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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 Japanese writing system is a mixed script, and has also incorporated syllabaries called kana to represent phonetic units called moras, rather than morphemes. Prior to the Meiji era (1868–1912), writers used certain kanji to represent their sound values instead, in a system known as man'yōgana .
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.
The line breaking rules in East Asian languages specify how to wrap East Asian Language text such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.Certain characters in those languages should not come at the end of a line, certain characters should not come at the start of a line, and some characters should never be split up across two lines.
Characters are traditionally classified according to a system of six categories (六書; liùshū; 'six writings') according to the apparent strategy used to create them. This system was first made popular by the Shuowen Jiezi dictionary (c. 100 AD). Three of these categories involved a representation of the meaning of the word:
Written Chinese makes use of Chinese characters, one of the four independent inventions of writing agreed by scholars, and the only one of these remaining in use. Speakers and readers exhibit a high degree of diglossia between both local varieties and Standard Chinese , and between written and spoken language.
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. [2]
The clerical script (隶书; 隸書 lìshū)—sometimes called official, draft, or scribal script—is popularly thought to have developed in the Han dynasty and to have come directly from seal script, but recent archaeological discoveries and scholarship indicate that it instead developed from a roughly executed and rectilinear popular or "vulgar" variant of the seal script as well as seal ...