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Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary .
Strokes (笔画; 筆劃; bǐhuà) are the smallest building units of Chinese characters. When writing a Chinese character, the trace of a dot or a line left on the writing material (such as paper) from pen-down to pen-up is called a stroke. [4] Strokes combine with each other in a Chinese character in different ways.
Vietnamese was first written from the 13th century using the chữ Nôm script based on Chinese characters, but the system developed in a quite different way than in Korea or Japan. Vietnamese was and is a strongly analytic language with many distinct syllables (roughly 4,800 in the modern standard language), so there was little motivation to ...
Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture.Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention.
Written Chinese makes use of Chinese characters, one of the four independent inventions of writing agreed by scholars, and the only one of these remaining in use. Speakers and readers exhibit a high degree of diglossia between both local varieties and Standard Chinese , and between written and spoken language.
In writing in the semi-cursive script, the brush leaves the paper less often than in the regular script. Characters appear less angular and instead rounder. In general, an educated person in China or Japan can read characters written in the semi-cursive script with relative ease, but may have occasional difficulties with certain idiosyncratic ...
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Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.