Over the past few decades, about 150000 oracle bone inscriptions have been unearthed from Yin Ruins, and nearly 5000 words have been found. According to statistics, there are 1723 Chinese characters that can be recognized and assigned as Chinese characters, 2549 single characters that can not be recognized and assigned as Chinese characters, and 371 combined characters.
From the perspective of the structure of characters, the so-called "six characters" of later generations, namely pictographic, referential, understanding, phonetic, pictophonetic and Zhuanzhu, have been possessed in oracle bone inscriptions, but more of them are pictographic, understanding, pictophonetic and phonetic.
Hieroglyphs. They all draw specific things through the province, such as: (dog), (pig) and so on, which are like animal bodies; (wood), (grass) and so on, which are like plant branches; (sun), (Moon) and so on, which are taken from astronomical phenomena; (earth), (field) and so on, which are taken from geography; (man), (woman) and so on, which are like human forms; (GE), (Ding), (Tang) and so on It depicts weapons, utensils and buildings.
Huiyi character is actually a kind of "image meaning". For example, the left side is like food utensils, and the right side is like people. People are close to eating, so "Ji" has the meaning of "jiu". Another example is that the person on the right turns his head to show that he has finished his meal, so "already" means "already".
Pictophonetic characters are composed of several pictographic characters and ideographic characters. One character is used as "pictographic symbol" to represent meaning, and the other as "phonetic symbol" to represent sound. For example, the word "Yu" has meaning below and sound above. The word "Si" has meaning on the left and sound on the right.
Pseudoloan character is a symbol that borrows the sound of pictograph to express the action of other homophonic things. However, after borrowing, the shape of the original character loses its meaning and becomes a homophonic substitute. For example, the "feather" of a feather is borrowed as "Yi" (i.e. tomorrow) and its shape is still "feather"; the "phoenix" of a phoenix is borrowed as "Feng" and its shape is still "phoenix".
According to the current oracle bone inscriptions, in the early period, that is, before and after Wuding, there were more pictographs. In the late period, that is, in the period of emperor Yi and Emperor Xin, there were fewer pictographs and more pictophonetic characters, and many characters had been basically shaped. Therefore, it can be said that the oracle bone script is already a strict and regular writing system.
In oracle bone inscriptions, except for a few big characters written with a brush first and then carved with a knife, most of them are directly carved on tortoise shells and animal bones with a special bronze knife. Because these materials are relatively hard, they are often straight lines, so most of the characters become square or rectangular. This unique national culture and art has been preserved to this day. There is the word "CE" in oracle bone inscriptions, which is like a collection of bamboo slips. Since there were pens and bamboo slips in the Shang Dynasty, we can see that there were documents written in the bamboo slips at that time. In the book of history, there are five pieces that are said to be the remains of the Shang Dynasty, among which three are believed to be from the hands of the merchants. Zhou people said: "only the ancestors of Yin, there are books, there are Canons" ("Shangshu · duotu"), should be credible.
