Exploring the Secret of the Ancient Chinese Character’s Development: A Hindsight After Reading The Development of Ancient Chinese Character

Abstract

With regard to analyzing the form of the ancient Chinese character, The Development of Ancient Chinese Character puts forward dynamic analysis and static analysis. It makes attempt to study the history of ancient Chinese character from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and combine the dynamic analysis of the character’s form with the static analysis. Besides, according to The Development of Ancient Chinese Character, “the change of Chinese character’s form into lines”, “symbolization”, and “uniformity” are the general direction that the form of ancient Chinese character develops towards. Besides, the development of ancient Chinese character also shows the features of the times. Moreover, the book compares the structures of the characters in the periods from the Shang dynasty to Qin dynasty, revealing the formation mode of ancient Chinese character which is in a dynamic transformation. Furthermore, the usage of ancient Chinese character is also included in the book, which encompasses many aspects, such as the total number of the different characters in different periods, the frequency of characters, commonly-used characters and rarely-used characters, and so on. Through detailed numbers, the book makes its argumentation convincing and vivid. In addition, the book is also filled with creative ideas in the interpretation of individual characters and in the establishment of new theories.