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As pinyin is a phonetic writing system for modern Standard Chinese, it is not designed to replace characters for writing Literary Chinese, the standard written language prior to the early 1900s. In particular, Chinese characters retain semantic cues that help distinguish differently pronounced words in the ancient classical language that are ...
Zhou Youguang (Chinese: 周有光; pinyin: Zhōu Yǒuguāng; 13 January 1906 – 14 January 2017), also known as Chou Yu-kuang or Chou Yao-ping, was a Chinese economist, linguist, sinologist, and supercentenarian.
[1] The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang, in the 1950s. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles (Beijing Mandarin) and Yale romanization (Beijing Mandarin and Cantonese).
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
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 complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese.
In the early 20th century, a standard form based on the Beijing dialect, with elements from other Mandarin varieties, was adopted as the national language. Standard Chinese is the official language of China [4] and Taiwan, [5] one of four official languages of Singapore and one of six official languages of the United Nations. [6]
Characters invented for Japanese-language use are called kokuji. The methods employed to create kokuji are equivalent to those used by Chinese-original characters, though most are ideographic compounds. For example, 峠 (tōge; 'mountain pass') is a compound kokuji composed of ⼭ 'MOUNTAIN', 上 'above', and 下 'below'. [145]