NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Hànzì

Chinese characters or Han characters (汉字/漢字) are used in the written forms of the Chinese (written) language (pinyin: zhōngw n) written in Chinese characters The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: H nyǔ, Hu yǔ, or Zhōngw n) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese... Chinese language, and to varying degrees in the The Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. The Japanese name for the language is in linguistics), similar to Serbian/Croatian. Additionally, there are a suggestive number of apparently regular correspondences in basic vocabulary, such as 日系, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese... Japanese and The Korean language is the most widely used language in Korea, and is the official language of both North and South Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 78 million Korean speakers, including large groups in the former Soviet Union, the United... Korean languages (though the latter only in South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK; Korean: (Han Nation, 한국; 韓國) or Official language Korean Capital Seoul President Roh Moo-hyun Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan Area - Total - % water Ranked 107th 99,274 km² 0.3% Population - Total (2003) - Density Ranked 24th... South Korea). Use of Chinese characters has disappeared from the Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, less commonly tiếng Việt Nam or Việt ngữ), formerly known as Annamite, is the national and official language of Vietnam ( or (Sino-Vietnamese) words. In fact, as the vernacular language of Vietnam gradually grew in prestige... Vietnamese language — in which they were used until the (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999... 20th century — and from North Korea, officially the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK; Korean: (North Chosŏn; 북조선; 北朝鮮). Official language Korean Capital Pyŏngyang Chairman Kim Jong-il1 President Kim Yong-nam2 Premier Pak Pong-ju Area - Total - % water Ranked 97th 120... North Korea, where they have been completely replaced by Hangul is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language (as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China). For other romanized spellings of Hangul, please see Names below. While Hangul writing may appear ideographic to the uninitiated, it is actually phonetic. Each Hangul syllabic block consists of several... Hangul.

Chinese characters are called hànzì in Mandarin listen?( Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: Běifānghuà, lit. Northern speech OR 北方方言 Hanyu Pinyin: Běifāng Fāngyán, lit. Northern dialects), is a category of Chinese dialects spoken across... Mandarin Chinese, The characters for Kanji, lit. Han characters. Kanji (漢字, literally characters from Han China; see also Han Chinese) are Chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are one of the four character sets used in the modern Japanese writing system (the other three being hiragana, katakana and romaji). This article... kanji in Japanese, Hanja (lit. ( (음훈; 音訓; from 音 sound + 訓 meaning, teaching). For example, the character 愛 is referred to in character dictionaries as (사람 인), where saram means person and in is its sound. When the two characters are put together to form the word 愛人, they... hanja or hanmun in Korean, and hán tư (also used in the . Chữ n m ( gave way to a Roman-style alphabet known as , few Vietnamese today can read it. After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, scholars began their creation of . In other words, approximately 1,000 years of Vietnamese cultural history is recorded in this unique system. This... chu nom script) in Vietnamese. However, the last is considered an extremely sinified form and Chinese characters are normally called chữ nho (字儒). (Note that the In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. This is the definition established in 1933 by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. Free morphemes like Reference Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1992 Categories: Language ... morphemes are reversed as is common in Vietnamese borrowings from Chinese.)

In Chinese, a word or phrase (词/詞 cí) (a unit of meaning) is composed of one or more characters (字 zì), as in hànzì (汉字/漢字), which has two characters. As in all Spoken Chinese The Chinese spoken language(s) comprise(s) many regional variants. Although the English word ) and spoken language (语[語] ), while there is no collective term that encompasses all of the variations of the spoken language. Terms used to describe spoken Chinese, such as 汉语 hànyǔ... spoken Chinese, each Chinese character is read as a single A syllable (ancient Greek: is often a sonorant, usually a vowel, diphthong, or triphthong, but sometimes including consonants like [l] and [r]. The syllable ) consists of a nucleus and a coda. Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus. A coda-less syllable of the form syllable, while a syllable that has... syllabic unit.

Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are not linguistically related to Chinese, and in order to make Chinese characters work in those languages with radically different grammar, many adaptations had to be made. In many cases in these languages, characters different from those used in Chinese are used for words or ideas of the same meaning. Also, many similar characters with identical meanings are written with slight differences. One example is Black is a color with several subtle differences in meaning. Color or light Black can be defined as the visual impression experienced in directions from which no visible light reaches the eye. (This makes a contrast with whiteness, the impression of any combination of colors of light that equally stimulates... black, which is written as 黒 (kuro and koku ) in Japanese, but as 黑 (hēi) in Chinese. In the (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar (often from (1900 to 1999 in common usage). Sometimes it is known as the nineteen hundreds (1900s), referring to... twentieth century, thousands of Simplified Chinese characters (Simplified Chinese: 简体字; Traditional Chinese: 簡體字; pinyin: jiǎntǐzì; also called 简化字/簡化字, jiǎnhuàzì) are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. The other set is Traditional Chinese... simplified characters were created or adopted in mainland China, creating a distinction between, for example, 汉 in simplified characters used in mainland China and Singapore, and 漢 in Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. The other form is simplified Chinese characters, created by the government of the Peoples Republic of China (mainland China). Traditional Chinese is text written with Traditional Chinese characters. Traditional Chinese characters are used... traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

For these reasons, particularly in China and Japan, where Chinese characters are used most often, it is frequently necessary to distinguish between Chinese Chinese characters and Japanese Chinese characters (though in The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. It is the third most common first language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence... English the distinction can often be made well enough by using the respective words hanzi and kanji).

Styles

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漢字 in 《尋隱者不遇》—賈島松下問童子言師採藥去隻在此山中雲深不知處 Seeking the Master but not Meeting by Jia Dao Beneath a pine I asked a little child. He said the... small seal script, Centuries: 4th century BC - 3rd century BC - 2nd century BC Decades: 270s BC 260s BC 250s BC 240s BC 230s BC - 220s BC - 210s BC 200s BC 190s BC 180s BC 170s BC Years: 225 BC 224 BC 223 BC 222 BC 221 BC - 220 BC - 219 BC 218 BC... 220 BC

The earliest Chinese characters are the so called " Oracle bone script (甲骨文 pinyin: Jia3gu3wen2) are incised characters found on ox scapula and tortoise plastrons (oracle bones) thought to be the earliest Chinese characters. Oracle bone script is seen to develop over the several generations of Shang kings, so there is no single defined form of for... Oracle Script" or (甲骨文) jiǎgǔwén during the Shang Dynasty (Chinese: 商朝) or Yin Dynasty (殷代) (1600 BC - 1046 BC) followed the legendary Xia Dynasty and preceded the Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC) in China. Information about the Shang Dynasty comes from bronze artifacts and oracle bones, were turtle shells or cattle scapula on which... Shang Dynasty, followed by the Bronzeware script (金文 pinyin jin wen or 鐘鼎文 pinyin zhong1 ding3 wen2) is a family of scripts found on Chinese bronzes such as zhong (bells) and ding (tripods), since bronze artifacts with Chinese characters span many centuries and they have been found in many areas of China... Bronzeware Script or (金文) jīnwén during the has often been applied to the Zhou period because the Zhous early decentralized rule invites comparison with medieval rule in Europe. However, historians debate the meaning of the term by Sima Qian. Eastern Zhou divides into two subperiods. The first, from 722 to 481 BC, is called the Spring... Zhou Dynasty. These scripts no longer serve as anything but a source for scholars.

The first script that is still in (restricted) use today is the " 《尋隱者不遇》—賈島松下問童子言師採藥去隻在此山中雲深不知處 Seeking the Master but not Meeting by Jia Dao Beneath a pine I asked a little child. He said the... Seal Script" or 篆書[篆书] zhuànshū. It is the result of the efforts of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇) (November or December 260 BC - September 10, 210 BC), personal name Zheng, was king of the Chinese State of Qin from 247 BC to 221 BC, and then the first emperor of a unified China from 221 BC to 210 BC, ruling under the... Qin Shi Huang, in the standardization of the Chinese script. The Seal Script, as the name suggests, is now only used in artistic seals. Few people are still able to read the seal script, although the art of carving a traditional seal in the seal script remains alive in China today.

Scripts that are still used regularly for print are the "Clerk Script" or 隸書[隶书] lìshū, the "Wei Monumental" or 魏碑 wèibēi, the " Calligraphy in the Kaishu style The Regular Script, or in Chinese Kaishu (楷書 Pinyin: kǎishū) and Japanese Kaisho, also commonly known as Standard Regular (正楷), is the newest of the Chinese calligraphy style (peaked at the 7th century), hence most common in modern writings and... Regular Script" or 楷書[楷书] kǎishū, the "Song Style" or 宋體[宋体] sòngtǐ (mainly used in printing and computer fonts), and the "Running Script" or 行書[行书] xíngshū. Modern Chinese handwriting is usually modeled on the Running Script.

Finally, there is the "Draft Script" (also called "Grass Script"), or 草書[草书] cǎoshū. The draft script is an idealized calligraphic style, where characters are suggested rather than realized. Despite being cursive to the point where individual strokes are no longer differentiable, the draft script is highly revered for the beauty and freedom that it embodies. Many simplified Chinese characters are based on this style.

Radicals

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漢字 in Bronzeware script (金文 pinyin jin wen or 鐘鼎文 pinyin zhong1 ding3 wen2) is a family of scripts found on Chinese bronzes such as zhong (bells) and ding (tripods), since bronze artifacts with Chinese characters span many centuries and they have been found in many areas of China... bronzeware script, ca. Centuries: 10th century BC - 9th century BC - 8th century BC Decades: 850s BC 840s BC 830s BC 820s BC 810s BC - 800s BC - 790s BC 780s BC 770s BC 760s BC 750s BC Events and Trends 804 BC - Hadad-nirari IV of Assyria conquers Damascus. 804 BC - Death of Pedubastis... 800 BC

Main article: A radical (from Latin by Xu Shen (许慎) (d.147 AD) is the first to thoroughly describe the characters and their radicals. Xu attributed all characters to 540 radicals. The early dictionaries did not order the characters for each radical by the number of strokes. This ordering was introduced... radical

Each character has a fundamental component, or radical (部首 Chinese: bù shǒu, Japanese: bushu, literally "initial portion"), and this design principle is used in Chinese dictionaries to logically order characters in sets.

Full characters are ordered according to their initial radical, which fall into roughly 200 types. Then these are subcategorised by their total number of Stroke order refers to the way of writing Chinese characters. Each character is made up of a number of strokes (Chinese characters were originally written using a brush) which must be written in a prescribed order. A stroke is a single movement of the writing instrument. Stroke order can refer... strokes.

This principle of categorisation is exploited by everybody who must learn to write Chinese characters: the vast number of Chinese characters can be much more easily memorized if they are mentally broken down into their constituent radicals.

Classification

Chinese scholars classify Han characters in several groups. The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are represented the head of an ox, and if it is turned upside down, a bovine head with horns can be seen. Pictograms remain in common use today, serving as signs or instructions. Because of their graphical nature and fairly realistical style, they are widely used to indicate public toilets, or... pictograms, which are pictorial representations of the morpheme represented. There are also A Chinese character. The ideographic representation of a . Japanese ideograms, or Kanji, as well as Korean ideograms, or Hanja, are mostly Chinese characters, sometimes altered in shape, or native characters made to resemble Chinese characters. (The characters of Japanese origin are called 国字, or ). From their introduction in the... ideograms that attempt to graphicalize abstract concepts, such as "up" (上) and "down" (下). However, these pictograms and ideograms take up but a small proportion of Chinese A Chinese logogram, which is also an ideogram. A logogram, or logograph, is a single written character which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other orthography, such as syllabaries, abjads, and alphabets, where each symbol primarily represents a sound or... logograms.

Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters

Most Chinese characters, however, are radical-radical compounds, in which each element (radical) of the character hints at the meaning, and radical-phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the kind of concept the character describes, and the other hints at the pronunciation. This last type accounts for the majority of Chinese logograms. Note that despite being called "compounds", these logograms are single entities in themselves; they are written so that they take up the same amount of space as any other logogram.

Note that due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters are often useless and sometimes quite misleading in modern usage. This is particularly true in non-Chinese languages.

Classification has its own problems, as the origins of characters are often obscure. For example, the character for "East" (東; Chinese: dōng, Japanese: higashi and tō), which combines the "tree" radical (木) and the "sun" radical (日), is usually considered a radical-radical compound. Though it appears to represent a sun rising through trees, and this is both an evocative image and a useful mnemonic, the origin and classification of the character are disputed among scholars. While some agree with the radical-radical classification, others see it as a unique character in and of itself — some claim it as being derived from an early pictograph of bundled sticks.

As another example, the character for "mother" (媽 in Chinese mā) consists of one component meaning "female" (女) and another one meaning "horse" (馬 mǎ). The first component denotes a female entity, whereas the second suggests the pronunciation by referring to the word for "horse." The reason that "horse" was chosen to represent mother may be that horses — in a historical context — were often used to represent "steadfastness". The majority of Chinese characters, like this example, have one component that suggests the meaning and another that suggests pronunciation. In many cases, even the component intended to suggest pronunciation has an abstract semantic relation to the idea expressed by the character. This is possible because the phonetic system of Chinese allows for many words to have the same pronunciation ( Homonyms (in Greek means has the same name, , a part of a whale called a , a savings , in this sentence is not homophonous with too or two because the vowel sound is different.) the metal and . This term is particularly appropriate where the homograph, such as in that they are... homonymy), and because the consideration of phonetic similarity used in a character generally ignores its Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. All languages use intonation to express emphasis, emotion, or other such nuances, but not every language uses tone to distinguish meaning outright. When this occurs, tones are equally important and essential as phonemes (discrete sounds, for example, /t... tone and the In speech there are different ways of producing a consonant. Manners of articulation include: Nasals, where there is a total blockage and the sound instead goes through the nose. Examples include English /m/, /n/, etc. Plosives, or stops, an explosion resulting from a momentary closure and then release of air... manner of articulation of its initial consonant (but not the In speech, consonants may have different places of articulation, generally with full or partial stoppage of the airstream. The descriptions below list positions where the obstruction may occur: Bilabial, between the lips Labiodental, between the lip and teeth Linguolabial, between the lip and the tongue tip Dental, between the top... place of articulation).

Orthography

Chinese characters all take up the same amount of space. One of the easiest ways for beginners to ensure this is with a grid as guidance. In addition to strictness in the amount of space a character takes up, Chinese characters are written with very precise rules. The three most important rules are the strokes employed, the stroke placement, and the order with which they are written (see Stroke order refers to the way of writing Chinese characters. Each character is made up of a number of strokes (Chinese characters were originally written using a brush) which must be written in a prescribed order. A stroke is a single movement of the writing instrument. Stroke order can refer... Stroke order). Most words can be written with just one stroke order, though some words also have variant stroke orders, which may result in different stroke counts. On a larger scale, Chinese text is traditionally written from top to bottom and then right to left, but it is more common today to see the same orientation as Western languages: going from left to right and then top to bottom. Most Punctuation marks are written symbols that do not correspond to either phonemes (sounds) of a spoken language nor to lexemes (words and phrases) of a written language, but which serve to organize or clarify written language. See orthography. The round brackets) ((, )), square brackets ([, ]), curly brackets ( (/) space between words to provide... punctuation was adopted from Western ones, but there are a few exceptions: for example, names of books are marked with a wavy line drawn to their right in vertical text, or enclosed in a special double pointed bracket in horizontal text.

Common errors while writing Chinese characters include incorrect stroke direction, incorrect stroke order, incorrect stroke length relative to other strokes, and incorrect placement of strokes relative to other strokes. Each mistake is highly visible to the literate eye due to the imperfections of the human fingers, as well as the weight given to the different parts of a stroke. Mistakes are often shunned, as they are marks of illiteracy or incompetence. In a culture that values scholarship as its highest virtue, such attributions are highly undesirable. Because of this strictness in not only the image of the character, but how the image is produced, it is considered by many the most difficult to learn properly.

Due to the long history of China, as well as many stylistic variations that have developed and the many attempts by past rulers to standardize writing, some characters have multiple forms. The characters themselves can be considered separate, but often are merely derivatives of each other in that their composition is of the same root. They are often not considered simplifications, as their stroke count is sometimes the same, and often lessened only but a slight amount. The most famous today is probably the character for sword (劍), where the radical (on the right) is knife (刀). The same word can be written with different forms for the radical, including using 刃 or 刀 itself.

The usage of traditional characters versus simplified characters varies greatly, and can depend on both the local customs and the medium. Often, simplified characters would be used in everyday writing, or quick scribblings, while traditional characters would be used in printed works. However, the PRC's adoption of simplified characters has almost completely removed all traces of their traditional counterparts, save for in Hong Kong (香港; Cantonese IPA: ; Jyutping: hoeng1 gong2; Yale: heūng góng; pinyin: Xiānggǎng; Wade-Giles: Hsiang-kang) is one of the two Special Administrative Regions of the Peoples Republic of China. (The other one is Macau.) Administratively, the name Hong Kong... Hong Kong and refers to all permanent inhabitants of Macau. But narrowly, it refers to an ethnic group in Macau originating from Portuguese descent, usually mixed with Chinese blood. Besides historical colonial relics, the biggest attractions in Macau are the casinos. Though many forms of gambling are legal there, the most popular game... Macau. There is no appropriate time or place to use either system, and often, it is what the target audience understands, as well as the upbringing of the writer. In addition there is a special system of characters used for writing numerals in financial contexts; these characters are deliberately chosen to be complicated, to prevent forgeries.

Dictionaries

The design and use of a A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with their glyphs, or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. Many dictionaries also provide pronunciation information, word derivations, histories, or etymologies, illustrations, usage guidance, and examples in sentences. Dictionaries are most commonly... dictionary of Chinese characters presents interesting problems. Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for the Chinese characters. The great majority of these schemes — beloved by their inventors but nobody else — have appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly widespread use. This is the system of A radical (from Latin by Xu Shen (许慎) (d.147 AD) is the first to thoroughly describe the characters and their radicals. Xu attributed all characters to 540 radicals. The early dictionaries did not order the characters for each radical by the number of strokes. This ordering was introduced... radicals.

Chinese character dictionaries often allow users to locate entries in several different ways. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries of Chinese characters list characters in radical order: characters are grouped together by radical, and radicals containing fewer Stroke order refers to the way of writing Chinese characters. Each character is made up of a number of strokes (Chinese characters were originally written using a brush) which must be written in a prescribed order. A stroke is a single movement of the writing instrument. Stroke order can refer... strokes come before radicals containing more strokes. Under each radical, characters are listed by their total number of strokes. In Japanese and Korean dictionaries, it is usually possible to search for characters by sound, using Kana is a general term for two types of syllabic Japanese script: hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). These were developed as an alternative and adjunct to ideograph based characters of Chinese origin, or Kanji (漢字). Hiragana and katakana (grouped vertically). Syllables in parenthesis... Kana and Hangul is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language (as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China). For other romanized spellings of Hangul, please see Names below. While Hangul writing may appear ideographic to the uninitiated, it is actually phonetic. Each Hangul syllabic block consists of several... Hangul. Most dictionaries also allow searches by total number of strokes, and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well.

For instance, to look up the character 松 (pine tree) in a typical dictionary, the user first determines which part of the character is the radical, then counts the number of strokes in the radical (in this case four), and turns to the radical index (usually located on the inside front or back cover of the dictionary). Under the number 4, the user locates the radical 木, then turns to the page number listed, which is the start of the listing of all the characters containing this radical. This page will have a sub-index giving stroke numbers and page numbers. The right half of the character also contains four strokes, so the user locates the number 4, and turns to the page number given. From there, the user must scan the entries to locate the character he or she is seeking. Some dictionaries have a sub-index which lists every character containing each radical, so that if the user knows the number of strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, he or she can locate the correct page number directly.

In Korean, character dictionaries are usually called Okpyeon (옥편; 玉篇), which literally means "Jewel Book", rather like the Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. It is said... Latin word thesaurus ("treasure"). 玉篇 is also the name of a fourth-century Chinese dictionary from the Liang Dynasty 梁朝 (502-557) was the third of Southern dynasties in China, followed by the Chen Dynasty. Nan Liang Dynasty 南梁, founded in 555, claimed to be the real legitimate successor of Liang Dynasty, only to be eliminated by Sui Dynasty in 587. ... Liang Dynasty.

Another popular dictionary system is the The four corner method (四角號碼檢字法) is a method of encoding Chinese characters using four numerical digits per character (in some situations, an additional digit is used). The method was invented by Wang Yun-Wuu (or Y. W. Wong), the Editor-in-chief of the... four corner method.

Most Chinese-English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries sold to English speakers use the radical lookup method combined with an alphabetical listing of characters based on their Pinyin (拼音, pīnyīn) literally means join (together) sounds (a less literal translation being phoneticize, spell or transcription) in Chinese and usually refers to Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (汉语拼音, literal meaning: Han language pinyin), which is a system... pinyin A romanization or latinization is a system for representing a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, where the original word or language used a different writing system. Methods of romanization include transliteration, representing written text, and transcription, representing the spoken word. The latter can be subdivided into may... romanization system. To use one of these dictionaries, the reader finds the radical and stroke number of the character, as before, and locates the character in the radical index. The character's entry will have the character's pronunciation in pinyin written down; the reader then turns to the main dictionary section and looks up the pinyin spelling alphabetically, just as if it were an English dictionary.

Derivatives of Han characters

Besides Korean and Japanese, a number of Asian languages have historically been written with Han characters, or with characters modified from Han characters. They include:

Number of Chinese characters

The question of how many characters there are is still the subject of debate. In the 18th century, A comprehensive collection of continental features is found in Europe, albeit on a smaller scale than elsewhere. Mountain ranges, peninsulas, islands and more arid or cold regions can be seen in this satellite composite image of Europe Europe is a historical and cultural continent, and a geographical subcontinent, forming the... European scholars claimed the total tally to be about 80,000. This number, however, is thought to be exaggerated as the character count varies by dictionary and its comprehensiveness. For example, the The Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典; Kangxi Zidian) was a dictionary, compiled under an edict from the Qing Dynasty Emperor Kangxi of China in 1710. It was completed and published in 1716 and named in honour of the Emperor. The dictionary contains some 47,000 plus entries, with Chinese... Kangxi Dictionary lists about 40,000 characters, while the modern Zhonghua Zihai lists in excess of 80,000. One reason for the overwhelming number of characters is due to the existence of rarely-occurring variant and obscure characters (many of which are unused, even in Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese (文言, pinyin: wényán, literal meaning: literary language or 古文, literal: ancient written language) is a traditional style of written Chinese prose using grammar and vocabulary very different from any modern spoken form of Chinese. Classical Chinese was used for almost all... Classical Chinese). Note, however, that no two characters are ever ConTEXT is a freeware text editor directed at programmers. External Links ConTEXT home page Categories: Text editors | Stub ... contextually identical.

The large number of Chinese characters is due to their logographic nature — for every In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. This is the definition established in 1933 by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. Free morphemes like Reference Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1992 Categories: Language ... morpheme there must be a symbol, and sometimes there are variant characters have developed for the same In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. This is the definition established in 1933 by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. Free morphemes like Reference Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1992 Categories: Language ... morpheme. It has also been claimed that the sheer number of characters is used as a way to separate scholars from the ordinary, and perhaps even to keep certain texts from being read by but the most scholarly.

China

It is usually said that about 3,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), and a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Note that it is not necessary to know a character for every known word of Chinese, as the majority of modern Chinese words are compounds made of two or more In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. This is the definition established in 1933 by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. Free morphemes like Reference Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1992 Categories: Language ... morphemes, and are thus written not with a single unique character, but with multiple, usually common, characters. There are 6763 Hanzi in GB-2313, the Chinese national standard. The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi proficiency test covers approximately 5000 hanzi.

Japan

In Japan there are 1945 "daily use The characters for Kanji, lit. Han characters. Kanji (漢字, literally characters from Han China; see also Han Chinese) are Chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are one of the four character sets used in the modern Japanese writing system (the other three being hiragana, katakana and romaji). This article... kanji" (常用漢字 The : It is against the law for publishers to use kanji outside of this list without providing furigana. : The list contains all the kanji you need to read modern Japanese. : You must learn the entire Joyo Kanji list in order to read any Japanese. Reality: The most common characters show... jōyō kanji) designated by the Ministry of Education. These are taught during primary and secondary school. Publications which include characters which fall outside this list should print Furigana (ふりがな), also called yomigana, are kana printed next to a kanji or other character to indicate its pronunciation. In horizontal text, they are above the character; in vertical text, they are to the right of the character. They are one type of ruby text. or Furigana... furigana or Ruby characters, also called ruby, rubi or furigana, are sometimes used in the typography of ideographic languages, especially Japanese and Chinese. They are small characters placed above or to the side of an ideogram (kanji in the case of Japanese) that the reader may not recognize, providing its phonetic equivalent... rubi over the characters as a phonetic guide.

There are also 2232 government-designated "name kanji" (jinmeiyō kanji 人名用漢字) used in personal and geographical names, with plans to increase this list by 578 kanji in the near future. This would be the largest increase since Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km (60,000 ft) into the air. August 9, 1945 World War II was a global conflict that started in 7 July 1937 in Asia and 1 September 1939 in Europe and lasted until 1945, involving the majority of the... World War II. The plan has not been without controversy, however. For example, the Chinese characters for "cancer," "hemorrhoids," "corpse" and "excrement," as well as parts of compound words (words created from two or more Chinese characters) meaning "curse," "prostitute," and "rape," are among the proposed additions to the list. This is because no measures were taken to determine the appropriateness of the kanji proposed, with the committee deciding that parents could make such decisions themselves. However, the government will seek input from the public before approving the list. For further information, see the The characters for Kanji, lit. Han characters. Kanji (漢字, literally characters from Han China; see also Han Chinese) are Chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are one of the four character sets used in the modern Japanese writing system (the other three being hiragana, katakana and romaji). This article... Names section of the main Kanji article. (There is also some speculation that the "odd" kanji being added to the names list are being done so in an attempt to make a de-facto expansion of the Jouyou Kanji List, rather than with the serious idea that anyone will use them in names. The idea of reducing the number of kanji in use has been a politically contentious issue, with many conservatives believing that kanji are culturally Japanese and that people should use them frequently.)

A well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3500 kanji. The The kanji kentei (漢字検定, sometimes shortened to simply kanken), is a test of Chinese character ability. The full Japanese name (Nihon kanji nōryoku kentei shiken　日本漢字能力検定試験) is The Japanese kanji Aptitude Test. Developed for native... Kanji kentei (日本漢字能力検定試験 Nihon kanji nōryoku kentei shiken or Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude) tests the ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the Kanji kentei tests the ability to read and write 6000 kanji, though in practice few people attain this level as Japanese generally uses fewer Chinese characters than Chinese does, and literacy in Japanese requires knowledge of fewer Chinese characters than literacy in Chinese.

Korea

In South Korea, middle and high school students learn 1,800 to 2,000 basic characters ( Hanja (lit. ( (음훈; 音訓; from 音 sound + 訓 meaning, teaching). For example, the character 愛 is referred to in character dictionaries as (사람 인), where saram means person and in is its sound. When the two characters are put together to form the word 愛人, they... Hanja), but most people use Hangul is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language (as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China). For other romanized spellings of Hangul, please see Names below. While Hangul writing may appear ideographic to the uninitiated, it is actually phonetic. Each Hangul syllabic block consists of several... Hangul exclusively in their day-to-day lives. Chinese characters are still used to some extent, particularly in newspapers, weddings, place names and Calligraphy (from Greek καλλι . Calligraphy at every point in time is a conscious art, which is distinguished from the studies of epigraphy or palaeography in general. The study of permanent inscriptions engraved in metal or chiselled into stone and the forms of letters used in them... calligraphy.

Vietnam

Although nearly extinct, Vietnamese used varying scripts of Chinese characters to write the language, with use of Chinese characters becoming limited to ceremonial uses beginning in the lead most of Latin America to independence. The Industrial Revolution continues and spreads, developments include the Rail Transport, telegraph, and telephone. The rebellion of Greece begins in 1821 which ultimately leads to its independence Belgium becomes independent in 1830 after a massive uprising against the Dutch. Leopold becomes the first... 19th century. Similarly to Japan and Korea, Chinese was used by the ruling classes, and the characters were eventually adopted to write Vietnamese. To express native Vietnamese words which had different pronunciations than the Chinese, Vietnamese developed the . Chữ n m ( gave way to a Roman-style alphabet known as , few Vietnamese today can read it. After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, scholars began their creation of . In other words, approximately 1,000 years of Vietnamese cultural history is recorded in this unique system. This... Chu Nom script which added diacritical marks to distinguish native (Vietnamese) words from Chinese.

Rare characters

Often a character which is not commonly used (called "rare" or "variant" characters) will appear in a personal or place name in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names (see The Chinese name is made up of a family name (姓), which is always placed first, followed by a generation name and personal name as part of the given name (名). In addition to the given name, many Chinese have various kinds of nicknames. Family names There are over 700... Chinese name, Yamada Tarō, a common Japanese name (male) A modern Japanese name (日本人名) consists of a family name, or surname, followed by a given name. There are no middle names, but rarely, men may have two first names. This is a continuation of a samurai tradition. Common... Japanese name, and A Korean personal name consists of a family name and a given name, both of which are generally composed of Hanja. In Korean, a given name follows a family name. In English, some Koreans keep the original order and others reverse their names to match the European or North American... Korean name respectively). This has caused problems as many computer encoding systems include only the 5,000 or so most common characters and exclude the less often used characters. This is especially a problem for personal names which often contain rare or classical characters.

People who have run into this problem include Taiwanese politicians Wang Chien-shien (王建煊 Pinyin: Wáng Jiànxuān) (born August 7, 1938) is a founder of the New Party. He was a finance minister of the Republic of China and is the chairman of the Chinese Management Association (since 1990). Born in Anhui, Wang was... Wang Chien-shien (王建煊) and Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃 pinyin: Yóu Xíkūn) (born April 25, 1948), a Taiwanese politician of the Democratic Progressive Party, has been Premier of the Republic of China since February 1, 2002. Born in Taihe Village (太和村), Dongshan Township (冬山鄉), Yilan... Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) and Taiwanese singer David Tao(Chinese: 陶喆) is a singer of Taipei, Taiwan. ... David Tao (陶喆). Newspapers have dealt with this problem in varying ways, including trying to create a character from two characters, including a picture, or, especially as is the case with Yu Shyi-kun, simply omitting the rare character with the hope that the reader will be able to infer who it refers to. Japanese newspapers may render such names and words in Katakana (片仮名, literally: fragmentary kana) are a Japanese syllabary, one of four Japanese writing systems (the others are hiragana, kanji and rōmaji). Katakana are characterized by squarish lines and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts. Katakana are used for: Onomatopoeia, for example ). For example, television... katakana instead of kanji, and it is common practice for people to write names for which they are unsure of the correct kanji in katakana instead.

Styles

Radicals

Classification

Orthography

Dictionaries

Derivatives of Han characters

Number of Chinese characters

China

Japan

Korea

Vietnam

Rare characters

Related topics

See also

External links

Styles GA_googleFillSlot("encyclopedia_square");

Radicals

Classification

Orthography

Dictionaries

Derivatives of Han characters

Number of Chinese characters

China

Japan

Korea

Vietnam

Rare characters

Related topics

See also

External links

Styles