1.
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
2.
Hanja
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Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. Borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation, hanja-mal or hanja-eo refers to words that can be written with hanja, and hanmun refers to Classical Chinese writing, although hanja is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts. Because hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese, only a small number of hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in Japan and Mainland China have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding hanja characters. Today, a working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts. Learning a certain number of hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—hanja-eo —are written with the hangul alphabet most of the time. A major motivation for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism, the major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, Cheonjamun. One way of adapting hanja to write Korean in such systems was to represent native Korean grammatical particles, for example, Gugyeol uses the characters 爲尼 to transcribe the Korean word hăni, in modern Korean, that means does, and so. However, in Chinese, the characters are read as the expression wéi ní. This is an example of Gugyeol words where the radical is read in Korean for its meaning. Hanja was the means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great promoted the invention of hangul in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write in hanmun and it was not until the 20th century that hangul truly replaced hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949, additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are a number of Chinese-borrowed words in widespread usage in the North. The replacement has been less total in South Korea where, although usage has declined over time, some remains in common usage in some contexts. Each hanja is composed of one of 214 radicals plus in most cases one or more additional elements, the vast majority of hanja use the additional elements to indicate the sound of the character, but a few hanja are purely pictographic, and some were formed in other ways. This dual meaning-sound reading of a character is called eumhun, the word or words used to denote the meaning are often—though hardly always—words of native Korean origin, and are sometimes archaic words no longer commonly used. South Korean primary schools abandoned the teaching of hanja in 1971 and it is taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum
3.
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
4.
Hyangchal
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Hyangchal is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language in hanja. Under the hyangchal system, Chinese characters were given a Korean reading based on the associated with the character. The hyangchal writing system is classified as a subgroup of Idu. The first mention of hyangchal is the monk Kyun Yes biography during the Goryeo period, Hyangchal is best known as the method Koreans used to write Hyangga, vernacular poetry. Today, twenty-five such poems still exist and shows that vernacular poetry used native Korean words, Korean word order, the writing system covered nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, particles, suffixes, and auxiliary verbs. The practice of hyangchal continued during the Goryeo Dynasty where it was used to record native poetry as well, a Silla era Korean poem in Hyangchal with Hangul transliteration 处容歌 東京明期月良夜入伊遊行如可 入良沙寢矣見昆脚烏伊四是良羅 二兮隱吾下於叱古二兮隱誰支下焉古 本矣吾下是如馬於隱奪叱良乙何如爲理古 처용가 셔블 발기다래 밤드리 노니다가 드러사 자리보곤 가라리 네히여라 둘은 내해 엇고 둘은 뉘해난고. 본디 다 내해다마라난 아사놀 엇디하릿고 A poem in Hyangchal 薯童谣 서동요 善化公主主隱 他密只嫁良置古 薯童房乙 夜矣卯乙抱遣去如 Idu
5.
Gugyeol
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Gugyeol is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was chiefly used during the Joseon Dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance, thus, in gugyeol, the original text in classical Chinese was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases. The Korean reader would read the parts of the Chinese sentence out of sequence to approximate Korean rather than Chinese word order. A similar system for reading classical Chinese is used to day in Japan and is known as Kanbun. The name gugyeol can be rendered as phrase parting, and may refer to the separation of one Chinese phrase from another and this name is itself believed to originate from the use of hanja characters to represent the Middle Korean phrase ipgyeot, with a similar meaning. Gugyeol first came into use in the early Goryeo dynasty, in this period, certain hanja characters were used to represent Korean sounds through their meaning. For example, the syllable 잇 was represented with the hanja character 有 and this technique came to be replaced in the late Goryeo period with using hanja characters according to their sound. This later version of the system was formalized by Jeong Mong-ju and Gwon Geun around 1400 in the early Joseon Dynasty. At this time a number of Confucian classics, including the Classic of Poetry, were rendered into gugyeol, the term gugyeol is often extended beyond this early system to similar uses of hangul following the introduction of the Hunminjeongeum in the 15th century. In this respect, gugyeol remains in use in contemporary South Korea. Gugyeol should be distinguished from the idu and hyangchal systems which preceded it, gugyeol used specialized markings, together with a subset of hanja, to represent Korean morphological markers as an aid for Korean readers to understand the grammar of Chinese texts. Hanja Idu Hyangchal Hangul Katakana Kanbun Doosan Encyclopedia entry
6.
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
7.
Korean Braille
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Korean Braille is the braille alphabet of the Korean language. It is not graphically-related to other braille scripts found around the world, instead, it reflects the patterns found in hangul, and differentiates initial consonants, vowels, and final consonants. It features characters for grammatical devices and punctuation, numerals are similar to those of other braille systems. Consonants have different syllable-initial and -final variants, capturing some of the feel of hangul, the initial and final variants have the same shapes, but are shifted across the braille block. There are two patterns, The consonants that span the width of the block are shifted one space downward when final and those that dont span the width of the block are on the right side of the block when initial, but on the left side when final. No consonant occupies more than two rows, *There is no initial version of ng. Initial ieung in hangul is not written in Korean Braille, however, the expected form is reserved and may not serve other uses, such as punctuation. The heavy consonants are written by prefixing an s, an old hangul convention, in initial position, they are, ⠠⠠ ㅆ ss ⠠⠈ ㄲ kk ⠠⠊ ㄸ tt ⠠⠘ ㅃ pp ⠠⠨ ㅉ jj All vowels span the width and height of the block. Because the consonants are specifically syllable-initial or syllable-final, a syllable that begins with a vowel causes no confusion when written without ieung. The simpler vowels reflect the symmetries of hangul, the yin–yang pairs a, eo and o, u are related through inversion and this creates a different pattern of symmetry than in hangul. The graphically-similar hangul letters i and eu are also related by reflection, the w in wa, wo is indicated by making the left side of the block solid, while the i in ui, oe is shown by making the right side solid. However, the e, ae and their yotized variants show no such patterns. Four diphthongs are represented with two blocks, by adding ⠗ to the appropriate vowel for the final element -i. Korean Braille contains several single cell syllable defined, many are the braille cell for an initial consonant, with an assumed vowel a added. Some make use of unused cell definitions, while others utilize multi-cell abbreviations, as in most braille scripts, ⠼ is prefixed to digits, which are the same as in English Braille. ⠴ is prefixed to the 26 basic roman letters in the same way. The first tactile encoding of hangul was developed by Rosetta Sherwood Hall in 1894 and it used a cell 4 dots wide by 2 dots high, like New York Point. 6-dot braille was adapted to Korean by Park Du-seong in 1926, there have since been a number of revisions. The current form was announced in 1994, Korean Braille library, chart is here
8.
Romanization of Korean
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The romanization of Korean is a system for representing the Korean language using the Latin script. Koreas alphabetic script is called Hangul, and is written using the combination of. Romaja literally means Roman letters in Korean, and refers to the Latin script, romaja is not to be confused with romanization. Many romanization schemes are in use, Revised Romanization of Korean, This is the most commonly used. It includes rules both for transcription and for transliteration, South Korea now officially uses this system which was approved in 2000. Road signs and textbooks were required to follow these rules as soon as possible, almost all road signs, names of railway and subway stations on line maps and signs etc. have been changed. Romanization of surnames and existing companies names has been left untouched, RR is similar to MR, but uses neither diacritics nor apostrophes, which has helped it to gain widespread acceptance on the Internet. In cases of ambiguity, orthographic syllable boundaries may be indicated with a hyphen, hyphenation on street and address signs is used to separate proper names and numbers from their assigned function. McCune–Reischauer, the first transcription to gain some acceptance, a slightly modified version of MR was the official system for Korean in South Korea from 1984 to 2000, and yet a different modification is still the official system in North Korea. MR uses breves, apostrophes and diereses, the latter two indicating orthographic syllable boundaries in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous, mR-based romanizations have been common in popular literature until 2000. Library of Congress system is based on but deviates from MR, unlike in MR, it addresses word division in seven pages of detail. Syllables of given names are separated with a hyphen, which is expressly never done by MR. Sound changes are ignored more often than in MR, aLA-LC also distinguishes between ‘ and ’. Yale, This system has become the standard romanization for Korean among linguists. Vowel length in old or dialectal pronunciation is indicated by a macron, in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous, orthographic syllable boundaries are indicated with a period. ISO/TR11941, This actually is two different standards under one name, one for North Korea and the other for South Korea. The initial submission to the ISO was based heavily on Yale and was a joint effort between both states, but they could not agree on the final draft, hence, the same hangul letter may be represented by different Roman letters, depending on its pronunciation in context. The Yale system, on the hand, represents each Korean letter by always the same Roman letter context-independently
9.
Cyrillization of Korean
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The Kontsevich system for the Cyrillization of the Korean language was created by the Russian scholar Lev Kontsevich on the basis of the earlier system designed by Aleksandr Kholodovich. It is currently the system of transcribing Korean words into the Russian language. Cyrillization systems for Korean were developed domestically in both North Korea and South Korea, Kontsevich carried out work on the systemisation of these rules. In contrast with systems of romanization of Korean, the transcription is based primarily on the pronunciation of a word. Some letters are transcribed differently in the middle of a word when following certain other letters, personal names are written by family name first, followed by a space and then the given name. As a rule, syllables in given names are not separated, romaja New Korean Orthography Hangul List of Korea-related topics Degrees of Courtesy and Communication Styles in the Korean Language, by K. B. Entry for Lev Kontsevich on the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian and Latin Transcription of Korean Words, by Lev Kontsevich
10.
Yale romanization of Korean
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The Yale romanization of Korean was developed by Samuel Elmo Martin and his colleagues at Yale University about half a decade after McCune–Reischauer. It is the romanization of the Korean language in linguistics. The Yale system places primary emphasis on showing a words morphophonemic structure and this distinguishes it from the other two widely used systems for romanizing Korean, the Revised Romanization of Korean and McCune–Reischauer. In terms of content, the Yale systems approach can be compared to North Koreas former New Korean Orthography. The Yale system tries to use a consistent spelling for each morphophonemic element irrespective of its context. But Yale and Hangul differ in how back vowels are handled, Yale may be used for both modern Korean and Middle Korean. There are separate rules for Middle Korean, martins 1992 Reference Grammar of Korean uses italics for Middle Korean as well as other texts predating the 1933 abandonment of arae a, whereas it shows current language in boldface. Palatalization is shown by a medial -y-, although Hangul treats the rounded back vowels of Middle Korean as simple vowels, Yale writes them as a basic vowel, combined with a medial -w-. *Since Modern Standard Korean has lost the vowel ㆍ, medial w, thus, it is important to consider the time period in question when the romanization is interpreted. **As this w is not phonemically distinctive after labial consonants in Modern Korean, Yale then omits it, thus, there is no one-to-one correspondence in the spelling of back vowels. Yale uses unvoiced consonant letters to write Modern Korean consonants, Middle Korean ㅿ is written as z. Tense consonants and consonant clusters are transcribed according to the Hangul spelling, aspirated consonants are written as if they were clusters ending in h. It is also used for purposes such as to indicate sound change, 늙은 nulk. un “old” 같이 kath. i /kachi/ “together”, “like”. Note, Vowel length as a distinctive feature seems to have disappeared at least among younger speakers of the Seoul dialect sometime in the late 20th century, a superscript letter indicates consonants that have disappeared from a words South Korean orthography and standard pronunciation. For example, the South Korean orthographic syllable 영 is romanized as follows, example, 영어 yenge ˡyeng where an initial l has been dropped or changed to n in the South Korean standard language. Examples, 영도 ˡyengto, 노무현 ˡNo Muhyen ⁿyeng where a n has been dropped in the South Korean standard language. At higher levels of abstraction, superscript and subscript vowel symbols joined by a slash may be used to indicate alternations due to vowel harmony. If used for modern day language, this just means the symbol e⁄a, an apostrophe may be used for vowel elision or crasis
11.
ISO/TR 11941
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ISO/TR11941,1996 is a Korean romanization system used in ISO. One example of its use is in Unicode character names and it is very similar to Yale Romanization. This system is used in Unicode character names, for example, the character ᄎ is named HANGUL CHOSEONG CHIEUCH, ㅊ is romanized as ch. However, the character 차 is named HANGUL SYLLABLE CA, ㅊ is romanized as c
12.
SKATS
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SKATS stands for Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System. It is also known as Korean Morse equivalents, despite the name, SKATS is not a true transliteration system. SKATS maps the Hangul characters through Korean Morse code to the codes in Morse code. Any phonetic correspondence between the Korean and Roman letters would be purely coincidental, if a Korean Morse code operator were to transmit a Korean message in Morse, and an English speaking Morse code operator heard the message, what he would write down is SKATS. The advantage of SKATS is the accuracy in conveying the Korean message. The primary users of SKATS are government departments who are interested in letter-to-letter accuracy, when using SKATS it is important to remember not to read the letters as they sound in English, but to read them as they sound in SKATS. The letters are written left to right as in standard written English, the correct form is to put one space between syllables and two spaces between words, but this often varies from one user to another. Without the double spaces between words, word breaks are ambiguous, if the rules are strictly observed, a Korean text written in SKATS could be perfectly recovered. Double consonants and double or triple vowels are written the same way – each letter in the order as if it were written in Hangul. SKATS, LUM CU LE MEG KUGG BE
13.
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
14.
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
15.
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
16.
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
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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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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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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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