Simple linear signs and pictures of animals, such as fish and frogs, resembled characters engraved in oracle bones, which suggests that these Neolithic signs might be the harbinger of Chinese characters. Evidence from the Yangshao culture developed in the middle and lower runs of the Yellow River in northeast China (a.k.a., the cradle of Chinese civilization) shows painted pottery, stone implements, and incised signs in farming communities (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Although some archeologists trace the origin of Chinese characters back to about 8,000 years ago, a credible account goes back to the Neolithic times around 5000 to 3000 B.C. The emergence of Chinese characters is rich in history and distinctive in writing. 1.1 A Brief Historical Account 1.1.1 The Origin of Chinese Writing The remaining part of this chapter attempts to address these questions in terms of historical considerations, scriptal characteristics, and cultural compatibility. This causes a number of questions to arise: What has made the Chinese writing system endure so long, despite its inefficiency? Is it the case that precedence or tradition surpasses convenience or efficiency? In addition, if it was inefficient, how could Chinese native students excel over their counterparts in the world in reading, as shown in the results of an international test (PISA, 2018)? If there is a truth to the claim of Chinese characters being inefficient and if Hannas’ condemnation of Chinese script is justified, how could the Chinese writing system exert an immense influence on the Japanese writing system? This does not fit well with the notion of natural selection. The Chinese writing system is the only one, among all writing systems invented before 1,000 B.C., which is still used by a great number of people in the world. Notwithstanding their inefficiency and complexities, Chinese characters have endured for more than 5,000 years. ![]() Some scholars claim that Chinese characters are inefficient for learning, compared to the alphabet, because it takes long to learn to read in Chinese due to the vast number of characters to master (Hannas, 1997 Man, 2000 Wolf, 2007). Based on the feature that a character represents a morpheme in a syllabic unit, a term morphosyllary has been used to refer to the Chinese writing system (Leong, 1997). The common designation is a logography ( logo = word graph = written symbol), representing the meaning primarily and the sound secondarily (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Chinese characters or words are used as Sino-Japanese or Sino-Korean words, which means the use of Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean pronunciation, respectively, on top of their native lexicons. Since their oral languages do not have common genetic affinity Footnote 2, the adoption of Chinese characters in the Japanese and Korean writing systems was not seamless. Although they share cultural heritage, the three countries have different oral and written languages from one another, except for the partial use of Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean Footnote 1 written languages. According to Taylor and Taylor ( 2014), Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are closely related geographically, historically, culturally, and racially such that they can be discussed within one book. With the immense influence of China on Korea and Japan, the three countries have common cultural traditions. Historically, China exerted a massive impact on Korea and Japan in many respects.
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