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Written Chinese

The Chinese written language employs the Han characters (漢字 pinyin hànzì), which are named after the Han culture to which it is largely attributed. Chinese characters appear to have originated in the Shang dynasty as pictograms depicting concrete objects. The first examples we have of Chinese characters are inscriptions on oracle bones, which are occasionally sheep scapula but mostly turtle plastrons (lower shells) used for divination purposes. Over the course of the Zhou and Han dynasties, the characters became more and more stylized. Also, additional components were added so that many characters contain one element that gives (or at least once gave) a fairly good indication of the pronunciation, and another component (the so-called "radical") gives an indication of the general category of meaning to which the character belongs. In the modern Chinese languages, the majority of characters are phonetically based rather than logographically based. An example would be the character for the word 按 àn that means "to press down." It contains 安 ān (peace), which serves as its phonetic component, and 手 shǒu (hand), that indicates that the action is frequently one that is done using one's hand.

Many styles of Chinese calligraphic writing developed over the centuries, such as zhuanshu (篆書, seal-script), caoshu (草書, grass script), lishu (吏書, official script) and kaishu (楷書, standard script).

In Japan and Korea, Han characters were adopted and integrated into their languages and became Kanji and Hanja, respectively. Japan still uses Kanji as an integral part of its writing system; however, Korea's use of Hanja has diminished (indeed, it is not used at all in North Korea).

In the field of software and communications internationalization, CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and the rarer CJKV a collective term for the same plus Vietnamese, all of which are double-byte languages, as they have more than 256 characters in their "alphabet". The computerized processing of Chinese characters involves some special issues both in input and character encoding schemes, as the standard 100+ key keyboards of today's computers don't allow input of that many characters with a single key-press.

The Chinese writing system is mostly logographic, i.e., each character expresses a monosyllabic word part, also known as a morpheme. This is helped by the fact that 90%+ of Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic. The majority of modern words, however, are multisyllable and multigraphic. Multisyllabic words have a separate logogram for each syllable. Some, but not all, Han characters are ideographs, but most Han Chinese characters have forms that were based on their pronunciation rather than their meanings, so they do not directly express ideas.

Character forms
There are currently two standards for printed Chinese characters. One is the Traditional system, used in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Mainland China and Singapore use the Simplified system (developed by the PRC government in the 1950s), which uses simplified forms for many of the more complicated characters. Most simplified versions were derived from established, though obscure, historically-established simplifications. In Taiwan, many simplifications are used when characters are handwritten, but in printing traditional characters are the norm. In addition, most Chinese use some personal simplifications.

Classification of writing styles
One can classify Chinese writing into four basic types:

  • baihua (白話) (Vernacular Chinese)
  • wenyan (文言) (Classical Chinese)
  • "Written colloquial Chinese" - In particular, written colloquial Cantonese. Cantonese is unique in that it has a commonly used written character system that is different from "baihua" or "wenyan". Colloquial Chinese usually involves the use of "dialectal characters".
  • Poems and other Chinese constrained writings.

    As with other aspects of the Chinese language, the contrast between different written standards is not sharp and there can be a socially accepted continuum between the written standards. For example, in writing an informal love letter, one may use informal bai hua. In writing a newspaper article, the language used is different and begins to include aspects of wen yan. In writing a ceremonial document, one would use even more wen yan. The language used in the ceremonial document may be completely different from that of the love letter, but there is a socially accepted continuum existing between the two. Pure "wen yan", however, is rarely used.

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    Article text licensed under the GFDL. The original Wikipedia article is here .