[Assignment/Research]

1. HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN (AGD1222)
CHINESE HANDWRITING
PREPARE FOR:
MADAM RINA BINTI ABD. SHUKOR
PREPARED BY:
Dip.DG26B NURUL SYAMIMI BINTI
MOHD MOKHTAR
3153006491
JABATAN PENGAJIAN UMUM
PUSAT PENGAJIAN ASASI & UMUM (CFGS)
UNIVERSITI SELANGOR
SEMESTER MEI 2015

2. Introduction
Ancient Chinese literature.
People in China began writing about 1500 BC, more than a thousand years later
than people in West Asia or Egypt, but earlier than anyone in Europe, Africa, or Central
America. The earliest writing that we know of from China was on animal bones, which
are called "oracle bones" because priests used them to tell the future. The writing on these
oracle bones is the same writing that people use in modern China, just in an earlier
version. The signs they used came from pictures, like earlier Egyptian hieroglyphs or
Sumerian cuneiform.
People in early China also wrote on strips of bamboo wood. Later on, people also wrote
on silk cloth. The earliest Chinese literature that we know of probably comes from the
later part of the Western Zhou Dynasty about 800 BC (the same time as Homer in
Greece) and was written on silk. This is the I Ching, a fortune-telling book, like the
earlier oracle bones.
Sometime around 300 BC, in the Warring States period, a general called Sun Tzu wrote a
book called the Art of War, about the best ways to organize armies and battles.
Around 100 BC, Ts'ai Lun invented paper to write on. Paper was cheaper to write on than
silk, so more people wrote and copied books during theHan Dynasty. The first woman
writer of China, Ban Zhao, lived later in the Han Dynasty, in the first century AD. She
wrote many books, including poetry and a history of the Western Han. Ban Zhao also
wrote astronomy and math books, and she wrote "Lessons for Women," which
advised women to submit to the men around them. This last book became very famous.
During the Tang Dynasty, about 700 AD, people in China inventedwood-block printing,
which was easier than copying out books by hand and made books much cheaper than
they had been before. Many more people learned to read, and many more people wrote
books. The poet Bai Juyi wrote a famous poem, the Song of Everlasting Sorrow.

3. Soon afterward, during the Song Dynasty, about 1000 AD, people invented movable clay
type, and this made books even cheaper and more popular than before. In 1103 AD, Lie
Jie published a book setting architectural standards for all of China.
One of the most famous novels of early China is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
which was written about 1330 AD, during theYuan Dynasty, by a man named Luo
Guanzhong.

4. The Chinese Writing System
The Chinese writing system developed more than 4,000 years ago; the oldest extant
examples of written Chinese are from the 14th or 15th cent. B.C., when the Shang
dynasty flourished. Chinese writing consists of an individual character or ideogram for
every syllable, each character representing a word or idea rather than a sound; thus,
problems caused by homonyms in spoken Chinese are not a difficulty in written Chinese.
The written language is a unifying factor culturally, for although the spoken languages
and dialects may not be mutually comprehensible in many instances, the written form is
universal.
Traditionally, the characters are written in columns that are read from top to bottom and
from right to left, or in horizontal lines that read from left to right. The Chinese
characters, although universal to all dialects, have proved to be an obstacle to mass
literacy, for one needs to know at least several thousand characters to read a newspaper
and even more to read literary works. In an attempt to deal with this problem, the
People's Republic of China in 1956 introduced simplifications of commonly used
characters. This was intended as a transitional phase until a workable alphabet could be
devised and adopted.
Also in 1956 an alphabet based on Roman letters (Pinyin) was developed in mainland
China. Its purpose, however, was the phonetic transcription of Chinese characters rather
than the replacement of them. Since alphabetic writing requires a standardized spoken
language, the local differences in the pronunciation of Chinese present a serious obstacle
to the development of a satisfactory alphabet. The Chinese government has made a great
effort to standardize the pronunciation of Mandarin, which is essentially a spoken
language, and to have it adopted throughout China. The Beijing dialect of Mandarin was
chosen because it was already the most widely used.
The literary language of Chinese differs greatly from the spoken form. Known
as wenyen, the literary language is the same for all variants of Chinese as far as
vocabulary, grammar, and the system of writing are concerned, but pronunciation differs
locally according to the dialect. Under Nationalist leadership a movement began in 1917
to employ the popular, everyday speech (called paihua ) in literature insead
of wenyen. Since 1949, under the Communists, paihua has been used for all writing,
including governmental, commercial, and journalistic texts as well as literary works.

5. Introduction to Chinese Characters
Chinese characters, also known as Hanzi (漢字) are one of the earliest forms of
written language in the world, dating back approximately five thousand years. Nearly
one-fourth of the world’s population still use Chinese characters today. As an art form,
Chinese calligraphy remains an integral aspect of Chinese culture.
There are 47,035 Chinese characters in the Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), the standard
national dictionary developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, but the precise quantity
of Chinese characters is a mystery; numerous, rare variants have accumulated throughout
history. Studies from China have shown that 90% of Chinese newspapers and magazines
tend to use 3,500 basic characters.
Evolution of Chinese Characters
Chinese characters have evolved over several thousands of years to include many
different styles, or scripts. The main forms are: Oracle Bone Inscriptions (Jia Gu Wen 甲
骨文), Bronze Inscriptions, (Jin Wen 金文), Small Seal Characters (Xiao Zhuan 小篆),
Official Script (Li Shu 隸書), Regular Script (Kai Shu 楷書), Cursive Writing or Grass
Stroke Characters (Cao Shu 草書), and Freehand Cursive (XingShu 行書).
The evolution of the Chinese character for dragon (long 龍) is illustrated below:
Oracle Bone Inscriptions refers to the
writings inscribed on the carapaces of
tortoises and mammals during
the Shang Dynasty (1600 – 1046 B.C.).
This is the earliest form of Chinese
characters. Because Oracle Bone
inscriptions mainly recorded the art of
divination, this script is also called bu
ci (卜辭), divination writings. Over one
thousand of the over four thousand
characters inscribed on excavated oracle
bones have been deciphered.

6. Bronze Inscriptions are the characters
inscribed on bronze objects, such as ritual
wine vessels, made during the Shang (1600
– 1046 B.C.) and Zhou (1046 – 256 B.C.)
dynasties. Over two thousand of the nearly
four thousand collected single characters
from these bronze objects are now
understood.
Small Seal Characters refer to the written
language popular during the Qin Dynasty
(221-207 B.C.). In the Warring States
Period (475-221 B.C.), different scripts
were in use in different parts of the Chinese
empire. Following the conquest and
unification of the country, the first emperor
of the Qin Dynasty simplified and unified
the written language. This unification of
the written language during
the Qin Dynasty significantly influenced
the eventual standardization of the Chinese
characters.
Official Script is the formal written
language of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. –
220 A.D.). Over time, curved and broken
strokes gradually increased, becoming
distinct characteristics of this style. Official
Script symbolizes a turning point in the
evolution history of Chinese characters,
after which Chinese characters transitioned
into a modern stage of development.

7. Regular Script first appeared at the end of
the Han Dynasty. But it was not until the
Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589
A.D.) that Regular Script rose to dominant
status. During that period, regular script
continued evolving stylistically, reaching
full maturity in the early Tang Dynasty
(618-907 A.D.). Since that time, although
developments in the art of calligraphy and
in character simplification still lay ahead,
there have been no more major stages of
evolution for the mainstream script.
Cursive Writing first appeared at the
beginning of the Han Dynasty. The earliest
cursive writings were variants of the rapid,
freestyle form of Official Script. Cursive
Writing is not in general use, being a
purely artistic, calligraphic style. This form
can be cursive to the point where individual
strokes are no longer differentiable, and
characters are illegible to the untrained eye.
Cursive Writing remains highly revered for
the beauty and freedom it embodies.
Freehand Cursive (or semi-cursive
writing) appeared and became popular
during the Three Kingdoms Period (220-
280 A.D.) and the Jin Dynasty (265-420
A.D.). Because this style is not as
abbreviated as Cursive Writing, most
people who can read Regular Script can
read semi-cursive. Some of the best
examples of semi-cursive are found in the
work of Wang Xizhi (321-379 A.D.), the
most famous calligrapher in Chinese
history, from the Eastern Jin Dynasty (316-
420 A.D.).

8. Simplified Chinese characters ( Jianti Zi,
简体字) are standardized Chinese
characters used in Mainland China. The
government of the People’s Republic of
China began promoting this form for
printing use in the 1950s ’60s in an attempt
to increase literacy. Simplified characters
are the official form of the People’s
Republic of China and in Singapore;
traditional Chinese characters are still used
in Hong Kong, Macau and the Republic of
China (Taiwan). Since 1954, over 2,200
Chinese characters have been simplified.
The Formation of Chinese Characters
The presumed methods of forming characters was first classified by the Chinese
linguist Xu Shen (許慎), whose etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字)
divides the script into six categories, or liushu ( 六書): pictographic characters,
(xiangxing zi 象形字), self-explanatory characters (zhishi zi 指示字), associative
compounds (huiyi zi 會意字), pictophonetic characters (xingsheng zi 形聲字), mutually
explanatory characters (zhuanzhu zi 轉注字), and phonetic loan characters (jiajie zi 假借
字). The first four categories refer to ways of composing Chinese characters; the last two
categorizes ways of using characters.
It is a popular myth that Chinese writing is pictographic, or that each Chinese character
represents a picture. Some Chinese characters evolved from pictures, many of which are
the earliest characters found on oracle bones, but such pictographic characters comprise
only a small proportion (about 4%) of characters. The vast majority are pictophonetic
characters consisting of a “radical,” indicating the meaning and a phonetic component for
the original sound, which may be different from modern pronunciation.

9. Below is an example of how some of the earliest Chinese characters were built.
好 hao
A woman holding a newborn in her arms, symbolizing goodness and happiness.

10. Stages of Chinese Writing
Given its immense time depth, the Chinese writing system is far from static. After the
early evolution during the Shang dynasty, the script continued to evolved. Visually it
became increasingly more linear, more stylized and less resembling of the natural objects.
It also grew in complexity, as the innovations of semantic determinatives (radicals) and
phonetic complements continued to be applied to form new words.
Scholars have conveniently divided different styles of Chinese writing into a number of
"scripts". The following chart compares different Chinese characters in various forms
throughout time.
The first four phases of Chinese writing trace the first 1,500-year history of Chinese and
essentially encompass the evolution from a nascent pictographic and ambiguous writing
script to a standardized system containing thousands of characters still in use today.

11. References
[1] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2016) Chinese Characters. Retrieved March 19,
2016, from, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters
[2] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2016) Written Chinese. Retrieved March 11,
2016, from, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese
[3] PDF Reference (2012) Research on Offline Handwritten Chinese Character
Recognition Based on BP Neural Networks. Retrieved 2012, from,
http://www.ipcsit.com/vol51/055-A801.pdf
[4] PDF Reference (2010) Writer Identification for Chinese Handwriting
Retrieved July, 2010, from,
aaaahttps://www.researchgate.net/profile/Siti_Mariyam_Shamsuddin/publication/256487
aaaa184_YeeLeng_IJASCA2010/links/0046352310874dc597000000.pdf
[5] Lawrence Lo (Copyright © 1996-2012) Chinese. Retrieved 2012, from,
http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html