Calligraphy is the art of writing Chinese characters. To understand calligraphy, one must first know something about Chinese characters. The various nationalities in the world have created their own languages, but the Chinese have created an independent calligraphic art. Why? The reason is mainly related to the features of the language.
Languages fall into two systems; one expresses sound; the other expresses meaning. The cuneiform writing of the Sumerian, the Katakana in the Japanese language, English, French, Russian, German and Latin-these languages are phonetic. The language of the sacred books of ancient Egypt, the pictographic language of Crete, the Chinese language and the language of the Dongba nationality are all ideographic.
Ideographic languages have for the most part become extinct. Only one such language, Chinese, is still widely used today. A comparison of the two systems of language indicates that a phonetic language has an advantage over an ideographic language. Alphabets with few letters can easily be learned and memorized. Such a language can be popularized more easily. The pinyin form of Chinese represents the direction of language development. An ideographic language has a great many symbols. The morphology is cumbersome and difficult. It is hard to learn and remember it. Such a language cannot easily be popularized.
The inscriptions on bones and tortoise .shells of the Shang Dynasty, three thousand years ago or so, had vocabularies of five thousand symbols. The recently published Han Yu Da Zi Dian, a comprehensive Chinese-language dictionary, has over 54,000 entries. So vast is the Chinese vocabulary! Every character can be written in regular script, grass script, official script, etc., and every script can be written differently, ranging from a few to as many as scores of styles. The largest runs to about one hundred. For example, bai shou tu shows one hundred ways to write shou (longevity) in official script.
The Chinese language contains an enormous number of characters. A Chinese who spends his entire life learning to write his language will find it difficult to complete his task. The difficulty facing the novice can hardly be imagined.
Everything in the world is said to have a dual character. If it possesses advantages, it will also have drawbacks. This is also true to language. In the case of Chinese there is a huge stock of characters and the morphology varies greatly. This means that you can write words in many ways. The drawback is thus turned into an advantage. It opened up a huge vista for Chinese calligraphy to develop into an independent art. Chinese characters may be difficult to master, but they are governed by rules. Just like notes in music, characters are formed by changing the combination of elements. Tens of thousands of words in Chinese can be broken down into several hundred component parts. Take, for instance, the two characters Zhong Guo (China). The character zhong is made up of and a vertical stroke . The character guo is made up of and . Further analysis of Chinese characters leads to the discovery that there are eight basic strokes: namely, dot , dash, perpendicular downstroke , downstroke to the left , wavelike stroke , hook , upstroke to the right and bend. The eight basic strokes, like notes in music, can be developed into many "tunes" and "movements", or schools of Chinese calligraphy.
Every Chinese character can be said to contain a picture. The two characters and show sunrise and sunset. In primitive pottery inscriptions was written as , made up of (sun), (moon), and (mountain), showing that the moon had gone down behind a mountain and that the sun is rising. The character was written as in ancient script. In official script it is written as . indicates grass. indicates a thick growth of grass. The picture shows that the sun has set behind a thick growth of grass. It is not too much to say that these two characters are pictures of sunrise and sunset. The reason why Chinese calligraphy has devel oped into an art containing images may be closely related to the fact that a picture stands for a word. Some will perhaps remark that Chinese calligraphy is the art of the brush. This is true. If you use a stiff or hard pen, it is difficult to write such beautiful characters as done by the brush. If you try to use a brush to write the twenty-six letters in the pinyt'n system, it is also difficult to create such beautiful images as in Chinese calligraphy.
