Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: When did the Chinese writing system develop?
Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC,[6][7][8] but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier.[9] After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC).[10] Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.[11] As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese.[12] In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to the standard spoken language ("Mandarin"). Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.
Some researchers consider that logocentrism may not be something which exists across all cultures, but instead has a particular bias in Western culture. Tedlock's study of stories in the Quiché Maya culture leads him to suggest that the development of alphabetic writing systems may have led to a logocentric perspective, but this is not the case in all writing systems, and particularly less prevalent in cultures where writing has not been established. Tedlock writes, "The voice is linear, in [Derrida's] view; there is only one thing happening at a time, a sequence of phonemes," and this is reflected in writing and even the study of language in the field of linguistics and what Tedlock calls "mythologics (or larger-scale structuralism)", "are founded not upon a multidimensional apprehension of the multidimensional voice, but upon unilinear writing of the smallest-scale articulations within the voice." This one dimensionality of writing means that only words can be represented through alphabetic writing, and, more often than not, tone, voice, accent and style are difficult if not impossible to represent. Geaney, in writing about ming (names) in early Chinese reveals that ideographic writing systems present some difficulty for the idea of logocentrism, and that even Derrida wrote of Chinese writing in an ambivalent way, assuming firstly that "writing has a historical telos in which phonetic writing is the normal 'outcome'", but also "speculat[ing] without irony about Chinese writing as a 'movement of civilization outside all logocentrism'".
Initially Chinese characters were not used for writing Japanese, as literacy meant fluency in Classical Chinese, not the vernacular. Eventually a system called developed, which, along with kanji and something very similar to Chinese grammar, employed diacritics to hint at the Japanese translation. The earliest written history of Japan, the , compiled sometime before 712, was written in kanbun. Even today Japanese high schools and some junior high schools teach kanbun as part of the curriculum.
When Microsoft developed the Chinese Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, traditional Chinese software developer and users shifted to Windows from DOS. The last version of the Eten OS was a Chinese Windows-compatible version. The Eten and other traditional Chinese OS are now used in a few DOS based POS systems.
Southern Min dialects lack a standardized written language. Southern Min speakers are taught how to read Standard Chinese in school. As a result, there has not been an urgent need to develop a writing system. In recent years, an increasing number of Southern Min speakers have become interested in developing a standard writing system, Systems such as Pe̍h-ōe-jī exist for phonetic writing of Hokkien.
Chinese writing, culture and institutions were imported as a whole by Vietnam, Korea, Japan and other neighbouring states over an extended period. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD, followed by Confucianism as these countries developed strong central governments modelled on Chinese institutions.
In Vietnam and Korea, and for a shorter time in Japan and the Ryukyus, scholar-officials were selected using examinations on the Confucian classics modelled on the Chinese civil service examinations.
Shared familiarity with the Chinese classics and Confucian values provided a common framework for intellectuals and ruling elites across the region.
All of this was based on the use of Literary Chinese, which became the medium of scholarship and government across the region.
Although each of these countries developed vernacular writing systems and used them for popular literature, they continued to use Chinese for all formal writing until it was swept away by rising nationalism around the end of the 19th century.
Prior to the modern era, the main written language of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and vocabulary based on Old Chinese used in ancient times. Whilst the written form of Chinese mostly remained static, the spoken varieties of Chinese diverged from Old Chinese. In the early 20th century, reformers in China saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a writing system that allowed Chinese people to write the language the same way they speak, a system called written Vernacular Chinese. Because the various Mandarin Chinese dialects had the largest number of speakers amongst all varieties of Chinese, it was chosen as the basis for the vernacular standard.
Scribes from the Korean state of Baekje who wrote Chinese introduced writing to Japan in the early fifth century. The man traditionally credited as being the first to teach writing in Japan is the Baekje scholar Wani. Though a small number of Japanese people were able to read Chinese before then, it was thanks to the work of scribes from Baekje that the use of writing was popularized among the Japanese governing elite. For hundreds of years thereafter a steady stream of talented scribes would be sent from Korea to Japan, and some of these scholars from Baekje wrote and edited much of the Nihon Shoki, one of Japan's earliest works of history.
According to Bjarke Frellesvig, "There is ample evidence, in the form of orthographic 'Koreanisms' in the early inscriptions in Japan, that the writing practices employed in Japan were modelled on continental examples. The history of how the early Japanese modified the Chinese writing system to develop a native phonogram orthography is obscure, but scribal techniques developed in the Korean peninsular played an important role in the process of developing Man'yōgana. The pronunciation of Chinese characters at this period thus may well reflect that current in the Baekje kingdom. Frellesvig states, "However, writing extensive text passages entirely or mostly phonographically, reflected in the widespread use of "man'yōgana", is a practice not attested in Korean sources which therefore seems to be an independent development which took place in Japan." Japanese katakana share many symbols with Korean Gugyeol, for example, suggesting the former arose in part at least from scribal practices in Korea, though the historical connections between the two systems are obscure.
The development of Chinese fiction in the 19th and early 20th centuries was one of his most important concerns. The 19th century has often been considered as a relatively stagnant period when compared to the efflorescence of the 17th and 18th century for Chinese fiction. The development of Chinese fiction in this period got much less attention from literary critics for its lack of innovation and creativity. However, in the monograph “Chinese fiction of the Nineteenth and early twenties centuries”, Patrick Hanan proves that this view is misguided by presenting to readers eleven detailed and insightful critical essays. He indicated that Chinese novelists came into much more frequent contact with western fictions and fictional methods in the 19th and early 20th centuries so that the literary works was actually experiencing constant evolution. He was interested in examining writings in this period from an integrated approach of combining Chinese classical literary tradition as well as the western narratological techniques. He was also concerned that how did western missionaries in Chinese society adapt their religious writing to the taste of Chinese reader in this period.
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. They have been adapted to write a number of other Asian languages. They remain a key component of the Japanese writing system (where they are known as "kanji") and are occasionally used in the writing of Korean (where they are known as "Hanja"). They were formerly used in Vietnamese (in a system known as "chữ Nôm") and Zhuang (in a system known as "Sawndip"). Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. Vietnamese is sometimes also included, making the abbreviation CJKV.
In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the Soviet Chinese people, like most sizable ethnic groups in the early USSR, had a writing system based on the Latin alphabet developed for them; it was used to publish a number of periodicals. A separate, different, Latin-based writing system was simultaneously developed for the Dungans, who were already considered a separate ethnic group. This was accompanied by a broader campaign to raise literacy among Chinese workers, estimated at just one-third in 1923. By the 1930s, there were ten state elementary schools, one vocational secondary school, one college, and two evening schools using Chinese as their medium of instruction.
Writing systems developed in East Asia include Chinese and Japanese writing systems. Chinese characters represent whole morphemes rather than individual sounds, and consequently are visually far more complex than European scripts; in some cases their pictographic origins are still visible. The earliest form of Chinese was written on bones and shells (called Jiaguwen) in the fourteenth century BC. Other writing surfaces used during this time included bronze, stone, jade, pottery, and clay, which became more popular after the twelfth century BC. Greater Seal script (Dazhuan) flourished during 1100 BC and 700 BC and appeared mainly in bronze vessels. Lesser Seal script (Xiaozhuan) is the precursor of modern complex Chinese script, which is more stylized than the Greater Seal.
Like the rest of East Asia (including Korea and Vietnam), Lingnan traditionally wrote in classical Chinese, rather than the peoples' spoken languages. Despite the attempt to create vernacular forms of writing in the late 19th century, the Greater China region still tend to use Vernacular Chinese, a writing system based on Mandarin, not Cantonese (i.e., the peoples' language in the Lingnan region), in writing. Hong Kong is no exception. The vast majority of works of Hong Kong literature were composed in Vernacular Chinese. However, starting from the 21st century, Hong Kong, as a cultural center in the region, has developed a complete writing system for Cantonese. Some writers in the city now advocate composing literature in written Cantonese.
The early laws of Japan are believed to have been heavily influenced by Chinese law. Little is known about Japanese law prior to the seventh century, when the Ritsuryō was developed and codified. Before Chinese characters were adopted and adapted by the Japanese, the Japanese had no known writing system with which to record their history. Chinese characters were known to the Japanese in earlier centuries, but the process of assimilation of these characters into their indigenous language system took place in the third century. This was due to the willingness of the Japanese to borrow aspects of the culture of continental civilisations, which was achieved mainly via adjacent countries such as the Korean kingdoms rather than directly from the Chinese mainland empires.
In some ways, the lack of native Chinese development of the concept of a unit of sound is surprising, as it had already been developed by Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini by the 4th century BC at the latest, and the phonological analysis of the Yunjing shows a close familiarity with the tradition of Sanskrit grammar. Furthermore, some non-Chinese writing systems within the Chinese cultural orbit, such as the Korean script and especially the Tibetan script, were developed under the close influence of Indian writing systems and have the concept of phoneme directly embedded in them. (Furthermore, the 'Phags-pa script, an alphabetic script of Tibetan origin, had been used to write Chinese itself during the Mongolian Yuan dynasty, c. 1270-1360, although it later fell out of use.) It seems likely, however, that
In terms of its writing system, Cantonese, traditionally preferred not to write their own language verbatim and instead relied on classical Chinese in most forms of writing. Starting from the 21st century however, a complete Cantonese writing system has been developed in Hong Kong and Macau that utilizes both, Chinese characters and native characters, and become popularized.
The oracle-bone script is a well-developed writing system, suggesting that the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the late second millennium BC. Although these divinatory inscriptions are the earliest surviving evidence of ancient Chinese writing, it is widely believed that writing was used for many other non-official purposes, but that the materials upon which non-divinatory writing was done – likely wood and bamboo – were less durable than bone and shell and have since decayed away.
Historic times are marked apart from prehistoric times when "records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations"; which may be in written or oral form. If the rise of civilization is taken to coincide with the development of writing out of proto-writing, the Near Eastern Chalcolithic, the transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age during the 4th millennium BC, and the development of proto-writing in Harappa in the Indus Valley of South Asia around 3300 BC are the earliest incidences, followed by Chinese proto-writing evolving into the oracle bone script, and again by the emergence of Mesoamerican writing systems from about 900 BC.
Kublai Khan commissioned Chögyal Phagpa to design a new writing system to unify the writing of the multilingual Yuan China. Phagpa modified the Tibetan alphabet to create his 'Phags-pa script, which was completed in 1268. Kublai Khan decided to use the 'Phags-pa script as the official writing system of the empire, including when he became Emperor of China in 1271, instead of Chinese characters or the Old Uyghur alphabet formerly used for Mongolian. However, he encountered major resistances and difficulties when trying to promote this script and never achieved his original goal. As a result, only a small amount of texts were written in this script, and the majority (including most official documents) were still written in Chinese ideograms or the Uyghur alphabet. The script fell into disuse after the collapse of the Yuan in 1368. The script was used for about a century and is thought to have influenced the development of Hangul.
Over time, a writing system evolved. Chinese characters (kanji) were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese, or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used to write grammatical elements, were simplified, and eventually became two syllabic scripts: hiragana and katakana which were developed based on Manyogana from Baekje. However this hypothesis "Manyogana from Baekje" is denied by other scholars.
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min, was the first Chinese language romanization system in Taiwan. Initially developed by Presbyterian missionaries in Southeast Asia in the 19th century, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan after success in Fujian. Pe̍h-ōe-jī is also the first written system for Taiwanese Hokkien, and a similar system for Hakka was also developed at that time. A milestone was reached when the "Taiwan Church News", printed in the POJ system, became Taiwan's first printed newspaper in 1885.
Kublai Khan commissioned Chögyal Phagpa to design a new writing system to unify the writing of the multilingual Mongol Empire. Chögyal Phagpa in turn modified the traditional Tibetan script and gave birth to a new set of characters called Phagspa script which was completed in 1268. Kublai Khan decided to use the Phagspa script as the official writing system of the empire, including when he became Emperor of China in 1271, instead of the Chinese ideogrammes and the Uyghur script. However, he encountered major resistances and difficulties when trying to promote this script and never achieved his original goal. As a result, only a small amount of texts were written in this script, and the majority were still written in Chinese ideogrammes or the Uyghur alphabet. The script fell into disuse after the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368. The script was, though never widely, used for about a century and is thought to have influenced the development of modern Korean script.
Like the rest of East Asia, Lingnan traditionally used classical Chinese for writing, rather than the peoples' spoken languages. Despite the attempt to create vernacular forms of writing in late 19th century, the Greater China area still tend to use standard written Chinese, a writing system based on Mandarin, not Cantonese (i.e., the native language of the Lingnan region), in writing. Even in the cosmopolitan Hong Kong, the vast majority of the people's works of literature have been written in standard written Chinese. However, starting from 21st century, Hong Kong, as a cultural center in the region, has developed a complete writing system for Cantonese. Some writers in the city now advocate composing literature in written Cantonese.
The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose characters have been used with varying degrees of modification in varieties of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Mayan writing system are also systems with certain logographic features, although they have marked phonetic features as well and are no longer in current use. Vietnamese speakers switched to the Latin alphabet in the 20th century and the use of Chinese characters in Korean is increasingly rare. The Japanese writing system includes several distinct forms of writing including logography.
Jerry Norman and Mei Tsu-Lin presented evidence that the Yue spoke an Austroasiatic language:There is no known evidence of a writing system among the Yue peoples of the Lingnan region in pre-Qin times, and the Chinese conquest of the region is believed to have introduced writing to the area. However, Liang Tingwang, a professor from the Central University of Nationalities, said that the ancient Zhuang had their own proto-writing system but had to give it up because of the Qinshi Emperor's tough policy and to adopt the Han Chinese writing system, which ultimately developed into the old Zhuang demotic script alongside classical Chinese writing system during the Tang dynasty (618-907). Old Chinese seems to have been the language of government, likely because Zhao Tuo and most government officials were Chinese immigrants and not Yue. Archaeological finds at the Tomb of the Nanyue King in Guangzhou, the Nanyue Palace Ruins, and the Luobowan tombs have provided nearly all that is known of Nanyue writing. These sites contained a wide variety of artifacts with writings in several different media. Items from King Zhao Mo's tomb have seal script characters on them, while those from the Palace and Luobowan tend to have clerical script characters.