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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 .
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 ...
The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen c. 100 CE, during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the Erya (c. 3rd century BCE), the Shuowen Jiezi contains the first comprehensive analysis of characters in terms of their structure, where Xu attempted to provide rationales for their construction.
Scholar-official as a concept and social class first appeared during the Warring States period; before that, the Shi and Da Fu were two different classes.During the Western Zhou dynasty, the Duke of Zhou divided the social classes into the king, feudal lords, Da Fu, Shi, ordinary people, and slaves.
A 15th-century portrait of the Ming official Jiang Shunfu.The cranes on his mandarin square indicate that he was a civil official of the sixth rank. A Qing photograph of a government official with mandarin square embroidered in front A European view: a mandarin travelling by boat, Baptista van Doetechum, 1604 Nguyễn Văn Tường (chữ Hán: 阮文祥, 1824–1886) was a mandarin of the ...
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.
Characters that can sometimes function as a copula in specific circumstances include 為 (wéi; 'make', 'do') when indicating temporary circumstances, and 曰 (yuē; 'say') when used in the sense of 'to be called'. [13] Classical Chinese has more pronouns compared to the modern vernacular.
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 ...