Ideogramology (continued 4):

Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world. Ancient Chinese characters, ancient Egyptian characters, ancient Sumerian characters, Mayan scripts, and ancient Babylonian characters are all over four thousand years old. However, Chinese ideographic characters have been written and spoken, in terms of language usage, for over four thousand years with various adaptations but without any interruptions. While the other oldest characters have not been used for more than two thousand years and/or interrupted in the history of human language evolution. Most of them have evolved into the form of alphabetic letters (phonographic languages). At the same time, Chinese characters are still one of the most widely used characters in the world. They have had an important impact on the generation and development of other Asian countries’ characters. For example, Japanese Hiragana is from Chinese cursive script, and katakana is half of the Chinese character in Chinese regular scripts since the Tang Dynasty. Vietnam created a type of ideographic character, called Nanzi,  in the form of Chinese characters that many characters are modeled in the method of “phonetic characters”, where half of the word means the meaning of the word, and the other half means the pronunciation.

(To be continued)