Later on, to reduce ambiguity, new characters were created for these phonetic borrowings by appending a radical that conveys a broad semantic category, resulting in compound xingsheng ( phono-semantic) characters ( 形聲字). At first, words that were difficult to represent visually were written using a "borrowed" character for a similar-sounding word ( rebus principle). Although the script is not alphabetic, the majority of characters were created based on phonetic considerations. Throughout the Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word. ![]() Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters, including Oracle Bone, Bronze, and Seal scripts. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the Analects, the Mencius, and the Zuo zhuan. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the late Shang dynasty. Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. ![]() Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.
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