Written Chinese

Written Chinese is a millennia-old system that uses a complex template of thousands of characters to represent sounds and meaning. Chinese is a logographic system, a type of writing in which characters, known as Hanzi, are used instead of letters to represent whole words or syllables. The Chinese language uses a relatively small amount of syllables, yet the number of traditional characters is in the tens of thousands. Many syllables, therefore, are represented by more than one character, each with its own specific meaning. Modern Chinese dictionaries contain only a fraction of the available characters, and most written works utilize only about three to four thousand characters. While there are several Chinese dialects, written Chinese is based on the Mandarin dialect used by about 70 percent of the country's population.

Background

According to legend, the characters used in written Chinese were invented around 2600 BCE during the reign of the Yellow Emperor, the mythical founder of Chinese civilization. The emperor wanted an easier way to keep records and tasked his court historian, Cangjie, to develop a writing system that would do the job. Cangjie is said to have invented characters inspired by bird and animal tracks he saw on the ground. His system pleased the emperor, and it was implemented across the kingdom.

While the story of Cangjie is nothing more than myth, possible examples of written symbols have been found on pottery dating back earlier than 3000 BCE. Archaeologists, however, suspect the characters may be simple identification markings and not a written script. The first true form of written Chinese originated between 1500 and 1200 BCE. It is commonly referred to as oracle bone script because it was found on animal bones and turtle shells the ancient Chinese used for divination. Oracle bone script was a pictographic script, meaning each character represented an object or concept. There were an estimated four thousand individual characters that could be combined to form more than thirty thousand total characters.

Bronze script, also known as great seal script, developed between 1000 and 700 BCE and was named for its use on bronze objects. It evolved into a system known as Xiaozhuan, or lesser seal script, around 700 BCE. Xiaozhuan was a more artistic script and began moving away from pictographs toward a logographic system. Modern written Chinese can trace its ancestry to the Xiaozhuan system, which is still used in the twenty-first century in calligraphy on official state seals. During the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), another form of writing called Lishu, or clerical script, developed. Lishu was a simplified system of Xiaozhuan with fewer strokes and a more flowing style. As its name suggests, it became the script used for official government business and was adopted by the population for everyday use.

Overview

Near the end of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), Lishu was adapted into Kaishu, or standard script. Kaishu featured a more cursive style and used serif elements—small lines at the end of strokes. A decorative cursive script called Xingshu, or running script, later developed from Kaishu, but standard script became the basis for most forms of modern written Chinese. In 1949, the government of the People's Republic of China decided to make the Kaishu script easier to use in an attempt to increase literacy among the population. The simplified script reduced the number of strokes needed to write some characters and abbreviated or removed elements from other characters. In the twenty-first century, simplified Chinese is used in mainland China and Singapore. Traditional, or Kaishu-based, Chinese is still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and by Chinese communities worldwide.

Prior to the 1950s, Chinese was written in vertical columns and read from right to left. Since that time, it has adopted a more Western style, and it is written horizontally from left to right in most areas. All Chinese characters are written from a palette of twelve basic strokes—horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling, rising, four hooked strokes, two turning strokes, and a dot. Individual characters can consist of anywhere from one to sixty-four strokes and must be written within the same fixed space, no matter how complex the character—a practice that has been in place since the Qin dynasty.

In written Chinese, the number of possible characters is unlimited, meaning traditional scripts and their variations have accumulated over the years to form a dictionary of many thousands of characters. The most extensive Chinese dictionaries contain about fifty-six thousand characters; however, many are outdated or seldom used. While most functional dictionaries contain about twenty-thousand characters, everyday written Chinese generally uses about three to four thousand characters. To read older literature or scholarly texts, knowledge of about six thousand characters is required. Individual characters are often combined with others to create a new character with a different definition. For example, the character 子 means "child," and 女 represents "woman." When combined, they become 好, the character for "good."

The basis for Chinese scripts, the Mandarin dialect, contains about 1,700 syllables, a fraction of the thousands used in languages such as English. As a result, many Chinese characters are homophones, syllables or words that sound the same but have different meanings. These syllables are represented in written Chinese by combining separate character elements into one character to give it a new meaning. Most Chinese characters consist of at least two components, one character indicating word meaning and another indicating its sound.

Representing written Chinese in the Latin alphabet requires a system that can translate the large volume of characters into a twenty-six-letter format. Several systems have tackled this problem over the years with two remaining in wide use in the twenty-first century. Both use phonetic substitutions to replace Chinese characters with letters. The Wade-Giles system was created in the early twentieth century, and it remained the standard for decades. At the same time, it simplified written Chinese in 1949, the People's Republic of China designed the Pinyin system, which was based on the Mandarin dialect. By the late twentieth century, Pinyin replaced Wade-Giles as the accepted version, but both systems are still used. The disparity in systems is why many Chinese names have different English spellings. For example, the Qin dynasty is spelled in that manner in Pinyin. In Wade-Giles, it is spelled as the Ch'in dynasty—the origin of the name China.

Contrary to common belief, some research studies using computational methods to analyze language have found that the complexity of Chinese characters has increased over time with more intricate designs across different eras. Additionally, twenty-first-century research has indicated that technology and the heavy use of smartphones and computers impacted Chinese writing. Some individuals experience a phenomenon called character amnesia, forgetting how to write some characters because they are used to typing them using a keyboard.

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