Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The character-building units obtained by analyzing the external structure of Chinese characters are external structural components. In internal structures, Chinese characters are analyzed according to the rationale of character formation, and the basic unit of character formation is internal structural components, or internal components in short, also called pianpang (偏旁) or characters ...
Chinese character external structure is on how the writing units are combined level by level into a complete character. There are three levels of structural units of Chinese characters: strokes, components, and whole characters. [3] For example, character 字 (character) is composed of two components, each of which is composed of three stokes:
Modern Chinese characters appear in the form of square blocks. There are two methods to analyze the forms of Chinese characters, source tracing analysis (溯源分析) and current status analysis (現狀分析, 现状分析). Source tracing analysis is also called the method of character creation (造字法). It takes the form of a character ...
Chinese characters are accepted as representing one of four independent inventions of writing in human history. [b] In each instance, writing evolved from a system using two distinct types of ideographs—either pictographs visually depicting objects or concepts, or fixed signs representing concepts only by shared convention.
Characters and components may reflect aspects of meaning or pronunciation. The best known exposition of Chinese character composition is the Shuowen Jiezi, compiled by Xu Shen c. 100 CE. Xu did not have access to the earliest forms of Chinese characters, and his analysis is not considered to fully capture the nature of the writing system. [14]
The structure of a Chinese character is the pattern or rule in which the character is formed by its (first level) components. [ 4 ] Chinese character structures include [ 5 ] Single-component structure: The character is formed by a single primitive component, such as 口 , 日 and 月 .
tā He 打 dǎ hit 人。 rén person 他 打 人。 tā dǎ rén He hit person He hits someone. Chinese can also be considered a topic-prominent language: there is a strong preference for sentences that begin with the topic, usually "given" or "old" information; and end with the comment, or "new" information. Certain modifications of the basic subject–verb–object order are permissible and ...
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. [34] As with Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform, early Chinese characters were used as rebuses to express abstract meanings that were not easily ...