Chinese character

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Unless otherwise specified, Chinese texts in this article are written in (Simplified Chinese / Traditional Chinese; Pinyin) format. In cases where Simplified and Traditional Chinese scripts are identical, the Chinese term is written once. This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.
Chinese character

Left: "Chinese character" in Traditional Chinese. Right: "Chinese character" in Simplified Chinese. Pronounced as Hànzì, kanji, hanja, and Hán tự.
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 漢字
Simplified Chinese 汉字
Transliterations
Gan
- Romanization hon5 ci5
Hakka
- Romanization hon⁵⁵ sii⁵⁵
Mandarin
- Hanyu Pinyin Hànzì
- Bopomofo ㄏㄢˋ ㄗˋ
Min
- Hokkien POJ Hàn-jī
- Teochew Peng'im hang3 ri7
Wu
- Shanghainese
romanization [høz]
Cantonese
- Jyutping hon3 zi6
Japanese name
Kanji 漢字
Hiragana かんじ
Transliterations
- Revised Hepburn kanji
- Kunrei-shiki kanzi
Korean name
Hangul 한자
Hanja 漢字
Transliterations
- Revised
Romanization hanja
- McCune-
Reischauer hancha
Vietnamese name
Quốc ngữ Hán Tự (Sino-Viet.)
Chữ Nho (native tongue)
Hán tự 漢字 (Sino-Viet.)
字儒 (native tongue)
Chinese
Type Logographic
Spoken languages Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese
Time period Bronze Age China to present
Parent systems
ISO 15924 Hani, Hans, Hant
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Chinese characters
Precursors
Traditional Chinese
Variant characters
Simplified Chinese
Simplified Chinese (2nd-round)
Traditional/Simplified (debate)
Kanji _(Japanese)

• Man'yōgana

Hanja _(Korean)

• Idu

Hán tự _(Vietnamese)

• Chữ Nôm

Sawndip _(Zhuang)
East Asian calligraphy

• Oracle bone script
• Bronze inscriptions
• Seal script
• Clerical script
• Standard script
• Semi-cursive script
• Cursive script

Input methods

A Chinese character, also known as a Han character (汉字 / 漢字; Hànzì), is a logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), Korean (hanja), and formerly Vietnamese (hán tự), and other languages. Chinese characters are also known as sinographs, and the Chinese writing system as sinography. Chinese characters represent the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.[1][2][3]

The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely used variants accumulated throughout history. Studies carried out in China have shown that literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.[4]

In the Chinese writing system, the characters are morphosyllabic, each usually corresponding to a spoken syllable with a basic meaning. However, although Chinese words may be formed by characters with basic meanings, a majority of words in Mandarin Chinese require two or more characters to write (thus are poly-syllabic) but have meaning that is distinct from the characters they are made from.[5] Cognates in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character.

Chinese characters have also been used and in some cases continue to be used in other languages, most significantly Japanese (where a single character can represent several spoken syllables), Korean, and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are used both by meaning to represent native words, ignoring the Chinese pronunciation, and by meaning and sound, to represent Chinese loanwords. These foreign pronunciations of Chinese characters are known as Sinoxenic pronunciations, and have been useful in the reconstruction of Ancient Chinese.

History

Precursors

In the last 50 or so years, inscriptions have been found on pottery in a variety of locations in China such as Bànpō near Xī'ān, as well as on bone and bone marrows at Hualouzi, Chang'an County near Xi'an. These simple, often geometric marks have been frequently compared to some of the earliest known Chinese characters, on the oracle bones, and some have taken them to mean that the history of Chinese writing extends back over six millennia.

However, because these marks occur singly, without any context to imply, and because they are generally extremely crude and simple, Qiú Xīguī (2000, p. 31) concluded that "we do not have any basis for stating that these constituted writing, nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to Shang dynasty Chinese characters." Isolated graphs and pictures continue to be found periodically, frequently accompanied by media reports pushing back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing a few thousand years. For example, at Damaidi in Ningxia, 3,172 pictorial cliff carvings dating to 6000–5000 BC have been discovered, leading to headlines such as "Chinese writing '8,000 years old.'"[6] Similarly, archaeologists report finding a few inscribed symbols on tortoise shells at the Neolithic site of Jiahu in Henan, dated to around 6,600–6,200 BCE, leading to headlines of "'Earliest writing' found in China.[7]

In his comment released to the BBC, Professor David Keightley urged caution in the latter instance, pointing to the lack of any direct cultural connection to Shāng culture, combined with gaps between them of many millennia. However, in the same BBC article, a supporting argument is provided by Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, who collaborated with a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province in the discovery. Dr Harbottle points to the persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shāng period, when a complex writing system appears.[7]

One group of sites of interest is the Dàwènkǒu culture sites (2800–2500 BCE, only one millennium earlier than the early Shāng culture sites, and positioned so as to be plausibly albeit indirectly ancestral to the Shāng). There, a few inscribed pottery and jade pieces have been found,[8] one of which combines pictorial elements (resembling, according to some, a sun, moon or clouds, and fire or a mountain) in a stack which brings to mind the compounding of elements in Chinese characters. Major scholars are divided in their interpretation of such inscribed symbols. Some, such as Yú Xǐngwú,[9] Táng Lán[10] and Lǐ Xuéqín,[11] have identified these with specific Chinese characters. Others such as Wang Ningsheng[12] interpret them as pictorial symbols such as clan insignia, rather than writing. But in the view of Wang Ningsheng, "True writing begins when it represents sounds and consists of symbols that are able to record language. The few isolated figures found on pottery still cannot substantiate this point."[13]

Legendary origins

According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zì—Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of the world.

Oracle bone script

The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the Oracle bone script (甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén, literally "shell-bone-script"). These were identified by scholars in 1899 on pieces of bone and turtle shell being sold as medicine, and by 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiǎotún (小屯) village at Ānyáng in Hénán Province, where official archaeological excavations in 1928–1937 discovered 20,000 oracle bone pieces, about 1/5 of the total discovered. The inscriptions were records of the divinations performed for or by the royal Shāng household. The oracle bone script is a well-developed writing system, attested from the late Shang Dynasty (1200–1050 BC).[14][15][16] Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known oracle bone script logographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and thus deciphered by paleographers.