汉字是世界上使用时间最久、空间最广、人数最多的文字之一，汉字的创制和应用不仅推进了中华文化的发展，还对世界文化的发展产生了深远的影响。大约在距今六千年的半坡遗址等地方，已经出现刻划符号，共达五十多种。
Chinese characters are one of the characters with the longest use time, the widest space, and the largest number of people in the world. The creation and application of Chinese characters not only promoted the development of Chinese culture, but also had a profound impact on the development of world culture. More than fifty kinds of carved symbols have appeared in places such as the Banpo ruins about six thousand years ago.
汉字的起源与演变
在中国文字中，各个历史时期所形成的各种字体，有着各自鲜明的艺术特征。如篆书古朴典雅，隶书静中有动，富有装饰性，草书风驰电掣、结构紧凑，楷书工整秀丽，行书易识好写，实用性强，且风格多样，个性各异。但是在秦统一文字前，中国的汉字，不论从字体、应用角度而言，还是混乱的。古文广义而言，其包括大篆在内的小篆以前的文字；狭义的讲，指中国文字史上大篆以前的文字。这里采用狭义的古文概念。古文包含甲骨文与金文；其中，前者被人们视为中国最早的定型文字。
甲骨文字：为商朝后期用写或刻的方式，在龟甲、兽骨上所留下的文字，其内容多为”卜辞”，也有少数为”记事辞”。甲骨文大部分符合象形、会意的造字原则，形声字只占20%。其文字有刀刻的，有的填满朱砂，也有直接朱书墨书的。因文字多为图画文字中演变而成的，象形程度高，且一字多体，笔画不定。这说明中国的文字在殷商时期尚未统一。
殷代图像金文：先秦称铜为金，故铸刻在青铜器上的文字叫做金文，又叫钟鼎文、彝器款识。与甲骨文相比，金文象形程度更高，显示了更古的文字面貌。金文填实的写法，使形象生动逼真，浑厚自然。
在中国文字史上，夏、商、周三代，就其对文字学的贡献而言，以史籀为最。史籀是周宣王的史官，他别创新体，以趋简便。大篆又有籀文、籀篆、籀书、史书之称。因其为史籀所作，故世称”籀文”。大篆散见于《说文解字》和后人所收集的各种钟鼎彝器中。其中以周宣王时所作石鼓文最为著名。
汉字的演变过程是汉字字形字体逐步规范化、稳定化的过程。小篆使每个字的笔画数固定下来；隶书构成了新的笔形系统，字形渐成扁方形；楷书诞生以后，汉字的字形字体就稳定下来，确定了“横、竖、撇、点、捺、挑、折”的基本笔画，笔形得到了进一步的规范，各个字的笔画数和笔顺也固定下了。一千多年来，楷书一直是汉字的标准字。 汉字是以象形字为基础，以形声字为主体的表意文字体系，总数约有一万个，其中最常用的是三千个左右。这三千余个汉字可以组成无穷多的词组，进而组成各种各样的句子。汉字产生以后，对周边国家产生了深刻影响。目前，考古学者共发掘甲骨16万余片。其中有的完整，有的只是没有文字记载的碎块。据统计，所有这些甲骨上的各种文字总计为四千多个，其中经过学者们考证研究的约有三千个，在三千余字里面，学者们释读一致的是一千多字。其余的或者不可释读，或者学者们分歧严重。尽管如此，通过这一千多字，人们已经可以大致了解有关商朝政治、经济、文化等各个方面的情况了。甲骨文是一种成熟而系统的文字，为后世的汉字发展奠定了基础。此后，汉字又经历了铜铭文（金文）、小篆、隶书、楷书等形式，并一直沿用至今。日本、越南、朝鲜等国家的文字都是在汉字的基础上创制的。
The origin and evolution of Chinese characters
In Chinese characters, various fonts formed in various historical periods have their own distinctive artistic characteristics. For example, the seal script is simple and elegant, the official script is static and dynamic, rich in decoration, cursive script is fast and electric, compact in structure, regular script is neat and beautiful, the running script is easy to read and write, and it has strong practicability, and has various styles and different personalities. However, before Qin unified the characters, Chinese characters were still chaotic in terms of font and application. In a broad sense, ancient Chinese characters include characters before Xiaozhuan including the Great Seal; in a narrow sense, they refer to characters before the Great Seal in the history of Chinese characters. Here adopts the narrow concept of ancient prose. Ancient inscriptions include oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions; among them, the former is regarded as the earliest stereotyped writing in China.
Oracle-bone script: written or engraved in the later period of the Shang Dynasty, the text left on tortoise shells and beast bones, most of which are “divine inscriptions”, and a few are “notes for notes”. Most of the oracle bone inscriptions conform to the pictographic and knowing character-making principles, and the pictophonetic characters account for only 20%. The characters are carved with a knife, some are filled with cinnabar, and some are written directly in ink. Because the characters are mostly evolved from pictorial characters, they have a high level of pictology, and there are many types of characters with indefinite strokes. This shows that Chinese writing has not yet been unified during the Yin and Shang dynasties.
Yin dynasty pictorial inscriptions: In the pre-Qin period, copper was called gold, so the inscriptions carved on bronzes were called inscriptions, also called Zhong Dingwen, and Yi Qiqi. Compared with the oracle bone inscriptions, the inscriptions on the bronze inscriptions have a higher degree of pictogram and show a more ancient appearance. The inscription is filled with solid writing, which makes the image vivid and natural.
In the history of Chinese writing, the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, in terms of their contributions to philology, Shi Lai is the most. Shi Lai is the historian of King Zhou Xuan, he is not innovative, he is simple. The big seal is also known as the text, the seal, the book, and the history book. Because it was written by Shi Lai, it was called “Lao Wen” in the world. The Great Seal Sans can be found in “Shuowen Jiezi” and various bells, tripods and Yi implements collected by later generations. Among them, the stone drum inscriptions made by King Zhou Xuan is the most famous.
The evolution of Chinese characters is a process of gradual standardization and stabilization of Chinese character fonts. Xiaozhuan fixed the number of strokes of each character; official script constituted a new system of strokes, and the font gradually became oblate; after the birth of regular script, the font of Chinese characters stabilized, determining “horizontal, vertical, abbreviation, dot, 捺, The basic strokes of “pick and fold” have been further standardized, and the number of strokes and stroke order of each character have also been fixed. For more than a thousand years, regular script has been the standard Chinese character. Chinese characters are ideographic characters based on pictographs and pictophones as the main body. There are about 10,000 in total, of which about 3,000 are the most commonly used. These three thousand Chinese characters can form an infinite number of phrases, and then form a variety of sentences. After the Chinese characters came into being, they had a profound impact on neighboring countries. At present, archaeologists have unearthed more than 160,000 oracle bones. Some of them are complete, and some are just fragments without written records. According to statistics, there are more than 4,000 words on all these oracle bones. Among them, about 3,000 have been verified and studied by scholars. Among the more than 3,000 words, scholars have unanimously interpreted more than 1,000 words. The rest are either uninterpretable, or scholars are deeply divided. Nevertheless, through these more than a thousand words, people can already roughly understand the political, economic, cultural and other aspects of the Shang Dynasty. Oracle is a mature and systematic writing, which laid the foundation for the development of Chinese characters in later generations. Since then, Chinese characters have gone through the forms of bronze inscriptions (bronze), small seal, official script, regular script, etc., and they have been in use ever since. The scripts of Japan, Vietnam, North Korea and other countries are all created on the basis of Chinese characters.