Chinese Writing

Project 8 “Chinese Writing” 10Dec09
Tell me what do you see? (slide 1) Let me turn it. (slide 1 -2nd) Does it look like a horse – look at the mane (the long thick hair) at the back of the neck? Yes, this is a horse!
3000 years ago, the Chinese etched picture onto turtle shells and animal bone. What you see here is the earliest form of Chinese writing – Oracle Bone Script – it very much depicts an image of the actual object – what u see is close to what u get (slide 2) Over the years, the writing evolves and it now becomes the Chinese Character that we know. The Chinese writing for Horse seems complicated, let’s start with something simple
(slide 3) a circle with a short stroke inside – what is it? We see it everyday and we need it to warm the earth during the day. Yes, it’s the sun. The circle is the shape of the sun, the stroke is the dark shadow inside. (slide 4) Let’s see how this picture evolves itself to become the modern Chinese character for sun – a rectangle with a stroke in the middle.
(slide 5) Now what do you see? A person standing at its side, here’s the head, hand, leg. (Slide 6- 1st) See how this evolves into the Chinese word for human. What happens if I add an extra stroke at the top? (Slide 6 – 2nd) It takes on a new meaning - Big. The Oracle bone script looks pretty much the same as the modern writing. But how does this describes the adjective “big”? (loud & gesture) This is a BIG Elephant! This is a BIG House! The Chinese uses shape of a person stretching his legs/hands to denote the adjective BIG.
What happens if I add an extra stroke at the top (slide 6 – 3rd) It becomes the Chinese word for sky. Could anyone explain this? The sky is very high and it does not have a tangible shape. But it’s above the human being, so the Chinese just add a big dot above the human to denote the sky! The dot has slowly evolved to become a stroke in modern writing.
We’ve been looking at some Chinese characters but do you know how to pronounce it? I’m going to show you briefly how you could speak Standard Chinese (or what we call Putonghua) which is widely used in China.
(Slide 7) Where is this place? Yes, it’s Tiananmen. TIAN is pronounced tian in standard Chinese and it means sky. This pronunciation system which romanizes Chinese word is called pinyin or what u may call phonetics. (Slide 8) There are 4 tones in standard Chinese and you can see the little marking like this above the alphabet.
Now, let’s try to pronounce the Chinese characters we learnt earlier. (Slide 9). Ma, ren, da
OPTIONAL: Let us recap the oracle bone script for Horse – could anyone tell me why is it upright? To save space! Imagine some Chinese word can be very long if we do not turn the picture upright.
(6min)
We now recognize Chinese character and are able to pronounce it – what about writing it? Let’s try to write (slide 10) the Chinese word for sky – where we do begin? The general guideline is start to from top to bottom, left to right.
(7min)
Have you heard of Traditional and Simplified Chinese writing? Simplified Chinese was introduced 60years ago in China, in its attempt to increase literacy among its people. Let’s compare the two. (Slide 11) The word Horse - the 4 dots (which are horse’ legs) is simplified to one short stroke. The head is also simplified. The word for human remains the same – it’s too simple to be simplified!
OPTIONAL: Let’s me share one last interesting aspect of Chinese writing. Do you know Chinese writing may be linked to Bible story? (write船). Look at the Chinese Character for ship and think about Story of Noah’s Ark. God asked Noah to built a ship for himself, his wife, 3 sons & 3 daughters-in-law (altogether 8 mouths) so that all of them can be saved from the big flood.
There is so much about Chinese writing and we could go on and on. However, in short few minutes, we’ve learnt that ▲the earliest form of Chinese writing is Oracle Bone Script – it very much paints an image of the actual object. ▲We may use a Romanized system to pronounce standard Chinese and ▲we write Chinese character starting from top to bottom, left to right. With this, let’s tell our children, nieces and nephew – Chinese is very interesting and is not difficult to learn.