Oracle bone script (L) and Chinese bronze inscription (R): “mountain” and “rain.” (Source: Bronze Script – A Step ForwardĪs the Bronze Age came, words were widely casted onto bronze vessels used for sacrificial ceremonies. Earlier this year, Legend of Deification, a Chinese movie featuring the life story of a famous politician/king advisor of that era, incorporated the oracle bone script style into its poster. This is the font in Chinese history that looks the most ancient, mysterious, primitive, or even tribal. Prior to the Bronze Age, kings and priests on the land that is now China used to carve hieroglyphs onto these same media, set them on fire, and interpret the cracking marks afterwards and the images they carved soon evolved into a script.
The first documented Chinese words, dating back to the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 B.C.), were carved into animal bones and tortoise shells for divination, hence the name oracle bone script (甲骨文). Oracle Bone Script – The First Chinese Words No one has trained us to think this way, but as native speakers, we’d know it when spotting a misused font, just like how English speakers would never mix the time periods of Gothic fonts, cursive, and typewriter style. The Chinese writing system and fonts, like the language itself, have evolved for thousands of years and the fonts that remain preserved today seem to each serve a default purpose in the speakers’ minds, whether it be for engraving, writing, or printing.
(This struggle of losing traditional scripts due to modern technology also exists in many other cultures, for example, Urdu.) They are relatively modern fonts invented for the convenience of print and digital presentation, rather than for carrying cultural value or personality statements. If you do an online search for “Chinese tattoo fail,” you’ll find most of the tattoos are not only hilarious in content, but also feature a similar font style: rigid, squarish, every stroke cleanly separated from each other. “Chinese tattoo fail.” (Source: Unfortunately, this is a common mistake when international languages are visually presented outside their regions.
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