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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 .
Chengyu (traditional Chinese: 成語; simplified Chinese: 成语; pinyin: chéngyǔ; trans. "set phrase") are a type of traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Chengyu were widely used in Literary Chinese and are still common in written vernacular Chinese writing
A page from the Yiqiejing yinyi, the oldest extant Chinese dictionary of Buddhist technical terminology – Dunhuang manuscripts, c. 8th century. There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: 'character dictionaries' (字典; zìdiǎn) list individual Chinese characters, and 'word dictionaries' (辞典; 辭典; cídiǎn) list words and phrases.
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes —which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. [ 2 ]
Characters that can sometimes function as a copula in specific circumstances include 為 (wéi; 'make', 'do') when indicating temporary circumstances, and 曰 (yuē; 'say') when used in the sense of 'to be called'. [13] Classical Chinese has more pronouns compared to the modern vernacular.
Chinese characters "Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms Script type Logographic Time period c. 13th century BCE – present Direction Left-to-right Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left Languages Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Zhuang (among others) Related scripts Parent systems (Proto-writing) Chinese characters Child systems Bopomofo Jurchen ...
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.
The Kangxi Dictionary (Chinese: 康熙字典; pinyin: Kāngxī zìdiǎn) is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the High Qing, considered from the time of its publishing until the early 20th century to be the most authoritative reference for written Chinese characters.