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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:
Strokes (bǐhuà; 筆劃; 笔画) are the smallest writing units of Chinese characters. When writing a Chinese character, the trace of a dot or a line left on the writing material (such as paper) from pen-down to pen-up is called a stroke. [5] Stroke number is the number of strokes of a Chinese character. It varies, for example, characters "一 ...
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 .
The boundary between character structure and style—and thus whether forms represent different characters, or are merely variants of the same character—is often non-trivial or unclear. [ 95 ] For example, prior to the Qin dynasty the character meaning 'bright' was written as either 明 or 朙 —with either 日 'Sun' or 囧 'window' on the ...
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 ...
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 are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length.
A Chinese whole character, or whole Chinese character (Pinyin: hànzì zhěngzì; Traditional Chinese: 漢字整字; Simplified Chinese: 汉字整字), is a complete Chinese character. It lies at the final level of the stroke-component-character Chinese character composition.