HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN (AGD1222)

CHINESE HANDWRITING

PREPARE FOR:

MADAM RINA BINTI ABD. SHUKOR

PREPARED BY:

Dip. DG26B NURUL SYAMIMI BINTI MOHD MOKHTAR

3153006491

JABATAN PENGAJIAN UMUM PUSAT PENGAJIAN ASASI & UMUM (CFGS)

UNIVERSITI SELANGOR SEMESTER MEI 2015

Introduction Ancient Chinese literature.

People in China began writing about 1500 BC, more than a thousand years later

than people in West Asia or Egypt, but earlier than anyone in Europe, Africa, or Central

America. The earliest writing that we know of from China was on animal bones, which

are called "oracle bones" because priests used them to tell the future. The writing on these

oracle bones is the same writing that people use in modern China, just in an earlier

version. The signs they used came from pictures, like earlier Egyptian hieroglyphs or

Sumerian cuneiform.

People in early China also wrote on strips of bamboo wood. Later on, people also wrote

on silk cloth. The earliest Chinese literature that we know of probably comes from the

later part of the Western Zhou Dynasty about 800 BC (the same time as Homer in

Greece) and was written on silk. This is the I Ching, a fortune-telling book, like the

earlier oracle bones.

Sometime around 300 BC, in the Warring States period, a general called Sun Tzu wrote a

book called the Art of War, about the best ways to organize armies and battles.

Around 100 BC, Ts'ai Lun invented paper to write on. Paper was cheaper to write on than

silk, so more people wrote and copied books during theHan Dynasty. The first woman

writer of China, Ban Zhao, lived later in the Han Dynasty, in the first century AD. She

wrote many books, including poetry and a history of the Western Han. Ban Zhao also

wrote astronomy and math books, and she wrote "Lessons for Women," which

advised women to submit to the men around them. This last book became very famous.

During the Tang Dynasty, about 700 AD, people in China inventedwood-block printing,

which was easier than copying out books by hand and made books much cheaper than

they had been before. Many more people learned to read, and many more people wrote

books. The poet Bai Juyi wrote a famous poem, the Song of Everlasting Sorrow.

Soon afterward, during the Song Dynasty, about 1000 AD, people invented movable clay

type, and this made books even cheaper and more popular than before. In 1103 AD, Lie

Jie published a book setting architectural standards for all of China.

One of the most famous novels of early China is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms,

which was written about 1330 AD, during theYuan Dynasty, by a man named Luo

Guanzhong.

The Chinese Writing System

The Chinese writing system developed more than 4,000 years ago; the oldest extant

examples of written Chinese are from the 14th or 15th cent. B.C., when the Shang

dynasty flourished. Chinese writing consists of an individual character or ideogram for

every syllable, each character representing a word or idea rather than a sound; thus,

problems caused by homonyms in spoken Chinese are not a difficulty in written Chinese.

The written language is a unifying factor culturally, for although the spoken languages

and dialects may not be mutually comprehensible in many instances, the written form is

universal.

Traditionally, the characters are written in columns that are read from top to bottom and

from right to left, or in horizontal lines that read from left to right. The Chinese

characters, although universal to all dialects, have proved to be an obstacle to mass

literacy, for one needs to know at least several thousand characters to read a newspaper

and even more to read literary works. In an attempt to deal with this problem, the

People's Republic of China in 1956 introduced simplifications of commonly used

characters. This was intended as a transitional phase until a workable alphabet could be

devised and adopted.

Also in 1956 an alphabet based on Roman letters (Pinyin) was developed in mainland

China. Its purpose, however, was the phonetic transcription of Chinese characters rather

than the replacement of them. Since alphabetic writing requires a standardized spoken

language, the local differences in the pronunciation of Chinese present a serious obstacle

to the development of a satisfactory alphabet. The Chinese government has made a great

effort to standardize the pronunciation of Mandarin, which is essentially a spoken

language, and to have it adopted throughout China. The Beijing dialect of Mandarin was

chosen because it was already the most widely used.

The literary language of Chinese differs greatly from the spoken form. Known

as wenyen, the literary language is the same for all variants of Chinese as far as

vocabulary, grammar, and the system of writing are concerned, but pronunciation differs

locally according to the dialect. Under Nationalist leadership a movement began in 1917

to employ the popular, everyday speech (called paihua ) in literature insead

of wenyen. Since 1949, under the Communists, paihua has been used for all writing,

including governmental, commercial, and journalistic texts as well as literary works.

Introduction to Chinese Characters

Chinese characters, also known as Hanzi (漢字) are one of the earliest forms of

written language in the world, dating back approximately five thousand years. Nearly

one-fourth of the world’s population still use Chinese characters today. As an art form,

Chinese calligraphy remains an integral aspect of Chinese culture.

There are 47,035 Chinese characters in the Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), the standard

national dictionary developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, but the precise quantity

of Chinese characters is a mystery; numerous, rare variants have accumulated throughout

history. Studies from China have shown that 90% of Chinese newspapers and magazines

tend to use 3,500 basic characters.

Evolution of Chinese Characters

Chinese characters have evolved over several thousands of years to include many

different styles, or scripts. The main forms are: Oracle Bone Inscriptions (Jia Gu Wen 甲

骨文), Bronze Inscriptions, (Jin Wen 金文), Small Seal Characters (Xiao Zhuan 小篆),

Official Script (Li Shu 隸書), Regular Script (Kai Shu 楷書), Cursive Writing or Grass

Stroke Characters (Cao Shu 草書), and Freehand Cursive (XingShu 行書).

The evolution of the Chinese character for dragon (long 龍) is illustrated below:

Oracle Bone Inscriptions refers to the writings inscribed on the carapaces of

tortoises and mammals during the Shang Dynasty (1600 – 1046 B.C.).

This is the earliest form of Chinese characters. Because Oracle Bone inscriptions mainly recorded the art of

divination, this script is also called bu

ci (卜辭), divination writings. Over one

thousand of the over four thousand characters inscribed on excavated oracle bones have been deciphered.

Bronze Inscriptions are the characters inscribed on bronze objects, such as ritual

wine vessels, made during the Shang (1600 – 1046 B.C.) and Zhou (1046 – 256 B.C.)

dynasties. Over two thousand of the nearly four thousand collected single characters from these bronze objects are now

understood.

Small Seal Characters refer to the written language popular during the Qin Dynasty (221-207 B.C.). In the Warring States

Period (475-221 B.C.), different scripts were in use in different parts of the Chinese

empire. Following the conquest and unification of the country, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty simplified and unified

the written language. This unification of the written language during

the Qin Dynasty significantly influenced the eventual standardization of the Chinese characters.

Official Script is the formal written

language of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.). Over time, curved and broken strokes gradually increased, becoming

distinct characteristics of this style. Official Script symbolizes a turning point in the

evolution history of Chinese characters, after which Chinese characters transitioned into a modern stage of development.

Regular Script first appeared at the end of the Han Dynasty. But it was not until the

Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 A.D.) that Regular Script rose to dominant

status. During that period, regular script continued evolving stylistically, reaching full maturity in the early Tang Dynasty

(618-907 A.D.). Since that time, although developments in the art of calligraphy and

in character simplification still lay ahead, there have been no more major stages of evolution for the mainstream script.

Cursive Writing first appeared at the beginning of the Han Dynasty. The earliest

cursive writings were variants of the rapid, freestyle form of Official Script. Cursive

Writing is not in general use, being a purely artistic, calligraphic style. This form can be cursive to the point where individual

strokes are no longer differentiable, and characters are illegible to the untrained eye.

Cursive Writing remains highly revered for the beauty and freedom it embodies.

Freehand Cursive (or semi-cursive writing) appeared and became popular during the Three Kingdoms Period (220-

280 A.D.) and the Jin Dynasty (265-420 A.D.). Because this style is not as

abbreviated as Cursive Writing, most people who can read Regular Script can read semi-cursive. Some of the best

examples of semi-cursive are found in the work of Wang Xizhi (321-379 A.D.), the

most famous calligrapher in Chinese history, from the Eastern Jin Dynasty (316-420 A.D.).

Simplified Chinese characters ( Jianti Zi,

简体字) are standardized Chinese

characters used in Mainland China. The government of the People’s Republic of

China began promoting this form for printing use in the 1950s ’60s in an attempt

to increase literacy. Simplified characters are the official form of the People’s Republic of China and in Singapore;

traditional Chinese characters are still used in Hong Kong, Macau and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Since 1954, over 2,200

Chinese characters have been simplified.

The Formation of Chinese Characters

The presumed methods of forming characters was first classified by the Chinese

linguist Xu Shen (許慎), whose etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字)

divides the script into six categories, or liushu ( 六書): pictographic characters,

(xiangxing zi 象形字), self-explanatory characters (zhishi zi 指示字), associative

compounds (huiyi zi 會意字), pictophonetic characters (xingsheng zi 形聲字), mutually

explanatory characters (zhuanzhu zi 轉注字), and phonetic loan characters (jiajie zi 假借

字). The first four categories refer to ways of composing Chinese characters; the last two

categorizes ways of using characters.

It is a popular myth that Chinese writing is pictographic, or that each Chinese character

represents a picture. Some Chinese characters evolved from pictures, many of which are

the earliest characters found on oracle bones, but such pictographic characters comprise

only a small proportion (about 4%) of characters. The vast majority are pictophonetic

characters consisting of a “radical,” indicating the meaning and a phonetic component for

the original sound, which may be different from modern pronunciation.

Below is an example of how some of the earliest Chinese characters were built.

好 hao

A woman holding a newborn in her arms, symbolizing goodness and happiness.

Stages of Chinese Writing

Given its immense time depth, the Chinese writing system is far from static. After the early evolution during the Shang dynasty, the script continued to evolved. Visually it

became increasingly more linear, more stylized and less resembling of the natural objects. It also grew in complexity, as the innovations of semantic determinatives (radicals) and

phonetic complements continued to be applied to form new words.

Scholars have conveniently divided different styles of Chinese writing into a number of "scripts". The following chart compares different Chinese characters in various forms

throughout time.

The first four phases of Chinese writing trace the first 1,500-year history of Chinese and

essentially encompass the evolution from a nascent pictographic and ambiguo us writing

script to a standardized system containing thousands of characters still in use today.

References

[1] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2016) Chinese Characters. Retrieved March 19,

2016, from, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

[2] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2016) Written Chinese. Retrieved March 11,

2016, from, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

[3] PDF Reference (2012) Research on Offline Handwritten Chinese Character

Recognition Based on BP Neural Networks. Retrieved 2012, from,

http://www.ipcsit.com/vol51/055-A801.pdf

[4] PDF Reference (2010) Writer Identification for Chinese Handwriting

Retrieved July, 2010, from,

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[5] Lawrence Lo (Copyright © 1996-2012) Chinese. Retrieved 2012, from,

http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html