As we know, written Chinese is not an alphabetic language. We call Chinese characters as
'squared characters' and they are. They seems very complicated and hard to learn. But
Chinese is the most used language in the world and certainly one of the most beautiful languages.
It will be interesting to know its origin.
The development of Chinese characters can be dated back to about 4,500 years
as discovered at Yanghe, Shandong Province in recent years. There are about a dozen
pottery wine vessels unearthed, which have a character each. Those characters
are quite close to the oracle inscriptions carved by the ancients of the Shang Dynasty (16th to 11th
century B. C.).
Here is a simple
timeline of the development of Chinese characters.
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