Written Chinese

Written Chinese is a special way of writing that uses pictures called characters to show words and ideas in the Chinese language. Unlike the letters we use in English, these characters do not tell us how a word sounds. Instead, each character stands for a meaning or a small part of a word. Many characters are made from smaller pieces called radicals, which can give clues about what the character means or how it sounds.

Learning to read and write Chinese takes a lot of practice because people need to remember thousands of characters. On average, someone who finishes college knows about 4,000 characters. To help with this, people also use systems that show how to say each character out loud, like Pinyin and Bopomofo.

The history of Chinese writing goes back thousands of years. The earliest known form of Chinese writing was found on bones and shells used for telling the future during the Shang dynasty, around 1250–1050 BCE. Over time, these symbols changed and became more organized. Today, Chinese writing has many beautiful styles used in art and printing, and it helps people who speak different forms of Chinese understand each other even if they cannot speak the same way.

Structure

Written Chinese is different from writing systems that use letters or sounds. Most characters are made from smaller parts that can show meaning or sound. The book Shuowen Jiezi, written by Xu Shen around 100 CE, is a famous book that talks about how Chinese characters are made. Even though it doesn’t show everything, it is still important today for studying old characters.

Characters can be made in six main ways. Two ways make simple characters:

1. Pictographs: characters that look like the things they stand for, like 人 for "person" or 日 for "sun".
2. Indicatives: characters that show ideas, like 上 for "up" or 三 for "three".

Four other ways make more complex characters. Two of these combine simpler parts: 3. Ideographic compounds: parts are used for their meanings to create a new idea, like 东 for "east", showing a sun rising between trees. 4. Phono-semantic compounds: one part shows the meaning and another part shows the sound, like 晴 for "clear weather", with 日 for "sun" and 青 for its sound.

The last two ways give new meanings to existing characters: 5. Transference: a character with a simple meaning gets a new, more abstract meaning, like 网 for "net" also meaning any kind of lattice or network. 6. Loangraphs: a character is used for a completely different purpose, like 哥 for "older brother", which came from part of the character 歌 meaning "to sing".

Most characters show some sound or are made from logic, not just ideas. Characters are drawn to fit inside a square, even when made from smaller parts.

Characters are drawn using strokes, which fall into eight main types. There are eight general rules for the order of strokes, though they are not always followed strictly.

Chinese text was traditionally written in columns from top to bottom, going from right to left, with little punctuation. In the 20th century, writing in rows from left to right, like in Western scripts, became common in mainland China. Vertical writing is still used for style or space reasons. Taiwan also changed to mostly horizontal writing for official documents in 2004, but vertical writing is still seen in some books and newspapers.

Punctuation is now more common. It fits the width of a character to keep the text neat. Some punctuation marks are special to Asian languages, like double and single quotation marks (『 』 and 「 」) and a hollow full stop (。) for ending sentences. There is also a special mark (、) used to separate items in a list.

History

Written Chinese is one of the oldest writing systems still in use today. The earliest known examples are the oracle bone inscriptions made during the time of the Shang king Wu Ding around 1250–1192 BCE. These inscriptions were carved on animal bones and turtle shells to record the results of special question-and-answer rituals. People would carve a question onto a bone, heat it to create cracks, and then interpret those cracks as answers.

Later, writing evolved into forms seen on bronze objects during the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods, known as bronze script. Over time, the script became more regular and stylized. By the time of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), a form called seal script became the standard across China. This script is still used today mainly for special seals or signatures.

Simplification and standardization

Main articles: Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters

See also: Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters

In the mid-20th century, two main types of Chinese writing developed: simplified and traditional characters. Simplified characters were created by the Chinese government to help more people learn to read and write. They often have fewer strokes than traditional characters. Today, simplified characters are used mainly in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while traditional characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and some other Chinese communities around the world.

Function

Chinese characters have been used to show single spoken syllables. When writing was first created in the Yellow River valley, words in spoken Chinese were mostly one syllable, and each written character matched one of these words. Over time, spoken Chinese has added many words made from joining together smaller parts.

For over two thousand years, the main way people wrote in Chinese was Literary Chinese. This style of writing used words and rules from very old spoken Chinese, from around the time of Confucius (about 500 BCE). By the 20th century, Literary Chinese was very different from how people actually spoke, and people had to study it separately. Once learned, it helped people who spoke different dialects understand each other.

Today, modern written Chinese replaced the old style because of changes that started in 1919 during the May Fourth Movement. This new way of writing is called written vernacular Chinese. It mostly uses words and rules from Mandarin, the most common Chinese language. Even though it is based on Mandarin, this writing style helps people who speak different dialects talk to each other. It works like a shared language for educated speakers, even though the shapes of the characters don’t always show what they mean.

Because different Chinese languages have different words, some people use special characters that are old or not usually used in standard writing. Cantonese, for example, has its own way of writing that is used in places like Hong Kong, especially online. Hokkien is also sometimes written in Taiwan, though it does not have as many standard characters as Cantonese.

Media

People have used many different things to write Chinese over time. These include bamboo and wooden slips, which were used as early as the 13th century BCE, paper invented by the 2nd century BCE, and silk from the Han dynasty onward. Other materials like stone, metal, wood, bamboo, plastic, and ivory were also used, especially on seals. Since the Han dynasty, these materials have been used to make hanging scrolls and handscrolls.

Literacy

Written Chinese uses special symbols called characters instead of letters. These characters show the meaning of words but not how they sound. Knowing how to read Chinese means knowing many characters and words.

There are different ways to organize characters in dictionaries. One common way uses "radicals," which are parts of characters. Characters are grouped by these radicals and then by the number of strokes they have. Other methods also exist, like grouping by sound or by parts of the character. Today, computer programs make it easier to find characters.