Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day. When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic, and each character denoted a single word. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used. This article or section should specify the language of its non-English content, using for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. Some characters retained their phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in a historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. In other languages, most significantly in modern Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords or to represent native words independent of the Chinese pronunciation (e.g., kun'yomi in Japanese). Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. A particular character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, which might have different pronunciations. Modern Chinese has many homophones thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by one of many characters, depending on meaning. However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes (written with two characters), bimorphemic syllables (written with two characters) and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase. A character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme. Unlike alphabetic writing systems, in which the unit character roughly corresponds to one phoneme, the Chinese writing system associates each logogram with an entire syllable, and thus may be compared in some aspects to a syllabary. In modern Chinese, most words are compounds written with two or more characters. During the 1970s, Singapore had also briefly enacted its own simplification campaign, but eventually streamlined its simplification to be uniform with mainland China. In Japan, common characters are often written in post-Tōyō kanji simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms. Vietnam once used the chữ Hán and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as hanja, retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents, history, literature and records. In addition, Chinese characters have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as kanji. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Due to separate simplifications of characters in Japan and in China, the kanji used in Japan today has some differences from Chinese simplified characters in several respects. In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school (the Jōyō kanji), and hundreds more are in everyday use. A college graduate who is literate in written Chinese knows between three and four thousand characters, though more are required for specialized fields. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graphic variants, were used historically and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. Hanzi (Chinese character) in traditional (left) and simplified form (right)Ĭhinese characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese.
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