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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 meaning of a Chinese character is the morpheme meaning recorded in it. The meaning of a single-character word is its character meaning. The meaning of a multi-character word is generally derived from the meanings of the characters. The main ways to combine character meanings into word meanings include: [15] [16]
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. A writing system is most commonly defined to include 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. [8]
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.
Strokes (笔画; 筆劃; bǐhuà) are the smallest building units of Chinese characters. When writing a Chinese character, the trace of a dot or a line left on the writing material (such as paper) from pen-down to pen-up is called a stroke. [4] Strokes combine with each other in a Chinese character in different ways.
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”.
In the Japanese writing system, kyujitai are traditional forms, which were simplified to create shinjitai for standardized Japanese use following World War II. Kyūjitai are mostly congruent with the traditional characters in Chinese, save for minor stylistic variation.
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 ...