从整体上看“龙山时代”前后中原和周边的“文字萌芽”

Study on the Writing Sprouts that Appeared in the Central Plains and Their Surrounding Areas Around the Longshan Era Based on Understanding Chinese Proto-writing as a Whole

中国文明有五千多年的悠久历史,作为中国文明符号标识的汉字,理应具有同样悠久的历史。但由于种种原因,尤其是受西方语言学理论对文字定义的限制,文字史家们在讨论汉字起源和形成问题时,总习惯于从甲骨文、金文开始,而罔顾汉字前文字阶段实际发生的事实,或者仅作为讨论汉字体系形成问题的附缀,这是不应该的。跟世界上的其他文字一样,汉字是社会发展到一定阶段的产物,汉字发生发展与演变的全过程始终与中国文明的发展趋势存在高度的一致性。在“龙山时代”前后中国文明“多元一体”格局形成的同时,出现在中原和周边地区的“文字萌芽”应从整体上看作汉字的原始文字。

Chinese civilization has a long history of more than 5,000 years.Chinese characters,as the symbol of Chinese civilization,should share the same history.However,due to various reasons including especially limitation from the defi nition of characters in Western linguistic theories,historians of writing used to start with oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions when discussing the origin and formation of Chinese characters.The pre-writing stage of Chinese characters are often ignored or deemed merely as an appendix to the discussion of the formation of the Chinese character system,which is totally wrong.Like other writings in the world,Chinese characters was a stage product of social development.The whole process of the development and evolution of Chinese characters has always been highly consistent with the developing tendency of Chinese civilization.While the unity pattern of varieties in Chinese civilization was formed around the Longshan era,the character sprouts that appeared in the Central Plains and their surrounding areas should also be regarded as part of Chinese proto-writing.