Chinese characters

Chinese characters are used to varying degrees in the written forms of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages (though the latter only in South Korea). Chinese characters have disappeared from Vietnamese &where they were used until the 20th century—and North Korea, where they have been completely replaced by Hangul.

Chinese characters (漢字) are called hànzì in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, hanja or hanmun in Korean, and hán tư in Vietnamese. However, the last is considered an extremely sinified form and Chinese characters are normally called chữ nho (字儒). (Note that the morphemes are reversed as is common in Vietnamese borrowings from Chinese.)

Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are not linguistically related to Chinese, and in order to make Chinese characters work in those languages with radically different grammar, many adaptions had to be made. In many cases in these languages, characters different from those used in Chinese are used for words or ideas of the same meaning. A frequently cited example of this is 愛人 which means spouse in Mainland China but lover in Japanese and 情人 which means lover in China but spouse in Japanese. Also, many similar characters with identical meanings are written with slight differences. One example is black, which is written as 黒 in Japanese, but as 黑 in Chinese. For these reasons, particularly in China and Japan, where Chinese characters are used most often, it is frequently necessary to distinguish between Chinese Chinese characters and Japanese Chinese characters (though in English the distinction can often be made well enough by using the respective words hanzi and kanji).

Styles

The earliest Chinese characters are the so called "Oracle Script" or (甲骨文) jia3gu3wen2 during the Shang Dynasty, followed by the Bronzeware Script or (金文) jin1wen2 during the Zhou Dynasty. These scripts no longer serve as anything but a curiosity.

The first script that is still of relevance today is the "Seal Script" or 篆書[篆书] zhuan4shu1. It is the result of the efforts of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang Di, in the standardization of the Chinese script. The Seal Script, as the name suggests, is now only used in artistic seals. Few people are still able to read the seal script, although the art of carving a traditional seal in the seal script remains an art in China today.

Scripts that are still used regularly for print are the "Clerk Script" or 隸書[隶书] li4shu1, the "Wei Monumental" or 魏碑 wei4bei1, the "Regular Script" or 楷書[楷书] kai3shu1, the "Song Style" or 宋體[宋体] song4ti3 (only in printing), and the "Running Script" or 行書[行书] xing2shu1. Modern Chinese handwriting is usually modeled on the Running Script.

Finally, there is the "Draft Script", or 草書[草书] cao3shu1. The Draft Script is an idealized calligraphic style, where characters are suggested rather than realized. Despite being cursive to the point where individual strokes are no longer differentiable, the Draft Script is highly revered for the beauty and freedom that it embodies. Many simplified Chinese characters are based on this style.

In Japan there is also a style called Grass script.

Radicals

Main article: radical

Each character has a fundamental component, or radical (部首 bu4 shou3, literal meaning: "initial portion"), and this design principle is used in Chinese dictionaries to logically order characters in sets.

Full characters are ordered according to their initial radical, which fall into roughly 200 types. Then these are subcategorised by their total number of strokes.

This principle of categorisation is exploited by everybody who must learn to write Chinese characters: the vast number of Chinese characters can be much more easily memorized if they are mentally broken down into their constituent radicals.

Classification

Chinese scholars classify Han characters in several groups. The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are pictograms, which are pictorial representations of the morpheme represented. There are also ideograms that attempt to graphicalize abstract concepts, such as "up" or "down". However, these pictograms and ideograms take up a small proportion of Chinese logograms.

Most Chinese Chinese characters, however, are radical-radical compounds, in which each element (radical) of the character hints at the meaning, and radical-phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the kind of concept the character describes, and the other hints at the pronunciation. This last type accounts for the majority of Chinese logograms. Note that despite being called "compounds", these logograms are single entities in themselves; they are written so that they take up the same amount of space as any other logogram.

Note that due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters are often useless and sometimes quite misleading in modern usage. This is particularly true in non-Chinese languages.

Classification has its own problems, as the origins of characters are often obscure. For example, the character for "East" (東; Chinese: dong1, Japanese: higashi), which combines the "tree" radical (木) and the "sun" radical (日), is usually considered a radical-radical compound. Though it appears to represent a sun rising through trees, and this is both an evocative image and a useful mnemonic, the origin and classification of the character are disputed among scholars. While some agree with the radical-radical classification, others see it as a unique character in and of itself -- some claim it as being derived from an early pictograph of bundled sticks.

Aa another example, the character for "mother" (媽 in Chinese ma1) consists of one component meaning "female" (女) and another one meaning "horse" (馬 ma3). The first component denotes a female entity, whereas the second suggests the pronunciation by referring to the word for "horse." The reason that "horse" was chosen to represent mother may be that horses -- in a historical context -- were often used to represent "steadfastness".

Dictionaries

The design and use of a dictionary of Chinese characters presents interesting problems. Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for the Chinese characters. The great majority of these schemes - beloved by their inventors but nobody else - have appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly widespread use. This is the system of radicals.

Chinese character dictionaries often allow users to locate entries in several different ways. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries of Chinese characters list characters in radical order: characters are grouped together by radical, and radicals containing fewer strokes come before radicals containing more strokes. Under each radical, characters are listed by their total number of strokes. In Japanese and Korean dictionaries, it is usually possible to search for characters by sound, using Kana and Hangul. Most dictionaries allow searches by total number of strokes as well, and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well.

For instance, to look up the character 松 (pine tree) in a typical dictionary, the user first determines which part of the character is the radical, then counts the number of strokes in the radical (in this case four), and turns to the radical index (usually located on the inside front or back cover of the dictionary). Under the number 4, the user locates the radical 木 , then turns to the page number listed, which is the start of the listing of all the characters containing this radical. This page will have a sub-index giving stroke numbers and page numbers. The right half of the character also contains four strokes, so the user locates the number 4, and turns to the page number given. From there, the user must scan the entries to locate the character he or she is seeking. Some dictionaries have a sub-index which lists every character containing each radical, so that if the user knows the number of strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, he or she can locate the correct page number directly.

In Korean, character dictionaries are usually called Okpyeon (옥편; 玉篇), which literally means "Jewel Book."

Other dictionary systems include the Four corner method

Number of Chinese characters

The question of how many characters there are is still the subject of debate. In the 18th century, European scholars claimed the total tally to be about 80,000. This number, however, is thought to be exaggerated; the most comprehensive dictionary (the Kangxi Dictionary) lists about 40,000 characters. One reason for large number of characters is that estimates include all of the different variations of characters.

China

It is usually said that about 3,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), and a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters.

Japan

In Japan there are 1945 "daily use kanji" (常用漢字 jouyou kanji) designated by the Ministry of Education. These are taught during primary and secondary school. Publications which include characters which fall outside this list are required to print furigana or rubi over the characters as a phonetic guide.

The government has also designated several hundred "name kanji" (人名用漢字 jinmeiyou kanji, or "name-use kanji") which are used in personal and geographical names. It is not permitted to give a child a name that includes kanji not on this list, though parents are increasingly using the jinmeiyou kanji creatively to produce unusual (and hard to read) names.

A well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3500 kanji. The Kanji kentei (日本漢字能力検定試験 Nihon kanji nouryoku kentei shiken or Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude) tests the ability to read and write kanji. Someone who attains the very highest level on that test is able to read 6000 kanji, though very few people attain this level. This should not be taken as an indication that Japan uses more Chinese characters than China. In fact, Japanese generally uses fewer Chinese characters than Chinese does, and literacy in Japanese requires knowledge of fewer Chinese characters than Chinese does. One major difference in the use of Chinese characters in China and Japan is that in Chinese one character generally has one pronunciation (depending on dialect), which in Japanese a single character may have several (in rare cases ten or more) possible pronunciations, depending on context, compounds, meaning and location in the sentence).

Korea

In South Korea, middle and high school students learn 1,800 to 2,000 basic characters, but most people use Hangul exclusively in their day-to-day lives. Chinese characters are still used to some extent, particularly in newspapers, place names and calligraphy.

Rare characters

Often a character which is not commonly used (coined "rare" or "variant" characters) will appear in a personal or place name in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names (see Chinese name, Japanese name, and Korean name respectively). This has caused problems as many computer encoding systems include only the 5,000 or so most common characters and exclude the less often used characters. This is especially a problem for personal names which often contain rare or classical characters.

People who have run into this problem include Taiwanese politicians Wang Chien-shien and Yu Shyi-kun and Taiwanese singer David Tao. Newspapers have dealt with this problem in varying ways, including trying to create a character from two characters, including a picture, or, especially as is the case with Yu Shyi-kun, simply omitting the rare character with the hope that the reader will be able to infer who it refers to. Japanese newspapers may render such names and words in katakana instead of kanji, and it is common practice for people to write names for which they are unsure of the correct kanji in katakana instead.

External links

A Typographic Outcry: a curious perspective
Chinese characters and culture
Chinese Character Dictionary: Look up simplified and traditional characters by English definition, pinyin, Cantonese, and radical/stroke.