Hello Jonny,
I just want to give you a general idear on the history of Chinese writing.
The history of Chinese writing goes back a long time.
There is a story that 25 bc the minister 伏羲 FuxI of the Yellow emperor 黄帝 once walked in the emperial garden in the evening. He noticed th footprints of bird in the garden.
All of them from different species. He could guess which footprint belonged to which specy.
Then he realised that this would be a great instrument to write down general idears by writing down their “footprint” and so he deviced a script whith basic charcters now known as radicals like 女 nuu woman 日 ri sun 月 yue moon 子 zi child. But this is a legendairy story.
The oldest writing are on turtle shells and bones, discovered during the last century by a pharmasist, they used these turtle shells and bones for medical purposes. They noticed some schratches on the shells and bones, which turned out to be ancient Chinese writing.
When the Chinese society evolved and there was need for a larger vocabulairy, scribes begun to combine the so called radicals to form new idears like
女 + 宀 =安 an womnan roof = peace,日 月=明 ming sun moon =clear, understand 女子=好 hao woman+child=good.
When the Chinese began to run out of combinations they turnedyet an another system. Here part of a character would indicate the sound of the character and the other the meaning for example 房: 方 fang =square is there for the sound of the character and 户 hu door for the meaning namely door or house
(a house has a door how else can you get in or out). So 户 meaning house is pronounced as 方 fang.
I believe 80% of the Chinese characters belong to the last group, but since the sound, pronunciation of the Chinese language has changed dramatically during the ages the soundpart of the character no longer is a guide to the correct pronunciation.
Lastly old Chinese is a monosylabic language, that is one sylable expressed by one charater for each word. Since Chines is a non-flectional analitacal language with no glues what so ever what rol a word plays in a sentence, old Chinese is extreemly difficult to understand.
Modern Chines combines to characters or sometimes more to form one word like
明白 mingbai clear white = to understand 女子nuuzi woman 东西 dong xi things (all
between east and west). 子 is used as a particle with no actual meaning, It seves to make the sound a little longer so the listner has moer time to pick up the meaning.
During the reign of the emperor state Qi, who combined all the warring states to one big country under the reign of Qi (hance the name China from the name Qi)
the emperor standerdized the script to whole China.
Centuries later in Europe Charle Le Magne, Karel de Grote did the for our script, the one I am typing now.
There is a marveleous book about the history of Chines writing by
Cecilia Lindqvist called Het karakter vam China. It is in Dutch and Sweedish
but maybe also in English.
I hope this will answer your question.
(希望我没有错本霓我尊敬汉语老师)
