Learning the Language 209Written Chinese: A ‘Pictographic’ History
Written Chinese is one of the world’s oldest languages,
perhaps the oldest in more-or-less continuous use. Chinese
people date the use of characters from the ‘oracle bone’
scripts found on burnt ox-bones and other shamanistic
religious objects dating from as early as 1800 BC, then later
from bronze seal-script characters. Those early, primitive
characters were in fact often pictographs. For example, this
was an oracle bone character for ‘rain’: (we can see the
drops falling from the clouds).
But as with Egyptian hieroglyphs, over the centuries
the language evolved tremendously. First, the pictographs
became more stylised as writing became more common—
first on carved jade seals, then bronzes, then written with
brush and ink on paper (a Chinese invention).
Orthography (basic character shapes) were standardised
and fixed in about 200 BC. This was known as the ‘rectification
of writing’, one of the great accomplishments of that great
over-achiever the Emperor Qinshihuang (also known for
starting construction on the Great Wall and the Grand Canal,