Unit 5 Video time 听力稿及改编练习 -2022-2023学年高中英语人教版（2019）必修第一册

A Brief History of Chinese Characters The history of Chinese characters dates back to ancient times, with a history of at least several thousand years. There are many tales and legends about the origin of hanzi, Chinese characters: there is Cangjie, the legendary inventor of Chinese characters; the ancient practice of knot-tying; the eight trigrams (八卦) and ancient painting legends, to name a few. It is generally agreed that hanzi began as simple pictures, images that the ancient Chinese people drew, painted or carved to describe nature or their lives. Other ancient cultures developed picture-based writing systems as well, such as the hieroglyphs (象形文字) of ancient Egypt or the script of the ancient Mayan civilization. Hanzi, however, is the only one of these ancient writing systems to survive. Today, Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. Researchers generally agree that the old symbols recognizable as Chinese characters are those found on ancient oracle bones (甲骨). These 3,000-year-old symbols, known as jiaguwen, were carved on turtle shells or bones of animals. The jiaguwen can give all of us in the modern era insight into how ancient Chinese saw the world around them and into their great creativity in expressing their observations. Take, for example, the modern character Jia, meaning home or family. The jiaguwen character looks like a house with a nice pig inside, originating from the ancient idea that a good family home has plenty of food. Over thousands of years, this hanzi evolved into a variety of different forms, but finally developed in a more stable manner after the unification of China under Emperor Qinshihuang. When you first look at Chinese characters, you will most likely feel that they are very complicated. However, if you know just a little about how these characters are formed, you will find that they are not nearly as difficult as they see. About 80% of Chinese characters are composed of smaller par