Han characters

Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji''. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as ''hanja'', retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents, history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the ''chữ Hán'' and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.

The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graphic variants, were used historically and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature. A college graduate who is literate in written Chinese knows between three and four thousand characters, though more are required for specialized fields. In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school (the ''Jōyō kanji''); hundreds more are in everyday use. Due to separate simplifications of characters in Japan and in China, the ''kanji'' used in Japan today has some differences from Chinese simplified characters in several respects. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia; traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and, to some extent, in South Korea. In Japan, common characters are often written in post-Tōyō kanji simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms. During the 1970s, Singapore had also briefly enacted its own simplification campaign, but eventually streamlined its simplification to be uniform with mainland China.

In modern Chinese, most words are compounds written with two or more characters. Unlike alphabetic writing systems, in which the unit character roughly corresponds to one phoneme, the Chinese writing system associates each logogram with an entire syllable, and thus may be compared in some aspects to a syllabary. A character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes (written with two characters), bimorphemic syllables (written with two characters) and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase.

Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by one of many characters, depending on meaning. A particular character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, which might have different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. In other languages, most significantly in modern Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords or to represent native words independent of the Chinese pronunciation (e.g., kun'yomi in Japanese). Some characters retained their phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in a historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

Function

When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic, and each character denoted a single word. Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day. It is estimated that about 25–30% of the vocabulary of classic texts from the Warring States period was polysyllabic, though these words were used far less commonly than monosyllables, which accounted for 80–90% of occurrences in these texts.
The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones.
It has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables.

The most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, written with the characters of the constituent words. Words have also been created by adding affixes, reduplication, and borrowing from other languages.
Polysyllabic words are generally written with one character per syllable.
In most cases, the character denotes a morpheme descended from an Old Chinese word.

Many characters have multiple readings, with instances denoting different morphemes, sometimes with different pronunciations. In modern Standard Chinese, one fifth of the 2,400 most common characters have multiple pronunciations.
For the 500 most common characters, the proportion rises to 30%.
Often these readings are similar in sound and related in meaning. In the Old Chinese period, affixes could be added to a word to form a new word, which was often written with the same character. In many cases, the pronunciations diverged due to subsequent sound change. For example, many additional readings have the Middle Chinese departing tone, the major source of the 4th tone in modern Standard Chinese. Scholars now believe that this tone is the reflex of an Old Chinese *-s suffix, with a range of semantic functions.
For example,
* / has readings OC * > MC > Mod. 'to transmit' and * > > 'a record'. (Middle Chinese forms are given in Baxter's transcription, in which ''H'' denotes the departing tone.)
* has readings * > > 'to grind' and * > > 'grindstone'.
* has readings * > > 'to stay overnight' and * > > 'celestial "mansion"'.
* / has readings * > > 'speak' and * > > 'exhort'.
Another common alternation is between voiced and voiceless initials (though the voicing distinction has disappeared on most modern varieties).
This is believed to reflect an ancient prefix, but scholars disagree on whether the voiced or voiceless form is the original root.
For example,
* / has readings * > > 'to see' and * > > 'to appear'.
* / has readings * > > 'to defeat' and * > > 'to be defeated'. (In this case, the pronunciations have converged in Standard Chinese, but not in some other varieties.)
* has readings * > > 'to bend' and * > > 'to break by bending'.

Principles of formation

Chinese characters represent words of the language using several strategies. A few characters, including some of the most commonly used, were originally pictograms, which depicted the objects denoted, or ideograms, in which meaning was expressed iconically. The vast majority were written using the rebus principle, in which a character for a similarly sounding word was either borrowed or more commonly extended with a disambiguating semantic marker to form a phono-semantic compound character.

The traditional six-fold classification (' / "six writings") was first described by the scholar Xu Shen in the postface of his dictionary ''Shuowen Jiezi'' in 100 AD.
While this analysis is sometimes problematic and arguably fails to reflect the complete nature of the Chinese writing system, it has been perpetuated by its long history and pervasive use.

Pictograms

* '
Pictograms are highly stylized and simplified pictures of material objects. Examples of pictograms include ' for "sun", ' for "moon", and ' for "tree" or "wood". Xu Shen placed approximately 4% of characters in this category.
Though few in number and expressing literal objects, pictograms and ideograms are nonetheless the basis on which all the more complex characters such as associative compound characters (会意字/會意字) and phono-semantic characters (形声字/形聲字) are formed.

Over time pictograms were increasingly standardized, simplified, and stylized to make them easier to write. Furthermore, the same Kangxi radical character element can be used to depict different objects.
Thus, the image depicted by most pictograms is not often immediately evident. For example, 口 may indicate the mouth, a window as in 高 which depicts a tall building as a symbol of the idea of "tall" or the lip of a vessel as in 富 a wine jar under a roof as symbol of wealth. That is, pictograms extended from literal objects to take on symbolic or metaphoric meanings; sometimes even displacing the use of the character as a literal term, or creating ambiguity, which was resolved through character determinants, more commonly but less accurately known as " radicals" i.e. concept keys in the phono-semantic characters.

Simple ideograms

* '

Also called ''simple indicatives,'' this small category contains characters that are direct iconic illustrations. Examples include ' "up" and ' "down", originally a dot above and below a line. Indicative characters are symbols for abstract concepts which could not be depicted literally but nonetheless can be expressed as a visual symbol e.g. convex 凸, concave 凹, flat-and-level 平.

Compound ideographs

* / '
Also translated as logical aggregates or associative idea characters, these characters have been interpreted as combining two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest a third meaning. The canonical example is bright. 明 is the association of the two brightest objects in the sky the sun 日 and moon 月, brought together to express the idea of "bright". It is canonical because the term 明白 in Chinese (lit. "bright white") means "to understand, understand". Adding the abbreviated radical for grass, cao above the character, ming, changes it to meng 萌, which means to sprout or bud, alluding to the heliotropic behavior of plant life. Other commonly cited examples include "rest" (composed of the pictograms "person" and "tree") and "good" (composed of "woman" and "child").

Xu Shen placed approximately 13% of characters in this category, but many of his examples are now believed to be phono-semantic compounds whose origin has been obscured by subsequent changes in their form. Peter Boodberg and William Boltz go so far as to deny that any of the compound characters devised in ancient times were of this type, maintaining that now-lost "secondary readings" are responsible for the apparent absence of phonetic indicators, but their arguments have been rejected by other scholars.

In contrast, associative compound characters are common among characters coined in Japan. Also, a few characters coined in China in modern times, such as platinum, "white metal" (see ''Chemical elements in East Asian languages'') belong to this category.

Rebus

* '

Also called ''borrowings'' or ''phonetic loan characters,'' the rebus category covers cases where an existing character is used to represent an unrelated word with similar or identical pronunciation; sometimes the old meaning is then lost completely, as with characters such as ', which has lost its original meaning of "nose" completely and exclusively means "oneself", or ', which originally meant "scorpion" but is now used only in the sense of "ten thousand".

Rebus was pivotal in the history of writing in China insofar as it represented the stage at which logographic writing could become purely phonetic (phonographic). Chinese characters used purely for their sound values are attested in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period manuscripts, in which ' was used to write ' and vice versa, just lines apart; the same happened with ' 勺 for ' , with the characters in question being homophonous or nearly homophonous at the time.

Phonetical usage for foreign words

Chinese characters are used rebus-like and exclusively for their phonetic value when transcribing words of foreign origin, such as ancient Buddhist terms or modern foreign names. For example, the word for the country "Romania" is 罗马尼亚/羅馬尼亞 (Luó Mǎ Ní Yà), in which the Chinese characters are only used for their sounds and do not provide any meaning. This usage is similar to that of the Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, although the Kanas use a special set of simplified forms of Chinese characters, in order to advertise their value as purely phonetic symbols. The same rebus principle for names in particular has also been used in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya glyphs. In the Chinese usage, in a few instances, the characters used for pronunciation might be carefully chosen in order to connote a specific meaning, as regularly happens for brand names: Coca-Cola is translated phonetically as 可口可乐/可口可樂 (Kěkǒu Kělè), but the characters were carefully selected so as to have the additional meaning of "Delicious and Enjoyable". A more literal translation would be "the Mouth can be happy", and the phrase in Chinese is technically grammatically sound.

Phono-semantic compounds

* / Mandarin: '

''Semantic-phonetic compounds'' or ''pictophonetic compounds'' are by far the most numerous characters. These characters are composed of at least two parts. The semantic component suggests the general meaning of the compound character. The phonetic component suggests the pronunciation of the compound character. In most cases the semantic indicator is also the 部首 radical under which the character is listed in dictionaries. In some rare examples phono-semantic characters may also convey pictorial content. Each Chinese character is an attempt to combine sound, image, and idea in a mutually reinforcing fashion.

Examples of phono-semantic characters include ' "river", ' "lake", ' "stream", ' "surge", ' "slippery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes (氵), which is a reduced form of the character 水 ''shuǐ'' meaning "water", indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water. The right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator- for instance: ' has a very similar pronunciation to and ' has a similar (though somewhat different) pronunciation to 河. For example, in the case of ' (Old Chinese ) "surge", the phonetic indicator is ' (Old Chinese ), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; the effect of historical sound change means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today.

In general, phonetic components do not determine the exact pronunciation of a character, but only give a clue as to its pronunciation. While some characters take the exact pronunciation of their phonetic component, others take only the initial or final sounds. In fact, some characters' pronunciations may not correspond to the pronunciations of their phonetic parts at all, which is sometimes the case with characters after having undergone simplification. The 8 characters in the following table all take 也 for their phonetic part, however, as it is readily apparent, none of them take the pronunciation of 也, which is yě (Old Chinese *lajʔ). As the table below shows, the sound changes that have taken place since the Shang/Zhou period when most of these characters were created can be dramatic, to the point of not providing any useful hint of the modern pronunciation.

Xu Shen (c. 100 AD) placed approximately 82% of characters into this category, while in the Kangxi Dictionary (1716 AD) the number is closer to 90%, due to the extremely productive use of this technique to extend the Chinese vocabulary. The chữ Nôm characters of Vietnam were created using this principle.

This method is used to form new characters, for example / ' ("plutonium") is the metal radical ' plus the phonetic component ', described in Chinese as " gives sound, gives meaning". Many Chinese names of the chemical elements and many other chemistry-related characters were formed this way. In fact, it is possible to tell from a Chinese periodic table at a glance which elements are metal (), solid nonmetal (, "stone"), liquid (), or gas () at standard temperature and pressure.

Occasionally a bisyllabic word is written with two characters that contain the same radical, as in ' "butterfly", where both characters have the insect radical . A notable example is pipa (a Chinese lute, also a fruit, the loquat, of similar shape) – originally written as with the hand radical (扌), referring to the down and up strokes when playing this instrument, which was then changed to (tree radical ), which is still used for the fruit, while the character was changed to when referring to the instrument (radical ). In other cases a compound word may coincidentally share a radical without this being meaningful.

Derivative cognates

* / '

The smallest category of characters is also the least understood. In the postface to the ', Xu Shen gave as an example the characters ' "to verify" and ' "old", which had similar Old Chinese pronunciations (*khuʔ and *C-ruʔ respectively) and may once have been the same word, meaning "elderly person", but became lexicalized into two separate words. The term does not appear in the body of the dictionary, and is often omitted from modern systems.

History

Legendary origins

According to traditional legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie, a figure said to have been a scribe to the legendary Yellow Emperor during the 27th century BC. Inspired by his study of the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth and the stars in the sky, Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called ' () – the first Chinese characters. The legend relates that on the day the characters were created, grain rained down from the sky and that night the people heard ghosts wailing and demons crying because the human beings could no longer be cheated.

Early sign use

In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at Neolithic sites in China, including Jiahu (c. 6500 BC), Dadiwan and Damaidi from the 6th millennium BC, and Banpo (5th millennium BC). Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years. However, because these marks occur singly without any implied context and are made crudely, Qiu Xigui concluded that "we do not have any basis for stating that these constituted writing nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to Shang dynasty Chinese characters." They do however demonstrate a history of sign use in the Yellow River valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period.

Oracle bone script

The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions carved on bronze vessels and oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1050 BC). The earliest of these is dated to around 1200 BC. In 1899, pieces of these bones were being sold as "dragon bones" for medicinal purposes, when scholars identified the symbols on them as Chinese writing. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to a village near Anyang in Henan Province, which was excavated by the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. Over 150,000 fragments have been found.

Oracle bone inscriptions are records of divinations performed in communication with royal ancestral spirits. The shortest are only a few characters long, while the longest are 30 to 40 characters in length. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors on topics relating to the royal family, military success, weather forecasting, ritual sacrifices, and related topics by means of scapulimancy, and the answers would be recorded on the divination material itself.

The oracle bone script is a well-developed writing system, suggesting that the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the late second millennium BC. Although these divinatory inscriptions are the earliest surviving evidence of ancient Chinese writing, it is widely believed that writing was used for many other non-official purposes, but that the materials upon which non-divinatory writing was done – likely wood and bamboo – were less durable than bone and shell and have since decayed away.

Bronze Age: parallel script forms and gradual evolution

The traditional picture of an orderly series of scripts, each one invented suddenly and then completely displacing the previous one, has been conclusively demonstrated to be fiction by the archaeological finds and scholarly research of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Gradual evolution and the coexistence of two or more scripts was more often the case. As early as the Shang dynasty, oracle bone script coexisted as a simplified form alongside the normal script of bamboo books (preserved in typical bronze inscriptions), as well as the extra-elaborate pictorial forms (often clan emblems) found on many bronzes.

Based on studies of these bronze inscriptions, it is clear that, from the Shang dynasty writing to that of the Western Zhou and early Eastern Zhou, the mainstream script evolved in a slow, unbroken fashion, until assuming the form that is now known as seal script in the late Eastern Zhou in the state of Qin, without any clear line of division. Meanwhile, other scripts had evolved, especially in the eastern and southern areas during the late Zhou dynasty, including regional forms, such as the ''gǔwén'' ("ancient forms") of the eastern Warring States preserved as variant forms in the Han dynasty character dictionary ''Shuowen Jiezi'', as well as decorative forms such as bird and insect scripts.

Unification: seal script, vulgar writing, and proto-clerical

Seal script, which had evolved slowly in the state of Qin during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, became standardized and adopted as the formal script for all of China in the Qin dynasty (leading to a popular misconception that it was invented at that time), and was still widely used for decorative engraving and seals (name chops, or signets) in the Han dynasty period. However, despite the Qin script standardization, more than one script remained in use at the time. For example, a little-known, rectilinear and roughly executed kind of common (vulgar) writing had for centuries coexisted with the more formal seal script in the Qin state, and the popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing itself became more widespread. By the Warring States period, an immature form of clerical script called "early clerical" or "proto-clerical" had already developed in the state of Qin based upon this vulgar writing, and with influence from seal script as well. The coexistence of the three scripts – small seal, vulgar and proto-clerical, with the latter evolving gradually in the Qin to early Han dynasties into clerical script – runs counter to the traditional belief that the Qin dynasty had one script only, and that clerical script was suddenly invented in the early Han dynasty from the small seal script.

Han dynasty

Proto-clerical evolving to clerical

Proto-clerical script, which had emerged by the time of the Warring States period from vulgar Qin writing, matured gradually, and by the early Western Han period, it was little different from that of the Qin. Recently discovered bamboo slips show the script becoming mature clerical script by the middle-to-late reign of Emperor Wu of the Western Han, who ruled from 141 to 87 BC.

Clerical and clerical cursive

Contrary to the popular belief of there being only one script per period, there were in fact multiple scripts in use during the Han period. Although mature clerical script, also called () script, was dominant at that time, an early type of cursive script was also in use by the Han by at least as early as 24 BC (during the very late Western Han period), incorporating cursive forms popular at the time, well as many elements from the vulgar writing of the Warring State of Qin. By around the time of the Eastern Jin dynasty, this Han cursive became known as ''zhāngcǎo'' (also known as / ''lìcǎo'' today), or in English sometimes clerical cursive, ancient cursive, or draft cursive. Some believe that the name, based on ''zhāng'' meaning "orderly", arose because the script was a more orderly form of cursive than the modern form, which emerged during the Eastern Jin dynasty and is still in use today, called ''jīncǎo'' or "modern cursive".

Neo-clerical

Around the mid-Eastern Han period, a simplified and easier-to-write form of clerical script appeared, which Qiu terms "neo-clerical" ( / , ''xīnlìtǐ''). By the late Eastern Han, this had become the dominant daily script, although the formal, mature () clerical script remained in use for formal works such as engraved stelae. Qiu describes this neo-clerical script as a transition between clerical and regular script, and it remained in use through the Cao Wei