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QUESTION:
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.
Another legend to explain the first
characters is:
A. Cangjie copied the crags and
impressions of a large mountain;
B. Cangjie's hand was trembling
when he was painting one day;
C. Cangjie copied the footprints
of birds and beasts he saw;
D. Cangjie's mother liked to tell
stories so he developed his own
system for recording her spoken
words.
ANSWERS:
C is right. 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 pictographs, the earliest forms
of Chinese written characters, already
possessed the characteristics of
a script. |
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| Category: China Trivia
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