IV. The writing system in Chinese

The writing system in Chinese is characters, a script using logographs rather than alphabets. Chinese script has been in use for over 5,000 years. It originated from pictograghs (xi3ngx^ng) first, and later utilized other means to create new characters representing more abstract and/or more complicated words, including representation of relational/abstract concepts (zh&sh* ), associative compounds (hu*y* ), pictophonetics (x^ngsh4ng), mutually explanation of meaning (zhu2nzh]), and phonetic borrowing (ji2ji7). These are known as the Six Categories of Chinese Characters (li]sh[) -- the six principles used to create characters. Among them, pictophonetics is the most powerful one, which combines a semantic component and a phonetic component to represent characters. It makes up about 85% of the total amount of Chinese characters. Just as English words are composed of letters, the overwhelming majority of characters are composed of parts -- some are pictographic, some are semantic, still some are ideographic. There are, however, much more parts in Chinese than there are letters in English.

Although Chinese script developed into a fairly mature writing system by the late Shang dynasty (1600-1100 BC), it has undergone constant evolution, parcticularly its forms of writing. The following are some examples of the evolution of Chinese script:

Nowadays, there are two forms of characters in use -- traditional and simplified characters. While traditional characters are mostly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and oversea Chinese communities such as those in North America, simplified characters are primarily used in China, and Singapore. Strictly speaking, characters in traditional form are written vertically in columns from the top right-hand side of the page. When written horizontally, the lines should read from right to left. As for simplified form, it is similar to English which reads horizontally from left to right. Compared with the traditional form, the stroke counts of each simplified character have been reduced considerably.

The total number of characters is between 87,019 (Zh8nghu1 Z*h2i -- A Glossary of Chinese Characters, 1994) and 91,251 (Gu9 ~n Z* K\--Guo An Character Bank, 1999). However, the frequently used characters are 3,500 only, among which 1,000 are sub-frequently used ones. Just as the total vocabulary of English contains far more words than ordinary people normally use in everyday life, on average, an educated Chinese person knows about 3,500 characters only.

Evolution of Chinese Characters

As Chinese is not a phonetic language, there is little connection between the spoke form and written form. Unlike English and other Indo-European languages, Chinese characters, for the most part, do not symbolize the spoken sound, or vice verse. Chinese speakers, therefore, are able to understand each other through reading and writing regardless whatever dialects they speak, as long as they are literate. For the same reason, one must pay close attention to the sound, the shape, and the meaning of every single character simultaneously when learning to read and write. This is parcticularly true for learners of Chinese whose native writing system uses alphabet. Pinyin and other phonetic spelling systems are primarily for learning Chinese pronunciation, dictionary indexing and computer input, etc. They are, in the eyes of Chinese people, not real writing systems of the language at all. One must learn characters to be able to read and write Chinese.

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