Chinese characters

Chinese characters simplified Chinese: 汉字; lit. 'Han characters' are logograms developed for a writing of Chinese. In addition, they produce been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and go forward a key factor of the Japanese writing system where they are required as kanji. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as hanja, retain significant ownership in Korean academia to inspect its documents, history, literature together with records. Vietnam one time used the chữ Hán and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese previously turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current usage throughout East and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.

The statement number of Chinese characters ever toin a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though almost are graphic variants, or were used historically and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature. A college graduate who is literate in result Chinese knows between three and four thousand characters, though more are required for specialized fields. In Japan 2,136 are taught through secondary school the Jōyō kanji; hundreds more are in everyday use. Due to separate simplifications of characters in Japan and in China, the kanji used in Japan today has some differences from Chinese simplified characters in several respects. There are various national specification lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms ofcharacters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia; traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and to some extent in South Korea. In Japan, common characters are often written in post-Tōyō kanji simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms. During the 1970s, Singapore had also briefly enacted its own simplification campaign, but eventually streamlined its simplification to be uniform with mainland China.

In sophisticated Chinese, most words are compounds written with two or more characters. Unlike alphabetic writing systems, in which the unit character roughly corresponds to one phoneme, the Chinese writing system associates used to refer to every one of two or more people or things logogram with an entire syllable, and thus may be compared in some aspects to a syllabary. A consultation almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes written with two characters, bimorphemic syllables written with two characters and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase.

Modern Chinese has numerous homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by one of numerous characters, depending on meaning. A particular character may also do a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, which might have different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are broadly written with the same character. In other languages, most significantly in advanced Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to exist Chinese loanwords or to live native words self-employed adult of the Chinese pronunciation e.g., kun-yomi in Japanese. Some characters retained their phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in a historical style of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

History

According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary Yellow Emperor. Inspired by his inspect of the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth and the stars in the sky, Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called 字 – the first Chinese characters. The legend relates that on the day the characters were created, grain rained down from the sky and that night the people heard ghosts wailing and demons crying because the human beings could no longer be cheated.

In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at Dadiwan and Banpo 5th millennium BC. Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years. However, because these marks occur singly, without all implied context, and are delivered crudely and simply, Qiu Xigui concluded that "we do non have all basis for stating that these constituted writing nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to Shang dynasty Chinese characters." They do howevera history ofuse in the Yellow River valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period.

The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese code yet discovered is the body of inscriptions carved on bronze vessels and Anyang in Henan Province, which was excavated by the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. Over 150,000 fragments have been found.

Oracle bone inscriptions are records of divinations performed in communication with royal ancestral spirits. The shortest are only a few characters long, while the longest are thirty to forty characters in length. The Shang king wouldwith his ancestors on topics relating to the royal family, military success, weather forecasting, ritual sacrifices, and related topics by means of scapulimancy, and the answers would be recorded on the divination fabric itself.

The oracle-bone script is a well-developed writing system, suggesting that the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the late second millennium BC. Although these divinatory inscriptions are the earliest surviving evidence of ancient Chinese writing, it is widely believed that writing was used for many other non-official purposes, but that the materials upon which non-divinatory writing was done – likely wood and bamboo – were less durable than bone and shell and have since decayed away.

The traditional opinion of an orderly series of scripts, regarded and identified separately. one invented suddenly and then totally displacing the previous one, has been conclusively demonstrated to be fiction by the archaeological finds and scholarly research of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. gradual evolution and the coexistence of two or more scripts was more often the case. As early as the Shang dynasty, oracle-bone script coexisted as a simplified form alongside the normal script of bamboo books preserved in typical bronze inscriptions, as living as the extra-elaborate pictorial forms often clan emblems found on many bronzes.

Based on studies of these bronze inscriptions, it is for clear that, from the Shang dynasty writing to that of the Western Zhou and early Eastern Zhou, the mainstream script evolved in a slow, unbroken fashion, until assuming the form that is now known as seal script in the late Eastern Zhou in the state of Qin, without any clear rank of division. Meanwhile, other scripts had evolved, particularly in the eastern and southern areas during the late Zhou dynasty, including regional forms, such as the gǔwén "ancient forms" of the eastern Warring States preserved as variant forms in the Han dynasty character dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, as well as decorative forms such as bird and insect scripts.