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The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen c. 100 CE, during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the Erya (c. 3rd century BCE), the Shuowen Jiezi contains the first comprehensive analysis of characters in terms of their structure, where Xu attempted to provide rationales for their construction.
Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length.
Character amnesia is a phenomenon where experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well-known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods, such as those that use romanizations of characters, and is documented to be a significant issue in China and Japan.
The meaning of a Chinese character is the morpheme meaning recorded in it. The meaning of a single-character word is its character meaning. The meaning of a multi-character word is generally derived from the meanings of the characters. The main ways to combine character meanings into word meanings include: [16] [17]
Although court records and other independent records existed beforehand, the definitive work in early Chinese historical writing was the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian written by Han dynasty court historian Sima Qian (145 BC – 90 BC). This groundbreaking text laid the foundation for Chinese historiography and the many official ...
Kanbun, literally "Chinese writing," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language.
The writing develops around the 5 edges of a star, which figures at the center. It has attracted a great deal of attention for being one of the few writings related to music that predate imperial times. [25] Yue feng 樂風. Wei tian yong shen 畏天用身. The text is reproduced in full in a paper by Shi Xiaoli 石小力. [28]
Various folk cultures and traditions assign symbolic meanings to plants. Although these are no longer commonly understood by populations that are increasingly divorced from their rural traditions, some meanings survive.