Old Chinese - Script

Script

At the time of the oracle bones, Old Chinese words were uniformly monosyllabic. Each character of the script represented a single word. The development of these characters follows the same three stages that characterized Egyptian hieroglyphic, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Mayan hieroglyphic writing.

Some words could be represented by pictures (later stylized) such as 日 rì "sun", 人 rén "person" and 木 mù "tree", by abstract symbols such as 三 sān "three" and 上 shàng "up", or by composite symbols such as 林 lín "grove" (two trees). About 1000 of the oracle bone characters, nearly a quarter of the total, are of this type, though 300 of them have not yet been deciphered. Though the pictographic origins of these characters are apparent, they have already undergone extensive simplification and conventionalization. Evolved forms of most of these characters are still in common use today.

In the next stage, characters of pictorial origin were borrowed to signify similar-sounding words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles (the rebus strategy). An example of such a phonetic loan is 來 lái "come", written with the character for a similar-sounding word meaning "wheat". Sometimes the borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with 毋 wú "don't", a borrowing of 母 mǔ "mother".

The final stage was disambiguation of phonetic loans by the addition of semantic indicators, yielding phono-semantic compound characters. For example, the character 其 originally representing jī "winnowing basket" was also used to write the pronoun and modal particle qí. Later the less common original word was written with the compound 箕, obtained by adding the symbol 竹 zhú "bamboo" to the character. This type was already used extensively on the oracle bones, and has been the main source of new characters since then. In the Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century, 80% of the 9,000 characters are classified as phono-semantic compounds. In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds also have a phonetic nature.

These developments were already present in the oracle bone script. The characters had been extensively simplified and linearized, implying a significant period of development prior to 1200 BC. This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character 册 cè "records". The character is thought to depict bamboo or wooden strips tied together with leather thongs, a writing material known from later archaeological finds.

Development and simplification of the script continued during the pre-Classical and Classical periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles. The language developed compound words, so that characters came to represent morphemes, though almost all morphemes could be used as independent words. Hundreds of morphemes of two or more syllables also entered the language, and were written with one phono-semantic compound character per syllable. During the Warring States period, writing became more widespread, with further simplification and variation, particularly in the eastern states. The most conservative script prevailed in the western state of Qin, which would later impose its standard on the whole of China.