The Story of Chinese Characters

Chinese characters: an example of an Oracle shell with inscriptions of the earliest Chinese characters. Wikipedia

Of all the cultural heritages and legacies that have evolved in the world, none is more significant than the human language. Of all the existing languages, none is equal, in terms of longevity, to the Chinese language, or, more specifically, to Chinese characters, which are logograms.

The Chinese use of pictures as the building blocks of their language is unique to nearly all written languages used today. As for the other ancient writing systems using pictorial scripts, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and the cuneiform of Mesopotamia, they vanished from our world some two thousand years ago.

The Origin of the Chinese Language

In ancient China, people once tied knots in ropes to encode and record information. This primitive writing form is also known as “quipu” or talking knots, which were widely used by some ancient cultures in the Andean South America and by some native Hawaiians. Linguists contend that quipu served as accounting devices, memory aids, as well as a way to record important events.