese characters themselves (such as between the traditional and simplified characters, as well as the writing specifications of Chinese characters in various regions). For example, Simplified Chinese in multi-use ” ballpoint pen “, more widely used in traditional Chinese ” pen “, Simplified Chinese in the ” Stalin ” is known in Traditional Chinese in “Stalin”, Simplified Chinese in the “North Korea (especially here in North North Korea)” is called “North Korea” in traditional Chinese.

Because of this difference, the term “Traditional Chinese” came into being. But in fact, this is not the difference between the traditional and simplified Chinese itself but is mainly due to the people who use the two, especially the Chinese mainland and Taiwan because they have less communication after being separated due to political reasons in the mid-twentieth century, resulting in a difference in work habits. This phenomenon has become more pronounced since the 1980s due to differences in scientific and technological terminology. Moreover, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where traditional Chinese is also used, there are also some differences in word usage habits.