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Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture.Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention.
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. [2]
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally ...
Chinese character structures (simplified Chinese: 汉字结构; traditional Chinese: 漢字結構; pinyin: hànzì jiégòu) are the patterns or rules in which the characters are formed by their writing units. [1] There are two aspects of Chinese character structures: The external structures are on the writing strokes, components and whole ...
Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, examples of logograms. In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other ...
Chinese characters are morpheme characters, and the meanings of Chinese characters come from the morphemes they record. [5] Most Chinese characters only represent one morpheme, and the meaning of the character is the meaning of the morpheme recorded by the character. For example: 猫: māo, cat, the name of a domestic animal that can catch mice.
Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as 正體字; 正体字; zhèngtǐzì; 'orthodox characters'. [9] This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and ...