Language of footprints in the snow
various complex concepts.
But, how to handle complicated things by simple rules?
“Duh, players can’t see most of the game,” Cang was suddenly enlightened, “simplify and then simplify again …”
He started to sketch again in the snow. He drew a circle with a dot in the middle to represent the sun, a crescent with a vertical line in the middle as the moon, and three curvy lines for water.
All the wooden patterns, ceramic patterns and carvings on stones all flashed in his mind. He kept sketching numerous patterns on the ground.
Finally, he drew a curve and a dash supporting each other. That is humans!
Just then, the snow stopped. The sun shone brightly and majestically. The simple traces and marks seemed to be animated, sparkling in the snow.
Cang ran to Ju and told him about his discovery. They decided to select inscriptions and carvings by different tribes that shared similarities, which represented a “symbol” that could be generally understood by everyone. Based on that, they created a whole set of symbols to document events and speeches.
(࿔*! refers to the symbols that were created according to items’ shapes, similar to a pictograph; while
(ጴ*!refers to characters that are selfexplanatory, associative compounds and onomatopoeia.
Yellow Emperor summoned his ministers when Cang and Ju reported on their character system.
Cang said: “As long as we confirm our characters, we can document and record our history.”
Yellow Emperor exclaimed: “Only the language of humans can explain the heart of heaven and Earth!”
To people’s applause, a storm of golden millet fell from the sky. The people extended their hands to receive the gift from heaven.
Yellow Emperor held the hands of Cang and Ju, looked up to heaven and exclaimed: “Cang Jie invented Chinese characters, which moved the heaven and Earth.”
Symbolic text which helps ancient people record events has a history of more than 8,000 years in China, with evidence discovered from the Jiahu Culture of Henan Province.
Cang, though widely acknowledged as the man who invented written Chinese, is more likely to have been the one who collected and organized pattern characters used by different people, and created systematic Chinese characters.
inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty (16th-11th century BC) discovered in the late 18th century, are said to be the earliest mature systematic written language so far discovered.
More than 3,000 different characters have been discovered on the shells and bones including nouns, pronouns, verbs, auxiliary verbs and adjectives. Some of them composed a nearly 200-word narration. Scholars believe that the inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty are not an initial stage of Chinese characters, but from a relatively mature period after long development.
Most of the characters survived thousands of years, and are still used today, though written differently. That includes (inscriptions on ancient bronze objects) used in the early Zhou Dynasty (11th century-256 BC), (large seal style) popular from the late Zhou Dynasty to the Warring States Period (476-221BC),
(small seal style) as the official writing of the Qin Kingdom in the Warring States Period and the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), (official script) widely used in the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), as well as the regular style, cursive handwriting developed later based on