Image of character evolution in classical chinese, with hypothesized pronunciation from p.194 of "Early Chinese Writing" by William Boltz, in The World's Writing SystemsISBN978-0-19-507993-7. Boltz argues that the character for 年 nián < *ˁznen "harvest, year" was formed by adding the character 人 rén < *znen "person" below 禾 hé "growing grain".
File:Old chinese(2).svg is a vector version of this file. It should be used in place of this PNG file when not inferior.
This licensing tag was added to this file as part of the GFDL licensing update.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/CC BY-SA 3.0Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0truetrue