news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

One of the important reasons why calligraphy is considered a unique art form in China is the unique appearance of Chinese characters. It is clearly different from cuneiform and Roman letters. The strokes and structure are rigorous and varied, and it can even be said that it has its own beauty. For thousands of years, Chinese characters have been continuously improved and developed, and have developed towards being easy to write and easy to recognize.

However, Chinese also has many difficulties, such as "homophones", "synonyms" and multiple ambiguities. Since the late Qing Dynasty, with the introduction of Western technology and concepts, many masters have been deeply influenced and gradually developed a more radical idea, that is, "everything in China is backward, and everything in the West is progressive." Some people even proposed to abolish Chinese characters and use pinyin instead.

You can imagine that if this proposal is passed, our calligraphy will be "eliminated" from the ground up. Although it was not realized in the end, some people have improved and created new Chinese characters, such as Liu Bannong, a famous linguist and calligrapher. In response to the problem of unclear meaning of Chinese characters, he proposed a word "she".

Before this, both men and women were referred to as "he", but Liu Bannong thought that English was more accurate, using "he" for men and "she" for women. We have been using "he" all the time, which needs to be improved. However, the word "she" he invented caused criticism from women at the time, because many Chinese characters with derogatory meanings such as "jealous", "envious", "prostitute", etc.

The word "她" is a variant of "姐", but Liu Bannong changed it to the third person female pronoun, which was called an invention by people at that time. In order to cater to the fact that the second person "you" in English is gender-neutral, Liu Bannong and others merged the Chinese words "你" and "你" into "你". "你" is a variant of "奶", which also refers to the female partner, but is rarely used nowadays.

Until today, we still use the word "she" every day, but unfortunately few people know Liu Bannong. Liu Bannong, whose original name was Shou Peng, whose courtesy name was Bannong and whose pseudonym was Qu'an, was born on May 29, 1891 in a scholarly family in Jiangyin. He was good at poetry and calligraphy since childhood and was extremely intelligent.

Liu Bannong was acquainted with Lu Xun, Zhao Yuanren, Cai Yuanpei and others, all of whom were masters who were well-versed in both Chinese and Western culture. Many people only know that Liu Bannong was a linguist and poet, but they don't know that he was also very good at calligraphy. He integrated inscriptions and calligraphy, and learned from Kang Youwei, Liu Yong, Yan Zhenqing, Ouyang Xun and other masters, and also absorbed the brushwork from the inscriptions of the Qin and Han dynasties.

His characters are clumsy and clever, often starting with the tip of the brush, then retracting, lifting and pressing, with the center of the brush as the main stroke, with many movements, slowness, lightness, heaviness, shaking and trembling, and are ancient and strange, quite interesting. The characters are dangerous and stretched, with different heights on the left and right, and the center of gravity is like a horse in the wind. The contrast between dry and wet ink is obvious. These are obviously influenced by Kang Youwei and others.

Liu Bannong's calligraphy combines ancient style with individuality, and he was a relatively successful calligrapher during the Republic of China period. Unfortunately, he died young and was unable to continue to have an impact, but this character "She" is destined to make Liu famous in history.