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
17.
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
18.
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
19.
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
21.
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
22.
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
23.
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
24.
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
25.
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
26.
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
27.
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
29.
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
31.
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
32.
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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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
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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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