Chinese characters

Structural analysis

Most characters can be analysed structurally as compounds made of smaller components (部件; bùjiàn), which are often independent characters in their own right, adjusted to occupy a given position in the compound.^[15] Components within a character may serve a specific function—phonetic components provide a hint for the character's pronunciation, and semantic components indicate some element of the character's meaning. Components that serve neither function may be classified as pure signs with no particular meaning, other than their presence distinguishing one character from another.^[16]

A straightforward structural classification scheme may consist of three pure classes of semantographs, phonographs, and signs—having only semantic, phonetic, and form components respectively—plus classes corresponding to each combination of component types.^[17] Of the 3500 characters that are frequently used in Standard Chinese, pure semantographs are estimated to be the rarest, accounting for about 5% of the lexicon, followed by pure signs with 18%, and semantic–form and phonetic–form compounds together accounting for 19%. The remaining 58% are phono-semantic compounds.^[18]

The 20th-century Chinese palaeographer Qiu Xigui presented three principles of character function adapted from earlier proposals by Tang Lan [zh] and Chen Mengjia,^[19] with semantographs describing all characters with forms wholly related to their meaning, regardless of the method by which the meaning was originally depicted; phonographs that include a phonetic component; and loangraphs encompassing existing characters that have been borrowed to write other words. Qiu also acknowledged the existence of character classes that fall outside of these principles, such as pure signs.^[20]

Semantographs

Pictographs

Graphical evolution of pictographs

日 ('Sun')

山 ('mountain')

象 ('elephant')

Most of the oldest characters are pictographs (象形; xiàngxíng), representational pictures of physical objects.^[21] Examples include 日 ('Sun'), 月 ('Moon'), and 木 ('tree'). Over time, the forms of pictographs have been simplified in order to make them easier to write.^[22] As a result, modern readers generally cannot deduce what many pictographs were originally meant to resemble; without knowing the context of their origin in picture-writing, they may be interpreted instead as pure signs. However, if a pictograph's use in compounds still reflects its original meaning, as with 日 in 晴 ('clear sky'), it can still be analysed as a semantic component.^[23][24]

Pictographs have often been extended from their original meanings to take on additional layers of metaphor and synecdoche, which sometimes displace the character's original sense. When this process results in excessive ambiguity between distinct senses written with the same character, it is usually resolved by new compounds being derived to represent particular senses.^[25]

Phonographs

Loangraphs

The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in the initial development of Chinese writing, and has remained common throughout its subsequent history. Some loangraphs (假借; jiǎjiè; 'borrowing') are introduced to represent words previously lacking a written form—this is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as 之 and 其.^[38] The process of characters being borrowed as loangraphs should not be conflated with the distinct process of semantic extension, where a word acquires additional senses, which often remain written with the same character. As both processes often result in a single character form being used to write several distinct meanings, loangraphs are often misidentified as being the result of semantic extension, and vice versa.^[39]

Loangraphs are also used to write words borrowed from other languages, such as the Buddhist terminology introduced to China in antiquity, and novel contemporary non-Chinese words and names. For example, each character in the name 加拿大 (Jiānádà; 'Canada') is often used as a loangraph for its respective syllable. However, the barrier between a character's pronunciation and meaning is never total; when transcribing into Chinese, loangraphs are often chosen deliberately as to create certain connotations. This is regularly done with corporate brand names—for example, Coca-Cola's Chinese name is 可口可乐; 可口可樂 (Kěkǒu Kělè; 'delicious enjoyable').^[40][41][42]

Signs

Some characters and components are pure signs, with meanings merely stemming from their having a fixed and distinct form. Basic examples of pure signs are found with the numerals beyond four, e.g. 五 ('five') and 八 ('eight'), whose forms do not give visual hints to the quantities they represent.^[43]

Traditional Shuowen Jiezi classification

The Shuowen Jiezi is a character dictionary authored c. 100 CE by the scholar Xu Shen. In its postface, Xu analyses what he sees as all the methods by which characters are created. Later authors iterated upon Xu's analysis, developing a categorization scheme known as the 'six writings' (六书; 六書; liùshū), which identifies every character with one of six categories that had previously been mentioned in the Shuowen Jiezi. For nearly two millennia, this scheme was the primary framework for character analysis used throughout the Sinosphere.^[44] Xu based most of his analysis on examples of Qin seal script that were written down several centuries before his time—these were usually the oldest specimens available to him, though he stated he was aware of the existence of even older forms.^[45] The first five categories are pictographs, indicatives, compound ideographs, phono-semantic compounds, and loangraphs. The sixth category is given by Xu as 轉注 (zhuǎnzhù; 'reversed and refocused'); however, its definition is unclear, and it is generally disregarded by modern scholars.^[46]

Modern scholars agree that the theory presented in the Shuowen Jiezi is problematic, failing to fully capture the nature of Chinese writing, both in the present and at the time Xu was writing.^[47] Traditional Chinese lexicography as embodied in the Shuowen Jiezi has suggested implausible etymologies for some characters.^[48] Moreover, several categories are considered to be ill-defined—for example, it is unclear whether characters like 大 ('large') should be classified as pictographs or indicatives.^[34] However, awareness of the 'six writings' model has remained a common component of character literacy, and often serves as a tool for students memorizing characters.^[49]

Traditional invention narrative

Several of the Chinese classics indicate that knotted cords were used to keep records prior to the invention of writing.^[52] Works that reference the practice include chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching^[B] and the "Xici II" commentary to the I Ching.^[C] According to one tradition, Chinese characters were invented during the 3rd millennium BCE by Cangjie, a scribe of the legendary Yellow Emperor. Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called 字 (zì) due to his frustration with the limitations of knotting, taking inspiration from his study of the tracks of animals, landscapes, and the stars in the sky. On the day that these first characters were created, grain rained down from the sky; that night, the people heard the wailing of ghosts and demons, lamenting that humans could no longer be cheated.^[53][54]

Neolithic precursors

Collections of graphs and pictures have been discovered at the sites of several Neolithic settlements throughout the Yellow River valley, including Jiahu (c. 6500 BCE), Dadiwan and Damaidi (6th millennium BCE), and Banpo (5th millennium BCE). Symbols at each site were inscribed or drawn onto artefacts, appearing one at a time and without indicating any greater context. Qiu concluded, "We simply possess no basis for saying that they were already being used to record language."^[55] A historical connection with the symbols used by the late Neolithic Dawenkou culture (c. 4300 – c. 2600 BCE) in Shandong has been deemed possible by palaeographers, with Qiu concluding that they "cannot be definitively treated as primitive writing, nevertheless they are symbols which resemble most the ancient pictographic script discovered thus far in China... They undoubtedly can be viewed as the forerunners of primitive writing."^[56]

Oracle bone script

Oracle bone script

天
'Heaven'

馬
'horse'

旅
'travel'

正
'straight'

韋
'leather'

Ox scapula inscribed with characters recording the result of divinations – dated c. 1200 BCE

The oldest attested Chinese writing comprises a body of inscriptions produced during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), with the very earliest examples from the reign of Wu Ding dated between 1250 and 1200 BCE.^[57] Many of these inscriptions were made on oracle bones—usually either ox scapulae or turtle plastrons—and recorded official divinations carried out by the Shang royal house. Contemporaneous inscriptions in a related but distinct style were also made on ritual bronze vessels. This oracle bone script (甲骨文; jiǎgǔwén) was first documented in 1899, after specimens were discovered being sold as "dragon bones" for medicinal purposes, with the symbols carved into them identified as early character forms. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to a village near Anyang in Henan—discovered to be the site of Yin, the final Shang capital—which was excavated by a team led by Li Ji from the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937.^[58] To date, over 150000 oracle bone fragments have been found.^[59]

Oracle bone inscriptions recorded divinations undertaken to communicate with the spirits of royal ancestors. The inscriptions range from a few characters in length at their shortest, to several dozen at their longest. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors by means of scapulimancy, inquiring about subjects such as the royal family, military success, and the weather. Inscriptions were made in the divination material itself before and after it had been cracked by exposure to heat; they generally include a record of the questions posed and the answers as interpreted in the cracks.^[60][61] A minority of bones feature characters that were inked with a brush before their strokes were incised; the evidence of this also shows that the conventional stroke orders used by later calligraphers had already been established for many characters by this point.^[62]

Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of later forms of written Chinese. The oldest known inscriptions already represent a well-developed writing system, which suggests an initial emergence predating the late 2nd millennium BCE. Although written Chinese is first attested in official divinations, it is widely believed that writing was also used for other purposes during the Shang, but that the media used in other contexts—likely bamboo and wooden slips—were less durable than bronzes or oracle bones, and have not been preserved.^[63]

Zhou scripts

Bronze script

The Shi Qiang pan, a bronze ritual basin bearing inscriptions describing the deeds and virtues of the first seven Zhou kings – dated c. 900 BCE^[64]

As early as the Shang, the oracle bone script existed as a simplified form alongside another that was used in bamboo books, in addition to elaborate pictorial forms often used in clan emblems. These other forms have been preserved in bronze script (金文; jīnwén), where inscriptions were made using a stylus in a clay mould, which was then used to cast ritual bronzes.^[65] These differences in technique generally resulted in character forms that were less angular in appearance than their oracle bone script counterparts.^[66]

Study of these bronze inscriptions has revealed that the mainstream script underwent slow, gradual evolution during the late Shang, which continued during the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 – 256 BCE) until assuming the form now known as small seal script (小篆; xiǎozhuàn) within the Zhou state of Qin.^[67][68] Other scripts in use during the late Zhou include the bird-worm seal script (鸟虫书; 鳥蟲書; niǎochóngshū) and the regional forms used in non-Qin states. Examples of these styles were preserved as variants in the Shuowen Jiezi.^[69] Historically, Zhou forms were collectively known as large seal script (大篆; dàzhuàn), though Qiu refrained from using this term due to its lack of precision.^[70]

Qin unification and small seal script

Small seal script

Following Qin's conquest of the other Chinese states that culminated in the founding of the imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, the Qin small seal script was standardized for use throughout the entire country under the direction of Chancellor Li Si.^[71] It was traditionally believed that Qin scribes only used small seal script, and the later clerical script was a sudden invention during the early Han. However, more than one script was used by Qin scribes—a rectilinear vulgar style had also been in use in Qin for centuries prior to the wars of unification. The popularity of this form grew as writing became more widespread.^[72]

Clerical script

Clerical script

By the Warring States period (c. 475 – 221 BCE), an immature form of clerical script (隶书; 隸書; lìshū) had emerged based on the vulgar form developed within Qin, often called "early clerical" or "proto-clerical".^[73] The proto-clerical script evolved gradually; by the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), it had arrived at a mature form, also called 八分 (bāfēn). Bamboo slips discovered during the late 20th century point to this maturation being completed during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141–87 BCE). This process, called libian (隶变; 隸變), involved character forms being mutated and simplified, with many components being consolidated, substituted, or omitted. In turn, the components themselves were regularized to use fewer, straighter, and more well-defined strokes. As a result, clerical script largely lacks the pictorial qualities still evident in seal script.^[74]

Around the midpoint of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), a simplified and easier form of clerical script appeared, which Qiu termed 'neo-clerical' (新隶体; 新隸體; xīnlìtǐ).^[75] By the end of the Han, this had become the dominant script used by scribes, though clerical script remained in use for formal works, such as engraved stelae. Qiu described neo-clerical as a transitional form between clerical and regular script which remained in use through the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE) and beyond.^[76]

Cursive and semi-cursive

Cursive script

Cursive script (草书; 草書; cǎoshū) was in use as early as 24 BCE, synthesizing elements of the vulgar writing that had originated in Qin with flowing cursive brushwork. By the Jin dynasty (266–420), the Han cursive style became known as 章草 (zhāngcǎo; 'orderly cursive'), sometimes known in English as 'clerical cursive', 'ancient cursive', or 'draft cursive'. Some attribute this name to the fact that the style was considered more orderly than a later form referred to as 今草 (jīncǎo; 'modern cursive'), which had first emerged during the Jin and was influenced by semi-cursive and regular script. This later form was exemplified by the work of figures like Wang Xizhi (fl. 4th century), who is often regarded as the most important calligrapher in Chinese history.^[77][78]

Semi-cursive script

An early form of semi-cursive script (行书; 行書; xíngshū; 'running script') can be identified during the late Han, with its development stemming from a cursive form of neo-clerical script. Liu Desheng (刘德升; 劉德升; fl. 2nd century CE) is traditionally recognized as the inventor of the semi-cursive style, though accreditations of this kind often indicate a given style's early masters, rather than its earliest practitioners. Later analysis has suggested popular origins for semi-cursive, as opposed to it being an invention of Liu.^[79] It can be characterized partly as the result of clerical forms being written more quickly, without formal rules of technique or composition—what would be discrete strokes in clerical script frequently flow together instead. The semi-cursive style is commonly adopted in contemporary handwriting.^[80]

Regular script

Regular script

Regular script (楷书; 楷書; kǎishū), based on clerical and semi-cursive forms, is the predominant form in which characters are written and printed.^[81] Its innovations have traditionally been credited to the calligrapher Zhong Yao, who lived in the state of Cao Wei (extant 220–266); he is often called the "father of regular script".^[82] The earliest surviving writing in regular script comprises copies of Zhong Yao's work, including at least one copy by Wang Xizhi. Characteristics of regular script include the 'pause' (頓; dùn) technique used to end horizontal strokes and heavy tails on diagonal strokes made going down and to the right. It developed further during the Eastern Jin (317–420) in the hands of Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi.^[83] However, most Jin-era writers continued to use neo-clerical and semi-cursive styles in their daily writing. It was not until the Northern and Southern period (420–589) that regular script became the predominant form.^[84] The system of imperial examinations for the civil service established during the Sui dynasty (581–618) required test takers to write in Literary Chinese using regular script, which contributed to the prevalence of both throughout later Chinese history.^[85]

Variant characters

Over a character's history, variant character forms (异体字; 異體字; yìtǐzì) emerge via several processes. Variant forms have distinct structures, but represent the same morpheme; as such, they can be considered instances of the same underlying character. This is comparable to visually distinct double-storey |a| and single-storey |ɑ| forms both representing the Latin letter ⟨A⟩. Variants also emerge for aesthetic reasons, to make handwriting easier, or to correct what the writer perceives to be errors in a character's form.^[93] Individual components may be replaced with visually, phonetically, or semantically similar alternatives.^[94] The boundary between character structure and style—and thus whether forms represent different characters, or are merely variants of the same character—is often non-trivial or unclear.^[95]

For example, prior to the Qin dynasty the character meaning 'bright' was written as either 明 or 朙—with either 日 ('Sun') or 囧 ('window') on the left, and 月 ('Moon') on the right. As part of the Qin programme to standardize small seal script across China, the 朙 form was promoted. Some scribes ignored this, and continued to write the character as 明. However, the increased usage of 朙 was followed by the proliferation of a third variant: 眀, with 目 ('eye') on the left—likely derived as a contraction of 朙. Ultimately, 明 became the character's standard form.^[96]

Layout

From the earliest inscriptions until the 20th century, texts were generally laid out vertically—with characters written from top to bottom in columns, arranged from right to left. Word boundaries are generally not indicated with spaces. A horizontal writing direction—with characters written from left to right in rows, arranged from top to bottom—only became predominant in the Sinosphere during the 20th century as a result of Western influence.^[97] Many publications outside mainland China continue to use the traditional vertical writing direction.^[98] Western influence also resulted in the generalized use of punctuation being widely adopted in print during the 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to this, the context of a passage was considered adequate to guide readers; this was enabled by characters being easier to read than alphabets when written without spaces or punctuation due to their more discretized shapes.^[99]

Calligraphy

Calligraphy was traditionally one of the four arts to be mastered by Chinese scholars, considered to be an artful means of expressing thoughts and teachings. Chinese calligraphy typically makes use of an ink brush to write characters. Strict regularity is not required, and character forms may be accentuated to evoke a variety of aesthetic effects.^[102] Traditional ideals of calligraphic beauty often tie into broader philosophical concepts native to East Asia. For example, aesthetics can be conceptualized using the framework of yin and yang, where the extremes of any number of mutually reinforcing dualities are balanced by the calligrapher—such as the duality between strokes made quickly or slowly, between applying ink heavily or lightly, between characters written with symmetrical or asymmetrical forms, and between characters representing concrete or abstract concepts.^[103]

Printing and typefaces

Woodblock printing was invented in China between the 6th and 9th centuries,^[104] followed by the invention of moveable type by Bi Sheng during the 11th century.^[105] The increasing use of print during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) led to considerable standardization in character forms, which prefigured later script reforms during the 20th century. This print orthography, exemplified by the 1716 Kangxi Dictionary, was later dubbed the jiu zixing ('old character shapes').^[106] Printed Chinese characters may use different typefaces,^[107] of which there are four broad classes in use:^[108]

• Song (宋体; 宋體) or Ming (明体; 明體) typefaces—with "Song" generally used with simplified Chinese typefaces, and "Ming" with others—broadly correspond to Western serif styles. Song typefaces are broadly within the tradition of historical Chinese print; both names for the style refer to eras regarded as high points for printing in the Sinosphere. While type during the Song dynasty (960–1279) generally resembled the regular script style of a particular calligrapher, most modern Song typefaces are intended for general purpose use and emphasize neutrality in their design.
• Sans-serif typefaces are called 'black form' (黑体; 黑體; hēitǐ) in Chinese and 'Gothic' (ゴシック体) in Japanese. Sans-serif strokes are rendered as simple lines of even thickness.
• "Kai" typefaces (楷体; 楷體) imitate handwritten regular script.
• Fangsong typefaces (仿宋体; 仿宋體), called "Song" in Japan, correspond to semi-script styles in the Western paradigm.

Use with computers

Before fax machines and computers with bit-mapped displays adequate for Chinese characters became ubiquitous, the first text-based telecommunications and word-processing devices like telegraphs, typewriters, and computer terminals supported only alphabets and used only alphabetic text encodings like Morse code and ASCII. Adapting these technologies for a writing system that uses thousands of distinct characters was non-trivial.^[109][110]

Input methods

Further information: Chinese input method and Japanese input method

Chinese characters are predominantly input on computers using a standard keyboard. Many input methods (IMEs) are phonetic, where typists enter characters according to schemes like pinyin or bopomofo for Mandarin, Jyutping for Cantonese, or Hepburn for Japanese. For example, 香港 ('Hong Kong') could be input as xiang1gang3 using pinyin, or as hoeng1gong2 using Jyutping.^[111]

Character input methods may also be based on form, using the shape of characters and existing rules of handwriting to assign unique codes to each character, potentially increasing the speed of typing. Popular form-based input methods include Wubi on the mainland, and Cangjie—named after the mythological inventor of writing—in Taiwan and Hong Kong.^[111] Often, unnecessary parts are omitted from the encoding according to predictable rules. For example, 疆 ('border') is encoded using the Cangjie method as NGMWM, which corresponds to the components 弓土一田一.^[112]

Contextual constraints may be used to improve candidate character selection. When ignoring tones, 知道 and 直刀 are both transcribed as zhidao; the system may prioritize which candidate appears first based on context.^[113]

Literary and vernacular Chinese

Words in Classical Chinese were generally a single character in length.^[134] An estimated 25–30% of the vocabulary used in Classical Chinese texts consists of two-character words.^[135] Over time, the introduction of multi-syllable vocabulary into vernacular varieties of Chinese was encouraged by phonetic shifts that increased the number of homophones.^[136] The most common process of Chinese word formation after the Classical period has been to create compounds of existing words. Words have also been created by appending affixes to words, by reduplication, and by borrowing words from other languages.^[137] While multi-syllable words are generally written with one character per syllable, abbreviations are occasionally used.^[138] For example, 二十 (èrshí; 'twenty') may be written as the contracted form 廿.^[139]

Sometimes, different morphemes come to be represented by characters with identical shapes. For example, 行 may represent either 'road' (xíng) or the extended sense of 'row' (háng)—these morphemes are ultimately cognates that diverged in pronunciation but remained written with the same character. However, Qiu reserved the term homograph to describe identically shaped characters with different meanings that emerge via processes other than semantic extension. An example homograph is 铊; 鉈, which originally meant 'weight used at a steelyard' (tuó). In the 20th century, this character was created again with the meaning 'thallium' (tā). Both of these characters are phono-semantic compounds with ⾦ ('gold') as the semantic component and 它 as the phonetic component, but the words represented by each are not related.^[140]

There are a number of 'dialect characters' (方言字; fāngyánzì) that are not used in standard written vernacular Chinese, but reflect the vocabulary of other spoken varieties. The most complete example of an orthography based on a variety other than Standard Chinese is written Cantonese. A common Cantonese character is 冇 (mou5; 'to not have'), derived by removing two strokes from 有 (jau5; 'to have').^[141] It is common to use standard characters to transcribe previously unwritten words in Chinese dialects when obvious cognates exist. When no obvious cognate exists due to factors like irregular sound changes, semantic drift, or an origin in a non-Chinese language, characters are often borrowed or invented to transcribe the word—either ad hoc, or according to existing principles.^[142] These new characters are generally phono-semantic compounds.^[143]

Japanese

In Japanese, Chinese characters are referred to as kanji. During the Nara period (710–794), readers and writers of kanbun—the Japanese term for Literary Chinese writing—began utilizing a system of reading techniques and annotations called kundoku. When reading, Japanese speakers would adapt the syntax and vocabulary of Literary Chinese texts to reflect their Japanese-language equivalents. Writing essentially involved the inverse of this process, and resulted in ordinary Literary Chinese.^[144] When adapted to write Japanese, characters were used to represent both Sino-Japanese vocabulary loaned from Chinese and the corresponding native synonyms. Most kanji were subject to both borrowing processes, and as a result have both Sino-Japanese and native readings, known as on'yomi and kun'yomi respectively. Moreover, kanji may have multiple readings of either kind. Distinct classes of on'yomi were borrowed into Japanese at different points in time from different varieties of Chinese.^[145]

The Japanese writing system is a mixed script, and has also incorporated syllabaries called kana to represent phonetic units called moras, rather than morphemes. Prior to the Meiji era (1868–1912), writers used certain kanji to represent their sound values instead, in a system known as man'yōgana. Starting in the 9th century, specific man'yōgana were graphically simplified to create two distinct syllabaries called hiragana and katakana, which slowly replaced the earlier convention. Modern Japanese retains the use of kanji to represent most word stems, while kana syllabograms are generally used for grammatical affixes, particles, and loanwords. The forms of hiragana and katakana are visually distinct from one another, owing in large part to different methods of simplification—katakana were derived from smaller components of each man'yōgana, while hiragana were derived from the cursive forms of man'yōgana in their entirety. In addition, the hiragana and katakana for some moras were derived from different man'yōgana.^[146] Characters invented for Japanese-language use are called kokuji. The methods employed to create kokuji are equivalent to those used by Chinese-original characters, though most are ideographic compounds. For example, 峠 (tōge; 'mountain pass') is a compound kokuji composed of 山 ('mountain'), 上 ('above'), and 下 ('below').^[147]

While characters used to write Chinese are monosyllabic, many kanji have multi-syllable readings. For example, the kanji 刀 has a native kun'yomi reading of katana. In different contexts, it can also be read with the on'yomi reading tō, such as in the Chinese loanword 日本刀 (nihontō; 'Japanese sword'), with a pronunciation corresponding to that in Chinese at the time of borrowing. Prior to the universal adoption of katakana, loanwords were typically written with unrelated kanji with on'yomi readings matching the syllables in the loanword. These spellings are called ateji—for example, 亜米利加 (Amerika) was the ateji spelling of 'America', now rendered as アメリカ. As opposed to man'yōgana used solely for their pronunciation, ateji still corresponded to specific Japanese words. Some are still in use, with the official list of jōyō kanji including 106 ateji readings.^[148]

Korean

In Korean, Chinese characters are referred to as hanja. Literary Chinese may have been written in Korea as early as the 2nd century BCE. During Korea's Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE – 668 CE), characters were also used to write idu, a form of Korean-language literature that mostly made use of Sino-Korean vocabulary. During the Goryeo period (918–1392), Korean writers developed a system of phonetic annotations for Literary Chinese called gugyeol, comparable to kundoku in Japan, though it only entered widespread use during the later Joseon period (1392–1897).^[149] While the hangul alphabet was invented by the Joseon king Sejong in 1443, it was not adopted by the Korean literati and was relegated to use in glosses for Literary Chinese texts until the late 19th century.^[150]

Much of the Korean lexicon consists of Chinese loanwords, especially technical and academic vocabulary.^[151] While hanja were usually only used to write this Sino-Korean vocabulary, there is evidence that vernacular readings were sometimes used.^[128] Compared to the other written vernaculars, very few characters were invented to write Korean words; these are called gukja.^[152] During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Korean was written either using a mixed script of hangul and hanja, or only using hangul.^[153] Following the end of the Empire of Japan's occupation of Korea in 1945, the total replacement of hanja with hangul was advocated throughout the country as part of a broader "purification movement" of the national language and culture.^[154] However, due to the lack of tones in spoken Korean, there are many Sino-Korean words that are homophones with identical hangul spellings. For example, the phonetic dictionary entry for 기사 (gisa) yields more than 30 different entries. This ambiguity had historically been resolved by also including the associated hanja. While still sometimes used for Sino-Korean vocabulary, it is much rarer for native Korean words to be written using hanja.^[155] When learning new characters, Korean students are instructed to associate each one with both its Sino-Korean pronunciation and a native Korean synonym.^[156] Examples include:

Vietnamese

In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are referred to as chữ Hán (𡨸漢), chữ Nho (𡨸儒; 'Confucian characters'), or Hán tự (漢字). Literary Chinese was used for all formal writing in Vietnam until the modern era,^[157] having first acquired official status in 1010. Literary Chinese written by Vietnamese authors is first attested in the late 10th century, though the local practice of writing is likely several centuries older.^[158] Characters used to write Vietnamese called chữ Nôm (𡨸喃) are first attested in an inscription dated to 1209 made at the site of a pagoda.^[159] A mature chữ Nôm script had likely emerged by the 13th century, and was initially used to record Vietnamese folk literature. Some chữ Nôm characters are phono-semantic compounds corresponding to spoken Vietnamese syllables.^[160] Another technique with no equivalent in China created chữ Nôm compounds using two phonetic components. This was done because Vietnamese phonology included consonant clusters not found in Chinese, and were thus poorly approximated by the sound values of borrowed characters. Compounds used components with two distinct consonant sounds to specify the cluster, e.g. 𢁋 (blăng;^[d] 'Moon') was created as a compound of 巴 (ba) and 陵 (lăng).^[162] As a system, chữ Nôm was highly complex, and the literacy rate among the Vietnamese population never exceeded 5%.^[163] Both Literary Chinese and chữ Nôm fell out of use during the French colonial period, and were gradually replaced by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. Following the end of colonial rule in 1954, the Vietnamese alphabet has been sole official writing system in Vietnam, and is used exclusively in Vietnamese-language media.^[164]

Other languages

Several minority languages of South and Southwestern China have been written with scripts using both borrowed and locally created characters. The most well-documented of these is the sawndip script for the Zhuang languages of Guangxi. While little is known about its early development, a tradition of vernacular Zhuang writing likely first emerged during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Modern scholarship characterizes sawndip writing as a network of regional traditions that have mutually influenced one another while maintaining their local characteristics.^[165] Like Vietnamese, some invented Zhuang characters are phonetic–phonetic compounds, though not primarily ones intended to describe consonant clusters.^[166] Despite the Chinese government encouraging its replacement with a Latin-based Zhuang alphabet, sawndip remains in use.^[167] Other non-Sinitic languages of China historically written with Chinese characters include Miao, Yao, Bouyei, Bai, and Hani; each of these are now written with Latin-based alphabets designed for use with each language.^[168]

Graphically derived scripts

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, dynasties founded by non-Han peoples in northern China also created scripts for their languages that were inspired by Chinese characters, but did not use them directly—these included the Khitan large script, Khitan small script, Tangut script, and Jurchen script.^[169] This has occurred in other contexts as well: Nüshu was a script used by Yao women to write the Xiangnan Tuhua language,^[170] and bopomofo (注音符号; 注音符號; zhùyīn fúhào) is a semi-syllabary first invented in 1907^[171] to represent the sounds of Standard Chinese;^[172] both use forms graphically derived from Chinese characters. Other scripts within China that have adapted some characters but are otherwise distinct include the Geba syllabary used to write the Naxi language, the script for the Sui language, the script for the Yi languages, and the syllabary for the Lisu language.^[169]

Chinese characters have also been repurposed phonetically to transcribe the sounds of non-Chinese languages. For example, the only manuscripts of the 13th-century Secret History of the Mongols that have survived from the medieval era use characters in this manner to write the Mongolian language.^[173]

Dictionaries

According to analyses of mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Japanese, and Korean sources, the total number of characters in the modern lexicon is around 15000.^[178] Dozens of schemes have been devised for indexing Chinese characters and arranging them in dictionaries, though relatively few have achieved widespread use. Characters may be ordered according to methods based on their meaning, visual structure, or pronunciation.^[179]

The Erya (c. 3rd century BCE) organized the Chinese lexicon into 19 sections according to character meaning, with three dealing with everyday vocabulary, and each of the remaining 16 dedicated to specialized vocabulary related to a specific topic.^[180] The Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 CE) introduced what would ultimately become the predominant method of organization used by later character dictionaries, whereby characters are grouped according to certain visually prominent components called radicals (部首; bùshǒu; 'section headers'). The Shuowen Jiezi used a system of 540 radicals, while subsequent dictionaries have generally used fewer.^[181] The set of 214 Kangxi radicals was popularized by the Kangxi Dictionary (1716), but originally appeared in the earlier Zihui (1615).^[182] Character dictionaries have historically been indexed using radical-and-stroke sorting, where characters are grouped by radical and sorted within each group by stroke number. Some modern dictionaries arrange character entries alphabetically according to their pinyin spelling, while also providing a traditional radical-based index.^[183]

Before the invention of romanization systems for Chinese, the pronunciation of characters was transmitted via rhyme dictionaries. These used the fanqie (反切; 'reverse cut') method, where each entry lists a common character with the same initial sound as the character in question, alongside one with the same final sound.^[184]

Neurolinguistics

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neurolinguists have studied the brain activity associated with literacy. Compared to phonetic systems, reading and writing with characters involves additional areas of the brain—including those associated with visual processing.^[185] While the level of memorization required for character literacy is significant, identification of the phonetic and semantic components in compounds—which constitute the vast majority of characters—also plays a key role in reading comprehension. The ease of recognition for a given character is impacted by how regular the positioning of its components is, as well as how reliable its phonetic component is in indicating a specific pronunciation.^[186] Moreover, due to the high level of homophony in Chinese languages and the more irregular correspondences between writing and the sounds of speech, it has been suggested that knowledge of orthography plays a greater role in speech recognition for literate Chinese speakers.^[187]

Developmental dyslexia in readers of character-based languages appears to involve independent visuospatial and phonological disorders co-occurring. This seems to be a distinct phenomenon from dyslexia as experienced with phonetic orthographies, which can result from only one of the aforementioned disorders.^[188]

People's Republic of China

Traditional (們)

Simplified (们)

Comparison between character forms, showing systematic simplification of the component ⾨ ('gate')

The project of script reform in China was ultimately inherited by the Communists, who resumed work following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. In 1951, Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the formation of a Script Reform Committee, with subgroups investigating both simplification and alphabetization. The simplification subgroup began surveying and collating simplified forms the following year,^[200] ultimately publishing a draft scheme of simplified characters and components in 1956. In 1958, Zhou Enlai announced the government's intent to focus on simplification, as opposed to replacing characters with Hanyu Pinyin, which had been introduced earlier that year.^[201] The 1956 scheme was largely ratified by a revised list of 2235 characters promulgated in 1964.^[202] The majority of these characters were drawn from conventional abbreviations or ancient forms with fewer strokes.^[203] The committee also sought to reduce the total number of characters in use by merging some forms together.^[203] For example, 雲 ('cloud') was written as 云 in oracle bone script. The simpler form remained in use as a loangraph meaning 'to say'; it was replaced in its original sense of 'cloud' with a form that added a semantic ⾬ ('rain') component. The simplified forms of these two characters have been merged into 云.^[204]

A second round of simplified characters was promulgated in 1977, but was poorly received by the public and quickly fell out of official use. It was ultimately formally rescinded in 1986.^[205] The second-round simplifications were unpopular in large part because most of the forms were completely new, in contrast to the familiar variants comprising the majority of the first round.^[206] With the rescission of the second round, work toward further character simplification largely came to an end.^[207] The Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese was published in 1988 and included 7000 simplified and unsimplified characters. Of these, half were also included in the revised List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese, which specified 2500 common characters and 1000 less common characters.^[208] In 2013, the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters was published as a revision of the 1988 lists; it includes a total of 8105 characters.^[209]

Japan

After World War II, the Japanese government instituted its own program of orthographic reforms. Some characters were assigned simplified forms called shinjitai; the older forms were then labelled kyūjitai. Inconsistent use of different variant forms was discouraged, and lists of characters to be taught to students at each grade level were developed. The first of these was the 1850-character tōyō kanji list published in 1946, later replaced by the 1945-character jōyō kanji list in 1981. In 2010, the jōyō kanji were expanded to include a total of 2136 characters.^[210][211] The Japanese government restricts characters that may be used in names to the jōyō kanji, plus an additional list of 983 jinmeiyō kanji whose use are historically prevalent in names.^[212][213]

South Korea

Hanja are still used in South Korea, though not to the extent that kanji are used in Japan. In general, there is a trend toward the exclusive use of hangul in ordinary contexts.^[214] Characters remain in use in place names, newspapers, and to disambiguate homophones. They are also used in the practice of calligraphy. Use of hanja in education is politically contentious, with official policy regarding the prominence of hanja in curricula having vacillated since the country's independence.^[215][216] Some support the total abandonment of hanja, while others advocate an increase in use to levels previously seen during the 1970s and 1980s. Students in grades 7–12 are presently taught with a principal focus on simple recognition and attaining sufficient literacy to read a newspaper.^[150] The South Korean Ministry of Education published the Basic Hanja for Educational Use in 1972, which specified 1800 characters meant to be learned by secondary school students.^[217] In 1991, the Supreme Court of Korea published the Table of Hanja for Use in Personal Names (인명용 한자; Inmyeong-yong Hanja), which initially included 2854 characters.^[218] The list has been expanded several times since; as of 2022^[update], it includes 8319 characters.^[219]

North Korea

In the years following its establishment, the North Korean government sought to eliminate the use of hanja in standard writing; by 1949, characters had been almost entirely replaced with hangul in North Korean publications.^[220] While mostly unused in writing, hanja remain an important part of North Korean education. A 1971 textbook for university history departments contained 3323 distinct characters, and in the 1990s North Korean schoolchildren were still expected to learn 2000 characters.^[221] A 2013 textbook appears to integrate the use of hanja in secondary school education.^[222] It has been estimated that North Korean students learn around 3000 hanja by the time they graduate university.^[223]

Taiwan

The Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters was published by Taiwan's Ministry of Education in 1982, and lists 4808 traditional characters.^[224] The Ministry of Education also compiles dictionaries of characters used in Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka.^[G]

Other regional standards

Singapore's Ministry of Education promulgated three successive rounds of simplifications. The first round in 1969 included 502 simplified characters, and the second round in 1974 included 2287 simplified characters—including 49 that differed from those in the PRC, which were ultimately removed in the final round in 1976. In 1993, Singapore adopted the revisions made in mainland China in 1986.^[225]

The Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau's List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters includes 4762 traditional characters used in elementary and junior secondary education.^[226]

Citations

Works cited

Primary and media sources