The Evolution and Visual Application of Chinese Characters 1

Summary

The term "layout arrangement" can be said to be the "new learning" that has been produced in the past one or two decades. In fact, in the ancient Chinese poetry and painting, the layout was fully used. When appreciating ancient paintings, it is not difficult to see that apart from pictures, the second priority is text (that is, what we call copywriting). From this we can see that the text is regarded as the design of "images" as an art of communication ( Communication Art) has existed in Chinese calligraphy and painting for a long time. Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, posters, DMs, flyers, web pages, and e-mails designed today are mostly completed using computer image processing and layout editing software. This article is to explore the posters designed by ancient Chinese poetry and painting and modern times. Apart from the differences in practice, there are differences in the visual application.

Preface

Before studying the visual application of ancient poetry and paintings, we must first understand Chinese characters—Chinese characters. Chinese characters originate from the picture and evolved from the original picture. It seems to be a non-dramatic, non-character word. We call it pictorial text. After more than 3,000 years of evolution, the pictorial texts have evolved from hieroglyphs, oracles, oracles, cymbals, cymbals, to books and even computer fonts. The pictorial text has become a simplified Chinese character with strokes.

è´°, the production of text

At the beginning of the Human Society, due to its extremely low productivity, people had to use primitive primitive production tools to fight nature in order to survive. In order to exchange ideas and communicate information, language came into being. However, language is fleeting and cannot be preserved or transmitted to distant places. Moreover, human brain memory alone cannot. Thus, the original note method "knot rope note" and "catch note" was produced.

Regardless of how many ropes are used to cross each other, it is just a kind of representation, a simple concept of recording numbers or orientations, and it is an ideographic form. It can be seen as a gestation phase before the text is produced, but it is absolutely impossible to evolve into text, and it is not the production of words.

In "Chinese Philology", it was pointed out: "The production of words is very natural. Tens of thousands of years ago, people of the Paleolithic era already had good paintings. These paintings were probably animals and portraits. This is a precursor to writing. However, it is only after "having a more general and more extensive language" that it is possible to change the picture into text. That is, when someone draws a tiger, they will call it "tiger" when they meet. As time went by, everyone agreed. With the passage of time, more and more pictures of this kind have been drawn, and paintings have become less realistic. This kind of picture gradually shifts to the direction of the text and becomes the picture character of the text symbol. The pictorial text further developed into the original text—hieroglyphics.

First, the production of Western text

(1) The cuneiform characters were around 3,000 years before the epoch, which was also the beginning of the occurrence of the Western languages. The tools for recording the characters—paper and pen—had not been invented yet. At that time, the Assyrians had used a fistula or a chisel to engrave the texts of the paintings on the clay or gravel, which is cuneiform. (Figure 1)

(Figure 1: cuneiform)

(b) Hieroglyphics

Around the age of 5,000-4,000 years ago, with Egyptian scriptures, the hieroglyphs were also drawn from natural forms. Like the Chinese characters, they were used to represent the paintings of objects and to symbolize the thoughts. They are also symbols of the expression of sounds. The method of pronunciation), this symbol was later regarded as the origin of the sound symbol. The Egyptian hieroglyphs are more like Chinese ancient hieroglyphs (Figure 2). Around 1500-1000 BC, the Phoenicians who had been erected on the east coast of the Mediterranean had exchanged deals with the Egyptians. The learned monks converted the simple hieroglyphs into orderly words, and they dealt with commercial transactions. Great help.

(Figure 2: Egyptian hieroglyphics)

The Greeks, who also traded with the Phoenicians, came to understand the word and were adopted about 400 years ago. Because of the high cultural level of the Greeks, they also invented words that express arpeggios, and they sorted out and beautified each word. At the same time, the right-to-left reading of the Phoenicians was changed from horizontal to left-to-right. This is the origin of the modern western writing from the left to the right. (See Table 1)

(Table 1: List of Greek Languages)

(3) The birth of the Roman script The 2nd century before the era, Rome had a war with Greece, Rome conquered Greece and touched Greek culture, architecture and sculpture. The Greek word was also absorbed and improved by the Romans. For the Greek words with complex pronunciation, they were simplistic by the Romans. They replaced Greek Φ with P and H, and they came up with F and decomposed into simple pronunciation.

At the beginning of the Western calendar (AD), the uppercase characters were almost complete. The Chinese characters were widely used in various countries in Europe. Around the 15th century, JUW was added to the twenty-six Roman alphabets. The Romans often engraved on public buildings or memorial tablets. The words written by the Suiguan pen made the stone more interesting and the beauty of the original text of the hand engraved. It was called Trajan's uppercase font.

(d) Ancient Roman

In the 4th and 8th centuries of the 4th century, in order to transcribe more manuscripts, naturally the kind of fast-letter Tarazhen uppercase typefaces were needed. This resulted in natural and round characters (Uncial) and Half Uncial (Half Uncial). This type of writing with high efficiency is often used in transcripts (Figures 3, 4).

(Figure 3: 4th and 8th century big round fonts) (Figure 4: 7th century semicircle font)

(5) The emergence of small letters

The quick copying of the transcripts requires the strokes to be simple and the characters can be distinguished, so try to extend them up or add dots to distinguish them. By the ninth century, small letters appeared and spread extensively among European nations and religions and nations. In the fourteenth century, black letters were formed (Black Letter), and they were used until the sixteenth century. Because papermaking occurred in Europe in the thirteenth century, stylus was invented in the fifteenth century. The text entered the era of notes from the age of carving.

(6) Invention of movable type printing

In 1445, German G. J. Gutenburg invented the movable type and produced the famous forty-two lines of the Bible. He entered the practical stage of printing and made the technique of hand-copying gradually decline.

With the advancement of printing, Nicolaus Genson invented the Original Roman in 1470 (Figure 5). Afterwards, more and more designers gradually worked hard to create beautiful and easy-to-read fonts, and they published many useful fonts in succession.

(Figure 5: Nick Romanos' original Roman body)

Thus, the process of the creation of the Western word, after the evolution of Egypt → Phoenician → Greece, was established on the Roman body, widely used by the Western world and now popular throughout the world.

Second, the production of Chinese characters

(a) The composition of Chinese characters

Chinese characters are composed of six types of characters: pictographic, referential, phonological, communicative, transliteration, and sham borrowing, that is, what people call "Six Books." At the beginning of the creation of Chinese characters, although similar to Egypt, they all evolved from pictures and hieroglyphs. But its evolution is different. The evolution of Chinese characters always maintains the original painting or symbolic content. It is only when more words are formed that various combinations are formed on the basis of the original writing composition in order to form more words. This is unique in the history of world culture. of.

1 pictogram

That is, the shape of a word is modeled on the shape of a thing. Words such as the sun, moon, mountains and water are written in the form of imitating the sun, moon, mountains, and water and gradually evolved. It retains the original painting features and reflects the true image of nature. In the poster series “Mountain” of the “Chinese character theme invitational exhibition” designed by Mr. Qiang Qiang (Figure 6), the outline of the mountain was drawn by calligraphy, and the inside of the mountain was carefully observed.

(Figure 6)

2 refers to things

The word-finding method is to use words to reflect the true condition of things. If people write "" (on).

3-shaped sound

It consists of two parts: form and sound. For example, the words "river" and "lake" are all shaped in the form of "water". The meaning of the word is related to water. The "half" and "hu" in the latter half of the word are the same or similar to the pronunciation. In the modern artistic creation and graphic design, it is not difficult to find out the design using the “Shaped Sound” technique. In Figure 7, if you only look at the images, you can't see what the men in the picture are doing, but with the text, it is easy to know that you are sneezing. The use of the town's example of "voice" is very authentic.

(Figure 7)

4 understanding

The principle of the composition of the word is to derive a new word by linking the meanings of the two original words and derive a new word meaning. If the words "person" and "word" are merged into the word "letter", it means that there is faith.

5 turn

The meaning of "beginning" is to use two words as annotations, synonymous and different from each other. For example, "test", "old" word. In ancient times, examinations can be interpreted as "longevity." The two words are the same and their meanings are the same. Therefore, these words are called transliteration words.

6 False

The word "under the guise of" is to use both words. Originally there was no such word, but some new meanings were not expressed in words, so the meaning of such unwritten words could be assigned to an original word. For example, if you ask "further" when the fur is speaking, the "seeking" of the request is.