![]() How something is written is incredibly important - and the order in which you actually write those strokes.ĪRABLOUEI: Chinese characters can be complex and difficult to write. TSU: It's not made of letters, but it's made of strokes, which are really just any kind of line you can draw on paper without lifting your pen. And once you've learned these 26 letters, you can compose any word you want from basically all Indo-European languages.ĪRABLOUEI: Chinese doesn't work this way. TSU: So when you think about it, the Western alphabet has 26 letters. It defies everything we deem important in the modern age, which is quickness and speed and, you know, efficiency and precision. TSU: Because if you ask linguists, they'll all tell you that, you know, if you look at Chinese system, by all accounts, it should not have survived. TSU: "The Language Revolution That Made China Modern."ĪBDELFATAH: Jing says that the fight to modernize Chinese as a language represents the beginning of China's climb to being a superpower. I work on modern China, from 19th century to the present.ĪBDELFATAH: She wrote a book called "Kingdom Of Characters." TSU: It's the desire to see China survive the modern age. ![]() And a movement arose to fight off foreign interference - to bring China back from the dead.ĪRABLOUEI: The key to that movement was what the four-eyed sage saw in the clouds - language. Those records are pictographs carved on turtle shells from thousands of years ago.ĪRABLOUEI: Writing was and continues to be a fundamental part of Chinese identity.ĪBDELFATAH: Today, China is a global superpower, but that disguises the fact that, less than 200 years ago, the nation was in a state of decline, and its survival was in question. TSU: And the language is the oldest living language we have that is still used, and the earliest records we have is really from the third millennium BCE. And then the lore has it that, from that, that's how he developed characters.Ĭhina is home to one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the world. He noticed that there were these recurring patterns in the universe that kind of tied the world together. TSU: And then he looked down on the ground and looked at how the birds were leaving tracks on the sand. Who spent his days looking up at the clouds. ![]() JING TSU: The oldest theory we have of how Chinese characters came into being is actually this myth of this four-eyed sage. ![]()
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