Written Chinese

Grammar Continued The Chinese written language is of an old and conservative type that assigns a single distinctive symbol, or character, to each word of the vocabulary. Knowledge of 2000 to 3000 characters is needed to read newspapers, and a large dictionary contains more than 40,000 characters (arranged according to sound or form). The oldest texts to have been discovered are oracular sayings incised on tortoise shells and cattle scapulae by court diviners of the Shang dynasty, from the early 14th century BC on; these are the so-called oracle-bone inscriptions.

Although the writing system has since been standardized and stylistically altered, its principles and many of its symbols remain fundamentally the same. Like other scripts of ancient origin, Chinese is derived from picture writing; it grew into a word-by-word representation of language when it was discovered that words too abstract to be readily pictured could be indicated by their sound rather than their sense. Unlike other scripts, however, Chinese still works pictographically as well as phonetically. Moreover, its sound indications have not been adapted to changes of pronunciation but have remained keyed to the pronunciation of 3000 years ago. The building blocks of the system are several hundred pictographs for such basic words as man, horse, and axe. In addition, expanded, or compound, pictographs exist. For example, a symbol of this type representing man carrying grain means "harvest," and thus "year" (nian ).