In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty summarized the structural rules of Chinese characters as "six books": pictographic characters, ideographic characters, knowing characters, pictophonetic characters, transliteration characters and loanwords. Among them, pictographic characters, fingering, knowing characters and pictophonetic characters are the principles of word formation, which is the "word formation method"; Annotation and borrowing are the rules of using words, and they are "methods of using words".
For more than 3,000 years, the writing style of Chinese characters has not changed much, enabling future generations to read ancient Chinese without obstacles. However, after modern western civilization entered East Asia, countries in the whole Chinese character cultural circle set off a trend of learning from the West, and giving up using Chinese characters was an important aspect of this movement. The argument of these movements is that Chinese characters are clumsy compared with western pinyin characters. Many countries that use Chinese characters have simplified Chinese characters to varying degrees and even tried to completely pinyin them. The Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese pseudonyms and the emergence of various pinyin schemes in Chinese are all based on this idea. Chinese mainland simplified the strokes of Chinese characters with reference to the cursive script, and revised and approved the Summary of Simplified Chinese Characters on June 28th, 1956, which is still used in China and New Zealand. Traditional Chinese has always been used in Taiwan Province Province.
At present, most areas where Chinese is used use two standardized Chinese characters, namely, traditional Chinese characters (traditional Chinese characters) and simplified Chinese characters (simplified Chinese characters).
Chinese characters, a writing system for recording Chinese, are still or have been used in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is the writing of Han nationality; Broadly speaking, it is the same word in the cultural circle of Chinese characters.
Chinese characters are an important tool to carry culture. At present, there are a large number of ancient books written in Chinese characters. Different dialects use Chinese characters as the writing system of * * * *, so Chinese characters have played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization in history and become an internal link in the formation of Southeast Asian cultural circles. In the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures have been left behind, forming a unique art of calligraphy in China.
A Chinese character generally has many meanings and strong word-formation ability, and many Chinese characters can form words independently. This leads to the extremely high "use efficiency" of Chinese characters, and about 2,000 commonly used words can cover more than 98% of written expressions. Coupled with the characteristics of ideographic characters, the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high. The information density of Chinese characters is higher than that of letters, so on average, the Chinese expression of the same content is shorter than that of any other letter language.
At present, the Chinese character system is divided into traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters. The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong, Macau and North America, while the latter is used in Chinese communities in Chinese mainland, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two writing systems, the individual differences of commonly used Chinese characters are within 25%.
Because of the complexity of Chinese character writing, the theory of Chinese character backwardness has a long history, which holds that Chinese characters are the bottleneck of education and informatization, and there is a trend to promote the "Latinization" of Chinese characters or even abolish them. It is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although it is difficult to learn at first, there is no continuous learning problem similar to a large number of English words after mastering common words, and its ideographic characteristics can fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the problem of computer input is basically solved, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" and "Chinese character latinization" have actually been gradually abandoned by most people.
At present, the Chinese character system has been basically stable, but the standardization of Chinese characters and the natural extinction of rare words continue.
On Chinese Character Coding
In order to exchange information, various regions where Chinese characters are used have formulated a series of Chinese character set standards.
① the GB 2313 character set contains 6763 Chinese characters and 7 15 symbols, totaling 7478 characters, which is a simplified character set widely used in Chinese mainland. Most fonts in the market, such as italics -GB23 13, imitation Song -GB23 13 and Chinese, support the display of this character set, which is also the character set adopted by most input methods. Most of the so-called traditional Chinese characters in the market are actually encoded with GB-23 13 character set and displayed as traditional Chinese characters in fonts, instead of encoding traditional Chinese characters directly with GBK character set, which is full of mistakes.
② Big Five Code Character Set, with 65,438+03,060 traditional characters and 808 symbols, totaling 65,438+03,868 characters, is widely used in Taiwan Province Province and Hongkong. Most fonts in Taiwan Province and Taiwan Province support the display of this character set, such as Songti Kai, which is the standard of the Ministry of Education.
③ GBK character set, also called large character set (GB=GuóBiāo national standard, K= extended), contains Chinese characters of the above two character sets, including 2 1003 Chinese characters, 882 symbols, * * * 2 1885 characters, including 20902 Chinese characters unified by China, Japan and Korea (CJK) and extended A set. The simplified Chinese version of Windows 95\98 comes with this GBK.txt file. Fonts such as Songti, Lishu, Bold, Xiao Yuan, Chinese Medium, Chinese Fine Black, Chinese Regular Script, Standard Regular Script (DFKai-SB), Arial Unicode MS, MingLiU and PMingLiU support the display of this character set. Microsoft Pinyin Input Method 2003, Quanpin, Ziguang Pinyin and other input methods, among which Rong Rong, Zi Rong, Zhe Zhe, and Zi Rong can be input? GBK Simplified and Traditional Chinese Characters.
The codes of BIG-5 (Traditional Chinese) and GB-23 13 (Simplified Chinese) are incompatible, and the characters will be garbled in different operating systems. The conversion between simplified and traditional (text and coding) can be solved by transcoding software such as BabelPad, TextPro or Convertz. If it is a program, Windows XP operating system can be solved by Microsoft AppleUtility 1.0; The operating system of Windows 2000 can only be solved by transcoding software such as Hanxing, Sitong Li Fang, invivo and Kingsoft Express.
④ GB 18030 character set, including all 6582 Chinese characters of GBK character set and CJK Ext-A, with a total of 27533 Chinese characters. Song Ti-18030, Fang Zhengkai (FZKai-Z03), Calligraphy Ti (Ms. Song) Song Ti (ht_cjk+), Hong Kong Standard Ti (DFSongStd), Hong Kong Standard Ti, CERG Chinese font, Korean New Gulim, and Song Heikai provided by Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. Windows 98 supports this character set, but the following character sets do not. Handwriting input method Xiaoyao Pen version 4.0 supports the input of GB 18030 character set and Founder super-large character set Chinese characters.
⑤ Founder super-large character set, including GB 18030 character set, 36,862 Chinese characters in CJK Ext-B and * * * 64,395 Chinese characters. Songti-Fangzheng super-large character set supports the display of this character set. Microsoft Office XP or 2003 simplified Chinese version comes with this font. The operating system of Windows 2000 needs to install the super-large character set support package "Agent Update".
⑥ ISO/IEC 10646/Unicode character set, which is a coded character set that can be enjoyed all over the world. They are integrated with each other, covering characters of major languages in the world, including simplified and traditional Chinese characters, including 20902 unified Chinese characters of CJK, 6582 unified Chinese characters of CJK Ext-A 6582 and 6582 unified Chinese characters of Ext-B 427 1 1. SimSun-ExtB (Song Style) and minliu-ExtB (Thin Style) can display all Ext-B Chinese characters. Up to now, there is not a single font that can display all 70 195 Chinese characters, but it can be input through Haifeng Wu Bi, New Concept Wu Bi, Century Edition of Cangjie Input Method, New Version of Microsoft's new phonetic notation and Cangjie Input Method 6.0 (single code function). Ext-C has more than 20,000 Chinese characters. For details, please refer to the websites of Chinese University of Hong Kong, Friends of Malaysia in Cang Xie and Chen Qingyu in Fujian.
⑦ Version 2.3 of Chinese Character Configuration Database contains 60082 regular script glyphs,1100 small seal characters, 2627 Chu bamboo slips and silk characters, 3459 inscriptions on bones, 177 Oracle characters and 12768 variant characters. You can install this program or use the extracted font file, which is very useful for sorting out some ancient documents.
If the character set supported by the input method is exceeded, the computer cannot be input. If there is no corresponding font support, it will be displayed as a black box, box or blank. If the operating system or application software does not support this character set, it is displayed as a question mark (one or two). The same situation exists on the web page.
About Unicode
Due to the differences in the number of Chinese characters and common words in national standard character sets in different countries, although the common words in GB/BIG5 character sets on both sides of China are basically similar, reading after conversion is not a problem, but the chaotic relationship between coding and conversion is always an obstacle to text communication. Therefore, with the joint efforts of relevant national standardization organizations and compilers, the Unicode Chinese character standard ISO 10646.6438+0 including Chinese characters of China, Japan and Korea (CJK) was finally completed in 1993. Unicode is a multi-national character coding system with double-byte representation, and the coding space is 0x0000-0xFFFF. И o10646.1Chinese standard command code 0x4E00-9FA5, * * contains 209020 Chinese characters. Among them are 17 124 put forward by Mainland China (S) and 17258 put forward by Taiwan Province Province (T). The union of s and t, that is, the number of Chinese characters proposed by China (c) is 20 158. Japanese (J) proposed the Chinese character 12 157, while China did not propose 690 (JA); There are 7477 Chinese characters put forward by Korea (K), 90 of which were not put forward by China (Ka); Weidong and Ka Alliance Collection ***744 words. Related computer system software supporting Unicode coding, such as UNIX and WIN 95, has been introduced. However, because the ASCII code of Unicode adopts double-byte coding (that is, the single-byte ASCII code in general computer systems is preceded by 0x00), its Chinese character coding is not compatible with the existing codes in various countries, and the existing software and data cannot be directly used, so there are not many users who completely use Unicode software system at present, and most of them just regard it as an international language coding standard.