Written Chinese

Chinese characters
Chinese family of scripts Written Chinese Kanji Hanja Chữ Hán
Evolution of script styles Neolithic symbols in China Oracle bone Bronze Seal Large Small Bird-worm Clerical Cursive Semi-cursive Regular Flat brush Modern typefaces Fangsong Ming Hei
Properties and classification Components Strokes order Radicals Orthography jiu zixing xin zixing Digital encoding
Collation and standards Kangxi Dictionary forms (1716) Commonly Used Characters (PRC, 2013) Commonly-Used Characters (Hong Kong, 2007) Nan Min Recommended Characters (Taiwan, 2009) Standard Form of National Characters (Taiwan, 1982) Jōyō kanji (Japan, 2010)
Reforms Simplified characters second round Traditional characters debate Japanese script reform kyūjitai
Homographs and readings Literary and colloquial readings Kanbun Idu
Variants Zetian characters
Derived systems Kana man'yōgana hiragana katakana Jurchen script Khitan large small Nüshu Bopomofo Slavonic transcription
Transliteration of Chinese
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Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation.^[1] Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000.^[2][3] This has led in part to the adoption of complementary transliteration systems as a means of representing the pronunciation of Chinese.^[4]

Chinese writing is first attested during the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250 – c. 1050 BCE),^[5][6][7] but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun centuries earlier during the Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age (c. 2500–2000 BCE).^[8] After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE).^[9] Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.^[10] As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Literary Chinese.^[11] In the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was replaced in large part with written vernacular Chinese, largely corresponding to Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.

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