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Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent a language's morphemes, its most basic units of meaning. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length.
The meaning added through the loan of homonymous sounds is the phonetic-loan meaning (simplified Chinese: 假借义; traditional Chinese: 假借義; pinyin: jiǎ jiè yì). For example, the original meaning of "其 (qí)" is "dustpan", and its pronoun usage of "his, her, its" is a phonetic-loan meaning.
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 .
Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length.
Jan W. Walls, professor of Chinese language and culture at Simon Fraser University, describes some minor oversights in the dictionary such as the "dīshì 的士 loan taxi" entry, which might imply the borrowing came directly from English, when it actually is a loanword from Cantonese dik 1 si 6 的士 transcribing taxi.
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. Other informative or qualifying ...
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 ...
In official documents, it is referred to as the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. Hanyu (汉语; 漢語) literally means 'Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official romanisation system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations. Its use has become common when ...