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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.
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 .
The List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代汉语通用字表; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語通用字表; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǔ Tōngyòngzì Biǎo) is a list of 7,000 commonly used Chinese characters in Chinese. It was created in 1988 in the People's Republic of China. [1]
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.
A writing system is most commonly defined to include 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. [8] Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language.
Chinese character Information Technology (IT) is the technology of computer processing of Chinese characters. While the English writing system makes use of a few dozen different characters, Chinese language needs a much larger character set. There are over ten thousand characters in the Xinhua Dictionary. [21]
Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to write Chinese languages. In Taiwan , the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in the Standard Form of National Characters .
Chinese uses a middle dot to separate characters in non-Han personal names, such as Tibetan, Uyghur, etc. For example "Nur Bekri" (نۇر بەكرى), the name of a Chinese politician of Uyghur descent is rendered as "努爾·白克力". "Leonardo da Vinci" is often transcribed to Mandarin as: 李奧納多·達·文西.