The impact of digital technology on China's national literacy rate

Changes in hieroglyphs after the Cultural Revolution in China, the transformation of existing hieroglyphs and the simplification of words and expressions in various established language systems are analyzed. It was found that the spread of Internet slang has affected not only speech norms, but also centuries-old traditions. The impact of technology on writing skills, which is increasingly discussed and feared by both linguists and the general public is discussed and reasons for this are given. The research findings show the decisive role of information on illiteracy among young people, its problems and prospects. Conclusions are drawn on the role and importance of the psychophysiology of writing (in the case of China) and the impact of global technological processes on language simplification and modernization.

Keywords : Chinese, hieroglyph, alphabetic, cursive, writing process

1. The Chinese writing traditions. Writing and thinking express thoughts more accurately and describe events or phenomena more figuratively and works more actively. Writing allows all of a person's sensory systems to develop, interact, and develop harmoniously.

The socio-cultural psychology of ethnic groups contributes to the written works of folk-art organization. Language and writing are directly related to the history and traditions of an ethnic group. The admirers of hieroglyphics note that they have shaped the outstanding qualities of the Chinese nation. These are special pride, diligence, the ability to understand complex ideological structures and to perceive the most complex technologies.

Chinese culture had a great influence on the development of the cultures of neighboring countries and the major countries of the medieval world.

2. The psychology of the Chinese and a special type of thinking. The surviving original intact ancient texts have been dated by scholars to the 18th and 21st centuries. The idea for the hieroglyphs is attributed to Fu Xi, one of the mythical «three princes» of ancient China, who ruled the Celestial Empire from 2852 to 2737 B. C. According to myth, Duke Fu Xi saw a large dragon while walking along the bank of the Yellow River, the curious Duke Fu Xi quickly rewrote it and suddenly realized that the shape of the sign was very similar to the mark of a bird on the bank. He accidentally discovered the deeper principle of the unity of the surrounding beings and enshrined it in the bagua, the first inscriptional symbols of Han script, and began to replace the earlier Chinese knot script with hieroglyphs.

The earliest hieroglyphs are dated from the end of the second millennium BC. The first inscriptions were inscribed on animal bones and turtle shells. People used writing to ask for help from various gods and ancestor spirits, to ask oracles about their future. That is why the first script was called «jiaguwen (writing on bones and shells). It is also known as the Cheyenne script. According to scholars, during the Zhou Dynasty in the middle of the first millennium B. C. a unified grammatical system of the ancient Chinese language began to form, based on the languages of northern and southern Asia.

The use of writing for administrative and managerial purposes began; by that time hieroglyphic writing had already been established, but the hieroglyphic forms themselves varied widely from text to text. Naturally, it became necessary to systematize the hieroglyphics in order for the chancellery to function properly. In 800 B.C., the chief scribe of Zhou compiled the first catalog of hieroglyphs, which established the form of the characters used by subsequent state scribes.

In the 6th-5th century BC, around the time of the fall of the Zhou dynasty, there was also a decline in education. Scribes were becoming increasingly illiterate, which was immediately reflected in Chinese writing. When scribes could not remember the correct spelling of a character, they simply invented a new character and replaced it with this one. In this way, the hieroglyphs acquired many irregular forms, later called strange characters, which were copied by other, also illiterate scribes and became more and more common. The great Confucius himself, who devoted much time to the study of ancient texts, sadly acknowledged the careless attitude of his contemporaries toward such language: «When I was young, I knew scribes who left blank spaces, not being able to write hieroglyphs correctly, but now there are no such noble people left!"

Evolution of Hieroglyphics of Writing in China is thought to have been completed by the time of the Sankan catalog, that is, in the third century B. C. The two main characteristics of this process were the excess of hieroglyphs and the gradual change in their form.

Writing began to be widely used both in everyday life and in state structures. The creation of phonideograms as the easiest way to create new hieroglyphs led to the fact that the number of characters grew exponentially. The boundaries of the empire were constantly expanding, new concepts were constantly appearing to which new names had to be given. Although there was absolutely no way to control the distribution of Chinese characters, the state at least tried to monitor the appearance of new hieroglyphic characters. Thus, the Sankan list was reissued seven times over a period of 200 years. The seventh edition listed 7,380 characters; two centuries later, the number had risen to 10,000.

3. 'Disappearing writing. In ancient times, small tablets made of bamboo or soft wood were used for writing, and as a writing instrument — a hollow stem of bamboo with an ink tank attached on top. This device made it possible to carry out both straight and arc-shaped lines in any direction. At the same time, these lines had one common feature — they were the same thickness.

The third century BC was the century of fundamental changes in the field of writing tools. Cheng Miao devises a new writing tool — a rod made of soft wood with a fibrous tip. There was no need for a tank, because now one could simply dip the tip into the inkwell, and it was absorbed a sufficient amount of ink. The new tool started to be used when writing on silk. The new invention turned out to be more practical; the writing process became faster, and soon the new method of writing became ubiquitous.

At the end of the III century BC, the most famous of Qin Shihuang's generals, Meng Tian invents a brush. And three hundred years later, in 105 AD, there has become a harbinger of the Golden Age of a new writing instrument. Brush and paper have made a real revolution in hieroglyphic forms. Moreover, the brush has the ability to connect individual elements of the sign into a single whole due to its elasticity. Thus, It has given the opportunity to write not only hieroglyphs and even whole sentences without taking her hands off the paper, which significantly accelerated the writing process.

With the development of the speed of the hand movement, hieroglyphs became sketchy, with individual elements often drawn with less care and simply abbreviated and often simply omitted. Writing styles became most common among the masses because they simplified the writing process as much as possible.

Today it is said that it is enough to know 7–9,000 hieroglyphs to read a literary work (50,000 in total). The average person living in China today cannot even read old books and newspapers printed in Taiwan.

Professor Wang Ning of Beijing University of Education believes the problem lies in the decline of cultural and human social standards. However, in addition to the call to 'encourage young people to develop writing skills', the challenge for schools is to develop a workforce with 'a comprehensively graded education'.

Unlike previous printed versions, electronic devices contain little information about the nature of the hieroglyphs, often showing only simplified meanings and sounds.

Latin characters «pinyin» used by the Chinese on their cell phones. The Chinese use a set of Latin characters, 'pinyin', in their written communication on their cell phones. They add sounds from the internet, use technical terms or replace words with pictograms.

4. The writing reforms. The first step was a trial-and-error approach to determine the number of signs required for universal use. As a first step, it was empirically established that about 4,300 signs are used for universal use in educational texts, children's literature and popular literature.

The first list of simplified characters appeared in the 30s and numbered 2,400; more than 300 of them were officially recommended for use. However, with rare exceptions, simplified symbols were not accepted in Kuomintang China and later in Taiwan. The hieroglyphics simplification program was implemented only in the mid-50s in the PRC: access to the basics of literacy was facilitated for the general population. Simplification of hieroglyphs was finally implemented in China in the mid-1950s, allowing the public access to the basics of literacy.

In 1919, the so-called alphabet was adopted zhuyin tzimu in order to teach Chinese hieroglyphs for educational purposes. Its pronunciation is simplified with Latin characters and used mainly in the field of school education.

The results of reform efforts turned out to be very modest. The results of reform efforts have been very modest. As a result, there is a significant gap between modern literacy and the ancient Chinese writing tradition. In the context of the computerization of society that is taking place before our eyes in China, the hieroglyphic reforms have generally lost their meaning. However, alphabetic writing has surprisingly proven to be very effective in the creation of various text programs in Chinese.

5. Conclusion. The devices currently in use by one billion Chinese people mechanically select standard hieroglyphs and transfer them to the text field, where there is no individuality. Only 5 % of respondents see this as a serious problem. Others believe that mobile phones and computers can overcome hieroglyphic illiteracy. The urgency of this matter and the increasing need for people to interact with each other has led to fundamental changes in language as a specialized social institution, reflecting the technological changes that have occurred. The writing system was not unified and official hieroglyphic status (as an administrative and reference form) was not granted.

Nevertheless, the practicality of cursive writing allowed it not only to survive for two thousand years, but also to become the most common and natural descriptive form for native Chinese speakers.

Internationally, digital signature input technology continues to gain popularity and adoption. This is because, although there are many ways to identify a person's identity, the signature remains a generally accepted and accessible sign of proof, a kind of 'personal seal'. It is not for nothing that handwriting input and recognition programs have been developed, 'digital pens' that synchronize our records with computer screens, portable scanners that are also used to transfer handwriting directly into computer memory, and programs that convert printed text into handwriting.

It can therefore be summarized that handwritten letters have not disappeared completely, but rather are in a transitional phase and their future is closely linked to computer technology.

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