Chinese Calligraphy and Orthographic Discussion

Text is the carrier of culture, and calligraphy is the artistic form of writing. Chinese characters (characters) are characterized by one word, one shape, and one sound, but they also have one word, many shapes and many sounds. This is related to China's specific history. Bing Bing's standardized writing of characters is a basic literacy for learning Chinese culture, and it is also a rule that calligraphers must follow.

The word "calligraphy" was first seen in "The Later Han Shu Rulin Biography". "Siping for four years, Ruan Zhu Ruzheng set the Five Classics and published it on a stone tablet. It is an ancient script, a calligraphy script, and a trigraph calligraphy. Learn to make the world more salty.” This means that “calligraphy” has a unified written rule for each character. The ancients called it the “orthographic character.” In layman's terms, it is impossible to write typos.

Calligraphy is a rigorous art. Ancient man-made characters are meticulous, with sound notes and ideograms, a few words plus or minus a few strokes, and their sounds and meanings have changed. In order to prevent writers from indiscriminately deciding, the "orthodox" principle has been specified. After many thousands of years of Chinese character circulation, although the shape of the characters has changed greatly, there are also laws that can be followed. Former Chinese literary scholars summarized the "Six Books," and later summed up ancient and modern characters and variant characters. How to identify it? This requires the scholars to learn the science of exegesis other than "pen gong."

Exegesis is a very deep knowledge. It involves a very wide range of topics. The aforementioned "six books", ancient and modern characters, and variant characters all belong to the scope of exegetics. Among ancient and modern calligraphy works, the most common ones are ancient and modern words and variant words. Scholars who are knowledgeable can tell whether they are correct or wrong. For example, the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai sentence: "Guanfan far shadow blue sky to make the best," the ancient book family wrote "shadow" as "scape", it should be said is correct. "King" is an ancient and modern word. The ancient word "scape" means "shadow", and the original meaning of "jing" is "sunshine", extending the meaning of scenes and shadows. Later, a "shadow" was created to represent "shadow" and the word "jing" lost its original meaning. If you do not understand ancient and modern characters, it is difficult to understand the writing style of ancient book writers.

The so-called variant words are a few ways of writing a word (that is, stroke changes). In the calligraphy work, in order to avoid the appearance of homonymous and homomorphic characters in the same word, the writer writes the characters in different styles. This is the requirement of the composition to seek the overall beauty of the work. Just as Sun Jiating said, "If you paint and apply different kinds of paintings, they will be of different shapes; all the points will be drawn together, and the bodies will be mutually ambiguous. The rules of one word are the rules of the end, and the words are the standards of the end. "But variant words have their origins, and they must not violate the positive word principle of "nothing". Calligraphers who wrote ancient calligraphy, calligraphy, and other handwritten calligraphy copybooks are examples of positive characters. Beyond this range, it is a typo. Because it cannot accurately express the meaning of the text, it makes the article impractical and the reader does not understand it. For example, there is a book of Tang Li Bai's poem: "Supposedly the Milky Way falls nine days," a mistake, written as "condensation is the Galaxy down nine days." The words "doubtful" and "condensing" have neither the "old or modern" relationship nor the "alien" connection. They are different in tone and meaning, and they violate the "orthodox" principle. In the 1980s, "Beijing Evening News" published the four characters of a calligrapher's work, "Protection of Birds." As the writer writes in traditional Chinese characters, he writes “protection” as “accepted”. The mistake of this word is exactly the opposite of the writer's original intention. "Protection of birds" has become a "preservation of birds," making jokes in the calligraphy world.

The ancients said: "If you don't recognize words, why talk about them, and you don't have rules, why are you talking about the law?" As long as you write a typo in a beautiful calligraphy work, it is difficult to get on to the elegance, and it is even less likely to spread to the world.