These steles are two of about 3000 at the largest stele museum in China. It is located in Xi'an and started with steles from the 7th century A.D. The stones represent a great variety of script, including traditional, simplified, and archaic symbols.
The earliest surviving characters are inscribed in oracle bones and only about a half of them can be related to (and therefore deciphered) later writing styles. These bone artifacts are scattered throughout the world's museums but I didn't see any in Xi'an. There are several legends that explain when and how characters where brought about. One states that they were inspired by different vein patterns, and another suggests that a scholar thought of the idea after observing the distinctive patterns of various bird footprints.
I've been asked by several folks now about what it is like to read from top to bottom. Although Chinese characters, like other East Asian characters, were traditionally written from top to bottom and from right to left, in modern times, due to western influence this is not the case. It is also worth mentioning that over the years, the characters have gone from being pictorial symbols, to traditional symbols (of which there are dozens of versions), and then to the simplified characters used today in mainland China.
The majority of simplified characters were introduced during the 1950's and 1960's. During this same period, Pinyin was also introduced to schools as a method to attach a common pronunciation to each of the characters. It is important to understand that before these changes, the Chinese language consisted only of written characters and scholars' pronunciation (passed down and memorized). This explains why throughout China there are 10 or so major spoken 'dialects' (each of which can be divided into dozens of sub-categories) that are mutually unintelligible. However, as I have traveled to various cities, I have come to notice that youth often use the new standardized Chinese (Putonghua) as their first language, while their elders use the area's accepted 'dialect' and understand as much Putonghua as their job requires. This being the case, most educated Chinese are now bilingual at minimum, but with several generations, the dialects may begin to completely die out. Interestingly, the same process is going on throughout Arabic speaking counties.
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