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Hán Tự <small>( Sino-Viet )</small> </br>Chữ Nho <small>(native tongue)</small>
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A or '''Han character''' () is a
Logogram used in writing
Chinese ,
Japanese , sometimes
Korean , and formerly
Vietnamese .
The number of Chinese characters contained in the
Kangxi Dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history. Studies carried out in
China have shown that full literacy requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.
1
In Chinese tradition, each character corresponds to a single syllable. A majority of
Word s in all modern varieties of Chinese are polysyllabic and thus require two or more characters to write.
Cognate s in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character. In addition, many characters were adopted according to their meaning by the Japanese and Korean languages to represent native words, disregarding pronunciation altogether. The loose relationship between phonetics and characters has thus made it possible for them to be used to write very different and probably unrelated languages.
Chinese characters are also known as ''sinographs'', and the Chinese writing system as ''sinography''. Non-Chinese languages which have adopted sinography — and, with the orthography, a large number of loanwords from the Chinese language — are known as
Sinoxenic Language s, whether or not they still use the characters. The term does not imply any genetic affiliation with Chinese. The major Sinoxenic languages are generally considered to be Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
)]]
The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the , and from
Zhengzhou , dated
1600 BC . In addition, there are very few logographs found on pottery shards and cast in bronzes, known as the
Bronze Script (), which is very similar to but more complex and pictorial than the Oracle Bone Script. Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known Oracle Bone logographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and therefore easily read. However, it should be noted that these 1,400 logographs include most of the commonly used ones.
According to legend, Chinese characters were invented earlier by
Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor,
Huangdi . The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today
Shanxi ) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called ''zì'' — Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of civilization, for good and for bad.
A complete writing system in Chinese characters appeared in inscriptions were discovered at what is now called the Yin Ruins near
Anyang city in 1899.
Sumerian Cuneiform is currently regarded as being the oldest known writing system having originated about 3200 B.C. In a 2003 archeological dig at
Jiahu in Henan province in western China,
Various Neolithic Signs were found inscribed on tortoise shells which date back as early as the 7th millennium BC, and may represent possible precursors of the Chinese script, although there has been no link established so far.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2956925.stm
See Also: Neolithic signs in China
society. Right: Bronze "fang yi" ritual container dated c. 1000 BC. A written inscription of some 180 Chinese characters appears twice on the vessel. The written inscription comments on state rituals that accompany court ceremony, recorded by an official scribe.]]
The earliest Neolithic signs come from ''
Jiahu '', a Neolithic site in the basin of the Yellow River in
Henan province, dated to c. 6500 BC,
2 known as the
Jiahu Script . It has yielded turtle carapaces that were pitted and inscribed with symbols. By the discoveries at Jiahu reported here Neolithic sign use in China must now be extended backward another two millennia to c. 6500 cal BC. Sign use, however, should not be easily equated with writing, although it may represent a formative stage.
Although the earliest forms of primitive Chinese writing are no more than individual symbols and therefore cannot be considered a true written script, the inscriptions found on bones (dated to 2500–1900 BC) used for the purposes of divination from the late Neolithic
Longshan () culture (c. 3200–1900 BC) are thought by some to be a proto-written script, similar to the earliest forms of writing in
Mesopotamia and
Egypt . It is possible that these inscriptions are ancestral to the later
Oracle Bone Script of the Shang Dynasty and therefore the modern Chinese script, since late Neolithic culture found in Longshan is widely accepted by historians and archaeologists to be ancestral to the Bronze Age
Erlitou Culture and the later
Shang and
Zhou dynasties.
At
Damaidi in
Ningxia , 3172 cliff carvings dating to 6000–5000 BC have been discovered "featuring 8453 individual characters such as the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing." These pictographs are reputed to be similar to the earliest characters confirmed to be written Chinese.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6669569.stm
3
calligrapher
Sun Guoting , c. 650 CE.]]
There are numerous styles, or scripts, in which Chinese characters can be written, deriving from various calligraphic and historical models. Most of these originated in China and are now common, with minor variations, in all countries where Chinese characters are used. These characters were used over 3,000 years ago.
The
Oracle Bone and
Bronzeware scripts being no longer used, the oldest script that is still in use today is the
Seal Script (). It evolved organically out of the Zhou bronze script, and was adopted in a standardized form under the first
Emperor Of China ,
Qin Shi Huang . The seal script, as the name suggests, is now only used in artistic seals. Few people are still able to read it effortlessly today, although the art of carving a traditional seal in the script remains alive; some
Calligraphers also work in this style.
Scripts that are still used regularly are the "
Clerical Script " () of the
Qin Dynasty to the
Han Dynasty , the
Weibei (), the "
Regular Script " () used for most printing, and the "
Semi-cursive Script " () used for most handwriting.
The
Cursive Script () is not in general use, and is a purely artistic calligraphic style. The basic character shapes are suggested, rather than explicitly realized, and the abbreviations are extreme. Despite being cursive to the point where individual strokes are no longer differentiable and the characters often illegible to the untrained eye, this script (also known as ''draft'') is highly revered for the beauty and freedom that it embodies. Some of the
Simplified Chinese Characters adopted by the People's Republic of China, and some of the simplified characters used in Japan, are derived from the Cursive Script. The Japanese
Hiragana script is also derived from this script.
There also exist scripts created outside China, such as the Japanese
Edomoji styles; these have tended to remain restricted to their countries of origin, rather than spreading to other countries like the standard scripts described above.
Table contributed by German Wiki--->
See Also: Chinese character classification
radical (Chinese character)
The early stages of the development of characters were dominated by
Pictogram s, in which meaning was expressed directly by the shapes. The development of the script, both to cover words for abstract concepts and to increase the efficiency of writing, has led to the introduction of numerous non-pictographic characters.
The various types of character were first classified c. 100 CE by the Chinese linguist
Xu Shen , whose etymological dictionary ''Shuowen Jiezi'' (/) divides the script into six categories, the ''liùshū'' (/). While the categories and classification are occasionally problematic and arguably fail to reflect the complete nature of the Chinese writing system, the system has been perpetuated by its long history and pervasive use.
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Four percent of Chinese characters are derived directly from individual
Pictograms (), and in most of those cases the relationship is not necessarily clear to the modern reader. Of the remaining 96%, some are logical aggregates (), which are characters combined from multiple parts indicative of meaning. But most characters are
Pictophonetic s (), characters containing two parts where one indicates a general category of meaning and the other the sound. The sound in such characters is often only approximate to the modern pronunciation because of changes over time and differences between source languages.
Contrary to popular belief, pictograms make up only a small portion of Chinese characters. While characters in this class derive from pictures, they have been standardized, simplified, and stylized to make them easier to write, and their derivation is therefore not always obvious. Examples include (rì) for "sun", (yuè) for "moon", and (mù) for "tree".
There is no concrete number for the proportion of modern characters that are pictographic in nature; however, Xu Shen (c. 100 CE) estimated that 4% of characters fell into this category.
Also called ''semantic-phonetic compounds'', or ''phono-semantic compounds'', this category represents the largest group of characters in modern Chinese. Characters of this sort are composed of two parts: a pictograph, which suggests the general meaning of the character, and a phonetic part, which is derived from a character pronounced in the same way as the word the new character represents.
Examples are (hé) ''river'', (hú) ''lake'', (liú) ''stream'', (chōng) ''riptide'', (huá) ''slippery''. All these characters have on the left a
Radical of three dots, which is a simplified pictograph for a water drop, indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water; the right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of 冲 (chōng), the phonetic indicator is (zhōng), which by itself means ''middle''. In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character has diverged from that of its phonetic indicator; this process means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today. Further, the choice of radicals may also seem arbitrary in some cases; for example, the radical of (māo) ''cat'' is (zhì), originally a pictograph for worms, but in characters of this sort indicating an animal of any sort.
Xu Shen (c. 100 CE) placed approximately 82% of characters into this category, while in the
Kangxi Dictionary (1716 CE) the number is closer to 90%, due to the extremely productive use of this technique to extend the Chinese vocabulary.
Also called a ''simple indicative'', ''simple ideograph'', or ''ideogram'', characters of this sort either add indicators to pictographs to make new meanings, or illustrate abstract concepts directly. For instance, while (dāo) is a pictogram for "knife", placing an indicator in the knife makes (rèn), an ideogram for "blade". Other common examples are (shàng) for "up" and (xià) for "down". This category is small, as most concepts can be represented by characters in other categories.
Also translated as ''associative compounds'', characters of this sort combine pictograms to symbolize an abstract concept. For instance, (mu) is a pictogram of a tree, and putting two together makes (lin), meaning ''forest''. Combining (rì) ''sun'' and (yuè) ''moon'' makes (míng) ''bright'', which is traditionally interpreted as symbolizing the combination of sun and moon as the natural sources of light.
Xu Shen estimated that 13% of characters fall into this category.
- an, as may be gleaned from the set yàn "tranquil", nuán "to quarrel", jiān "licentious".
Adding weight to this argument is the fact that characters claimed to belong to this "group" are almost invariably interpreted from modern forms rather than the archaic versions which as a rule are vastly different and often far more graphically complex. However, interpretations differ greatly, as can be evidenced from thorough studies of different sources.Sound Business: The Reality of Chinese Characters, Philip Philipsen, pp. 49-76, ISBN 0-595-35629-X
Characters in this category originally didn't represent the same meaning but have bifurcated through
Orthographic and often
Semantic Drift . For instance, (kǎo) ''to verify'' and (lǎo) ''old'' were once the same character, meaning "elderly person", but detached into two separate words. Characters of this category are rare, so in modern systems this group is often omitted or combined with others.
See Also: Jiajie
Also called ''phonetic loan characters'', this category covers cases where an existing character is used to represent an unrelated word with similar pronunciation; sometimes the old meaning is then lost completely, as with characters such as (zì), which has lost its original meaning of ''nose'' completely and exclusively means ''oneself'', or (wan), which originally meant ''scorpion'' but is now used only in the sense of ''ten thousand''.
This technique has become uncommon, since there is considerable resistance to changing the meaning of existing characters. However, it has been used in the development of written forms of dialects, notably
Cantonese and
Taiwanese in
Hong Kong and
Taiwan , due to the amount of dialectal vocabulary which historically has had no written form and thus lacks characters of its own.
Just as
Roman Letter s have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters occupying a roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters occupy a more or less square area. Characters made up of multiple parts squash these parts together in order to maintain a uniform size and shape — this is the case especially with characters written in the
Sòngtǐ style. Because of this, beginners often practise on squared graph paper, and the Chinese sometimes use the term "Square-Block Characters" ().
The actual shape of many Chinese characters varies in different cultures.
Mainland China adopted
Simplified Characters in 1956, but
Traditional Chinese Characters are still used in
Hong Kong ,
Macau and
Taiwan .
Singapore has also adopted simplified Chinese characters. Postwar Japan has used its own less drastically
Simplified Characters since 1946, while
South Korea has limited its use of Chinese characters, and
Vietnam and
North Korea have completely abolished their use in favour of
Romanized Vietnamese and
Hangul , respectively.
The nature of Chinese characters makes it very easy to produce
Allograph s for any character, and there have been many efforts at orthographical standardization throughout history. The widespread usage of the characters in several different nations has prevented any one system becoming universally adopted; consequently, the standard shape of any given character in Chinese usage may differ subtly from its standard shape in Japanese or Korean usage, even where no simplification has taken place.
Usually, each Chinese character takes up the same amount of space, due to their block-like square nature. Beginners therefore typically practice writing with a grid as a guide. 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, stroke placement, and the order in which they are written (
Stroke Order ). Most words can be written with just one stroke order, though some words also have variant stroke orders, which may occasionally result in different stroke counts; certain characters are also written with different stroke orders in different languages.
There are two common typefaces based on the regular script for Chinese characters akin to
Serif and
Sans-serif fonts in the West. The most popular for body text is a family of fonts called the
Song Typeface (宋体), also known as Minchō (明朝) in Japan, and Ming typeface (明體) in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The names of these fonts come from the
Song and
Ming dynasties, when
Block Printing flourished in China. Because the
Wood Grain on printing blocks ran horizontally, it was fairly easy to carve horizontal lines with the grain. However, carving vertical or slanted patterns was difficult because those patterns intersect with the grain and break easily. This resulted in a typeface that has thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical strokes. To prevent wear and tear, the ending of horizontal strokes are also thickened. These design forces resulted in the current Song typeface characterized by thick vertical strokes contrasted with thin horizontal strokes; triangular ornaments at the end of single horizontal strokes; and overall geometrical regularity. This typeface is similar to Western serif fonts such as
Times New Roman in both appearance and function.
The other common group of fonts is called the black typeface (黑体/體) in Chinese and Gothic typeface (ゴシック体) in Japanese. This group is characterized by straight lines of even thickness for each stroke, akin to sans-serif styles such as
Arial and
Helvetica in Western typography. This group of fonts, first introduced on newspaper headlines, is commonly used on headings, websites, signs and billboards.
The use of traditional characters versus simplified characters varies greatly, and can depend on both the local customs and the medium. Because character simplifications were not officially sanctioned and generally a result of
Caoshu writing or idiosyncratic reductions, traditional, standard characters were mandatory in printed works, while the (unofficial) simplified characters would be used in everyday writing, or quick scribblings. Since the 1950s, and especially with the publication of the 1964 list, the PRC has officially adopted a simplified script, while
Hong Kong , Macau, and the ROC retain the use of the traditional characters. There is no absolute rule for using either system, and often it is determined by 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 modifications or adaptations of the original, simple numerals, deliberately made complicated to prevent forgeries or unauthorized alterations.
Although most often associated with the
PRC , character simplification predates the 1949 communist victory. Caoshu, cursive written text, almost always includes character simplification, and simplified forms have always existed in print, albeit not for the most formal works. In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place within the
Kuomintang government, and a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers have long maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China. Indeed, this desire by the Kuomintang to simplify the Chinese writing system (inherited and implemented by the
CCP ) also nursed aspirations of some for the adoption of a phonetic script, in imitation of the
Roman Alphabet , and spawned such inventions as the
Gwoyeu Romatzyh .
The PRC issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964. A
Second Round Of Character Simplifications (known as ''erjian'', or "second round simplified characters") was promulgated in 1977. It was poorly received, and in
1986 the authorities rescinded the second round completely, while making six revisions to the 1964 list, including the restoration of three traditional characters that had been simplified: 叠 ''dié'', 覆 ''fù'', 像 ''xiàng''.
Many of the simplifications adopted had been in use in informal contexts for a long time, as more convenient alternatives to their more complex standard forms. For example, the traditional character 來 ''lái'' (come) was written with the structure 来 in the
Clerical Script (隸書 lìshū) of the
Han Dynasty . This clerical form uses two fewer strokes, and was thus adopted as a simplified form. The character 雲 ''yún'' (cloud) was written with the structure 云 in the
Oracle Bone Script of the
Shāng Dynasty , and had remained in use later as a phonetic loan in the meaning of ''to say''. The simplified form reverted to this original structure.
See Also: Kanji
In the years after
World War II , the
Japanese Government also instituted a series of orthographic reforms. Some characters were given simplified forms called ''
Shinjitai '' 新字体 (lit. "new character forms"; the older forms were then labelled the ''Kyūjitai'' 旧字体 , lit. "old character forms"). The number of characters in common use was restricted, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, first the 1850-character ''
Tōyō Kanji '' 当用漢字 list in 1945, and later the 1945-character ''
Jōyō Kanji '' 常用漢字 list in 1981. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged. This was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. These are simply guidelines, hence many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, especially those used for personal and place names (for the former, see
Jinmeiyō Kanji ).
Singapore underwent three successive rounds of character simplification. These resulted in some simplifications that differed from those used in
Mainland China . It ultimately adopted the reforms of the PRC in their entirety as official, and has implemented them in the
Educational System .
Malaysia promulgated a set of simplified characters in 1981, which were also completely identical to the Mainland China simplifications; here, however, the simplifications were not generally widely adopted, as the Chinese educational system fell outside the purview of the
Federal Government . However, with the advent of the PRC as an economic powerhouse, simplified characters are taught at school, and the simplified characters are more commonly, if not almost universally, used. However, a large majority of the older Chinese literate generation use the traditional characters. Chinese newspapers are published in either set of characters, with some even incorporating special Cantonese characters when publishing about the canto celebrity scene of Hong Kong.
''Note:'' this table is merely a brief sample, not a complete listing.
Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for arranging Chinese characters in
Chinese Dictionaries . The great majority of these schemes have appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly widespread use. This is the system of
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 s come before radicals containing more strokes. Under each radical, characters are listed by their total number of strokes. It is often also possible to search for characters by sound, using
Pinyin (in Chinese dictionaries),
Zhuyin (in Taiwanese dictionaries),
Kana (in Japanese dictionaries) or
Hangul (in Korean dictionaries). 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 where the sound is not known, e.g., 松 (pine tree), the user first determines which part of the character is the radical (here 木), then counts the number of strokes in the radical (four), and turns to the radical index (usually located on the inside front or back cover of the dictionary). Under the number "4" for radical stroke count, the user locates 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 remainder stroke numbers (for the non-radical portions of characters) 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, and if the user knows the number of strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, he or she can locate the correct page directly.
Another dictionary system is the
Four Corner Method , where characters are classified according to the "shape" of each of the four corners.
Most modern Chinese dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries sold to English speakers use the traditional radical-based character index in a section at the front, while the main body of the dictionary arranges the main character entries alphabetically according to their
Pinyin spelling. To find a character with unknown sound using 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.
Besides Japanese and Korean, a number of Asian languages have historically been written using Han characters, with characters modified from Han characters, or using Han characters in combination with native characters. They include:
In addition, the
Yi Script is similar to Han, but is not known to be directly related to it.
The total number of Chinese characters from past to present remains unknowable because new ones are developed all the time. Chinese characters are theoretically an
Open Set . The number of entries in major Chinese dictionaries is the best means of estimating the historical growth of character inventory.
