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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. Ideographs could either be pictographs visually depicting objects or concepts, or fixed signs representing concepts only by shared convention.
Traditional Chinese characters continue to be used for ceremonial, cultural, scholarly/academic research, and artistic/decorative purposes. [12] In the People's Republic of China, traditional Chinese characters are standardised according to the Table of Comparison between Standard, Traditional and Variant Chinese Characters. [13]
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]
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]
For example, the late Qing textbook "Chinese History of the Present Dynasty" published in 1910 stated that "the history of our present dynasty is part of the history of China, that is, the most recent history in its whole history. China was founded as a country 5,000 years ago and has the longest history in the world. And its culture is the ...
Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets widely used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters.Their mass standardization during the 20th century was part of an initiative by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to promote literacy, and their use in ordinary circumstances on the mainland has been encouraged by the Chinese ...
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
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: