Chinese Etymology
August 1st, 2009 | View Comments
I stumbled across this website while perusing one of favorite etymology websites. Growing up and attending Chinese school, we saw pictographs that eventually became the written characters today. However, after looking at some of the archaic written Chinese, I’m not convinced they weren’t written by preschoolers.
Take for example, 高 gao1, which means “tall”. Here are the historic writing samples.
Is it just me or do a lot of them look like houses?
In any case, I still fail to see the connection between many words and their associated meanings.
*The website classifies characters by time in history with “Seal” characters being the most recent (not counting modern Chinese) and “Oracle” characters as the oldest.
Peter posted this on August 1st, 2009 @ 12:36am in Chinese, Writing | Permalink to "Chinese Etymology"
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