Outline of the History of Chinese Characters

Author: Liu Youxin, Fang Youguo
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2000-01-01
Features: The author conducts substantial analysis and research on the origin and evolution of Chinese characters, dividing the history of Chinese characters into three stages: the pictographic stage; the phonetic stage based on pictographic characters, with phonetic characters as the main body; and the phonetic-semantic stage dominated by phonetic-semantic characters, which still retains some pictographic and phonetic elements. This breaks the traditional division of Chinese character development into four stages based on changes in script styles.