The Chinese Writing System - 2184 Words

The Chinese language is a diamond amidst the sea of common languages that one can encounter, more specifically the written aspect of the language. It is considered one of, if not the, oldest writing system in the world that is still in use today, although now they are altered and simplified the Chinese writing system and its characters have a very rich history indeed. This writing system is the same system that China used to compile what is now undisputedly the longest continuous documentation of a nation’s or people’s history and continues to progress and evolve even today. Before the Chinese writing history is discussed in any great depth, the more broad history of writing should be discussed. The oldest recorded†¦show more content†¦The simple coins used to identify and categorize farming goods gave rise to the practice of pressing coins into the clay tablets to make a like image of the coins in the form of raised symbols on the clay; the coins used to ident ify farming and manufacturing goods were then used to create a new format to be drawn on the clay tablets with a tool called a stylus. The marks left on the clay by using the stylus had a wedge-shaped appearance which is how these images received the name of â€Å"cuneiform† meaning wedge-writing. The earliest known implementation of cuneiform to symbolize sounds produced by the Sumerian tongue show up on pieces of clay that are estimated to have been produced around the time of 3100BC. These tablets were discovered around a city called Jemdet, in ancient Nasr which is located in the same area where Iraq resides today. The steps towards a complete writing system of the Sumerian language most likely developed around 400 to 900 years after the introduction of the cuneiform tablets mentioned above, this process entails the transition of using these images as a representation of sounds that the Sumerian language creates instead of actual visual representations of the objects th at they are in reference of or as memory aids. After the change from images representing objects to the