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Chinese character external structure is on how the writing units are combined level by level into a complete character. There are three levels of structural units of Chinese characters: strokes, components, and whole characters. [3] For example, character 字 (character) is composed of two components, each of which is composed of three stokes:
Modern Chinese characters appear in the form of square blocks. There are two methods to analyze the forms of Chinese characters, source tracing analysis (溯源分析) and current status analysis (現狀分析, 现状分析). Source tracing analysis is also called the method of character creation (造字法). It takes the form of a character ...
The character-building units obtained by analyzing the external structure of Chinese characters are external structural components. In internal structures, Chinese characters are analyzed according to the rationale of character formation, and the basic unit of character formation is internal structural components, or internal components in short, also called pianpang (偏旁) or characters ...
Obviously, learning by component analysis is much more efficient than learning by analyzing each character to strokes. Component analysis is also used in Chinese character encoding for computer input. [6] There are two methods for Chinese character dividing, hierarchical dividing and plane dividing. Hierarchical dividing separates layer by ...
The two terms are commonly used as synonyms, but there is a distinction between jiajiezi being a phonetic loan character for a word that did not originally have a character, such as using 東 ('a bag tied at both ends') for dōng ('east'), and tongjia being an interchangeable character used for an existing homophonous character, such as using ...
Characters and components may reflect aspects of meaning or pronunciation. The best known exposition of Chinese character composition is the Shuowen Jiezi, compiled by Xu Shen c. 100 CE. Xu did not have access to the earliest forms of Chinese characters, and his analysis is not considered to fully capture the nature of the writing system. [14]
Chinese characters are morpheme characters, which record the smallest lexical and grammatical units. There are thousands of commonly used Chinese characters, each with its own forms, sounds, and meanings. The Latin alphabet is a phonetic script that records the smallest phonetic units with distinctive meanings. There are only 26 Latin letters.
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.