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The main character meaning is generally the lexical meaning of the word, and the secondary character meaning is generally the grammatical meaning of the word. The meaning of the first character may be supplementary, with the meaning of the second character being primary. For example: 老師 (teacher), 容易 (easy), 阿姨 (aunt).
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 .
Other symbols in Chinese iconography that represent longevity include pine trees, cranes, spotted deer, special collectors' stones (shòushí 壽石), peaches, and tortoises. [5] These are often depicted in small groupings to emphasize the central, symbolic meaning of the picture (for example, cranes standing amongst pine trees).
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 ...
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.
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 .
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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.