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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 .
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.
Chinese characters "Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms Script type Logographic Time period c. 13th century BCE – present Direction Left-to-right Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left Languages Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Zhuang (among others) Related scripts Parent systems (Proto-writing) Chinese characters Child systems Bopomofo Jurchen ...
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 ]
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.
The List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代汉语通用字表; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語通用字表; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǔ Tōngyòngzì Biǎo) is a list of 7,000 commonly used Chinese characters in Chinese. It was created in 1988 in the People's Republic of China. [1]
The Kangxi Dictionary (Chinese: 康熙字典; pinyin: Kāngxī zìdiǎn) is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the High Qing, considered from the time of its publishing until the early 20th century to be the most authoritative reference for written Chinese characters.
In writing in the semi-cursive script, the brush leaves the paper less often than in the regular script. Characters appear less angular and instead rounder. In general, an educated person in China or Japan can read characters written in the semi-cursive script with relative ease, but may have occasional difficulties with certain idiosyncratic ...