Chinese bronze inscriptions
Chinese bronze inscriptions, also commonly referred to as bronze script or bronzeware script, are writing in a variety of Chinese scripts on ritual bronzes such as zhōng bells and dǐng tripodal cauldrons from the Shang dynasty to the Zhou dynasty and even later. Early bronze inscriptions were almost always cast, while later inscriptions were often engraved after the bronze was cast. The bronze inscriptions are one of the earliest scripts in the Chinese family of scripts, preceded by the oracle bone script.
Inscription on the Song ding, c. 800 BC
Left: Bronze fāng zūn ritual wine container, c. 1000 BC. The inscription commemorates a gift of cowrie shells to its owner. Right: Bronze fāng yí ritual container c. 1000 BC. An inscription of 180 characters appears twice on it, commenting on state rituals that accompany court ceremony, recorded by an official scribe.
Bronze biānzhōng bells from the early Warring States Tomb of Marquis Yĭ of Zēng
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000. This has led in part to the adoption of complementary transliteration systems as a means of representing the pronunciation of Chinese.
A 12th-century Song dynasty redaction of the Shuowen Jiezi
Chinese written from top-to-bottom on restaurant and bus stop signs in Hong Kong
A turtle plastron bearing oracle bone inscriptions
樽; Fāngzūn wine container – inscription commemorates a gift of cowrie shells.