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On 7 January 1964, the Chinese Character Reform Committee submitted a "Request for Instructions on the Simplification of Chinese Characters" to the State Council, mentioning that "due to the lack of clarity on analogy simplification in the original Chinese Character Simplification Scheme (汉字简化方案), there is some disagreement and confusion in the application field of publication”.
Chinese characters may have several variant forms—visually distinct glyphs that represent the same underlying meaning and pronunciation. Variants of a given character are allographs of one another, and many are directly analogous to allographs present in the English alphabet, such as the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ variants of the letter A, with the latter more commonly appearing in ...
Ruby characters or rubi characters (Japanese: ルビ; rōmaji: rubi; Korean: 루비; romaja: rubi) are small, annotative glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of logographic characters of languages in the East Asian cultural sphere, such as Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji, and Korean hanja, to show the logographs' pronunciation; these were formerly also used for Vietnamese chữ ...
Most Chinese characters represent only one morpheme, and in that case the meaning of the character is the meaning of the morpheme recorded by the character. For example: 猫: māo, cat, the name of a domestic animal that can catch mice. The morpheme "māo" has one meaning, and the Chinese character "猫" also has one meaning.
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 .
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 .
In the past, traditional Chinese was most often encoded on computers using the Big5 standard, which favored traditional characters. However, the ubiquitous Unicode standard gives equal weight to simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and has become by far the most popular encoding for Chinese-language text.
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.