In Written Chinese, jiajie (假借 "borrow; make use of") is the practice of using the character for one word to write another homophonous or near-homophonous word. When a character is used this way, it is called a jiajiezi (假借字 "borrowed character"), or phonetic loan character. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. ... Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ...

The term jiajie dates back to the Han Dynasty list of six categories in Chinese character classification. The related term tongjia (通假 pinyin:tōngjiǎ "interchangeable borrowing") apparently first occurred in the Ming Dynasty. These two terms are commonly used as synonyms, despite the Chinese linguistic distinction between jiajiezi specifying a character loan of another word that did not originally have a character, e.g., using 東 "a bag tied at both ends" for dōng "east", and tongjia specifying a character loan between two words that both have characters, e.g., using zǎo 蚤 "flea" for zǎo 早 "early", where 早 is the benzi (本字 "original character"). The practice of tongjia creates one of the most notorious diffculties for reading ancient Chinese texts, particularly the pre-Qin ones. Han Dynasty in 87 BC Capital Changan (202 BC–9 AD) Luoyang (25 AD–190 AD) Language(s) Chinese Religion Taoism, Confucianism Government Monarchy History  - Establishment 206 BC  - Battle of Gaixia; Han rule of China begins 202 BC  - Interruption of Han rule 9 - 24  - Abdication to Cao Wei 220... There are several kinds of Chinese characters, including a handful of pictograms (象形 pinyin: xiàngxíng) and a number of indicatives (指事 zhǐshì), but the vast majority are phono-semantic compounds (形聲 xíngshÄ“ng). ... For other uses, see Ming. ... Qin empire in 210 BC Capital Xianyang Language(s) Chinese Religion Taoism Government Monarchy History  - Unification of China 221 BC  - Death of Qin Shi Huangdi 210 BC  - Surrender to Liu Bang 206 BC The Qin Dynasty (Chinese: ; Pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: Chin Chao) (221 BC - 206 BC) was preceded...

The first Chinese characters were pictograms, such as 龜 (guī), depicting a turtle. But abstract meanings and grammatic particles cannot be expressed in pictograms. Instead, in the second phase of development, as in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian scripts, characters were used phonetically to express the more abstract meanings. That means some characters could stand for more than one word at the same time. In some cases, to avoid ambiguities, the etymological meaning of the character would be dropped, and a second character would be created for that. In the new character, the original graph would usually serve as the shengfu (聲符 "phonetic sign") while the meaning would be indicated by an additional yifu (意符/義符 "semantic sign"). Such a process of disambiguation is the source of the xingshengzi (形聲字 "semantic-phonetic characters"). This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... In classical Chinese philology, words are divided into two classes: the shizi (實字 lit. ... It has been suggested that Hieroglyph (French Wiki article) be merged into this article or section. ... The cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. ...

Note that the origins of many Chinese characters are debated, and there are very likely to be different etymologies in other works. Pinyin, more formally called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Pinyin: ), is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ...

See also

• ateji in Japanese where Chinese characters, or kanji, are used mainly phonetically
• transliteration into Chinese characters where Chinese characters are used mainly phonetically

Ateji (当て字 ) guessed characters are Kanji selected to write a borrowed non-Chinese or native Japanese word with the intent of implying an etymology, which is fanciful or false. ... When considering the transliteration of non-Chinese words into Chinese characters, one has to know the following facts: Chinese is written with monosyllabic logograms. ...

References

• Qiu Xigui, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (2000). Chinese Writing. Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.
• Wang Hongyuan (1993). The Origins of Chinese characters. Beijing: Sinolingua. ISBN 978-7-80052-243-7.