Chinese characters

logographic writing used in the Sinosphere

Chinese characters are symbols used to write the Chinese and Japanese languages. In the past, other languages like Korean and Vietnamese also used them. The beginning of these characters was at least 3000 years ago, making them one of the oldest writing systems in the world that is still used today. In Chinese they are called hanzi (汉字/漢字), which means "Han character". In Japanese they are called kanji, hanja in Korean, and chữ Hán in Vietnamese.

classical Chinese script
Chinese calligraphy

Chinese characters are an important part of East Asian culture. The art of writing Chinese characters is called calligraphy.

Writing change

Chinese characters are a type of logogram, which are written symbols that represent words instead of sounds. Most earlier Chinese characters were pictographs, which are simple pictures used to mean some kind of thing or idea. Today, very few modern Chinese characters are pure pictographs, but are a combination of two or more simple characters, also known as radicals. While many radicals and characters show a word's meaning, some give hints of the word's pronunciation instead.

To better explain the different purposes and types of Chinese characters that exist, Chinese scholars have divided Chinese characters into six categories known as liushu (六书 / 六書), literally translated as the Six Books. The six types of Chinese characters are:

  • Pictographs, xiàng xÍng (象形): characters that use a simple picture, or one radical, that directly represent concrete nouns, like persons, places, and things. Examples include:
Chinese

character

(traditional/

simplified)

Pīnyīn

(Mandarin

pronunciation)

Meaning Looks like
shān mountain 3 peaks
rén person/people/humanity a creature standing on 2 legs
kŏu mouth an open mouth
dāo sword/knife a blade
wood a tree
sun/day the sun with a cloud in the middle
yuè moon/month the moon in the shape of a crescent
woman/girl/female person with large breasts
zi/zĭ child a child wrapped in a blanket
馬 / 马 horse a horse with a head, a mane, a body, a tail, and 4 legs
鳥 / 鸟 niǎo bird a creature with a head and a wing with feathers
eye an eye with 2 eyelids
shuǐ water three streams of water
Chinese

character

(traditional/

simplified)

Pīnyīn

(Mandarin

pronunciation)

Meaning Looks like
one 1 line
èr two 2 lines
sān three 3 lines
big/large/great a person 人 holding out his/her arms as wide as possible
tiān heaven/sky/day like 大, but one line above, so the greatest of the great
xiǎo little/small fingers holding onto a needle
shàng up/above/previous a plant's stem and leaf above the ground
xià down/below/next a plant's roots
běn root a tree 木 with its roots showing underground
apex a tree 木 with one extra line on the top, so the very top
  • Complex ideograms, huì yì (会意), or characters that use more than one radical to represent more complex ideas or abstractions. Examples include:
Chinese

character

(traditional/

simplified)

Pīnyīn

(Mandarin

pronunciation)

Meaning Looks like
míng bright/light/tomorrow a sun 日 and a moon 月 next to each other, indicating that tomorrow happens after the sun and moon passes
hǎo good a woman 女 and a child 子 next to each other, indicating that a woman with a child is good
xiū rest a person 亻(人) next to a tree 木
lín woods two trees 木 next to each other
sēn forest three trees 木 next to each other
  • Phonetic loan characters, jiǎ jiè (假借), or characters that borrow a radical from other characters because they sound similar, not because they have the same meaning. These are called rebuses, or pictures/letters/numbers/symbols that are used to represent a word with the same pronunciation. For example, someone writes the sentence, "I'll see you tonight" as "⊙ L C U 2nite". Sometimes, a new character is made for the original word to not have any confusion between the different words.
Chinese

character

(traditional/

simplified)

Rebus word

(Mandarin

pronunciation)

Original word New character for the original word
來/来 lái "to come" lai "wheat" 麥/麦 mài
"four" "nostril(s)" 泗, can also mean "mucus/sniffle"
běi "north" bèi "back (of the body)"
yào "to want" yāo "waist"
shǎo "few/little" shā "sand" 沙 and 砂
yŏng "forever/eternity" yŏng "to swim"

Common examples of words using phonetic characters are the names of countries, such as Canada, which is pronounced Jiānádà (加拿大) in Chinese. While the third character 大 , which has the meaning "big/large/great", seems to describe Canada well, since it is a big country, the first two characters 加 jiā, meaning "to add", and 拿 , meaning "to take", have no obvious relation to Canada. Therefore, it is safe to say that these characters were chosen only because the pronunciation of each character sounds similar to the syllables of the English name of the country.

  • Semantic-phonetic compounds, xíng shēng (形声), are characters where at least one radical hints at the word's meaning and at least one radical hints at the word's pronunciation. Most Chinese characters are these kinds of characters. For example, the character 媽 / 妈 means mother, and the character is made of 2 radicals, 女 and 馬 / 马. The semantic radical 女 means female/woman/girl, since the word's meaning is related to the radical, and even though the meaning of the phonetic radical 馬 / 马 has little to do with the word's meaning, if any at all, it sounds similar to the word 媽 / 妈 mā,so it is used to help the reader remember the word's pronunciation. Other examples include:
Chinese

character

(traditional/

simplified)

Pīnyīn

(Mandarin

pronunciation)

Meaning Semantic radical Phonetic radical (meaning)
qīng clear 氵(水) water qīng (greenish-blue)
jīng eye 目eye qīng (greenish-blue)
cài vegetable/food dish 艹 (艸) grass/plant cǎi (harvest)
to wash oneself 氵(水) water (wood)
lín to pour 氵(水) water lín (woods)
嗎 / 吗 ma yes-no question marker (word that ends the sentence of a yes-no question) 口 mouth (interjections and particles often have this radical) 馬/马 (horse)
  • Transformed cognates, zhuan zhu (转注), or characters that used to be different ways of writing other characters, but have later taken on a different meaning.
Cognate word Original word New pronunciation and meaning of cognate word
lăo "old" kào “test, exam”

Nobody knows exactly how many Chinese characters there are, but the biggest Chinese dictionaries list about fifty thousand characters,[1] even though most of them are only variants of other characters seen in very old texts. For example, the character 回 (huí) has also been written as the variant characters 迴,廻,囬,逥,廽,and 囘, although most Chinese people only know and use the variant 回. Studies in China show that normally three to four thousand characters are used in daily life, so it is safe to say that someone needs to know three to four thousand characters to be functionally literate in Chinese, or be able to read everyday writing without serious problems.

Characters are a kind of graphic language, much different from languages that use an alphabet such as English. The correct way to tell between them is to remember the structure and meaning of every character, not pronunciation, because there is a very close relationship between meaning and structure of characters. Example: 房(house)=户+方. 房 is a shape-pronunciation character. 户 is for shape and 方 is for pronunciation. 户 means 'door'. 房 means 'A person lives behind a door'. 方 pronunciation is fang and tone is 1, and with the tone mark it is written as fāng. 房 pronunciation is also fang, but tone is 2, with the tone mark it is written as fáng.

Chinese characters in other languages change

Chinese characters have been used to write other languages.

There are still many Chinese characters that are used in Japanese and Korean. Generally the educational level of a Japanese person is decided by the number of Chinese characters understood by this person. While Koreans nowadays mostly write in hangul, the native Korean alphabet, people have found that some meanings cannot be expressed clearly by just hangul, so people need to use Chinese characters as a note with a bracket. Before 1446, Korean people only used Chinese characters.

In Japanese, characters that are borrowed from the Chinese language are called kanji. Kanji can be used to write both native Japanese words and Chinese loanwords. Japanese writing uses a mix of kanji and two kana systems. Kanji is mostly used to show a word's meaning, while hiragana and katakana are syllabaries that show the pronunciation of Japanese words. Both writing systems are used often when writing Japanese.

In Korean, they are called hanja. Throughout most of Korean history, hanja was the only writing system most literate Koreans knew. Even though hangul was invented in 1446, it was only used by commoners and not the government until Korea gained independence from Japan. Nowadays, most Koreans write mostly in hangul. In North Korea, people write almost completely in hangul since Kim Il-sung abolished hanja from Korean. In South Korea, people mostly write in hangul, and they sometimes write hanja. Native Korean words are almost always written in hangul. Hanja are usually only used to write words that are borrowed from the Chinese language, and are usually only used when the word's meaning isn't obvious based on the context.

In Vietnamese, they are called chữ Nôm. Many Chinese loanwords were used in Vietnamese, especially in old Vietnamese literature. While Vietnamese used many Chinese characters, they also invented tens of thousands of their own characters to write Vietnamese words. The radicals used in chữ Nôm were usually a mix of the words' meanings and pronunciations.

Related pages change

References change

  1. "How many Chinese characters do you need to know?". Fluent in Mandarin.com. 2014-02-20. Retrieved 2017-07-16.

Other websites change