1.
Logogram
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In written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or phrase. Chinese characters and Japanese kanji are logograms, some Egyptian hieroglyphs, the use of logograms in writing is called logography. A writing system that is based on logograms is called a logographic system, in alphabets and syllabaries, individual written characters represent sounds rather than concepts. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not necessarily have meaning by themselves, Writing language in this way is called phonemic orthography. Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems, the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, a more recent attempt is Zlango, intended for use in text messaging, currently including around 300 icons. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the domain is the syllable. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ duck and sȝ son, though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants and this can be illustrated with Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes, some morphemes are composed of more than one character, for example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū with the bug determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately, in Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse, a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king, in modern Mandarin, bimorphemic syllables are always written with two characters, for example 花儿 huār flower. These logograms, called hozwārishn, were dispensed with altogether after the Arab conquest of Persia, logograms are used in modern shorthand to represent common words. In addition, the numerals and mathematical symbols used in systems are logograms—1 one,2 two, + plus, = equals, and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for and and et, % for percent, # for number, § for section, $ for dollar, € for euro, £ for pound, ° for degree, @ for at, etc. All historical logographic systems include a dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component, called determinatives in the case of Egyptian and radicals in the case of Chinese. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters hanzi into six types by etymology. The first two types are single-body, meaning that the character was created independently of other characters, single-body pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms
2.
Korean language
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It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of the Peoples Republic of China. Approximately 80 million people worldwide speak Korean and this implies that Korean is not an isolate, but a member of a small family. There is still debate on whether Korean and Japanese are related with each other, the Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. A relation of Korean with Japonic languages has been proposed by linguists like William George Aston, Chinese characters arrived in Korea together with Buddhism during the pre-Three Kingdoms period. Mainly privileged elites were educated to read and write in hanja, however, today, the hanja are largely unused in everyday life, but in South Korea they experience revivals on artistic works and are important in historic and/or linguistic studies of Korean. Since the Korean War, through 70 years of separation, North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variations in pronunciation, verb inflection, the Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North Korea and South Korea. In South Korea, the Korean language is referred to by names including hanguk-eo Korean language, hanguk-mal, Korean speech and uri-mal. In hanguk-eo and hanguk-mal, the first part of the word, hanguk, refers to the Korean nation while -eo and -mal mean language and speech, Korean is also simply referred to as guk-eo, literally national language. This name is based on the same Chinese characters meaning nation + language that are used in Taiwan and Japan to refer to their respective national languages. In North Korea and China, the language is most often called Chosŏn-mal, or more formally, the English word Korean is derived from Goryeo, which is thought to be the first dynasty known to Western countries. Korean people in the former USSR refer to themselves as Koryo-saram and Goryeo In, the majority of historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. Such factors of typological divergence as Middle Mongolians exhibition of gender agreement can be used to argue that a relationship with Altaic is unlikely. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese–Korean 100-word Swadesh list, a good example might be Middle Korean sàm and Japanese asa, meaning hemp. Also, the doublet wo meaning hemp is attested in Western Old Japanese and it is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term. Among ancient languages, various relatives of Korean have been proposed. Some classify the language of Jeju Island as a distinct modern Koreanic language, Other famous theories are the Dravido-Korean languages theory and the mostly unknown southern-theory which suggest an Austronesian relation. Korean is spoken by the Korean people in North Korea and South Korea and by the Korean diaspora in countries including the Peoples Republic of China, the United States, Japan. Korean-speaking minorities exist in these states, but because of cultural assimilation into host countries, Korean is the official language of South Korea and North Korea
3.
Oracle bone script
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The vast majority were found at the Yinxu site. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BCE or 1200 BCE. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c.1046 BCE, divining with milfoil became more common and it is also the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script. The term oracle bone was first coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing, because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script. As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty and it is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script, because of its mature nature. However, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered, the oracle bone script of the late Shang appears pictographic, as does its contemporary, the Shang writing on bronzes. The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period, additionally, the writing of characters in vertical columns, from top to bottom, is for the most part carried over from the bamboo books to oracle bone inscriptions. The vertical columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally ordered from right to left and this level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. Compare, for instance, the third and fourth graphs in the row below, without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented 豕 shĭ swine and 犬 quǎn dog respectively. By the late Shang oracle bone script, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds, and associative compounds were already common. Although it was a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script was not fully standardized, a graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. These irregularities persisted until the standardization of the script in the Qin dynasty. Of the thousands of characters found from all the fragments so far. One reason for this is that components of certain oracle bone script characters may differ in later script forms, such differences may be accounted for by character simplification and/or by later generations misunderstanding the original graph, which had evolved beyond recognition. Another reason is that some characters exist only in oracle bone script, in such cases, context - when available - may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character. One good example is shown in the fragment below, labeled oracle bone script for Spring, the top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an isosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the oracle bone script character for 王 wáng, the numbers of oracle bones with inscriptions contemporaneous with the end of Shang and the beginning of Zhou is relatively few in number compared with the entire corpus of Shang inscriptions
4.
Seal script
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Seal script is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, arising in the Warring State of Qin, there are two uses of the word seal script, the Large or Great Seal script and the lesser or Small Seal Script, the latter is also called simply seal script. The Large Seal script was originally a later, vague Han dynasty reference to writing of the Qin system similar to and it has also been used to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bones as well. There were several different variants of seal script which developed in each kingdom independently during the warring state period and spring, the birds and worms script was used in the Kingdoms of Wu, Chu, and Yue. It was found on several artifacts including the Spear of Fuchai, on one side of the blade of Goujian, eight characters were written in an ancient script. The script was found to be the one called 鳥蟲文 birds and worms characters, initial analysis of the text deciphered six of the characters, 越王 and 自作用劍. As a southern state, Chu was close to the Wu-Yue influences, Chu produced broad bronze swords that were similar to Wuyue swords, but not as intricate. Chu also used the Birds and Worms style, which was borrowed by the Wu, the script of the Qin system had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance and this was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian and their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish. The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin, not long after, however, the Shuowen Jiezi, the lifework of Xu Shen, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, entries are categorized under 540 section headers. It has been anticipated that the Small Seal script will some day be encoded in Unicode, codepoints U+34000 to U+368FF have been tentatively allocated. Old Texts Phags-pa Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Qin Yun Song, Big Seal Script Banner Script translation Richard Sears on seal script
5.
Clerical script
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Due to its high legibility to modern readers, it is still used for artistic flavor in a variety of functional applications such as headlines, signboards, and advertisements. This legibility stems from the rectilinear structure, a feature shared with modern regular script. Clerical script is popularly but mistakenly thought to have developed or been invented in the early Han dynasty from the seal script. Another traditional account is that it was invented by government scribes, in particular involved in the justice. Furthermore, rather than being established by government scribes, it has argued that clerical script was already in popular use. The popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing became more widespread. The Qín bamboo script is an example of this transition, having evolved from vulgar Qín writing. The etymology of the Chinese name for the script lìshū is uncertain, during Warring States, proto-clerical script emerged in casual, informal usage. During the Qin dynasty it appears to have also used in some scribal capacity. Thus, the evolution from clerical script to standard script was not a step as commonly supposed. Translation of 文字學概論 by Mattos and Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
6.
Regular script
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Regular script, also called 正楷, 真書, 楷體 and 正書, is the newest of the Chinese script styles, hence most common in modern writings and publications. Regular script came into being between the Eastern Hàn and Cáo Wèi dynasties, and its first known master was Zhōng Yáo and he is known as the “father of regular script”, and his famous works include the Xuānshì Biǎo, Jiànjìzhí Biǎo, and Lìmìng Biǎo. Qiu Xigui describes the script in Zhong’s Xuānshì Biǎo as, …clearly emerging from the womb of early period semi-cursive script. However, other than a few literati, very few wrote in this script at the time, most continued writing in neo-clerical script, or a form of semi-cursive. Thus, regular script has parentage in early semi-cursive as well as neo-clerical scripts and those in between are usually called medium regular script, or zhongkai. What these are relative to other characters, the Eight Principles of Yong are said to contain a variety of most of the strokes found in regular script. The most common printed typeface styles Ming and sans-serif are based on the structure of regular script, the Japanese textbook typefaces are based on regular script, but modified so that they appear to be written with a pencil or pen. They also follow the character forms prescribed in the Jōyō kanji. Zhuyin Fuhao characters, although not true Chinese characters, are always written with regular script strokes. Translation of 文字學概論 by Mattos and Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, regular Script tao te king CHAPTER LVII More on Standard Script In English, at BeyondCalligraphy. com
7.
Kanji
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Kanji, or kanji, are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term kanji for the Chinese characters literally means Han characters and is using the same characters as the Chinese word hànzì. Chinese characters first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, the earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Yamato emissary in 57 AD. Chinese coins from the first century AD have been found in Yayoi-period archaeological sites, however, the Japanese of that era probably had no comprehension of the script, and would remain illiterate until the fifth century AD. The earliest Japanese documents were written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. For example, the correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read, during the reign of Empress Suiko, the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court. The Japanese language had no form at the time Chinese characters were introduced. Chinese characters also came to be used to write Japanese words, around 650 CE, a writing system called manyōgana evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Manyōgana written in cursive style evolved into hiragana, or onna-de, that is, ladies hand, major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a path, monastery students simplified manyōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are descended from kanji. Katakana are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, the names of plants and animals, and for emphasis on certain words. In 1946, following World War II and under the Allied Occupation of Japan and this was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged and these are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, these are known as hyōgaiji. The kyōiku kanji are 1,006 characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, originally the list only contained 881 characters. This was expanded to 996 characters in 1977 and it was not until 1982 the list was expanded to its current size
8.
Bopomofo
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Zhuyin fuhao, Zhuyin or Bopomofo is a system of phonetic notation for the transcription of spoken Chinese, particularly the Mandarin dialect. The first two are traditional terms, whereas Bopomofo is the term, also used by the ISO. Consisting of 37 characters and four marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Zhuyin was introduced in China by the Republican Government in the 1910s and used alongside the Wade-Giles system, the Wade system was replaced by Hanyu Pinyin in 1958 by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China, and at the International Organization for Standardization in 1982. The informal name Bopomofo is derived from the first four syllables in the ordering of available syllables in Mandarin Chinese. The four Bopomofo characters that correspond to these syllables are placed first in a list of these characters. The same sequence is used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems. The original formal name of the system was Guóyīn Zìmǔ and Zhùyīn Zìmǔ and it was later renamed Zhùyīn Fúhào, meaning phonetic symbols. In official documents, Zhuyin is occasionally called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I, in English translations, the system is often also called either Chu-yin or the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. A romanized phonetic system was released in 1984 as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Wu Zhihui from 1912 to 1913, created a system called Zhuyin Zimu, which was based on Zhang Binglins shorthand. A draft was released on July 11,1913, by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education and it was later renamed first Guoyin Zimu and then, in April 1930, Zhuyin Fuhao. The last renaming addressed fears that the system might independently replace Chinese characters. Zhuyin remains the predominant phonetic system in teaching reading and writing in school in Taiwan. It is also one of the most popular ways to enter Chinese characters into computers and smartphones, in elementary school, particularly in the lower years, Chinese characters in textbooks are often annotated with Zhuyin as ruby characters as an aid to learning. Additionally, one newspaper in Taiwan, the Mandarin Daily News. In teaching Mandarin, Taiwan institutions and some communities use Zhuyin as a learning tool. The Zhuyin characters were created by Zhang Binglin, and taken mainly from regularised forms of ancient Chinese characters, the modern readings of which contain the sound that each letter represents. It is to be noted that the first consonants are articulated from the front of the mouth to the back, /b/, /p/, /m/, /f/, /d/, /t/, /n/, Zhuyin is written in the same stroke order rule as Chinese characters
9.
Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world
10.
Khitan scripts
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There were two scripts, the large script and the small script. These were functionally independent and appear to have been used simultaneously, the Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the Jurchen people for several decades after the fall of the Liao dynasty until the Jurchens fully switched to a script of their own. Examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, many scholars recognize that the Khitan scripts have not been fully deciphered and that more research and discoveries would be necessary for a proficient understanding of them. The Khitan scripts are part of the Chinese family of scripts, knowledge of the Khitan language, which was written by the Khitan script, is quite limited as well. Although there are clues to its origins, which might point in different directions. Abaoji of the Yelü clan, founder of the Khitan, or Liao Dynasty, “Large script”, or “big characters, as it was referred to in some Chinese sources, was established to keep the record of the new Khitan state. The Khitan script was based on the idea of the Chinese script, the Khitan large script was considered to be relatively simple. The large script characters were equally spaced, in vertical columns. Although large script mostly uses logograms, it is possible that ideograms and syllabograms are used for grammatical functions, the large script has a few similarities to Chinese, with several words taken directly with or without modifications from the Chinese. Most large script characters, however, cannot be related to any Chinese characters. The meaning of most of them remains unknown, but that of a few of them has been established by analyzing dates in Khitan inscriptions, the Memorial for Yelü Yanning is one of the earliest inscriptions in Khitan large script. The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela and he drew his inspiration from “the Uyghur language and script, ” which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was thought to be a daughter script of the Uyghur alphabet. Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, unlike Hanguls jamo, a Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a CV or VC pair as well. Each block could incorporate two to seven such phonetic element characters, written in pairs within the block, with the first half of the pair on the left. If there were an odd number of characters in a block, although there is some speculation, it appears there are no characters that both scripts share. Periodically, epitaphs written using small script will be using the large script method of linearity. Although small script had some similarities to Chinese, Khitan characters were used to record Chinese words
11.
Jurchen script
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Jurchen script was the writing system used to write the Jurchen language, the language of the Jurchen people who created the Jin Empire in northeastern China in the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Chinese, the script has only been decoded to a small extent. The Jurchens were the ancestors of the Manchu people and spoke a related to the Manchu language. The Jurchen script, however, is not ancestral to the Manchu script, according to the Sino-Jurchen glossary, the Jurchen script contains 720 characters. These comprise a mixture of logograms, which represent whole words without any element, and phonograms. Compound words consisting of two or more characters were also used, the Jurchen characters have a system of radicals similar to Chinese characters and are ordered according to radical and stroke count. The Jurchen script is part of the Chinese family of scripts, after the Jurchen rebelled against the Khitan Liao Dynasty and established the new Jin dynasty in 1115, they were using the Khitan script. In 1119 or 1120, Wanyan Xiyin, the chancellor of the early Jin Empire, acting on the orders of the first emperor, Wanyan Aguda, invented the first Jurchen script, known as the large script. The second version, the small script, was promulgated in 1138 by the Xizong Emperor. According to the Jin Shi, in 1145 the small script characters were used officially the first time. There is no information about any original books that were written in Jurchen. The translation program started in 1164, among the translations were Confucian and Taoist classics, histories, unfortunately, not even a single fragment of any of the books survived. Most of the samples of the Jurchen writing available to researchers are epigraphic ones, as well as a few short inscriptions on seals, mirrors, ceramics, graffiti. A total of nine epigraphic inscriptions are known so far and it is apparently an abbreviated translation of the Chinese text on the front of the stele. However, the inscription from Qingyuan in northern Korea is now thought to be older. The only inscription dating from after the end of the Jin dynasty is the one on the stele erected in 1413 by the Ming eunuch admiral Yishiha on the Tyr Cliff, on the lower Amur River. No paper or silk manuscripts in Jurchen were known until 1968, kychanov among the Tangut papers in the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies. It is written on two sheets of paper and dates to 1217, writing in 1990, Herbert Franke describes the Leningrad document as unique and not yet deciphered
12.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
13.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
14.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
15.
Hangul
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The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and as Chosŏngŭl/Chosŏn Muntcha in North Korea is the alphabet that has been used to write the Korean language since the 15th century. It was created during the Joseon Dynasty in 1443 by King Sejong the Great, in South Korea, Hangul is used primarily to write the Korean language as using Hanja in typical Korean writing had fallen out of common usage during the late 1990s. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 19 consonant and 21 vowel letters, however, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as 한 han, each of which transcribes a syllable. That is, although the syllable 한 han may look like a single character, each syllabic block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel. These blocks are arranged horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom. Each Korean word consists of one or more syllables, hence one or more blocks, of the 11,172 possible Hangul syllables, the most frequent 256 have a cumulative frequency of 88. 2%, with the top 512, it reaches 99. 9%. The modern name Hangul was coined by Ju Sigyeong in 1912, han meant great in archaic Korean, and geul is the native Korean word for script. Taken together, then, the meaning is great script, as the word han had also become one way of indicating Korea as a whole the name could also potentially be interpreted as Korean script. Korean 한글 is pronounced, and in English as /ˈhɑːn. ɡʊl/ or /ˈhɑːŋɡʊl/, when used as an English word, it is often rendered without the diacritics, hangul, and it is often capitalized as Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries. Hankul in the Yale romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies, North Koreans call it Chosŏngŭl, after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea. Because of objections to the names Hangeul, Chosŏngŭl, and urigeul by Koreans in China, until the early 20th century, Hangul was denigrated as vulgar by the literate elite, who preferred the traditional hanja writing system. They gave it such names as these, Achimgeul, in the original Hanja, it is rendered as 故智者不終朝而會，愚者可浹旬而學。 Gugmun Eonmun Amgeul. Am is a prefix that signifies a noun is feminine Ahaetgeul or Ahaegeul Hangul was promulgated by Sejong the Great, the Hall of Worthies, a group of scholars who worked with Sejong to develop and refine the new alphabet, is often credited for the work. The project was completed in late December 1443 or January 1444, the publication date of the Hunmin Jeong-eum, October 9, became Hangul Day in South Korea. Its North Korean equivalent, Chosongul Day, is on January 15, various speculations about the creation process were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446 Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics, to assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people. However, it entered popular culture as Sejong had intended, being used especially by women, the late 16th century, however, saw a revival of Hangul, with gasa literature and later sijo flourishing. In the 17th century, Hangul novels became a major genre, by this point spelling had become quite irregular
16.
Chinese characters
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Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, and sometimes also in English, they are called hànzì. They have been adapted to write a number of languages including, Japanese, where they are known as kanji, Korean, where they are known as hanja. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters, in English, they are sometimes called Han characters. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world, Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan,2,136 are taught through secondary school, the characters used in Japan are distinct from those used in China in many respects. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, in South Korea, when Chinese characters are used they are of the traditional variant and are almost identical to those used in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Old Chinese, most words were monosyllabic and there was a correspondence between characters and words. Rather, a character almost always corresponds to a syllable that is also a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes. Modern Chinese has many homophones, thus the same syllable may be represented by many characters. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations and these foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations, and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic, increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day. The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones and it has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables. The most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, words have also been created by adding affixes, reduplication and borrowing from other languages. Polysyllabic words are written with one character per syllable
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Chinese script styles
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In Chinese calligraphy, Chinese characters can be written according to five major styles. These styles are intrinsically linked to the history of Chinese script, the Japanese syllabaries of katakana and hiragana are used in calligraphy, the katakana were derived from the shapes of regular script characters and hiragana from those of cursive script. In Korea, the post-Korean War period saw the use of hangul. The seal script is the script of the Qín system of writing. Today, this style of Chinese writing is used predominantly in seals, most people today cannot read the seal script, so it is considered an ‘ancient’ script, generally not used outside the fields of calligraphy and carved seals. Compared with the seal script, forms are strikingly rectilinear, however, some curvature. Seal script tended towards uniformity of stroke width, but clerical script gave the brush freer rein, most noticeable is the dramatically flared tail of one dominant horizontal or downward-diagonal stroke, especially that to the lower right. This characteristic stroke has famously been called silkworm head and wild goose tail due to its distinctive shape, the clerical script remains common as a typeface used for decorative purposes, but other than in artistic calligraphy, adverts and signage, it is not commonly written. The semi-cursive script approximates normal handwriting in which strokes and, more rarely, in writing in the semi-cursive script, the brush leaves the paper less often than in the regular script. Characters appear less angular and rounder, in general, an educated person in China or Japan can read characters written in the semi-cursive script with relative ease, but may have occasional difficulties with certain idiosyncratic shapes. Entire characters may be written without lifting the brush from the paper at all, strokes are modified or eliminated completely to facilitate smooth writing and to create a beautiful, abstract appearance. Characters are highly rounded and soft in appearance, with a lack of angular lines. The cursive script is the source of Japanese hiragana, as well as many modern simplified forms in Simplified Chinese characters and it emerged from a neatly written, early period semi-cursive form of clerical script. As the name suggests, the script is regular, with each of the strokes placed slowly and carefully. The regular script is also the most easily and widely recognized style, as it is the script to which children in East Asian countries and beginners of East Asian languages are first introduced. In the regular script samples to the right, the characters in the column are in Traditional Chinese while those to the right are in Simplified Chinese. These styles are not taught in Japanese calligraphy schools. Chinese and Korean people can read edomoji, but the style has a distinct Japanese feel to it and it is therefore commonly used in China and Korea to advertise Japanese restaurants
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Neolithic signs in China
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However, only isolated instances of these symbols have been found, and they show no indication of representing speech or of the non-pictorial processes that a writing system requires. These sites include those pertaining to the cultures of Yangshao, Liangzhu, Majiayao, proponents of the view that they are early Chinese writing tend to see evidence in comparisons of individual signs with individual oracle bone script characters. Others believe that Neolithic signs are part of an incipient semiotic system that led to the development of mature Chinese writing. As Qiu explains, Only when symbols. are consciously used to record words used to form sentences is there a true sign that the development of script has begun. It is still safe to conclude that the earliest known undisputed examples of writing in China are the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty. The earliest of Chinas Neolithic signs come from Jiahu, Dadiwan, Jiahu is a Neolithic site in Wuyang County, Henan Province, in the basin of the Yellow River, dated to 6600–6200 BCE. This site has yielded turtle plastrons that were pitted and inscribed with markings known as the Jiahu symbols, what did persist through these long periods was the idea of sign use. We should not assume there was a single path or pace for the development of a script. It seems astonishing that they would be connected, We cant call it writing until we have more evidence, Dadiwan is a Neolithic site discovered in Qinan County, in the province of Gansu. Its earliest phase has yielded symbols painted on the surfaces of pottery basins. More recent excavations there have also uncovered a handful of Neolithic symbols and these are reputed to be similar to some of the oracle bone characters, which is to be expected given that the oracle bones, which are true writing, still retain a significant pictorial flavor. As the Banpo symbols were discovered early and are relatively numerous. Still others feel they may be ownership mark or potters marks, finally, some scholars sound a note of caution, calling such conclusions unwarranted or premature. This is because all the Banpo-type symbols occur singly, on pottery and pottery fragments, unlike written words, thus, there is no context from which to conclude that the symbols are actually being used to represent language. Furthermore, there is no evidence of the phonetic loan usage, thus, leading scholar Qiu Xigui argues that, What these symbols represent definitely cannot be a fully formed system of writing, this much is quite clear. Is there any possibility that they are primitive writing and we simply possess no basis for saying that they were already being used to record language. Nor viewed from the standpoint of the symbols of this type that continued to be used following the creation of Chinese script do they even resemble script. Quite a number of people, basing themselves on the Banpo-type symbols, have said that the history of Chinese writing goes back more than 6,000 years
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Chinese bronze inscriptions
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Early bronze inscriptions were almost always cast, while later inscriptions were often engraved after the bronze was cast. The bronze inscriptions are one of the earliest scripts in the Chinese family of scripts, for the early Western Zhou to early Warring States period, the bulk of writing which has been unearthed has been in the form of bronze inscriptions. As a result, it is common to refer to the variety of scripts of this period as bronze script, the term usually includes bronze inscriptions of the preceding Shang dynasty as well. In addition, artistic scripts also emerged in the late Spring and Autumn to early Warring States, such as Bird Script, also called Bird Seal Script, and Worm Script. 寅 Yín in Four Different Scripts on Shang–Zhou bronzes Of the abundant Chinese ritual bronze artifacts extant today and these have been periodically unearthed ever since their creation, and have been systematically collected and studied since at least the Song dynasty. Examples, Of the 12,000 inscribed bronzes extant today, roughly 3,000 date from the Shang dynasty,6,000 from the Zhou dynasty, and the final 3,000 from the Qin and Han dynasties. As in the oracle bone script, characters could be written facing left or right, turned 90 degrees, for instance, and both represent the modern character xū 戌, while and are both hóu 侯 marquis. This was true of normal as well as extra complex identificational graphs, such as the hǔ 虎 tiger clan emblem at right and these inscriptions are almost all cast, and are relatively short and simple. Western Zhou dynasty characters basically continue from the Shang writing system, although most are not pictographs in function, the early Western Zhou bronze inscriptions have been described as more pictographic in flavor than those of subsequent periods. During the Western Zhou, many begin to show signs of simplification and linearization, with the result being a decrease in pictographic quality. Some flexibility in orientation of graphs continues in the Western Zhou, the graphs start to become slightly more uniform in structure, size and arrangement by the time of the third Zhou sovereign, King Kāng, and after the ninth, King Yì, this trend becomes more obvious. Some have used the term large seal to refer to the script of this period. This term dates back to the Han dynasty, when seal script, in the Eastern Zhou, the various states initially continued using the same forms as in the late Western Zhou. However, regional forms then began to diverge stylistically as early as the Spring and Autumn period, in the same areas, in the late Spring and Autumn to early Warring States, scripts which embellished basic structures with decorative forms such as birds or worms also appeared. Some bronzes of the period were incised in a rough, casual manner and it is thought that these reflected the popular writing of the time which coexisted with the formal script. Seals have been found from the Warring States period, mostly cast in bronze and these form an additional, valuable resource for the study of Chinese bronze inscriptions. It is also from this period that the first surviving bamboo, in the early Warring States period, typical bronze inscriptions were similar in content and length to those in the late Western Zhou to Spring and Autumn period. One of the most famous sets of bronzes ever discovered dates to the early Warring States, the total length of the inscriptions on this set was almost 2,800 characters
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Bird-worm seal script
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Bird-worm seal script is a type of ancient seal script originated in China. The Chinese character 鸟 means bird, the Chinese character 虫 means any creature that looks like a worm, including invertebrate worms and reptiles such as snakes and lizards. The character 篆 means seal script, other names for this kind of seal script, Niao-Chong Script. The Chinese character 书 here means script, the Chinese character 文 here means character. There are two subcategories, Bird seal script In this style, some parts of characters have a bird-like head, the bird style sign is a combination of two parts, a complete seal script character and one bird shape. Worm seal script In this style, some or all the strokes are winding, thus producing a worm-like character and this kind of seal script first appeared in the middle era of the Spring and Autumn period. It then became popular during the late Spring and Autumn period and it was often seen in southern kingdoms, such as the Wu Kingdom, Yue Kingdom, Chu Kingdom, Cai Kingdom, Xu Kingdom, and the Song Kingdom. Each state in China during the Warring States Period had its own variety of script, the bird seal script is often seen on bronze and iron antiques of the Yue Kingdom. The script was used on bronze and iron weapons, like swords, the characters engraved on the famous Sword of Goujian provide a fine example. A few examples of the seal script can be seen in or on containers. The bird seal script was used occasionally in the Han Dynasty seals, as well as a few eaves tiles. The worm seal script is more common, and probably originated from the Wu Kingdom or Chu Kingdom, examples can be seen on antique bronze weapons, containers, jades, and seals, and constructional or decorative parts like tiles, etc. The characters on the famous Spear of Fuchai would be an example of this category of seal script. Bronze inscriptions Seal script Large Seal Script Small Seal Script Seal Shuowen Jiezi, by Xu Shen. 《鸟虫书通考》, by CAO Jinyan, 《鸟虫篆大鉴》, by Xu Gupu, ISBN 7-80569-368-4, Shanghai Bookstore Press
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Large seal script
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The term is in contrast to the name of the official script of the Qin dynasty, which is often called Small or Lesser Seal Script. However, due to the lack of precision in the term, scholars often avoid it and instead refer more specifically to the provenance of particular examples of writing. At that time, there was knowledge of even older, often more complex graphs which differed from the Qin seal script forms. As a result, two terms emerged to describe them, greater seal script for the complex, earlier forms. It is only recently that the term greater seal script has been extended to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bone script. Xu Shen, the author of Shuowen, included these when they differed from the structures of the Qin seal script and this name comes from the name of the book and not the name of a script. Thus, it is not correct to refer to the ca.800 BCE Zhoū dynasty script as Zhòuwén, similarly, the Zhòu graphs are merely examples of large seal script when that term is used in a broad sense. Seal Script Small Seal Script Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Translation of 文字學概要 by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
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Small seal script
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Small Seal Script, formerly romanized as Hsiao-chuan and also known as Seal Script, Lesser Seal Script and Qin Script, is an archaic form of Chinese calligraphy. It was standardized and promulgated as a standard by Li Si, prime minister under Shi Huangdi. Hence coaches, roads, currency, laws, weights, measures, characters which were different from those found in Qin were discarded and Li Sis small seal characters became the standard for all regions within the empire. This policy came in about 220 BC, the year after Qins unification of the Chinese states, the small cursive form clerical script came after the small script. Li Sis compilation is only through Chinese commentaries through the centuries. It is stated to contain 3,300 characters, small Seal Script has been proposed for inclusion in Unicode
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Cursive script (East Asia)
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Cursive script, often mistranslated as grass script, is a style of Chinese calligraphy. Cursive script is faster to write than other styles, but difficult to read for those unfamiliar with it and it functions primarily as a kind of shorthand script or calligraphic style. People who can read standard or printed forms of Chinese may not be able to comprehend this script, the character 書 means script in this context, and the character 草 means quick, rough or sloppy. Thus, the name of this script is literally rough script or sloppy script, the same character 草 appears in this sense in the noun rough draft, and the verb to draft. The other indirectly related meaning of the character 草 is grass, cursive script originated in China during the Han dynasty through the Jin period, in two phases. First, a form of cursive developed as a cursory way to write the popular. Faster ways to write characters developed through four mechanisms, omitting part of a graph, merging strokes together, replacing portions with abbreviated forms, or modifying stroke styles. This evolution can best be seen on extant bamboo and wooden slats from the period, on which the use of early cursive, modern cursive evolved from this older cursive in the Wei Kingdom to Jin dynasty with influence from the semi-cursive and standard styles. Beside zhāngcǎo and the cursive, there is the wild cursive which is even more cursive. When it was developed by Zhang Xu and Huaisu in the Tang dynasty, cursive, in this style, is no longer significant in legibility but rather in artistry. Cursive scripts can be divided into the style where each character is separate. Many of the simplified Chinese characters are modeled on the forms of the cursive forms of the corresponding characters. Cursive script forms of Chinese characters are also the origin of the Japanese hiragana script, which developed from cursive forms of the manyōgana script. In Japan, cursive script was considered to be suitable for women, and was called women’s script, whereas the clerical style was considered to be suitable for men, the Art of Japanese Calligraphy,1973, author Yujiro Nakata, publisher Weatherhill/Heibonsha, ISBN 0-8348-1013-1. Translation of 文字學概要 by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
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Imitation Song
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Imitation Song is a style of Chinese typefaces modeled after a type style in Linan in the Southern Song Dynasty. They are technically a type of regular script typeface, the name of this kind of typeface varies across regions that use Chinese characters. In Chinese, it is called fǎng Sòngtǐ, in Japanese, it is called Sōchōtai. Characteristics of imitation Song typefaces include, The basic structure of regular script, relatively straight strokes, with horizontal strokes slanting up slightly. Low stroke width variation between horizontal and vertical strokes, with strokes usually being relatively thin, many publishers were established in Linan, including Chén zhái shūjí bù established by Chen Qi, from which publications used a distinct style of regular script with orderly, straight strokes. Modern typefaces of this style are classified as imitation Song typefaces
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Ming (typefaces)
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Ming or Song is a category of typefaces used to display Chinese characters, which are used in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. They are currently the most common style of type in print for Chinese and Japanese, in Mainland China, the most common name is Song. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, Ming is prevalent, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, “Song typeface” has been used but “Ming typeface” has increased currency since the advent of desktop publishing. These are a print analog of the slight dot caused by pausing ones brush, the technique, used to reinforce the beginning or ending of a stroke). Often there are different ways to write the same Chinese character, some of the differences are caused by character simplification, while others are purely orthographic differences such as stroke styling. The styling of the used in old Ming typefaces came from the style used in the Kangxi Dictionary. In mainland China, the standardized character forms are specified in the List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese. Some characters in the list differ from the Kangxi forms solely because they are Simplified, others differ because they use a different variant or orthography. In Taiwan, the Standard Form of National Characters specifies the modern standardized forms, unlike the mainland standard, the Taiwan standard uses mostly preexisting character forms. In Korea, most typefaces use the Kangxi forms, there are differences between print and script forms of many Chinese characters, just as there are differences between copperplate and most peoples handwriting. Some of these differences are persistent and specific to a style, none of these variations usually hinder reading. Many publishers were established in Linan, including Chén zhái shūjí pù established by Chen Qi, from which publications used a style of regular script with orderly. Modern typefaces of this style are classified as imitation Song typefaces, in the Ming Dynasty, the straightening of strokes in a reprint of a publication from Linan started a shift to what became the basis of the Ming style. Ming typefaces are the most commonly used style in print in Japan, there are several variations in use, such as the textbook style and the newspaper style. In Korean, a category of typefaces for the Korean alphabet hangul was called myeongjo until recently. A Ministry of Culture-sponsored standardization of typography terms in 1993 replaced myeongjo with batang, the Korean word for “foundation” or “ground”, technically, only Chinese characters can be printed in a Ming typeface. However, most modern typefaces often also include kana glyphs in a matching style, Modern Ming typefaces also incorporate Roman type glyphs for Latin characters, letterlike symbols, and numbers. In its modern role comparable to that of western serif typefaces, east Asian gothic typeface Chinese calligraphy www. kinkido. net – some information on Chinese typefaces, including Ming typefaces
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East Asian gothic typeface
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Gothic typefaces are a type style characterised by strokes of even thickness and lack of decorations akin to sans serif styles in Western typography. It is the second most commonly used style in East Asian typography, similar to Ming and Song typefaces, sans-serif typefaces were designed for printing, but they were also designed for legibility. They are commonly used in headlines, signs, and video applications, square sans, the classic sans-serif style in which the lines of the characters have squared ends. Overlapping square sans - This style is similar to the square sans, but in places where strokes overlap, square new book - Uses narrow horizontal and thick vertical strokes, similar to typefaces such as Optima. Round sans, has rounded ends and corners to the lines of the characters, in some cases, short protruding stroke ends at intersections are eliminated to make glyphs look rounder. This is the style of typeface used for Japanese road signs, overlapping round sans - This is similar to the round sans, but in places where strokes overlap, a margin is inserted between the strokes to distinguish the strokes. Rounded new book - Uses narrow horizontal and thick strokes, along with rounded line ends. Mixed art - Curved strokes are replaced by angled strokes with sharp or round corners, in Japanese computing, the use of sans-serif typefaces is common, with a number of default system fonts being sans-serif. Also, many Korean computing environments use Gulim which includes soft curves but is a sans-serif typeface, in Chinese versions of Microsoft Windows XP and older, the default interface typefaces are seriffed, which is inconsistent with the sans-serif styling use in most other regions of the product. Ming Nihongo resources, Japanese typefaces sci. lang. japan FAQ list of Japanese writing styles Sorting It All Out, The big font list in Windows Sorting It All Out, What are the fonts in Vista
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Stroke (CJKV character)
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CJKV strokes are the calligraphic strokes needed to write the Chinese characters in regular script used in East Asia. CJK strokes are the set of line patterns that may be arranged and combined to form Chinese characters in use in China, Japan, Korea. For example, is classified as a basic stroke because it is a stroke that forms a line moving in one direction. Is classified as a compound stroke because it is a stroke that forms a line that includes one or more abrupt changes in direction. This example is a sequence of three basic strokes written without lifting the instrument from the writing surface. CJK strokes are an attempt to identify and classify all single-stroke components that can be used to write Han radicals, there are some thirty distinct types of strokes recognized in Chinese characters, some of which are compound strokes made from basic strokes. The compound strokes comprise more than one movement of the writing instrument, a basic stroke is a single calligraphic mark moving in one direction across a writing surface. The following table lists a selection of basic strokes divided into two groups, simple and combining. Simple strokes can be written alone, combining strokes never occur alone, but must be paired with at least one other stroke forming a compound stroke. Thus, they are not in themselves individual strokes, note, the basic stroke Diǎn Dot is rarely a real dot. Instead it usually takes the shape of a small line pointing in one of several directions. A compound stroke is produced two or more basic strokes are combined in a single stroke written without lifting the writing instrument from the writing surface. The character 永 eternity described in detail below demonstrates one of these compound strokes. The centre line is a stroke that combines three stroke shapes in a single stroke. Basics for making compound strokes In most cases, concatenating basic strokes together form a compound stroke, for example, Shù combined with Gōu produce. A stroke naming convention sums the names of the basic strokes, an exception to this applies when a stroke makes a turn of 90°. For example, an initial Shù followed by an abrupt turn right produces, in the same way, an initial Shù followed by an abrupt turn right followed by a second turn down produces. Nearly all complex strokes can be named using this simple scheme, organization systems used to describe and differentiate strokes may include the use of roman letters, Chinese characters, numbers, or a combination of these devices
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Stroke order
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Stroke order refers to the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character are written. A stroke is a movement of an instrument on a writing surface. Chinese characters are used in forms in Chinese, Japanese, Korean. They are known as Hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Chinese characters are basically logograms constructed with strokes. Over the millennia a set of agreed rules have been developed by custom. This promotes writing speed, accuracy, and readability and this idea is particularly important since as learners progress, characters often get more complex. Since stroke order also aids learning and memorization, students are taught about it from a very early age in schools. The Eight Principles of Yong uses the single character 永, meaning eternity, in ancient China, the Jiǎgǔwén characters carved on ox scapula and tortoise plastrons showed no indication of stroke order. The characters show huge variations from piece to piece, sometimes even within one piece, during the divination ceremony, after the cracks were made, the characters were written with a brush on the shell or bone. In early Imperial China, the script was the Xiaozhuan style. About 220 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first to all of China, imposed Li Sis character uniformisation. Its graphs on old steles — some dating from 200 BC — reveal indications of the order of the time. However, stroke order could not yet be ascertained from the steles. The true starting point of order is the Lìshū style which is more regularized. Kǎishū style — still in use today — is more regularized, the stroke order 1000 years ago was similar to that toward the end of Imperial China. For example, the order of 广 is clear in the Kangxi dictionary of 1716, but in a modern book. The Kangxi and current shapes have tiny differences, while current stroke order is still the same, however, the stroke orders implied by the Kangxi dictionary are not necessarily similar to nowadays norm. Cursive styles such as Xíngshū and Cǎoshū show stroke order more clearly than Regular Script, the modern governments of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan have standardized official stroke orders to be taught in schools
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Radical (Chinese characters)
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A Chinese radical is a graphical component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. This component is often an indicator, though in some cases the original semantic connection has become obscure. In other cases, the radical may be a component or even an artificially extracted portion of the character. The English term radical is based on an analogy between the structure of characters and inflection of words in European languages, radicals are also sometimes called classifiers, but this name is more commonly applied to grammatical classifiers. In the earliest Chinese dictionaries, such as the Erya, characters were grouped together in broad semantic categories, in the 2nd century AD, the Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen organized his etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi by selecting 540 recurring graphic elements he called bù. Most were common semantic components, but they also included shared graphic elements such as a dot or horizontal stroke, some were even artificially extracted groups of strokes, termed glyphs by Serruys, which never had an independent existence other than being listed in Shuowen. Each character was listed only one element, which is then referred to as the radical for that character. For example, characters containing 女 nǚ female or 木 mù tree, Mei Yingzuos 1615 dictionary Zihui made two further innovations. These innovations were adopted by the more famous Kangxi Dictionary of 1716. Thus the standard 214 radicals introduced in the Zihui are usually known as the Kangxi radicals and these were first called bùshǒu in the Kangxi Dictionary. Some of the similar radicals are combined in many dictionaries, such as 月 yuè moon. Radicals may appear in any position in a character, for example, the radical 女 appears on the left side in the characters 姐, 媽, 她, 好 and 姓, but it appears at the bottom in 妾. However, there are two radicals that have the shape 阝, but are indexed as different radicals depending on where they appear in the character and these are only loose rules, though, and have exceptions. Many character components are distorted or change in form in order to fit into a block with other components and they may be narrowed, shortened, or may have different shapes entirely. Changes in shape, rather than simple distortion, may result in a reduction in the number of used to write a component. In some cases, these forms may have several variants. The actual shape of the component when it is used in a character can depend on its placement with respect to the elements in the character. Usually, the radical is also the component, but that is not always the case
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Chinese character classification
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All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs and a number which are ideographic in origin, including compound ideographs, the other categories in the traditional system of classification are rebus or phonetic loan characters and derivative cognates. Modern scholars have proposed various revised systems, rejecting some of the traditional categories, traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories. This classification is known from Xu Shens second century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, the phrase first appeared in the Rites of Zhou, though it may not have originally referred to methods of creating characters. When Liu Xin edited the Rites, he glossed the term with a list of six types without examples. Slightly different lists of six types are given in the Book of Han of the first century CE, Xu Shen illustrated each of Lius six types with a pair of characters in the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi. The traditional classification is still taught but is no longer the focus of modern lexicographic practice, some categories are not clearly defined, nor are they mutually exclusive, the first four refer to structural composition, while the last two refer to usage. For this reason, some scholars view them as six principles of character formation rather than six types of characters. The earliest significant, extant corpus of Chinese characters is found on turtle shells and the bones of livestock, chiefly the scapula of oxen, for use in pyromancy and these ancient characters are called oracle bone script. Roughly a quarter of these characters are pictograms while the rest are either phono-semantic compounds or compound ideograms, despite millennia of change in shape, usage and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to the modern reader of Chinese. At present, more than 90% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, however, as both the meanings and pronunciations of the characters have changed over time, these components are no longer reliable guides to either meaning or pronunciation. The failure to recognize the historical and etymological role of these components leads to misclassification. A study of the earliest sources is necessary for an understanding of the true composition. Reconstructing Middle and Old Chinese phonology from the present in characters is part of Chinese historical linguistics. In Chinese, it is called Yinyunxue, roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms — stylised drawings of the objects they represent. These are generally among the oldest characters, a few, indicated below with their earliest forms, date back to oracle bones from the twelfth century BCE. The table below summarises the evolution of a few Chinese pictographic characters, where no modern simplified form is provided, it is identical to the traditional character. Ideograms express an idea through an iconic form, including iconic modification of pictographic characters
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Variant Chinese character
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Variant Chinese characters are Chinese characters that are homophones and synonyms. Almost all variants are allographs in most circumstances, such as casual handwriting, some contexts require the usage of certain variants, such as in textbook editing. Variant Chinese characters exist within and across all regions where Chinese characters are used, whether Chinese-speaking, Japanese-speaking, some of the governments of these regions have made efforts to standardize the use of variants, by establishing certain variants as standard. The choice of which variants to use has resulted in some divergence in the forms of Chinese characters used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, other variants are known as vulgar characters. Unicode deals with variant characters in a manner, as a result of the process of Han unification. Other variants that are more divergent are encoded in different code points, the following are some examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with different code points and language tags. The following are examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with the same code points. For a set of variants to be allographs, someone who could read one should be able to read the others, an example is 搜 and 蒐, where someone who is able to read 搜 might not be able to read 蒐. Another example is 㠯, which is a variant of 以, ryakuji Han unification Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants
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Kangxi Dictionary form
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Variant Chinese characters are Chinese characters that are homophones and synonyms. Almost all variants are allographs in most circumstances, such as casual handwriting, some contexts require the usage of certain variants, such as in textbook editing. Variant Chinese characters exist within and across all regions where Chinese characters are used, whether Chinese-speaking, Japanese-speaking, some of the governments of these regions have made efforts to standardize the use of variants, by establishing certain variants as standard. The choice of which variants to use has resulted in some divergence in the forms of Chinese characters used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, other variants are known as vulgar characters. Unicode deals with variant characters in a manner, as a result of the process of Han unification. Other variants that are more divergent are encoded in different code points, the following are some examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with different code points and language tags. The following are examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with the same code points. For a set of variants to be allographs, someone who could read one should be able to read the others, an example is 搜 and 蒐, where someone who is able to read 搜 might not be able to read 蒐. Another example is 㠯, which is a variant of 以, ryakuji Han unification Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants
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Xin Zixing
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The xin zixing is a standardized form of Chinese characters set in mainland China. Note, Viewing this section correctly requires certain standard typefaces to be installed, the xin zixing has adopted various vulgar variants of its characters. For example, 群 The orthodox form of character has 君 above 羊, i. e. 羣. 峰 The orthodox form of character has 山 above 夆, i. e. 峯. 令 The orthodox form of character has 亼 above 卩, i. e. 令. 青 幾 The orthodox form of character is 幾. 卬 The orthodox form of character is 卭. 印 The orthodox form of character is 印. 熙 The orthodox form of character is 煕. List of character forms of General Used Chinese characters for Publishing is the first version of xin zixing, List of General Used Characters in Modern Chinese defines the amount of Chinese characters that should be used and the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. The second version of xin zixing is defined in the appendix of Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao, List of Generally Used Standardized Chinese characters defines the amount of Chinese characters that should be used and the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. The third version of xin zixing is defined in the appendix of List of Generally Used Standardized Chinese characters
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Table of General Standard Chinese Characters
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The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters is a standard list of 8,105 Chinese characters. Of these,6,500 are designated as common, a reduction from the 7,000 in the earlier List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese, ministry of Education of the Peoples Republic of China. Central Peoples Government of the Peoples Republic of China, the New Table of General Standard Chinese Characters Issued. School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, Table of General Standard Chinese Characters mapped with code points
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Standard Form of National Characters
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The Standard Form of National Characters or the Standard Typefaces for Chinese Characters is the standardized form of Chinese characters set by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China. Note, Viewing this section correctly requires certain standard typefaces to be installed, the Standard Form of National Characters tends to adopt orthodox variants for most of its characters, but it still adopts many common vulgar variants. For example, 群 The orthodox form of character has 君 above 羊, i. e. 羣. 峰 The orthodox form of character has 山 above 夆, i. e. 峯. 裡 The orthodox form of character has 里 inside 衣, i. e. 裏. Other vulgar variants which are common in handwriting have been adopted. For example, 為 The orthodox form of character is 爲 with the second. 令 The orthodox form of character has 亼 above 卩, i. e. 令. Some forms which were standardized have never used or are extremely rare. For example, 寺 Before this standard was created, the horizontal stroke was almost always the longest. 有青能 Whenever there is a radical resembling ⺼ or 月 under other components, most standards write the first stroke as a vertical stroke, some components are differentiated where most other standards do not differentiate. For example, 朠脈 The radical on the left in 朠 is 月 and they are differentiated in that 月 has two horizontal strokes where ⺼ has two dots resembling 冫. 草夢 The radical at the top of 草 is 艹, while the radical at the top of 夢 is 卝 and they are differentiated in that the horizontal strokes of 卝 do not pass through the vertical strokes. 次冰 The radical on the left in 次 is 二, while the radical on the left in 冰 is 冫. 冬致瓊 The radical on the top in 冬 is 夂, the radical on the right in 致 is 夊, and the radical on the bottom right of 瓊 is 攵. This standard tends to follow a rule of writing regular script where there should be no more than one of ㇏, long horizontal stroke, 樂業央 The first horizontal stroke in these characters are long horizontal strokes. Therefore, the last stroke cannot be ㇏, other standards use ㇏ as the last stroke, e. g. Mainland China and Japan. 七 This character has a horizontal stroke, so it cannot have a hook to the right
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Grapheme
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In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Greek γράφω, meaning write, the study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is an one and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the corresponding to the abstract concept of the Arabic numeral one has two distinct glyphs in the fonts Times New Roman and Helvetica. Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩ and this is analogous to the slash notation used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for phonetic transcriptions. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all semantically equivalent, for example, in written English, there are many different physical representations of the lowercase letter a, such as a, ɑ, etc. But because the substitution of any of these for any other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, italic and bold face are also allographic. There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower-case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes, some linguists consider digraphs like the ⟨sh⟩ in ship to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Ligatures, however, such as ⟨æ⟩, are distinct graphemes, as are letters with distinctive diacritics. For a full discussion of the different types, see Writing system § Functional classification, there are additional graphemic components used in writing, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, word dividers such as the space, and other typographic symbols. As mentioned in the section, in languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In practice, however, the orthographies of such languages entail at least an amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph, as the digraph sh represents a sound in English. Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, for more examples, see Alphabetical order § Language-specific conventions. Conversion of scripts Character Grapheme–color synesthesia Grapheme–color ideasthesia Sign
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Simplified Chinese characters
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Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
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Chinese Character Simplification Scheme
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The Chinese Character Simplification Scheme is the standardised simplification of Chinese characters promulgated in the 1950s by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China. It contains the existing Simplified Chinese characters that is in use today, to distinguish from the later Second round of simplified Chinese characters, this reform is also known as the First Chinese Character Simplification Scheme. The modified draft was reviewed by the State Councils Committee for the Application of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, the 23rd State Council Plenary Meeting passed the Resolution Regarding the Promulgation of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme on 28 January 1956. On 31 January 1956, the Peoples Daily published in full about the Resolution Regarding the Promulgation of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, the first list of the scheme was used nationwide on 1 February 1956, and the rest was put into use in batches later. On 21 November 1955, more than two earlier, the Ministry of Education issued a Notice Regarding the Implementation of Simplified Chinese Character in All Schools. The Peoples Liberation Army General Political Department made similar notices in the same month, significant changes were subsequently made to this scheme, in particular the introduction of the principle of simplification by analogy. In May 1964, the Language Reform Committee published the List of Simplified Chinese Characters to address the defects found in the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme and it is divided into three parts. There are a total of 2,238 characters, the Language Reform Committee of China proposed the Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme on 20 December 1977, rescinded in 1986. The Chinese Character Simplification Scheme is divided into three parts, the first part consists of 230 simplified characters, the second part consists of 285 simplified characters, the third part consists of 54 simplified radicals. The simplification of Chinese characters met strong resistance from the public, the prominent scholar Chen Mengjia was one of the outspoken critics of the scheme. When the Anti-Rightist Movement began in 1957, Chen was labeled a Rightist, in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Chen was again severely persecuted for his ideas and committed suicide. Simplified Chinese characters Second round of simplified Chinese characters
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Second round of simplified Chinese characters
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It was intended to replace the existing simplified Chinese characters that were already in use. The complete proposal contained a list of 248 characters that were to be simplified, of these,21 from the first list and 40 from the second served as components of other characters, amplifying the impact on written Chinese. Following widespread confusion and opposition, the round of simplification was officially rescinded on 24 June 1986 by the State Council. Since then, the PRC has used the simplified characters as its official script. Rather than ruling out further simplification, however, the retraction declared that further reform of the Chinese characters should be done with caution, today, some second-round simplified characters, while considered nonstandard, continue to survive in informal usage. The issue of whether and how simplification should proceed remains a matter of debate, the traditional relationship between written Chinese and vernacular Chinese has been compared to that of Latin with the Romance languages in the Renaissance era. Continuing the work of reformers, in 1956 the Peoples Republic of China promulgated the Scheme of Simplified Chinese Characters. The plan was adjusted slightly in the years, eventually stabilizing in 1964 with a definitive list of character simplifications. These are the simplified Chinese characters that are used today in Mainland China, taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau did not adopt the simplifications, and the characters used in those places are known as traditional Chinese characters. Also released in 1964 was a directive for further simplification in order to improve literacy and this was to take place gradually, with consideration for both ease of production and ease of recognition. In 1975, a round of simplifications, the Second Scheme, was submitted by the Script Reform Committee of China to the State Council for approval. Like the First Scheme, it contained two lists, one for use and another for evaluation and discussion. Of these,21 from the first list and 40 from the second served as components of other characters. On 20 December 1977, major such as the Peoples Daily. Both newspapers began to use the characters from the first list on the following day, second-round simplifications were taught inconsistently in the education system, and people used characters at various stages of official or unofficial simplification. The Second Scheme was officially retracted by the State Council on 24 June 1986, the State Councils retraction also emphasized that Chinese character reform should henceforth proceed with caution, and that the forms of Chinese characters should be kept stable. Later that year, a version of the 1964 list was published with minor changes. The second round of simplification continued to use the used in the first round
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Japanese script reform
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The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the kokugo kokuji mondai, the reforms led to the development of the modern Japanese written language, and explain the arguments for official policies used to determine the usage and teaching of kanji rarely used in Japan. Japanese script has undergone reforms dating at least to 1900, in the 1900 spelling reforms, hentaigana were eliminated, though historical kana orthography was retained. A separate character for ん was also prescribed, previously it had written as む and ん was a hentaigana for both these sounds. A proposal to eliminate certain kanji from use was implemented in a number of regions and overseas territories in the 1920s and this group of characters formed the basis for the tōyō kanji list, which eventually developed into the modern jōyō kanji list. In December,1923, the committee approved a set of reforms for kana usage, the reforms made after the Second World War have had a particularly significant impact on accepted kanji usage in the modern Japanese language. The report pointed out the difficulties concerning kanji use, and advocated the use of rōmaji, as a result, the gradual abolition of kanji became official policy for the SCAP, and the tōyō kanji list and modern kana usage proposals were drawn up in accordance with this policy. The tōyō kanji list, containing 1850 characters, was published by the cabinet on 16 November 1946 with the intention of abolishing the use of kanji in the future. The list reduced the number of kanji deemed appropriate for daily use, in Japan, changes were only made to complex characters that needed to be abbreviated. Another separate attempt was made to limit the number of kanji readings, for instance, the character 魚 had its readings limited to gyo and uo when the most common reading, sakana, was not officially recognized by the list. These shortcomings were acknowledged in the revised list of tōyō kanji and this use of alternative, common kanji in place of rarer ones was called kakikae. Different spellings for words were unified using characters from the tōyō kanji list, the list below shows some examples, with the non-tōyō kanji placed in brackets. 骨格 kokkaku 奇形 kikei Other words that used kanji that were not included in the list were given phonetic substitutes, the Japanese media has increasingly used non-approved kanji with furigana to aid the reader in place of mazegaki. On 16 February 1948,881 of the kanji were designated to be taught during primary education. In the same year, Article 50 of the family register law made it illegal to name a child using characters not on the official list. When this law first came into effect, the Ministry of Justice declared that all newborn babies must be registered in the koseki with a name used only hiragana, katakana or tōyō kanji. However, in 1951, an additional 92 characters were approved by the government as jinmeiyō kanji, kanji acceptable for use in names and this list was modified in 1997 to increase to a total of 285 characters. At the time, eight characters from the original jinmeiyō kanji list were added to the jōyō kanji list,578 characters were initially added, though some characters unsuitable for names such as 怨, 痔 and 屍 were removed as a result of public feedback
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Shinjitai
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Shinjitai are the forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in simplified Chinese, shinjitai were created by reducing the number of strokes in kyūjitai, unsimplified kanji equivalent to Traditional Chinese characters, also called seiji. There have been a few stages of simplifications made since the 1950s, the following forms were established as a result of the postwar character reforms. However, they were not completely created anew, as many were based on widely used handwritten abbreviations from the prewar era, due to the complexity of kanji, many abbreviations were used in handwriting, whose status rose to become official characters in the postwar reforms. Attention was paid to the balance of the characters in their new form. In almost all cases, characters in the new standard have fewer strokes than old forms, though in a few cases they have the same number, the most radical simplification was 廳→庁, removing 20 strokes. For example, the character 擧 was simplified as 挙, but the character 欅 which also contained 擧, simplified forms of hyōgaiji do exist, and are referred to as extended shinjitai. However, they are unofficial, a position reiterated in the National Language Council’s 2000 report on Characters Not Listed in the Jōyō Kanji Table, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper is thorough in its simplification of hyōgaiji, and its in-house simplifications are called Asahi characters. For example, 痙攣 is simplified following the model of 經→経 and this is also said to have been done because in the age of typewriter-based printing, more complicated kanji could not be clearly printed. Cursive script and semi-cursive script forms of kanji were adopted as shinjitai, examples include, 圖→図 觀→観 示 →礻 晝→昼 The aforementioned 门 handwritten simplification also originated from semi-cursive, but is not generally accepted in official Japanese writing. Characters in which there were two or more variants were standardized under one form, the character 島 also had the variant forms 嶋 and 嶌, but the 島 form became standard. The 辶 radical was once printed with two dots but was written one, so the written form with one dot became standard. The upper 丷 portion of the characters 半, 尊, and 平 was once printed as 八 and written 丷, Characters of the keisei monji group each contain a semantic part and a phonetic part. The choice was made to swap the phonetic parts with homophones which had fewer strokes, for example, 圍 was changed to 囲, because 韋 and 井 were homophones. Other simplifications of this method include 竊→窃, 廳→庁, 擔→担, there are also colloquial handwritten simplifications based on this model, in which various non-kanji symbols are used as onpu, for example 魔, 慶, 藤, and 機. In some cases, a character was replaced with a simpler character which neither had graphical resemblance, nor was homophonic. Examples include 登 → 正 and 登 → 丁, some kanji were simplified by removing entire components. Firstly, only a group of characters was simplified, with many characters outside this group retaining their earlier form
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, which is a cursive form of 無 (meaning "nothing").
