Celebrating Chinese Language Day by featuring a bit of history about the written language.
April 20th marks Chinese Language Day for the United Nations. Chinese is one of 6 official languages used by the United Nations. Chinese is the only language of these that is a logographic language where each written character represents an individual idea or word. For example, horse evolved from the literal depiction of a horse to an ever more simplified figure as shown below.
Ironically, what made the language easy to learn historically because of its literal depiction has now made it one of the most challenging languages to learn due to the complexity and number of symbols.
Because of this background in which characters that represent words developed from pictures, many children of Chinese descent learn to paint and are introduced to the arts early in life.
The picture above is by 7-year-old artist, Hannah Xu, granddaughter of well-known artist Longhua Xu. The insert below shows the evolution of the Chinese character for “heart.” Note the similarity between Hannah’s work and the origin of the word.
