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Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture.Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention.
Chinese characters are morpheme characters, and the meanings of Chinese characters come from the morphemes they record. [5] Most Chinese characters only represent one morpheme, and 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.
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. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally ...
Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as 正體字; 正体字; zhèngtǐzì; 'orthodox characters'. [9] This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and ...
Mandarin (/ ˈmændərɪn / ⓘ MAN-dər-in; simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'officials' speech') is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China and Taiwan. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of ...
Chinese grammar. 中文zhōngwén 语法yǔfǎ. [中文 語法], meaning "Chinese grammar", written vertically in simplified (left) and traditional (right) forms. The grammar of Standard Chinese shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection; words typically have only one grammatical form.
Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and ...
Chinese punctuation. Writing systems that use Chinese characters also include various punctuation marks, derived from both Chinese and Western sources. Historically, jùdòu (句读; 句讀) annotations were often used to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses in text. The use of punctuation in written Chinese only became mandatory ...