In fact, calligraphy, the elegant rendering of characters, is a highly cultivated art form, long prized in Chinese culture. For the Chinese, a harmonius relation exists between painting and calligraphy. Typically, a silk scroll is covered with a picture and a few lines of characters, where the two are carefully balanced against each other so that they enhance total harmony and aesthetic beauty (Wang, 1973). Although Chinese orthography has had a long and continuous development, there were only two great epochs in the history of the Chinese characters: (a) from the oldest times to down to the Qin dynasty, (b) from the 'Small Seal' of 200 B.C., to the present (Karlgren, 1974). "Essentially, the modern script is based directly upon Small Seal, being a modification of the Small Seal due to technical changes" (Karlgren; p.1, 1974; Technical Changes In Chinese Writing Instruments). Therefore, in our research, in order to avoid some mistakes introduced to the modern script by the scribes, we shall work directly with the source material--the Small Seal.
However, an important question remains: "What really happened at the gap between two great epochs?" In fact, why should there be a gap? Does not language generally evolve?" For this, we need to study Barnard's work (1973), entitled, "The Nature of the Ch'in Reform of the Script as Reflected in Archaeological Documents Excavated under Conditions of Control." There he presents important evidence on what must have transpired during that time period. He states that an important change occurred to a substantial proportion of the multi-elemental graphs in common use in Zhanguo times and that the change was strongly influenced by phonetic considerations. But, what was the nature of the Quin Script Reform? Its approach was essentially a pragmatic and practical one. They took what was available, and streamlined the characters by deletion, abbreviation, simplification, normalization, and abstraction. No attempt was made to invent new ones, nor research to produce a new system. The practical concern, then, was for effective communication of official matters to the distant administrators in the vast empire. In fact, a decree was making it mandatory and obligatory for all officials to use the 3300 or so characters that had the official sanction.
The nature of the archaic script may be described as follows: The pre-Qin script was comprised, for the greater part, of characters lacking significs. Generally, the phonetic alone existed. Then, the loan characters appeared. The "phonetic loans" are constructed by applying the "sound" of one character as a loan, to a totally different character. The great majority of the loan characters changed into phonetics later. With the elucidating significs, they formed new characters. This proliferation of new characters was a contributing factor to the flowering of literature in the Zhou time (Barnard, 1973).
The phonetics in "Shuowen Jiezi" are those that were in regular use during the Zhou, only their technical execution was abbreviated, simplified, and normalized through the "Small Seal" reform (Karlgren, 1936). Therefore, it seems reasonable that the "radicalized" characters were already in common use at an early period (i.e., from about 600 B.C.).
"Shouwen" is a lexicon published by Xu Shen (121 A.D.). Here is set forth once and for all the authentic form of the Chinese characters. This monumental work has remained, from that time on, the canon of Zi (characters). It is recognized as the authority by all chinese philologists. For the last seventeen centuries, all the major dictionaries published have claimed to having followed the "Shuowen".
The "Sall Seal" characters in "Shuowen", resulting from the Qin Reform, were necessarily a normalization of th earlier graphs. Normalization means involving no major structural alteration. Such abbreviation of characters and alteration in their forms were already being made during the Shang, following the long-established natural evolution of the Chinese scripts (Creel, 1936).
New evidence indicate the important role of the signific + phonetic combination in the pre-Qin characters, and the fact that there was indeed a reform of the script going on (Barnard, 1973). Barnard analyzed the archaic characters into four general groups for the purpose of investigation. The examples that he cites and illustrates are from oracle bones, bronze texts, inscriptions in pottery (seal-impressions and incised characters), silk and bamboo-tablets (brush-written in ink), etc. The four groups are called: (1a) simple single-element graphs, (2a) simple multi-element graphs, and (2b) complex multi-element graphs.
regardin (1a), the majority of these are structurally direct ancestors of their modern character parallels. Only slight technical change was evidenced through the transition period of Qin to Han.
The pronounced thickening in the center of vertical strokes has given way to a simple horizontal cross-stroke in the post-Qin forms, while angularity of execution has become the rule in later calligraphy. Circles, crescents, curves, etc., so characteristic of the Zhou and Zhanguo writings, have lost their graceful sinuosity. Many such characters of antiquity are easily recognized. And, in their context too, their meanings are practically identical.
The technical changes were assumed to be due to the Qin general Meng Tian, who invented the brush for writing. (Writing was done on some sort of stylus on wooden tablets, and the characters were either engraved or applied in laquer.) However, recent archaeological discoveries show evidence of the use of the brush and ink as early as Shang in the oracle records. Therefore, it seems reasonable that the reform of the script started much earlier, and reached a climax after the unification of Qin.
Furthermore, it did not stop there either. By Han times the brushes have been radically improved in design to cope with the refinements of the "new" script. This is amply evidenced by comparing the pre-Qin brush-writing with recently excavated examples of the early Han characters.
In conclusion, among the simple single-element graphs, the majority show a direct lineage through the Qin Reform (Barnard, 1973).
Regarding (1b), the more complex the element, the more sever is the degree of modification effected. Thus, an increasing degree of alteration in shape and structural change. For example, the complex graph for "chariot" of the Shang and Zhou times became obsolete long before the unification of Qin. In fact, the simpler form frequently occured in West Zhou inscriptions. Nor did the complex form appear in Cunqiu or Zhanguo inscriptions.
Pertaining to Chinese orthography, the character analysis portion of this research is based mainly upon Weiger's development of the formal elements of the Chinese characters (1965), which in turn had its foundation in "Shuowen".
From the calligraphic standpoint, all characters are reducible to simple strokes, which are the "material elements" of modern writing. The number of basic strokes in Chinese character formation is only nine. But, this reduction into simple strokes has no connection whatsoever with the etymology of the characters. From the logical and etymological viewpoint, the compounds are made, not of strokes, but of information items more simple, which have their own meanings and usage. In contrast to the material elements, these simpler information items are called "formal elements (Wieger, 1965). The formal elements are made of significs, phonetics, and primitives. These basic meaningful elements, then, constitute the essential units for heirarchical analysis.
How is information processed when a learner is actively looking at a character? Does s/he perceive it as an input stream of "strokes" arranged in the proper order learned, or in some way totally different? This is an important question to answer.
Traditionally, we learn a character via the repetitive process of writing it in the proper stroke order. Sometimes, in attempting to recall a character, we use our index finger to reconstruct it on our palm via the stroke order. In other words, the "stroke order" has been used as an elaborative means. But, the question is, Is this really an effective and efficient scheme for encoding? Two practical problems exist: (1) Long codes are unavoidable for differentiating characters beginning with the same sub-sequence of strokes. But, long codes are tedious. (2) It is innefective to learn the meaning of a character based on a meaningless sequence of strokes. This leads to the important question, What is really involved in learning Chinese characters? The two distinctive aspects of this question are: knowledge about Chinese orthography on the one hand, and knowledge about the learner on the other. In other words, we also need to understand how people think, and what intelligence is. A good grounding in Cognitive Psychology is required to address these issues.
Here is an animation of the evolution of the character for "sun".
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