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Chinese characters
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chinese characters are records The writing system of Chinese and is still or was used in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest writing systems in the world, with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is a Chinese character; in a broad sense, it is a unique character in the Chinese cultural circle.
Chinese characters are an important tool for carrying culture, and there are currently a large number of classics written in Chinese characters. Different dialects use Chinese characters as their own writing systems. Therefore, Chinese characters have played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization in history and have become an intrinsic link in the formation of Southeast Asian cultural circles. In the process of the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures were left behind, and a unique art of Chinese calligraphy was formed.
A Chinese character generally has multiple meanings and has a strong ability to form words, and many Chinese characters can independently form words. This has resulted in the extremely high "usage efficiency" of Chinese characters. About 2,000 commonly used characters can cover more than 98% of written expressions. Coupled with the characteristics of the phonetic characters of Chinese characters, the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high. Chinese characters have a higher information density than alphabetic characters. Therefore, on average, Chinese expressions of the same content are shorter than characters in any other alphabetic language.
The current Chinese character system is divided into traditional Chinese characters and simplified characters. The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and North America, and the latter is used in Chinese communities in mainland China, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two Chinese character writing systems, the individual differences in commonly used Chinese characters are less than 25%.
Due to the complexity of writing Chinese characters, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" has existed for a long time. It is believed that Chinese characters are a bottleneck in education and informatization, and there is a push to "Latinize Chinese characters" or even abolish them. Nowadays, it is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although the initial learning is difficult, after mastering common characters, there is no problem of continuing to learn similar to the massive English words, and its ideographic characteristics can also fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the computer input problem has been basically solved, the "theory of backwardness of Chinese characters" and the "Latinization of Chinese characters" 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 demise of rare characters are still going on.
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Table of Contents
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* 1 History
o 1.1 Original characters
o 1.2 From pictograms to ideograms
o 1.3 Character creation and composition
o 1.4 Formation of modern Chinese characters
* 2 Chinese language knowledge of Chinese characters
o 2.1 Glyphs (Chinese character calligraphy)
o 2.2 Pronunciation
o 2.3 Phonetic notation
o 2.4 Chinese characters and Words
o 2.5 Number of Chinese characters
* 3 Influence of Chinese characters
o 3.1 Derived words
o 3.2 Cultural circle of Chinese characters
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o 3.3 Chinese character folklore
o 3.4 Chinese character art
* 4 Latinization of Chinese characters
* 5 Simplification of Chinese characters
o 5.1 Variant characters
o 5.2 Glyphs
* 6 Computer processing of Chinese characters
o 6.1 Chinese character encoding system
* 7 Chinese characters The future
* 8 References
* 9 Bibliography
* 10 External links
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History
Oracle Bone Script
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Oracle Bone Script
Chinese characters are one of the three oldest writing systems in the world. Among them, the ancient Egyptian holy book characters and the cuneiform characters of the Sumerians in the Mesopotamia have been lost, and only Chinese characters are still in use today.
According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters by Cangjie. Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters based on the shapes of the sun and moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created the characters, the world was shocked - "The sky rained millet, and the ghosts cried at night." From a historical perspective, the complex Chinese character system cannot be invented by one person. Cangjie is more likely to have made outstanding contributions to the collection, arrangement, and unification of Chinese characters. Therefore, "Xunzi: Uncovering" records that "there are many good calligraphers." , and Cangjie is the only one who passed it on."
There is a view that the gossip in "The Book of Changes" has a greater impact on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.
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Original writing
The oral knowledge before the invention of writing had obvious shortcomings in the transmission and accumulation. Primitive humans used knotted ropes, carved deeds, The method of drawings was used to assist in recording things, and later characteristic graphics were used to simplify and replace drawings. Primitive writing is formed when graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific correspondence with language.
In 1994, a large number of pottery vessels were unearthed from the Daxi Cultural Site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the more than 170 symbols on them, some of the features are quite similar to oracle bone inscriptions. This discovery estimates the formation process of original Chinese characters to 6,000 years ago. In addition, the pictographic symbols on the pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong, and the geometric symbols on the Banpo painted pottery in Xi'an may all be manifestations of different stages in the formation of primitive writing (or before it was formed).
However, do Chinese characters after the Shang Dynasty and these geometric symbols have the same origin? This issue is still controversial. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the predecessors of Chinese characters, or even absolutely certain that they are written symbols.
[Editor]
From pictograms to ideographic meanings
The stone carvings on Mount Tai are said to have been written by Li Si
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The stone carvings on Mount Tai are said to have been written by Li Si
From oracle bone inscriptions to small seal scripts, Chinese characters have experienced the development process from hieroglyphs to phonetic characters, and the glyphs have gradually become separated from the specific images of things. The Chinese characters of this period are called ancient characters.
The oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou dynasties are already a relatively complete writing system.
Of the more than 4,500 oracle-bone inscriptions that have been discovered, nearly 2,000 have been recognized so far. At the same time as the oracle bone inscriptions, the characters cast on bronze vessels were called bronze inscriptions or bell and tripod inscriptions. The "Sanshi Pan" and "Maogong Ding" of the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical data and artistic value.
After Qin Shihuang unified China, Li Si standardized and organized the large seal script and the ancient texts of the Six Kingdoms, and formulated the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, unifying Chinese characters. The small seal script is rectangular and the strokes are round and smooth.
The Xiaozhuan script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters among the scripts of various countries, and the history of "scripts with the same script" began. The unification of writing has powerfully promoted the spread of culture among ethnic groups and played an important role in the identity of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of world writing.
The development of Chinese characters has gone through many different evolutions. In the early days, the number of characters in the Chinese character system was insufficient, and a large number of things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the written expressions. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters. However, there are so many things that it is impossible to express them all with a single Chinese character, and the excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters themselves. Chinese has gradually evolved from single-character ideograms to word-based ideograms.
[Editor]
Creation and composition
After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters continued to increase, and many newly created characters continued to appear:
* Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty, Yang Jian, was originally the Duke of Sui. However, because the word "辶" in the word "Sui" meant instability, the word "辶" was removed and the character "Sui" was created as the name of the country.
* During the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian coined the word "曌" (the same as the word "zhao") as her name based on the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".
* In the Five Dynasties, Liu Yan took the meaning of "flying dragon in the sky" and created the word "龑" in his name.
In modern times, due to the influx of a large amount of Western knowledge, many characters were also created. For example, with the introduction of "Beer" into China, how to express it in Chinese characters was a problem. It was originally translated as skin wine, but later felt that it was inappropriate, so around 1910, the word "beer" was created - translated as "beer". In order to express the imperial units, some polysyllabic words were also created, such as miles (nautical miles), 嗧 (gallons), 瓩 (kilowatts), feet (feet), etc. However, these multi-syllabic characters were eliminated in the "Notice on the Unified Use of Characters in the Names of Some Measurement Units" issued by the Chinese Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Measures on July 20, 1977, and are no longer used in the mainland, but in Taiwan It can still be seen in other places.
At present, due to informatization and standardization of word usage, new characters are no longer added arbitrarily to Chinese characters. The only exceptions are the various elements in the periodic table, such as "helium", "chlorine", "radon", "germanium", "chromium", "uranium", etc. This method of forming characters is still used to name new elements. For details on the rules of word formation for chemical elements, see Elements.
The Six Books is an analysis of the composition of Chinese characters. The Six Books were mentioned in Zhou Rites, but the specific content was not explained. In "Shuowen Jiezi" of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the structure rules of Chinese characters in the "Six Books": pictograms, meanings, meanings, pictophonetics, annotations, and borrowings. Among them, the four items of pictography, reference, meaning, and pictophonetic sound are the principles of character creation, which are the "methods of creating characters"; while transfers and borrowings are the rules of word usage, which are the "methods of using characters." What is noteworthy among them is "Zhuanzhu". Xu Shen's explanation of it in the Han Dynasty was: "Jian Lei Yi, agreeing to accept each other, test, and always." Later generations of philologists also made a lot of work on Xu Shen's definition. explanation. It includes three categories: "Xing Zhuo theory, Sound Zhuo theory, and Yi Zhuo theory". These three theories are not comprehensive. Mr. Lin Yun, a contemporary paleontologist, explained that "zhuanzhu" is a form (glyph) that records two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. For example, "mother and daughter", "broom and wife" and so on in oracle bone inscriptions. However, it should be noted that the "Six Books" are the arrangement and classification of Chinese characters, not the rules for character creation.
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The formation of modern Chinese characters
Xiaozhuan strokes were mainly curved, and later gradually became more straight-line features, making it easier to write. By the Han Dynasty, official script had replaced Xiaozhuan as the main calligraphy style. The emergence of official script laid the foundation for the glyph structure of modern Chinese characters and became a watershed between ancient and modern writing.
After the Han Dynasty, the way of writing Chinese characters gradually developed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to calligraphy on silk and paper. Cursive script, regular script, running script and other fonts appeared rapidly, which not only met official documents and daily needs, but also formed a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics.
After the invention of printing in ancient times, a new font used for printing, Song font, appeared. In modern times, fonts such as Hengti and imitation Song font have appeared one after another.
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Language knowledge of Chinese characters
Eight Methods of the Character "Yong"
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" "Eight Methods of Writing Yong"
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Glyphs (Chinese calligraphy)
Chinese characters have various writing methods, that is, different fonts; different The fonts and Chinese character shapes are different.
Chinese characters written in regular fonts (such as regular script, Song style, official script, seal script, etc.) are square characters, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters include single characters and combined characters. Single characters cannot be separated, such as "文", "中", etc.; combined characters are composed of basic components and account for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of combined characters include: upper and lower structures, such as "bi" and "chen"; left and right structures, such as "ci" and "ke"; semi-enclosed structures, such as "同" and "成"; full-enclosed structures, such as "Tuan", "Hui"; compound structures, such as "Win", "Ban", etc. The basic components of Chinese characters include single characters, radicals and other uncharacterized components.
The smallest unit of Chinese characters is the stroke.
When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the "stroke order", are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontally and then vertically, first left and then flattened, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside then inside, first outside then inside before sealing, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters in different writing styles may be different.
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Pronunciation
Chinese characters are a unique writing system for many dialects, and each character represents a syllable. Mainland China now uses Mandarin as the standard pronunciation. The syllables of Mandarin are determined by an initial consonant, a final and a tone. More than 1,300 syllables are actually used. Due to the large number of Chinese characters, there is an obvious phenomenon of homophones; at the same time, there are also situations where the same Chinese character has multiple pronunciations, which is called polyphones. This situation has certain differences in different dialects, but it is common in Chinese.
Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common ones are names of people and places, followed by transliterations of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original phonetic words, such as "fire" and "wuhu" (one life). But even so, there are still certain ideographic elements, especially the names of people and places in the country. Even for foreign names of people and places, there are certain bottom lines of meaning. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated into "immortal".
Since Chinese characters do not seem to have undergone much change from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, Chinese characters do not directly represent the changes in Chinese pronunciation. Special research is necessary to speculate on their pronunciation in Old and Middle Chinese.
Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, one Chinese character could represent two syllables, a minor syllable and a major syllable. See Ancient Chinese for details.
The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic pronunciation" and "training pronunciation". A word often has many pronunciations.
In Korean, it is roughly one word for one sound, and there is no training in reading.
Influenced by Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters later also used some polysyllabic characters, such as 里 (sea mile), 嗧 (gallon), 瓩 (kilowatt), etc. However, it is basically not used in mainland China due to official abolishment. It is still used occasionally in Taiwan, and ordinary people understand its meaning.
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Phonetic notation
The earliest phonetic notation methods are the dunruo method and the direct injection method. To read Ruofa is to use words with similar sounds to notate the pronunciation. Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi uses this phonetic notation method, such as "廻, she is also a pronunciation, and the pronunciation is accurate". The direct annotation method is to use another Chinese character to indicate the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, in "The woman is the one who talks about herself," the phonetic notation is done with "the speaker is Yue".
The above two methods have inherent imperfections. Some words do not have homophones or the homophones are too rare, which makes it difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "socks sound socks" and so on.
Fanqie method was developed during the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit using pinyin script. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be annotated by the fanqie method, that is, the initial consonant of the first character and the final and tone of the second character are combined to notate the pronunciation, making it possible to combine the pronunciations of all Chinese characters. For example, "Lian, Langdianqie" means that the pronunciation of "Lian" is made up of the initial consonant of "Lang" and the final and tone of "Dian".
In modern times, phonetic symbols in the form of Chinese characters (commonly known as ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) and many Latin alphabet phonetic notation methods have been developed. Phonetic notation is still part of teaching in Taiwan, but currently the most widely used in mainland China is Hanyu Pinyin.
Since Chinese characters mainly express their own meanings, their phonetic notation is relatively weak. This feature prevents documents dating back thousands of years from being too disparate in wording and phrasing like the Western world that uses pinyin writing, but it also makes it difficult to infer ancient pronunciation. For example, "Pang" derives its sound from "龙", but in today's Beijing dialect, the former is pronounced "páng" and the latter is pronounced "lóng". How to explain such differences is a topic discussed in phonology.
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Chinese characters and words
Chinese characters are the smallest units of Chinese shapes, similar to the "letters" in English. However, unlike "letters", Chinese characters also have ideographic components and are therefore similar to individual "words" in "English phrases". Therefore, Chinese characters are a component between "letters" and "words" in English. This can also be derived from the quantity.
Morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in Chinese, which is analogous to the general term of "vocabulary" and "phrase" in English. The vast majority of Chinese characters can independently form morphemes, such as "I", which is analogous to single-letter words in English, such as "I". Most words are composed of more than two Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "vocabulary" and "letter" in English, the meaning of a morpheme is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it independently constitutes the morpheme, so it is quite Simplifies memory to some extent.
Words include morphemes and phrases formed by several morphemes.
The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in the fact that thousands of commonly used characters can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words. However, on the other hand, it is necessary to accurately master the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. It has also become a burden. There are tens of thousands of commonly used Chinese words, and the total vocabulary is about one million words. Although the number seems a bit prohibitive, due to the ideographic nature of the word formation of most Chinese characters, it is not out of reach to basically master it. Therefore, in terms of vocabulary alone, learning difficulty is not high; in contrast, the memory intensity of mastering the same number of foreign vocabulary is much greater.
This high efficiency of word combination ensures the stability of the Chinese character system, that is, the vocabulary increases, the language develops, and the basic Chinese characters remain basically unchanged.
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The number of Chinese characters
There is no exact number of Chinese characters, but the number of Chinese characters used daily is about several thousand. According to statistics, 1,000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 words can cover more than 98%, and 3,000 words have reached 99%. The statistical results of simplified and traditional Chinese are not much different.
The total number of Chinese characters that have appeared in history is more than 80,000 (some say there are more than 60,000), most of which are variant characters and rare characters. The vast majority of variant characters and rare characters have died out naturally or been standardized. Except for ancient Chinese characters, they generally only appear occasionally in names of people and places. In addition, following the first batch of simplified characters, there are also a batch of "two simplified characters" that have been abolished, but there are still a few characters that are popular in society.
The first statistics on the number of Chinese characters was conducted by Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty in "Shuowen Jiezi", which included 9353 characters. Later, the "Yupian" written by King Gu Ye of the Southern Dynasties was recorded to contain 16,917 words, and the "Daguangyihui Yupian" revised on this basis was said to have 22,726 words. After that, Lei Pian, compiled by officials of the Song Dynasty, contained more characters, with 31,319 characters; Ji Yun, another book compiled by officials of the Song Dynasty, contained 53,525 characters, which was once the book with the most characters.
In addition, some dictionaries also include more characters, such as the Qing Dynasty's "Kangxi Dictionary" with 47,035 characters; Japan's "Dahanwa Dictionary" with 48,902 characters and 1,062 appendixes; Taiwan's "Chinese Dictionary" "Big Dictionary" contains 49,905 characters; "Big Chinese Dictionary" contains 54,678 characters. The book with the largest number of published words in the 20th century was "Chinese Character Ocean", containing 85,000 words.
In the Chinese character computer coding standard, GB 2312 contains 6763 simplified Chinese characters, GBK contains 20912 simplified, traditional, Japanese and Korean Chinese characters, the Big Five code contains 13053 traditional Chinese characters, and Unicode's Chinese, Japanese and Korean The unified ideographic basic character set contains 20,902 Chinese characters, and there are two expansion areas, with a total of 70,000 characters.
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The influence of Chinese characters
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Derivatives
The Chinese writing system is also One of the most important source scripts in the world, under the influence of Chinese characters, has also produced: Khitan script, Jurchen script, Xixia script, ancient Zhuang characters (square Zhuang characters), ancient white characters (square white characters), ancient Buyi characters (square characters) The word Buyi), the word Nan and other characters. But they all died out due to various reasons, and not many people can recognize Nüshu in Chinese today. Japanese kana (仮名) and Korean proverb (?) were also greatly influenced by the glyphs of Chinese characters when they were created.
In addition, Mongolian, Manchu, Xibe, etc. are also under the influence of Chinese writing methods and writing tools. The writing method derived from Aramaic writing from right to left has been changed from top to top. As you write down, the structure of the text changes accordingly.
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Chinese Character Cultural Circle
Since the connection between Chinese characters and their pronunciation is not very close, it is easier for them to be borrowed by other ethnic groups, such as Japan, Korea and There was a historical stage in Vietnam where people could not speak Chinese and simply wrote in Chinese characters. This characteristic of Chinese characters plays a major role in maintaining a unified Han nationality - a nation filled with various dialect groups that cannot communicate with each other.
Chinese characters have had a huge impact on the culture of surrounding countries, forming a Chinese character cultural circle that uses Chinese characters uniformly. In Japan and the Korean Peninsula, Chinese characters are integrated into the characters of their languages ????"Chinese characters (Chinese characters)". かんじ)" and "kanji (?)". Until now, the Japanese language still considers Chinese characters to be part of their writing system. In North Korea, the use of Chinese characters has completely stopped; in South Korea, the use of Chinese characters has become less and less in recent decades. However, because Korean uses a large number of Chinese characters and has severe stress, Chinese characters are still used when precise expression is required. Although under normal circumstances, personal names, company names, etc. are written in Korean, most personal names, company names, etc. have their corresponding Chinese character names.
Japan
Chinese characters were introduced to Japan via the Korean Peninsula in the 3rd century AD. After World War II, Japan began to restrict the number and use of Chinese characters, and promulgated the "List of Chinese Characters in Use" and the "List of Characters for Personal Names", which simplified some Chinese characters, but the Chinese characters used in literary creation were not included in the restrictions. In addition to the Chinese characters introduced from Chinese, Japan also created and simplified some Chinese characters, such as "tsuji" (crossroads), "栃", "堠" (山路) and "広" (广), "転" ( (turn), "卍" (labor), etc. See: Kanji for details.
Korean Peninsula
Around the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced to the Korean Peninsula, and Korean was once entirely written in Chinese characters. In 1444, King Sejong of Joseon promulgated the "Hunminjeongeum" and invented the use of proverbs and Chinese characters. Although the current Republic of Korea prohibits the use of Chinese characters in formal occasions and has stopped teaching Chinese characters in primary and secondary schools, Chinese characters continue to be used among the people and can be written according to personal habits. However, the number of Koreans who can write beautiful Chinese characters is now increasing. Come less and less. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea abolished Chinese characters in 1948, leaving only a dozen Chinese characters. For details, see: Korean and Chinese characters.
Vietnam
Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam in the 1st century AD. Vietnamese also completely used Chinese characters as writing characters, and created the word Nan based on Chinese characters. However, Due to the inconvenience of writing, Chinese characters are still the main writing method. After the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, Chinese characters were abolished and pinyin characters called "Guoyu characters" were used. There are no traces of Chinese characters in Vietnamese today. For details, see: Zi Nan, Zi Ru
[Editor]
Chinese Character Folklore
Many Chinese folk customs are related to Chinese characters, such as:
* Shehu: Guessing lantern riddles, also called lantern tiger, is closely related to Chinese characters. The ancient Shehu riddles can be roughly divided into two categories. One is the literati Shehu riddles, which have profound riddles and complex and diverse riddles, and the answers are mostly original sentences from the Four Books and Five Classics; the other is the market lantern riddles, which have very popular riddles and answers. Shooting the tiger is an important activity during the Lantern Festival.
* Combined characters: Chinese folk often combine some phrases with auspicious meanings into one word to pray for good luck. Common combined characters include "luck in wealth", "double happiness", etc.
The combined character “Confucius and Mencius loves learning”
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The combined character “Confucius and Mencius loves learning”
* Homophone: Chinese people like to use The homophonic characteristics of Chinese characters mean that homophonic words are used to take the meaning of auspiciousness. For example, the homophony of "bat" for bat is "Fu" for happiness, and the homophony of "Zhou" for animal is "Shou" for longevity.
, starting from the winter solstice, filling a stroke with color according to the weather every day, and completing the entire picture by the end of the number nine.
Known as flower and bird calligraphy, it is a colorful combination of flowers, birds, insects and fish calligraphy. In China, it can only be seen in Spring Festival temple fairs and some festival gatherings. Flower and bird characters have also become a kind of street art in Western countries such as Britain and the United States. Most of the early bird calligraphy paintings were written with some auspicious words to pray for good luck. Nowadays, the bird calligraphy paintings seen at temple fairs mainly write the names of customers. The purpose of the buyers has gradually changed from praying for good luck to hunting for novelties.
[Editor]
Chinese Character Art
Liang Qichao’s calligraphy works
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Liang Qichao’s calligraphy works< /p>
The unique and beautiful structure of Chinese characters and the diverse expressive power of the brush, the main tool for writing, gave rise to the unique Chinese plastic art - calligraphy. Seal cutting is an art related to calligraphy, using a knife to carve seal characters on stone as a seal.
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Latinization of Chinese characters
In the past four hundred years, Westerners and the Chinese themselves have proposed many Latinization plans for Chinese characters, mainly Includes:
* Waitomax Pinyin (1867)
* Postal Pinyin (1906)
* Mandarin Romaji (1928)< /p>
* New Latinized script for Northern dialect (1931)
* Chinese Pinyin plan (1958)
* Cantonese Pinyin (1993)
< p> * Tongyong Pinyin (1998)Now, the Chinese Pinyin scheme is the most widely used Chinese character Latinization scheme accepted by the United Nations.
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Simplification of Chinese characters
Main article: Simplification of Chinese characters
"Jiucheng Palace Liquan Ming" by Ouyang Xun in regular script< /p>
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"Jiucheng Palace Liquan Ming" by Ouyang Xun in regular script
In modern times, Western civilization, which was in a strong position, began to enter East Asia. The trend of learning from the West has emerged in the country. Some of them insist on the tradition of Chinese characters, but many others advocate giving up the use of Chinese characters. The argument for those advocating the abandonment of Chinese characters is that compared with Western pinyin writing, Chinese characters are cumbersome and cumbersome because Chinese characters cannot be written with typewriters and must use giant typesetting rooms. In this regard, many countries that use Chinese characters have made varying degrees of simplification of Chinese characters, and even attempted complete pinyinization. The emergence of the Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese kana and the various pinyin schemes of Chinese are all based on this idea.
The People's Republic of China issued the "Chinese Character Simplification Plan" on January 28, 1956. In May 1964, the "Simplified Character List" was approved and republished in 1986 after minor revisions. Used in mainland China to this day. In 1977, the "Second Batch of Chinese Character Simplification Plan (Draft)" was announced and the "Two Simplified Characters" were released. After a period of trial (about eight years), they were officially abolished in 1986 because the glyphs were too simple and confusing. Singapore and Malaysia have respectively released simplified character lists that are identical to the "Simplified Character List".
Japanese and Korean also have their own simplified Chinese characters.
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Various characters
See the entry for variant characters.
In addition to coined characters, there are also many variant characters. They are words with the same meaning and pronunciation, but different writing methods. Some are for historical reasons, and some are made-up words by famous people, such as "和" and "和", "秋" and "秋" and "羝", etc.
Mainland China announced a list of variant characters in 1956 and abolished a large number of variant characters. However, some variant characters were later restored due to various reasons. For example, "Yu" was once abolished as a variant of "Yu", but it was restored to a standard character in the "Modern Chinese Common Character List" published in 1988. In addition, different regions have different choices of variant characters. For example, South Korea uses the earliest style among the various variants of Chinese characters as the standard writing method. Therefore, in the standards of Korean Chinese characters, "甛" is taken instead of "sweet", "幇" is taken instead of "bang", and "畵" is taken instead of "paint".
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Glyphs
See the glyph entry for details.
Differences in Chinese characters in various regions
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Differences in Chinese characters in various regions
Because the use of glyphs is not uniform in various regions, and the use of " "New font", resulting in many differences. For example, "blade" and "horn" are written differently in different places. Another example is the word "口". In Taiwan, it is stipulated that the last horizontal line should be written a little beyond the horizontal fold above it, but the way of writing in other regions is to be silent (note the "口" of the character "开" in the picture on the right).
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Computer processing of Chinese characters
See Chinese information processing for details
Since the typewriter keyboard itself was not designed with Chinese characters in mind Regarding input issues, inputting Chinese characters is often more difficult than inputting Pinyin text. Chinese characters did not go through the popularization of Chinese typewriters and directly entered the stage of computer Chinese information processing. In the early days of the invention of computers, the question arose of whether Chinese characters could adapt to the computer age. Scholars who supported the Latinization of Chinese characters even used this as an argument.
With the emergence of various Chinese input methods, the computer input, storage, and output technology of Chinese characters have been basically solved, greatly improving the efficiency of Chinese writing, publishing, and information retrieval. At present, there are thousands of Chinese input methods, mainly including phonetic input and graphic input, and there are also a combination of both. Speech input of Chinese characters, handwriting recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) technology have also been widely used.
For example, GB 2312 (Mainland China), Big5 and CNS 11643 (Taiwan), HKSCS (Hong Kong), JIS (Japan), which contains thousands of words, and GBK (Mainland China), which contains more than 20,000 words. , international standard Unicode, ISO 10646, etc. During this process, due to technical and other factors, different levels of adjustments may be made to the number of words included and the fonts included. For example, when Taiwan's non-governmental organization Information Policy Council launched a character code standard, in order to facilitate computer processing of Chinese characters, it adopted a number of Japanese Chinese characters with relatively simplified fonts in the name of "unified variant characters", such as: "伟" -> "伟".
In order to solve the urgent need for characters in postal services, household registration and other fields, the Chinese government implemented a new national standard for Chinese character encoding in 2000, "Chinese Character Encoding Character Set - Expansion of the Basic Set" GB 18030- In 2000, 27,484 Chinese characters were collected. And it is mandatory that all computer products sold in China must support this new national standard.
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Chinese character encoding system
In order to exchange information, each region where Chinese characters are used has developed a series of Chinese character set standards.
* The national standard code ("national standard" is the abbreviation of the National Standard of the People's Republic of China) is used in mainland China. GB 2312 contains 6763 Chinese characters, GBK contains 20912 Chinese characters, and the latest GB 18030 contains 27533 Chinese characters.
* Big5 code. Contains 13053 Chinese characters. One-byte or two-byte encoding used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
* Unicode is not well accepted by the Chinese government. The Chinese government requires that software sold in mainland China must support GB 18030 encoding.
* In the field of international communication and software design, the China-Japan-Korean Unified Ideographic Code collects Chinese character sets in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
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The future of Chinese characters
Now simplified Chinese characters are mainly popular in Chinese communities in mainland China, Singapore and Southeast Asia; traditional Chinese characters are popular in Taiwan, Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Macao and America.
Some people believe that Traditional Chinese is more difficult to learn to write, so the use of Traditional Chinese will become less and less.
On the other hand, there are many cultural people who believe that Simplified Chinese is "impure" and "inferior" Chinese characters. But as the political and economic influence of mainland China continues to grow, and the influence of simplified Chinese becomes greater and greater, it seems unlikely that the use of traditional Chinese will return to its previous dominance. From a cultural perspective, traditional Chinese characters will not completely disappear unless mainland China wants to separate from Taiwan and completely separate from ancient Chinese culture. Currently, many scholars believe that simplified Chinese characters should be abolished and the use of traditional Chinese characters restored.
However, whether in mainland China or elsewhere, the calligraphy community generally uses traditional Chinese characters for creation. Many people believe that compared to simplified Chinese characters, some traditional writing forms are more beautiful.
In fact, the deepening economic cooperation between mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao