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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: [15] [16]
Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing all of the frequently used vocabulary in a language requires roughly 2000–3000 characters; as of 2024 [update] , nearly 100 000 have been identified and included in The Unicode Standard .
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 rarer occurrence is the blending of the Latin alphabet with Chinese characters, as in "卡拉OK" ("karaoke"), “T恤” ("T-shirt"), "IP卡" ("internet protocol card"). [3] In some instances, the loanwords exists side by side with neologisms that translate the meaning of the concept into existing Chinese morphemes.
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 .
This may be referred to as a "single sort/tier/layer alphabetical" order or series." He emphatically does not mean a usual Chinese dictionary collated according to the initial single graphs (zì 字) that are only the beginning syllables of whole words. "With the latter type of arrangement, more than one sort is required to locate a given term.
Longevity is commonly recognized as one of the Five Blessings (wǔfú 五福 – longevity, wealth, health, love of virtue, a peaceful death) of Chinese belief [3] that are often depicted in the homophonous rendition of five flying bats because the word for "bat" in Chinese (fú 蝠) sounds like the word for "good fortune" or "happiness" (fú ...
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...