1.
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
2.
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
3.
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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
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
7.
Korean mixed script
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Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul and hanja. The script has never used for languages other than Korean. In North Korea, writing in mixed script was replaced by writing only in Hangul in the middle of the 20th century and has not been used since, in South Korea, the use of mixed script has slowly declined. The script uses hanja to write Sino-Korean vocabulary, but never to write native Korean vocabulary, from the 15th to the 20th century, the Korean mixed script usually used hanja whenever possible, and Hangul to write only grammatical suffixes and native Korean words. Using Hangul to write Sino-Korean words became common in the 20th century, up to the 1970s, many books and newspapers were written in mixed Hangul and hanja characters. Since then, the majority of print publications are written in Hangul only. Modern texts – whether or not they contain a significant amount of native Korean vocabulary – rarely use hanja for all, or even most, of the Sino-Korean words in the text. Hanja still appear in many headlines, where they serve to both disambiguate and abbreviate, and to a lesser degree in some newspapers texts, but not in magazines. They can also sometimes be found in academic literature, Mixed script making use of hanja wherever possible is still used for judicial texts such as the constitution. When writing in Korean mixed script, semantic or content words were written in hanja. It also enables pure Chinese readers to get some faint gist of the meaning in a given Korean mixed script text from reading the Hanja alone, the text below is the preamble to the constitution of the Republic of Korea. The first text is written in Hangul, the second is its mixed script version, examples Hanja and Sino-Korean vocabulary Kanji and Sino-Japanese vocabulary New Korean Orthography Lukoff, Fred. A First Reader in Korean Writing in Mixed Script
8.
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
9.
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
10.
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
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