Hanzi is a writing system for recording 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 the most unique character in the Chinese cultural circle.
Chinese characters are the most basic unit of Chinese writing. Its use began in the Shang Dynasty at the latest and has gone through various changes in calligraphy styles such as oracle bone inscriptions, large seal script, small seal script, official script, and regular script (cursive script and running script). Qin Shihuang unified China, Li Si compiled the small seal script, and the history of "scripts with the same text" began. Although the pronunciation of Chinese dialects varies greatly, the unification of the writing system reduces the communication barriers caused by dialect differences.
Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty summarized the structure rules of Chinese characters into "six books" in "Shuowen Jiezi": pictogram, referring to things, understanding, pictophonetic, transliteration, and borrowing. 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."
For more than three thousand years, the way of writing Chinese characters has not changed much, allowing future generations to read ancient texts without any hindrance. However, after modern Western civilization entered East Asia, various countries in the entire Chinese character cultural circle have set off a trend of learning from the West. Among them, giving up the use of Chinese characters is an important aspect of this movement. The rationale for these movements was that Chinese characters were cumbersome and clumsy compared to Western pinyin characters. Many countries that use Chinese characters have made varying degrees of simplification of Chinese characters, and there are even attempts to completely pinyinize them. The emergence of the Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese kana and the various pinyin schemes of Chinese are all based on this idea. Mainland China simplified the strokes of Chinese characters by referring to cursive script, and approved the "Simplified Character List" on January 28, 1956, which is still in use in China and Singapore. Taiwan has always used Traditional Chinese.
Currently, in most areas where Chinese is spoken, two standardized Chinese characters are used, namely Traditional Chinese (traditional Chinese characters) and Simplified Chinese (simplified Chinese characters).
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 historically played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization and have become an intrinsic link in the formation of the Southeast Asian cultural circle. 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 ideographic characteristics 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.
Principles of character creation
The Six Books are the basic principles of Chinese character composition. The Six Books were mentioned in Zhou Rites, but the specific content was not explained. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the construction principles of Chinese characters of "Six Books" in "Shuowen Jiezi": pictogram, referring to things, understanding, pictophonetic, transliteration, and pretense.
Pictographic: This method of making characters is to depict the object according to its appearance characteristics. The so-called painting is to follow the object. The four characters such as sun, moon, mountain, and water were originally used to depict the sun, moon, mountain, and water, and later gradually evolved into the current shape.
Referring to things: This refers to the method of expressing abstract things. The so-called "each refers to his own thing and thinks of it". Ru Bu writes "Shang" above it, and Ren writes "Xia" below it.
Phonetic: This is a unique sound represented by a specific shape (root) in the text. For example: Hu, this character can also be a root. Combined with different attribute roots, it can be synthesized into: butterfly, butterfly, lake, gourd, coral, 鐐, etc., with the same pronunciation (some only have the same initial consonants) , expressing different things. However, due to changes in the phonology of ancient and modern languages, many pictophonetic characters of the same type in ancient times no longer have the same phonemes in today's Mandarin.
Knowing: This word-making method is to combine two radicals to derive new meanings. For example, when "sun" and "moon" are combined, sunlight plus moonlight becomes "bright". The word "人" and the word "言" combine to form the word "信", which means what a person has said in the past; "faith" means that this person always abides by what he has said.
[ url] Note: This is used for two words that are annotations for each other, synonymous with each other but different shapes. Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty explained: "Building a class, agreeing to accept each other, testing, always Also." How do you say this? These two words, "kao" in ancient times, can be used as "longevity". "Lao" and "kao" are connected and have the same meaning. That is to say, the old person is Kao, and the person who is Kao is old. The Book of Songs' "Daya? Chupu" also says: "The longevity test of the king of Zhou.". Su Shi's "Poetry on Qu Yuan Pagoda" also has ancients who are immortal, so why bother to test it. One word. The words "kao" and "kao" all mean "old". It is particularly noteworthy that later generations of philologists also made a lot of explanations for Xu Shen's aforementioned definitions. These include "Xing Zhuo theory, Sheng Zhuo theory, and Yi Zhuo theory." "Three categories, but some people think that these three views are not comprehensive enough. Mr. Lin Yu, a contemporary ancient calligrapher, also explained that "zhuanzhu" is a form (root) that records two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. For example, "broom and" "Woman" and "Mother and daughter" in oracle bone inscriptions, etc.
Borrowing: In short, this method is to borrow a word to express other things. Generally speaking, there is an indescribable new Things are borrowed from a root with similar pronunciation or similar attributes to express this new thing. For example: "you" originally refers to the right hand (first seen in oracle bone inscriptions), but was later borrowed to mean "also". The original meaning of "smell" is to listen to things with ears. For example, in "University? Chapter 7" there is "turn a blind eye, hear but not hear, eat without knowing the taste", but it was later used as a verb for smell (although some people think this is a misuse). ).
To summarize the above six books, the first two are "methods of making characters"; the second two are "methods of forming characters"; the last two are "methods of using characters". The principle is a theory of Chinese characters summarized by ancient philology scholars. It has evolved over a long period of time and is not the original creation of any one person.
The structure of Chinese characters.
< p>Chinese characters are composed of one or more radicals arranged in a square in a specific space in a two-dimensional manner (European languages ??are one-dimensional), so they are also called square characters. From a structural point of view, Chinese characters have the following Features:A single character has a high density of information. When expressing the same thing, the same message can be expressed in a shorter length than phonetic characters, so the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high < /p>
A Chinese character is composed of more than 400 ideographic letters as basic radicals, such as gold, wood, water, fire, earth, etc., which are combined like building blocks
An unknown. The meaning of words can be broken down into words, and the meaning of the words can be inferred from the composition of the roots and the arrangement of spaces. When the evolution of the times creates new things that are difficult to express in words, new words can also be synthesized based on the principle of root combination, for example. The Chinese character uranium is a newly created character in modern times to represent a newly discovered chemical element.
The spatial arrangement of the radicals composed of Chinese characters has an impact on the meaning of the character: it is also a combination of "heart and death". , the left and right rows are "busy", the upper and lower rows are "forget", the arrangement is different, resulting in different meanings; there is a part of the word "乂" on the right side of the text, which means that the right hand (the left radical of the hand represents the left hand) is holding something against the left hand The root means to do something (discovered by archeology in bronze inscriptions and oracle bone inscriptions). If you hold something on your right hand, it becomes "攵". People with this root are almost always aggressive or use violence to achieve something, such as attack or defeat. , knock, collect, disperse, government, animal husbandry, edict, etc.
Character (Chinese character calligraphy)
There are various ways of writing the Chinese characters for "国". That is, there are different fonts; different fonts have different glyphs of Chinese characters.
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 "xiao" and "jian"; 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.
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 character has multiple sounds, which is called polyphone. This situation is common in various Chinese languages.
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 (one life) "woohoo", "haha" and so on. 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".
Because Chinese characters themselves do not represent sounds, although the number and writing methods of Chinese characters have changed from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, the changes in pronunciation cannot be seen. Special research is necessary to speculate on their pronunciation in Old and Middle Chinese. Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, a Chinese character was pronounced as two syllables, a minor syllable and a major syllable, similar to today's Korean and Japanese. See Ancient Chinese for details.
The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic pronunciation" and "training pronunciation". One character often has many pronunciations, which comes from the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China in different periods.
In Korean, it is roughly one word for one sound, and there is no training in reading.
In addition to Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters also use some polysyllabic characters, such as "里" (nautical mile), "嗧" (gallon), "瓩" (kilowatt), etc. However, it is basically no longer used in mainland China due to official abolishment. It is still used in Taiwan, and ordinary people understand its meaning.
Phonetic notation
The earliest phonetic notation methods are Duruo method and Zhizhu method. To pronounce Ruofa is to use words with similar pronunciation 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 Yinshao" 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 through 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 composed 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.
Chinese characters and words
Chinese characters are the smallest unit of Chinese characters.
Morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in Chinese, which is analogous to the general term of "vocabulary" and "phrase" in English. Most Chinese characters can independently form morphemes, such as "I", which is analogous to words composed of single letters in English, such as "I". Most words in modern vernacular texts are composed of two or more 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 forms a morpheme. , thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent.
Words include morphemes and phrases formed by several morphemes.
The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in the fact that hundreds of basic pictograms can be combined into tens of thousands of Chinese characters representing various things in the sky and on earth; thousands of commonly used characters can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words. .
However, on the other hand, accurately mastering the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words has 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.
From the perspective of classical Chinese, using the original meaning of characters is more accurate and efficient than over-reliance on words since the May 4th Vernacular Movement. For example, Mr. Zhu Bangfu proposed a retro approach to accurately using Chinese characters. .
The number of Chinese characters: There is no exact number of Chinese characters. 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 small number of 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 include more characters, such as the "Kangxi Dictionary" of the Qing Dynasty, which contains 47,035 characters; Japan's "Dahanwa Dictionary", which contains 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.
Among the Chinese character computer coding standards, the current largest Chinese character coding is Taiwan’s national standard CNS11643, which currently (4.0) contains ***76,067 verifiable Chinese characters in Traditional and Simplified, Japanese and Korean languages. But it is not popular and is only used in a few environments such as household registration systems. The Big Five code commonly used by Taiwan and Hong Kong contains 13,053 traditional Chinese characters. GB18030 is the latest internal code character set of the People's Republic of China. GBK contains 20,912 simplified, traditional, Japanese, and Korean Chinese characters, while the early GB2312 contains 6,763 simplified Chinese characters. Unicode's basic Chinese, Japanese and Korean unified ideographic character set contains 20,902 Chinese characters, and there are two extension areas, with a total of more than 70,000 characters.
The initial Chinese character system did not have enough characters, and many things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the expression of the characters. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through stages of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters. The meaning that a single Chinese character can represent is limited, so many single Chinese meanings are represented by Chinese words, such as common two-character words. The current development of Chinese writing is mostly directed towards the creation of new words rather than new characters.
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. GB2312 contains 6763 Chinese characters, GBK contains 20912 Chinese characters, and the latest GB18030 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 GB18030 encoding.
In the field of international communication and software design, CJK encoding collects Chinese character sets in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
About Unicode: Due to the differences in the number of Chinese characters and commonly used characters included in the national standard character sets of various countries, although the commonly used characters in the GB/BIG5 character sets of China and Taiwan are basically similar, reading after conversion is not a problem, but this This confusing relationship of code switching is always an obstacle to written communication. Therefore, through joint efforts, standardization organizations and text workers in relevant countries finally completed the Unicode Chinese character standard ISO10646.1 including Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) Chinese characters in 1993. Unicode is a multi-national character encoding system with complete double-byte representation, and the encoding space is 0x0000-0xFFFF. The ISO10646.1 Chinese character standard uses encoding 0x4E00-9FA5, which contains 20902 Chinese characters. Among them: 17,124 Chinese characters proposed by Mainland China (S), 17,258 Chinese characters proposed by Taiwan (T); the union of S and T, that is, 20,158 Chinese characters proposed by China (C). Japan (J) proposed 12,157 Chinese characters, and China did not propose 690 (Ja); South Korea (K) proposed 7,477 Chinese characters, of which China did not propose 90 (Ka); Ja and Ka are combined** *744 words. Relevant computer system software that supports Unicode encoding, such as Unix and Win95, has been launched. However, because the ASCII code of Unicode is double-byte encoding (that is, the single-byte ASCII code in general computer systems is preceded by 0x00), and its Chinese character encoding It is also incompatible with existing codes in various countries, causing existing software and data to not be directly used. Therefore, there are not many users who fully use the Unicode software system. Most of them only use it as an international language coding standard.
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