1.
Chinese language
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Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language, the varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin, followed by Wu, Min, and Yue. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. Standard Chinese is a form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six languages of the United Nations. The written form of the language, based on the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is the spoken language and official in Hong Kong and Macau. It is also influential in Guangdong province and much of Guangxi, dialects of Southern Min, part of the Min group, are widely spoken in southern Fujian, with notable variants also spoken in neighboring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia. Hakka also has a diaspora in Taiwan and southeast Asia. Shanghainese and other Wu varieties are prominent in the lower Yangtze region of eastern China, Chinese can be traced back to a hypothetical Sino-Tibetan proto-language. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty, as the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have sought to promulgate a unified standard. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, in addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, and are often also sensitive border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, the earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty
2.
Standard Chinese
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Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese. Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a language with topic-prominent organization. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants, Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words. There exist two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan, aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters, while Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters. There are many characters that are identical between the two systems, in English, the governments of China and Hong Kong use Putonghua, Putonghua Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, and Mandarin, while those of Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, use Mandarin. The name Putonghua also has a long, albeit unofficial, history and it was used as early as 1906 in writings by Zhu Wenxiong to differentiate a modern, standard Chinese from classical Chinese and other varieties of Chinese. For some linguists of the early 20th century, the Putonghua, or common tongue/speech, was different from the Guoyu. The former was a prestige variety, while the latter was the legal standard. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different, Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, which is close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called the speech of the modern man. The use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai, prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably. In Taiwan, Guoyu continues to be the term for Standard Chinese. The term Putonghua, on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca, Huayu, or language of the Chinese nation, originally simply meant Chinese language, and was used in overseas communities to contrast Chinese with foreign languages. Over time, the desire to standardise the variety of Chinese spoken in these communities led to the adoption of the name Huayu to refer to Mandarin and it also incorporates the notion that Mandarin is usually not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live. The term Mandarin is a translation of Guānhuà, which referred to the lingua franca of the late Chinese empire, in English, Mandarin may refer to the standard language, the dialect group as a whole, or to historic forms such as the late Imperial lingua franca. The name Modern Standard Mandarin is sometimes used by linguists who wish to distinguish the current state of the language from other northern. Chinese has long had considerable variation, hence prestige dialects have always existed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán rather than colloquial regional dialects, rime books, which were written since the Northern and Southern dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times
3.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
4.
Wu Chinese
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Wu is a group of linguistically similar and historically related varieties of Chinese primarily spoken in the whole city of Shanghai, Zhejiang province, southern Jiangsu province and bordering areas. Major Wu varieties include those of Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo, Wuxi, Wenzhou/Oujiang, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Wu speakers, such as Chiang Kai-shek, Lu Xun and Cai Yuanpei, occupied positions of great importance in modern Chinese culture and politics. Wu can also be found being used in Shaoxing opera, which is only in national popularity to Peking opera, as well as in the performances of the popular entertainer. Wu is also spoken in a number of diaspora communities, with significant centers of immigration originating from Shanghai, Qingtian. Suzhou has traditionally been the center of Wu and was likely the first place the distinct variety of Sinitic known as Wu developed. Suzhou dialect is considered to be the most linguistically representative of the family. Due to the influence of Shanghainese, Wu as a whole is incorrectly labelled in English as simply, Shanghainese, among speakers of other Sinitic languages, Wu is often subjectively judged to be soft, light, and flowing. There is an idiom in Mandarin that specifically describes these qualities of Wu speech, Ngu nung nioe ngiu, Wu varieties have the largest vowel quality inventories in the world. The Jinhui dialect spoken in Shanghais Fengxian District has 20 vowel qualities, Wu Chinese, along with Min, is also of great significance to historical linguists due to their retention of many ancient features. These two languages have proven pivotal in determining the history of the Chinese languages. More pressing concerns of the present are those of language preservation, however, many analysts believe that a stable state of diglossia will endure for at least several generations if not indefinitely. Saying one speaks Wu is akin to saying one speaks a Romance language and it is not a particularly defined entity like Standard Mandarin or Hochdeutsch. They do this by affixing 話 Wo to their locations endonym, for example, 溫州話 Wēnzhōuhuà is used for Wenzhounese. Affixing 閒話 xiánhuà is also common and more typical of the Taihu division, Wu, the formal name and standard reference in dialectology literature. Northern Wu, Wu typically spoken in the north of Zhejiang and it by default includes the Xuanzhou division in Anhui as well, however this division is often neglected in Northern Wu discussions. Southern Wu, Wu spoken in southern Zhejiang and periphery, comprising the Oujiang, Wuzhou, Western Wu, A term gaining in usage as a synonym for the Xuanzhou division and modeled after the previous two terms since the Xuanzhou division is less representative of Northern Wu. Shanghainese, is also a common name, used because Shanghai is the most well-known city in the Wu-speaking region. The term Shanghainese is never used by linguists to refer to anything
5.
Cantonese
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Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou in southeastern China. It is the prestige variety of Yue, one of the major subdivisions of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and some neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese serves as one of their official languages and it is also spoken amongst overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western World. When Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified together, Cantonese is viewed as vital part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon, sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar, in English, the term Cantonese is ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton and this narrow sense may be specified as Canton language or Guangzhou language in English. However, Cantonese may also refer to the branch of Cantonese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, Cantonese is used for Cantonese proper, historically, speakers called this variety Canton speech or Guangzhou speech, although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong province, people call it provincial capital speech or plain speech. In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, in mainland China, the term Guangdong speech is also increasingly being used among both native and non-native speakers. Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Cantonese or Yue branch of Chinese varieties, the official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has different varieties, of which Cantonese is one. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and it is also used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language along with Portuguese. As in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The variant spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is known as Hong Kong Cantonese, Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China
6.
Jyutping
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Jyutping is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanisation Scheme, the LSHK promotes the use of this romanisation system. The name Jyutping is a contraction consisting of the first Chinese characters of the terms Jyut6jyu5, only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables. ^ ^ ^ Referring to the pronunciation of these words. There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese, however, as three of the nine are entering tones, which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping. Jyutping and the Yale Romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they differ in the following, The vowels eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, the initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale. The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale, the initial c represents /tsʰ/ in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale. In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel, in Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances. Jyutping defines three finals not in Yale, eu /ɛːu/, em /ɛːm/, and ep /ɛːp/ and these three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6, lem2, and gep6. To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they have differences, The vowel oe represents both /ɵ/ and /œː/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping. The vowel y represents /y/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas both yu and i are used in Jyutping, the initial dz represents /ts/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas z is used instead in Jyutping. The initial ts represents /tsʰ/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas c is used instead in Jyutping. To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in Cantonese Pinyin, however, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping
7.
Southern Min
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Southern Min, or Minnan, is a branch of Min Chinese spoken in certain parts of China including southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Zhejiang, and in Taiwan. The Min Nan dialects are spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia. In common parlance, Southern Min usually refers to Hokkien, including Amoy and Taiwanese Hokkien, the Southern Min dialect group also includes Teochew, though Teochew has limited mutual intelligibility with Hokkien. Hainanese is not mutually intellgible with other Southern Min and is considered a separate branch of Min. Southern Min is not mutually intelligible with Eastern Min, Pu-Xian Min, any other Min branch, Hakka, Cantonese, Shanghainese or Mandarin. Southern Min dialects are spoken in the part of Fujian. The variant spoken in Leizhou, Guangdong as well as Hainan is Hainanese and is not mutually intelligible with other Southern Min or Teochew, Hainanese is classified in some schemes as part of Southern Min and in other schemes as separate. Puxian Min was originally based on the Quanzhou dialect, but over time became heavily influenced by Eastern Min, eventually losing intellegility with Minnan. A forms of Southern Min spoken in Taiwan, collectively known as Taiwanese, Southern Min is a first language for most of the Hoklo people, the main ethnicity of Taiwan. The correspondence between language and ethnicity is not absolute, as some Hoklo have very limited proficiency in Southern Min while some non-Hoklo speak Southern Min fluently, there are many Southern Min speakers also among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic Chinese immigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian and brought the language to what is now Burma, Indonesia and present-day Malaysia and Singapore. In general, Southern Min from southern Fujian is known as Hokkien, Hokkienese, many Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese also originated in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong and speak Teochew language, the variant of Southern Min from that region. Southern Min-speakers form the majority of Chinese in Singapore, with the largest group being Hokkien, despite the similarities the two groups are rarely seen as part of the same Minnan Chinese subgroups. The variants of Southern Min spoken in Zhejiang province are most akin to that spoken in Quanzhou, the variants spoken in Taiwan are similar to the three Fujian variants and are collectively known as Taiwanese. Those Southern Min variants that are known as Hokkien in Southeast Asia also originate from these variants. The variants of Southern Min in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province are known as Teochew or Chaozhou. Teochew is of importance in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, particularly in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sumatra. The Philippines variant is mostly from the Quanzhou area as most of their forefathers are from the aforementioned area, the Southern Min language variant spoken around Shanwei and Haifeng differs markedly from Teochew and may represent a later migration from Zhangzhou
8.
Hokkien
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Hokkien /hɒˈkiɛn/ is a group of Southern Min dialects spoken throughout Southeastern China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and by other overseas Chinese. Hokkien originated in southern Fujian, the Min-speaking province and it is closely related to Teochew, though there is limited mutual intelligibility, and is somewhat more distantly related to Hainanese and Leizhou dialect. Besides Hokkien, there are also other Min and Hakka dialects in Fujian province, the term Hokkien is etymologically derived from the Southern Min pronunciation for Fujian, the province from which the language hails. The variety is known by other terms such as the more general Min Nan or Southern Min. Fujianese and Fukienese are also used, although they are somewhat imprecise, the term Hokkien is not usually used in Mainland China or Taiwan. Conversely Hokkien is the name in Southeast Asia in both English, Chinese or other languages. Speakers of Hokkien, particularly those in Southeast Asia, typically refer to Hokkien as a dialect, people in Taiwan most often refer to Hokkien as the Taiwanese language, with Minnan and Holo also being used and 福建話 is not as common. Hokkien originated in the area of Fujian province, an important center for trade and migration. The major pole of Hokkien varieties outside of Fujian is Taiwan, the Taiwanese version mostly have origins with the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou variants, but since then, the Amoy dialect is becoming the modern prestige standard for the language. There are many Hokkien speakers among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia as well as in the United States, many ethnic Han Chinese emigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian, and brought the language to what is now Burma, Indonesia and present day Malaysia and Singapore. Many of the Hokkien dialects of this region are similar to Taiwanese and Amoynese. Hokkien is reportedly the native language of up to 80% of the Chinese people in the Philippines, Hokkien speakers form the largest group of overseas Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. Southern and part of western Fujian is home to four principal Hokkien dialects, Chinchew, Amoy, Chiangchew and Longyan, originating from the cities of Quanzhou, Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Longyan. As Xiamen is the city of southern Fujian, Amoy is considered the most important, or even the prestige dialect. It is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, same as Amoy dialect, the varieties of Hokkien spoken in Taiwan are hybrids of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, and are collectively known as Taiwanese Hokkien or just Taiwanese. Used by a majority of the population, it bears much importance from a socio-political perspective, the varieties of Hokkien in Southeast Asia originate from these dialects. The Singaporeans, Southern Malaysians and people in Indonesias Riau and surrounding islands variant is from the Quanzhou area and they speak a distinct form of Quanzhou Hokkien called Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, and other states in Northern Malaysia and Medan, with areas in North Sumatra, Indonesia
9.
Vietnamese alphabet
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The Vietnamese alphabet is the modern writing system for the Vietnamese language. The many diacritics, often two on the letter, make written Vietnamese easily recognizable. There are 29 letters in the Vietnamese alphabet, note, Naming b bê bò and p bê phở is to avoid confusion in some dialects or some contexts, the same for s xờ mạnh and x xờ nhẹ, i i ngắn and y i dài. Q, q is always followed by u in every word and phrase in Vietnamese, e. g. quang, quần, quyến rũ, etc. The alphabet is derived from the Portuguese, although the usage of gh and gi was borrowed from Italian. The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is somewhat complicated, in some cases, the same letter may represent several different sounds, and different letters may represent the same sound. This may be because the orthography was designed centuries ago and the language has changed. The letters y and i are mostly equivalent, and there is no rule that says when to use one or the other, except in sequences like ay. Most people and the media continue to use the spelling that they are most accustomed to. The uses of the i and y to represent the phoneme /i/ can be categorized as standard and non-standard as follows. This standard set by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục is not definite and it is unknown why the literature books use Lí while the history books use Lý. The table below matches the vowels of Hanoi Vietnamese and their respective orthographic symbols used in the writing system. Notes, The vowel /i/ is, usually written i, /si/ = sĩ. sometimes written y after h, k, l, m, s, t, v, /mi/ = Mỹ America. It is always written y when, preceded by a vowel, /xwiən/ = khuyên to advise, at the beginning of a word derived from Chinese. The vowel /ɔ/ is written oo before c or ng, /ʔɔk/ = oóc organ and this generally only occurs in recent loanwords or when representing dialectal pronunciation. Similarly, the vowel /o/ is written ôô before c or ng, the diphthong /uə/ is written, ua in open syllables, /muə/ = mua to buy, uô before a consonant, /muən/ = muôn ten thousand. The diphthong /ɨə/ is written, ưa in open syllables, /mɨə/ = mưa to rain, ươ before consonants, Vietnamese is a tonal language, i. e. the meaning of each word depends on the tone in which it is pronounced. There are six tones in the standard northern dialect
10.
History of writing in Vietnam
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The two scripts coexisted until the era of French Indochina when the Latin alphabet quốc ngữ script gradually became the written medium of both government and popular literature. In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called chữ Hán, Hán tự, Hán văn, Hán văn also means Chinese language literature. The Vietnamese word chữ is derived from the Old Chinese word 字, however the character set for chữ nôm is extensive, up to 20,000, and both arbitrary in composition and inconsistent in pronunciation. There is a significant orthographic overlap between Hán and Nôm and many characters are used in both Hán and Nôm with the same reading, the term chữ quốc ngữ means Vietnamese written in romanised script. No writings in Chinese by Vietnamese writers survive from the Chinese domination period, in Imperial Vietnam, formal writings were, in most cases, done in classical Chinese. This was true both of the language of government and administration, and also of entry into government and administration by the wholly Chinese-language Confucian examination system in Vietnam, Chinese was also the language of medicine, astrology, religion, science and high literature such as poetry. Vietnamese existed only as a language, before the creation of the nom script to preserve and circulate less serious poetry. In Vietnam classical Chinese texts was read with the vocalization of Chinese text as such, equivalent to the Chinese On-readings in Japanese kambun and this occurring alongside entry of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into the vernacular Vietnamese language. And creating, in Samuel Martins term, a Sinoxenic dialect, the Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank was the one of the first linguists to actively employ Sino-Vietnamese to recover the earlier history of Chinese. During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam chữ nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were destroyed, the use of classical Chinese, and its written form, chữ nho, died out in Vietnam early in the 20th century during the middle years of French Indochina. At this time there were four competing writing systems in Vietnam, chữ nho, chữ nôm, quốc ngữ. Some scholars still study it today although its application is mostly confined to the context of Vietnamese texts. Individual Hán tự are still written by calligraphers for special occasions such as the Vietnamese New Year, Hán Nôm Institute is the national centre for academic research into both Hán and nôm texts. Since the mid-1990s a small resurgence in teaching of Chinese characters, the significance of the characters has occasionally entered Western depiction of Vietnam, for instance novelist E. M. Nathanson mentions the characters in A Dirty Distant War. For linguists the Sino-Vietnamese readings of Chinese characters provide data for the study of historical Chinese phonology, 漢字 Hán tự, A Vietnamese-Chinese wordlist Từ điển Hán Việt Thiều Chửu Hán Việt Từ Điển Trích Dẫn, Vietnamese Han character dictionary Thiều Chửu dictionary
11.
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
12.
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
13.
Kanji
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Kanji, or kanji, are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term kanji for the Chinese characters literally means Han characters and is using the same characters as the Chinese word hànzì. Chinese characters first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, the earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Yamato emissary in 57 AD. Chinese coins from the first century AD have been found in Yayoi-period archaeological sites, however, the Japanese of that era probably had no comprehension of the script, and would remain illiterate until the fifth century AD. The earliest Japanese documents were written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. For example, the correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read, during the reign of Empress Suiko, the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court. The Japanese language had no form at the time Chinese characters were introduced. Chinese characters also came to be used to write Japanese words, around 650 CE, a writing system called manyōgana evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Manyōgana written in cursive style evolved into hiragana, or onna-de, that is, ladies hand, major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a path, monastery students simplified manyōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are descended from kanji. Katakana are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, the names of plants and animals, and for emphasis on certain words. In 1946, following World War II and under the Allied Occupation of Japan and this was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged and these are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, these are known as hyōgaiji. The kyōiku kanji are 1,006 characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, originally the list only contained 881 characters. This was expanded to 996 characters in 1977 and it was not until 1982 the list was expanded to its current size
14.
Hiragana
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Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and in some cases rōmaji. It is a lettering system. The word hiragana literally means ordinary or simple kana, Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two exceptions, each sound in the Japanese language is represented by one character in each system. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants, words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual authors preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write furigana, a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters, There are two main systems of ordering hiragana, the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more prevalent gojūon ordering. Of the 50 theoretically possible combinations, yi and wu do not exist in the language, wo is usually pronounced as a vowel in modern Japanese, and is preserved in only one use, as a particle. Romanization of the kana does not always follow the consonant-vowel scheme laid out in the table. For example, ち, nominally ti, is very often romanised as chi in an attempt to represent the actual sound in Japanese. These basic characters can be modified in various ways, by adding a dakuten marker, a voiceless consonant is turned into a voiced consonant, k→g, ts/s→z, t→d, h→b and ch/sh→j. Hiragana beginning with an h can also add a handakuten marker changing the h to a p, a small version of the hiragana for ya, yu or yo may be added to hiragana ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide to a, u or o, for example, き plus ゃ becomes きゃ. Addition of the small y kana is called yōon, a small tsu っ, called a sokuon, indicates that the following consonant is geminated. In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation, for example, the sokuon also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes a glottal stop, as in いてっ. However, it cannot be used to double the na, ni, nu, ne, no syllables consonants – to double these, Hiragana usually spells long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana, for example, おかあさん. In informal writing, small versions of the five vowel kana are used to represent trailing off sounds. Standard and voiced iteration marks are written in hiragana as ゝ and ゞ respectively, the following table shows the complete hiragana together with the Hepburn romanization and IPA transcription in the gojūon order. Hiragana with dakuten or handakuten follow the gojūon kana without them, obsolete and normally unused kana are shown in gray
15.
Hepburn romanization
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The system was originally proposed by the Romanization Club in 1885. The revised edition by Romaji-Hirome-kai in 1908 is called standard style romanization, Hepburn is based on English phonology and has competed with the alternative Nihon-shiki romanization, which was developed in Japan as a replacement of Japanese script. In 1930, a Special Romanization Study Commission was appointed to compare the two, the ordinance was temporarily overturned by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers during the Occupation of Japan, but was reissued in 1954. In 1972, a version of Hepburn was codified as ANSI standard Z39. 11-1972. It was proposed in 1989 as a draft for ISO3602, the ANSI Z39. 11-1972 standard was consequently deprecated on October 6,1994. As of 1978, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, in addition The Japan Times, the Japan Travel Bureau, and many other private organizations used Hepburn instead of Kunrei-shiki. The National Diet Library used Kunrei-shiki, although Hepburn is not a government standard, some government agencies mandate it. In many other areas where it de jure status, Hepburn remains the de facto standard. Signs and notices in city offices and police stations, at shrines, temples, English-language newspapers and media use the simplified form of Hepburn. Cities and prefectures use it in information for English-speaking residents and visitors, official tourism information put out by the government uses it, as do guidebooks, local and foreign, on Japan. Many students of Japanese as a foreign language learn Hepburn, there are many variants of Hepburn romanization. The two most common styles are, Traditional Hepburn, as defined in various editions of Hepburns dictionary and this variant is characterized by the rendering of syllabic n as m before the consonants b, m and p, e. g. Shimbashi for 新橋. Modified Hepburn, also known as Revised Hepburn, in which the rendering of syllabic n as m before certain consonants is no longer used, in Japan itself, there are some variants officially mandated for various uses, Railway Standard, which follows the Hyōjun-shiki Rōmaji. All JR railways and other major railways use this type for station names, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Standard, which follows the modified Hepburn style. This is used for road signs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Passport Standard, a permissive standard which explicitly allows the use of non-Hepburn romaji in personal names, notably for passports. In particular, rendering the syllabic n as m before b, m, p, details of these variants can be found below. The romanizations set out in the first and second versions of Hepburns dictionary are primarily of historical interest, supporters argue that Hepburn is not intended as a linguistic tool. The long vowels are indicated by macrons
16.
Chinese dictionary
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Chinese dictionaries date back over two millennia to the Eastern Zhou dynasty, which is a significantly longer lexicographical history than any other language. There are hundreds of dictionaries for the Chinese language, and this article introduces some of the most important, the Chinese language has two words for dictionary, zidian for written forms, that is, Chinese characters, and cidian, for spoken forms. For character dictionaries, zidian combines zi and dian, for word dictionaries, cidian is interchangeably written or, using cí, and its graphic variant cí. Zidian is an older and more common word than cidian. The precursors of Chinese dictionaries are primers designed for students of Chinese characters, the earliest of them only survive in fragments or quotations within Chinese classic texts. The Cangjiepian Chapters of Cang Jie), named after the inventor of writing, was edited by Li Si. The collation or lexicographical ordering of a dictionary generally depends upon its writing system, for a language written in an alphabet or syllabary, dictionaries are usually ordered alphabetically. Samuel Johnson defined dictionary as a book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, but Johnsons definition cannot be applied to the Chinese dictionaries, as Chinese is written in characters or logograph, not alphabets. To Johnson, not having an alphabet is not to the Chineses credit, as in 1778 and they have not been able to form what all other nations have formed. Nevertheless, the Chinese made their dictionaries, and developed three original systems for lexicographical ordering, semantic categories, graphic components, and pronunciations, the first system of dictionary organization is by semantic categories. The circa 3rd-century BCE Erya is the oldest extant Chinese dictionary and it contains lists of synonyms arranged into 19 semantic categories. The Han Dynasty dictionary Xiao Erya reduces these 19 to 13 chapters, the early 3rd century CE Guangya, from the Northern Wei Dynasty, followed the Eryas original 19 chapters. The circa 1080 CE Piya, from the Song Dynasty, has 8 semantically-based chapters of names for plants, for a dictionary user wanting to look up a character, this arbitrary semantic system is inefficient unless one already knows, or can guess, the meaning. Two other Han Dynasty lexicons are loosely organized by semantics, the 1st century CE Fangyan is the worlds oldest known dialectal dictionary. The circa 200 CE Shiming employs paranomastic glosses to define words, the second system of dictionary organization is by recurring graphic components or radicals. The famous 100-121 CE Shuowen Jiezi arranged characters through a system of 540 bushou radicals, the 543 CE Yupian, from the Liang Dynasty, rearranged them into 542. The 1615 CE Zihui, edited by Mei Yingzuo during the Ming Dynasty and it also originated the radical-stroke scheme of ordering characters on the number of residual graphic strokes besides the radical. The 1627 Zhengzitong also used 214, the 1716 CE Kangxi Zidian, compiled under the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, became the standard dictionary for Chinese characters, and popularized the system of 214 radicals
17.
Kangxi Emperor
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The Kangxi Emperors reign of 61 years makes him the longest-reigning emperor in Chinese history and one of the longest-reigning rulers in the world. However, since he ascended the throne at the age of seven, actual power was held for six years by four regents and his grandmother, the Kangxi Emperor is considered one of Chinas greatest emperors. The Kangxi Emperors reign brought about stability and relative wealth after years of war. He initiated the period known as the Prosperous Era of Kangxi and Qianlong or High Qing and his court also accomplished such literary feats as the compilation of the Kangxi Dictionary. Born on 4 May 1654 to the Shunzhi Emperor and Empress Xiaokangzhang in Jingren Palace, the Forbidden City, Beijing and he was enthroned at the age of seven, on 7 February 1661. His era name Kangxi, however, only started to be used on 18 February 1662, large bright eyes lighted up his face, which was pitted with smallpox. Before the Kangxi Emperor came to the throne, Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang had appointed the powerful men Sonin, Suksaha, Ebilun, Sonin died after his granddaughter became Empress Xiaochengren, leaving Suksaha at odds with Oboi in politics. In a fierce struggle, Oboi had Suksaha put to death. The Kangxi Emperor and the rest of the imperial court acquiesced in this arrangement, in 1669, the Kangxi Emperor had Oboi arrested with the help of his grandmother Grand Dowager Empress Xiaozhuang, who had raised him. And began taking control of the empire. He listed three issues of concern, flood control of the Yellow River, repair of the Grand Canal, the Grand Empress Dowager influenced him greatly and he took care of her himself in the months leading up to her death in 1688. The main army of the Qing Empire, the Eight Banners Army, was in decline under the Kangxi Emperor. It was smaller than it had been at its peak under Hong Taiji and in the reign of the Shunzhi Emperor, however. In addition, the Green Standard Army was still powerful with generals such as Tuhai, Fei Yanggu, Zhang Yong, Zhou Peigong, Shi Lang, Mu Zhan, Shun Shike and Wang Jingbao. The main reason for decline was a change in system between the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors reigns. The Kangxi Emperor continued using the military system implemented by his predecessors. According to the system, a commander who returned from a battle alone would be put to death and this was meant to motivate both commanders and soldiers alike to fight valiantly in war because there was no benefit for the sole survivor in a battle. By the Qianlong Emperors reign, military commanders had become lax and this was because commanders statuses had become hereditary, a general gained his position based on the contributions of his forefathers
18.
Qing dynasty
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It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China. The Qing multi-cultural empire lasted almost three centuries and formed the base for the modern Chinese state. The dynasty was founded by the Jurchen Aisin Gioro clan in Manchuria, in the late sixteenth century, Nurhaci, originally a Ming vassal, began organizing Banners, military-social units that included Jurchen, Han Chinese, and Mongol elements. Nurhaci formed the Jurchen clans into an entity, which he renamed as the Manchus. By 1636, his son Hong Taiji began driving Ming forces out of Liaodong and declared a new dynasty, in 1644, peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng conquered the Ming capital, Beijing. The Ten Great Campaigns of the Qianlong Emperor from the 1750s to the 1790s extended Qing control into Central Asia, the early rulers maintained their Manchu ways, and while their title was Emperor, they used khan to the Mongols and they were patrons of Tibetan Buddhism. They governed using Confucian styles and institutions of government and retained the imperial examinations to recruit Han Chinese to work under or in parallel with Manchus. They also adapted the ideals of the system in dealing with neighboring territories. The Qianlong reign saw the apogee and initial decline in prosperity. The population rose to some 400 million, but taxes and government revenues were fixed at a low rate, corruption set in, rebels tested government legitimacy, and ruling elites did not change their mindsets in the face of changes in the world system. Following the Opium War, European powers imposed unequal treaties, free trade, the Taiping Rebellion and the Dungan Revolt in Central Asia led to the deaths of some 20 million people, most of them due to famines caused by war. In spite of disasters, in the Tongzhi Restoration of the 1860s, Han Chinese elites rallied to the defense of the Confucian order. The initial gains in the Self-Strengthening Movement were destroyed in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895, in which the Qing lost its influence over Korea, New Armies were organized, but the ambitious Hundred Days Reform of 1898 was turned back by Empress Dowager Cixi, a conservative leader. Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries competed with reformist monarchists such as Kang Youwei, after the deaths of Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor in 1908, the hardline Manchu court alienated reformers and local elites alike. The Wuchang Uprising on October 11,1911, led to the Xinhai Revolution, General Yuan Shikai negotiated the abdication of Puyi, the last emperor, on February 12,1912. Nurhaci declared himself the Bright Khan of the Later Jin state in both of the 12–13th century Jurchen Jin dynasty and of his Aisin Gioro clan. His son Hong Taiji renamed the dynasty Great Qing in 1636, there are competing explanations on the meaning of Qīng. The character Qīng is composed of water and azure, both associated with the water element and this association would justify the Qing conquest as defeat of fire by water
19.
Zihui
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The Zìhuì is a Chinese dictionary, edited by Mei Yingzuo during the late Ming Dynasty and published in 1615, the forty-third year of the Ming Wanli Emperor. The work is divided into 14 scrolls and contains a total of 33,179 Chinese characters and it was the first dictionary to introduce the modern radical-stroke system. Whilst the ancillary first and last fascicles explain topics like stroke order and radicals, the Qing Dynasty scholar Wu Renchen published the 1666 Zihui Bu. The Zihui also formed the basis for the later Zhengzitong written by Zhang Zilie, for instance, its man radical 男, which compounds the field radical 田 and the power radical 力, only lists three, nan 男, sheng 甥, and jiu 舅. The Zihui more efficiently lists nan 男 under the radical, sheng 甥 under the life radical 生. The Zihui is renowned for establishing the system of 214 radicals still used in dictionaries today as the basis for the collation of Chinese characters and it also introduced the radical-and-stroke sorting principle of arranging characters under a radical according to the number of residual strokes. After the noted 1716 Kangxi Dictionary adopted these 214 graphic elements, in modern Chinese usage, zihui can mean glossary, wordbook, or lexicon. 字彙補 – Chinese Text Project The 214 Radicals 部首, ChinaKnowledge
20.
Kangxi radical
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The 214 Kangxi radicals form a system of radicals of Chinese characters. The radicals are numbered in stroke count order, originally introduced in the 1615 Zihui, they are named in relation to the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716. The system of 214 Kangxi radicals is based on the system of 540 radicals used in the Han-era Shuowen Jiezi. The radicals have between one and seventeen strokes, the number of strokes being 5 while the average number of strokes is slightly below 5.7. The ten radicals with the largest number of account for 10,665 characters. The 214 Kangxi radicals act as a de facto standard, which may not be duplicated exactly in every Chinese dictionary and they also serve as the basis for many computer encoding systems, including Unihan. The number of radicals may be reduced in modern practical dictionaries, thus, the Oxford Concise English–Chinese Dictionary, for example, has 188 radicals. The Xinhua Zidian, a pocket-sized character dictionary containing about 13,000 characters, a few dictionaries also introduce new radicals, treating groups of radicals that are used together in many different characters as a kind of radical. For example, Hanyu Da Cidian, the most inclusive available Chinese dictionary has 23,000 head character entries organised by a system of 200 radicals. The Unicode standard encoded 20,992 characters in version 1.0.1 in the CJK Unified Ideographs block and this standard followed the Kangxi order of radicals but did not encode all characters found in the Kangxi dictionary. More characters were added in later versions, adding CJK Unified Ideographs Extensions A, B, C and D as of Unicode 7.0 with further additions planned for Unicode 8.0, within each Extension, characters are also ordered by Kangxi radical and additional strokes. The Unicode Consortium maintains the Unihan Database, with a Radical-Stroke-Index, in Unicode version 3.0, a separate Kangxi Radicals block was introduced which encodes the 214 radicals in sequence, at U+2F00–2FD5. In addition, the CJK Radicals Supplement block was introduced, encoding alternative forms taken by Kangxi radicals as they appear within specific characters. For example, ⺁ CJK RADICAL CLIFF is a variant of ⼚ radical 27, itself identical in shape to the character consisting of unaugmented radical 27, Chinese etymology search radicals and receive the meaning as well as illustrations of radicals in history
21.
Ming dynasty
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The Ming dynasty was the ruling dynasty of China – then known as the Empire of the Great Ming – for 276 years following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming, described by some as one of the greatest eras of orderly government, although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng, regimes loyal to the Ming throne – collectively called the Southern Ming – survived until 1683. He rewarded his supporters and employed them as a counterweight against the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats. One, Zheng He, led seven enormous voyages of exploration into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia, the rise of new emperors and new factions diminished such extravagances, the capture of the Zhengtong Emperor during the 1449 Tumu Crisis ended them completely. The imperial navy was allowed to fall into disrepair while forced labor constructed the Liaodong palisade, haijin laws intended to protect the coasts from Japanese pirates instead turned many into smugglers and pirates themselves. The growth of Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch trade created new demand for Chinese products and produced an influx of Japanese. This abundance of specie remonetized the Ming economy, whose money had suffered repeated hyperinflation and was no longer trusted. While traditional Confucians opposed such a prominent role for commerce and the newly rich it created, combined with crop failure, floods, and epidemic, the dynasty collapsed before the rebel leader Li Zicheng, who was defeated by the Manchu-led Eight Banner armies who founded the Qing dynasty. The Mongol-led Yuan dynasty ruled before the establishment of the Ming dynasty, consequently, agriculture and the economy were in shambles, and rebellion broke out among the hundreds of thousands of peasants called upon to work on repairing the dykes of the Yellow River. A number of Han Chinese groups revolted, including the Red Turbans in 1351, the Red Turbans were affiliated with the White Lotus, a Buddhist secret society. Zhu Yuanzhang was a peasant and Buddhist monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352. In 1356, Zhus rebel force captured the city of Nanjing, with the Yuan dynasty crumbling, competing rebel groups began fighting for control of the country and thus the right to establish a new dynasty. In 1363, Zhu Yuanzhang eliminated his archrival and leader of the rebel Han faction, Chen Youliang, in the Battle of Lake Poyang, arguably the largest naval battle in history. Known for its ambitious use of ships, Zhus force of 200,000 Ming sailors were able to defeat a Han rebel force over triple their size, claimed to be 650. The victory destroyed the last opposing rebel faction, leaving Zhu Yuanzhang in uncontested control of the bountiful Yangtze River Valley, Zhu Yuanzhang took Hongwu, or Vastly Martial, as his era name. Hongwu made an effort to rebuild state infrastructure. He built a 48 km long wall around Nanjing, as well as new palaces, Hongwu organized a military system known as the weisuo, which was similar to the fubing system of the Tang dynasty. With a growing suspicion of his ministers and subjects, Hongwu established the Jinyiwei, some 100,000 people were executed in a series of purges during his rule
22.
Daoguang Emperor
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The Daoguang Emperor was the eighth emperor of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the sixth Qing emperor to rule over China, from 1820 to 1850. His reign was marked by disaster and internal rebellion, that is, by the First Opium War. The Daoguang Emperor was born in the Forbidden City, Beijing and it was later changed to Minning when he became emperor, The first character of his private name was changed from Mian to Min to avoid the relatively common character Mian. Mianning was the son of Yongyan, the 15th son of the Qianlong Emperor. In 1796, Yongyan was enthroned as the Jiaqing Emperor, after which he made Lady Hitara his empress consort, Mianning was favoured by his grandfather, the Qianlong Emperor. He frequently accompanied his grandfather on hunting trips, on one such trip, at the age of nine, Mianning successfully hunted a deer, which greatly amused the Qianlong Emperor. In 1813, while he was still a prince, Mianning also played a role in repelling and killing White Lotus invaders who stormed the Forbidden City. This action earned him important merit in securing his claim to the later on. In September 1820, at the age of 38, Mianning inherited the throne after the Jiaqing Emperor died suddenly of unknown causes and he became the first Qing emperor who was the eldest legitimate son of his father. Now known as the Daoguang Emperor, he inherited an empire with Westerners encroaching upon the borders of China. The Daoguang Emperor had been ruling for six years when the heir to the Khojas, Jahangir Khoja. By the end of 1826, the former Qing cities of Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan, after a friend betrayed him in March 1827, Khoja was sent to Beijing in an iron litter and subsequently executed, while the Qing Empire regained control of their lost territory. During the Daoguang Emperors reign, China experienced major problems with opium, Opium had started to trickle into China during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, but was limited to approximately 200 chests annually. By the time of the Qianlong era, this amount had increased to 1,000 chests,4,000 chests by the Jiaqing era and more than 30,000 chests during the Daoguang era. The Daoguang Emperor issued many imperial edicts banning opium in the 1820s and 1830s, which were carried out by Lin Zexu, Lin Zexus efforts to halt the spread of opium in China led directly to the First Opium War. With the development of the First Opium War, Lin Zexu was made a scapegoat, meanwhile, in the Himalayas, the Sikh Empire attempted an occupation of Tibet but was defeated in the Sino-Sikh war. On the coasts, technologically and militarily inferior to the European powers, in 1811, a clause sentencing Europeans to death for spreading Catholicism had been added to the statute called Prohibitions Concerning Sorcerers and Sorceresses in the Great Qing Code. The Daoguang Emperor granted the title of Wujing Boshi to the descendants of Ran Qiu, the Daoguang Emperor died on 25 February 1850 at the Old Summer Palace,8 km/5 miles northwest of Beijing
23.
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
24.
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
25.
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
26.
Fanqie
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The method was introduced in the 3rd century AD and used in dictionaries and commentaries on the classics until the early 20th century. Early dictionaries such as the Erya indicated the pronunciation of a character by the method of dúruò, the introduction of Buddhism to China around the first century brought Indian phonetic knowledge, which may have inspired the idea of fanqie. According to the 6th-century scholar Yan Zhitui, fanqie were first used by Sun Yan, of the state of Wei during the Three Kingdoms period, however, earlier examples have been found in the late 2nd century works of Fu Qian and Ying Shao. The oldest extant sources of significant bodies of fanqie are fragments of the original Yupian found in Japan and the Jingdian Shiwen, the method was used throughout the Qieyun, a Chinese rhyme dictionary published in 601 AD during the Sui Dynasty. During the Qing dynasty some bilingual Chinese-Manchu dictionaries had the Manchu words phonetically transcribed with Chinese characters, the book 御製增訂清文鑑 in Manchu and Chinese, used both Manchu script to transcribe Chinese words and Chinese characters to transcribe Manchu words with fanqie. In the fanqie method, a characters pronunciation is represented by two other characters, the onset is represented by that of the first of the two characters, the final and the tone are represented by those of the second of the two characters. For example, in the Qieyun the character 東 is described by the formula 德紅反. The first two characters indicate the onset and final respectively, so that the pronunciation of 東 is given as the onset of 德 with the final of 紅, with the same tone as 紅. The third character 反 fǎn turn back indicates that this is a fanqie spelling, in later dictionaries such as the Guangyun, the marker character is 切 qiè run together. The Qing scholar Gu Yanwu suggested that fǎn, which also meant overthrow, was avoided after the rebellions of the mid-Tang. The origin of both terms is obscure, the compound word fǎnqiè first appeared during the Song dynasty. Fanqie provide information about the sounds of earlier forms of Chinese, several characters could be used for each initial or final – in particular, no character was ever used to spell itself. For example, in that dictionary 東 was spelled 德 + 紅, 德 was spelled 多 + 特 and this implies that 東, 德 and 多 must all have had the same initial. By following such chains of equivalences Chen was able to identify categories of equivalent initial spellers, unaware of Chens work, the Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren repeated the analysis to identify the initials and finals in the 1910s. Chens method can be used to identify the categories of initials and finals, thus Middle Chinese has been reconstructed by Karlgren and later scholars by comparing these categories with Sino-Xenic pronunciations and pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese. Middle Chinese had four tones, and initial plosives and affricates could be voiced, aspirated or voiceless unaspirated. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, voicing then disappeared in all dialects except the Wu group, with consonants becoming aspirated or unaspirated depending on the tone. The tones then underwent further mergers in various varieties of Chinese, thus the changes in both the initial and the tone were each conditioned by the other, represented by different characters in the fanqie pair
27.
Homophone
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A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning, and may differ in spelling. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose, or differently, such as carat, caret, homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms. Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs, the term homophone may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, such as phrases, letters or groups of letters that are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter or group of letters. A word or unit with this property is said to be homophonous, homophone derives from the Greek homo-, same, and phōnḗ, voice, utterance. Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader or to suggest multiple meanings, the last usage is common in poetry and creative literature. An example of this is seen in Dylan Thomass radio play Under Milk Wood, some examples from English are, pin and pen in many southern American accents. Merry, marry, and Mary in most American accents, the pairs do, due and forward, foreword are homophonous in most American accents but not in most English accents. Wordplay is particularly common in English because the multiplicity of linguistic influences offers considerable complication in spelling and meaning, malapropisms, which often create a similar comic effect, are usually near-homophones. Homophones of multiple words or phrases are known as oronyms. This term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in his book The Joy of Lex, and it was used in the BBC programme Never Mind the Full Stops, examples of oronyms include, ice cream vs. Notable examples include, Initiate, My wife ate two sandwiches, initiate a bag o tater chips, Mayonnaise, Mayonnaise a lot of people here tonight. Innuendo, Hey dude I saw a bird fly innuendo, Moustache, I Moustache you a question. There are differences in such lists due to dialect pronunciations and usage of old words, in English, there are approximately 88 triples,24 quadruples,2 quintuples,1 sextet and 1 septet. If proper names are allowed then a nonet is Ayr, Aire, Eyre, heir, air, err, ere, eer, are. An extreme example is kikō, which is the pronunciation of at least 22 words, including, 機構, 紀行, 稀覯, 騎行, 貴校 (, 奇功, 貴公, 起稿, 奇行, 機巧, 寄港, 帰校, 気功, 寄稿, 機甲, 帰航, 奇効, 季候, 気孔, 起工, 気候, 帰港. The Korean language contains a combination of words that belong to Korean. For example, 화장하다, to put on makeup and 화장하다, also, 유산, inheritance and 유산, miscarriage. There are heterographs, but far fewer, contrary to the tendency in English, for example, 학문, learning, and 항문, anus
28.
Rime table
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The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used fǎnqiè analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively, the earliest rime tables are associated with Chinese Buddhist monks, who are believed to have been inspired by the Sanskrit syllable charts in the Siddham script they used to study the language. The oldest extant rime tables are the 12th-century Yunjing and Qiyin lüe, which are very similar, earlier fragmentary documents describing the analysis have been found at Dunhuang, suggesting that the tradition may date back to the late Tang dynasty. Some scholars use the French spelling rime, as used by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren, for the categories described in these works, to distinguish them from the concept of poetic rhyme. The Qieyun, produced by Lù Fǎyán in 601, was a dictionary, serving as a guide to the recitation of literary texts. It quickly became popular during the Tang dynasty, leading to a series of revised and expanded editions, in these dictionaries, characters were grouped first by the four tones, and then into rhyme groups. The dictionaries typically used several characters for each initial or final, the fanqie method of indicating pronunciation made the dictionaries awkward to use. The děngyùnxué was a sophisticated analysis of the Qieyun pronunciations. A tantalizing glimpse of this tradition is offered by fragments from Dunhuang, a fragment held by the British Library simply lists 30 initial consonants. Another document includes three fragments attributed to a monk called Shǒuwēn, who may have lived as early as the 9th century and these fragments do not contain tables, but describe the phonological analysis that underlies them. The oldest known rhyme tables are a version of the Yunjing published with prefaces dated 1161 and 1203, and the Qiyin lüe, the two are very similar, and are believed to be derived from a single version pre-dating the Song dynasty. The tables were accompanied by a body of known as mēnfǎ. Later rhyme tables were more elaborate, the Sìshēng děngzǐ was probably created during the Northern Song, and explicitly introduced broad rhyme classes, which were previously implicit in the ordering of the tables. The preface of the Qièyùn zhĭzhǎngtú is dated 1203, in the Southern Song, in this work the tables are restructured with separate columns for each of the 36 initials. The Jīng shǐ zhèng yīn Qièyùn zhǐnán, produced by Liú Jiàn in 1336, was the basis for one of the two sets of tables at the front of the Kangxi dictionary. The Yunjing was lost in China for several centuries, the Qieyun zhizhangtu, incorrectly attributed to the 11th century scholar Sima Guang, was believed to be the oldest of the rime tables, and was used in the earliest reconstruction efforts. However, in the 1880s several versions of the Yunjing were discovered in Japan, comparison with the Qiyin lüe showed that they were based on a common model, of which the other rime tables were later refinements. All recent reconstruction work has been based on the Yunjing, the Fù Sòng Yǒnglù edition of 1564 is considered the most reliable, and is the basis of all reproductions in circulation
29.
Syllable
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A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the water is composed of two syllables, wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the building blocks of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur and this shift from pictograms to syllables has been called the most important advance in the history of writing. A word that consists of a syllable is called a monosyllable. Syllable is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French sillabe, from Latin syllaba, συλλαβή means what is taken together, referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound. συλλαβή is a noun from the verb συλλαμβάνω syllambánō, a compound of the preposition σύν sýn with. The noun uses the root λαβ-, which appears in the aorist tense, the present tense stem λαμβάν- is formed by adding a nasal infix ⟨μ⟩ ⟨m⟩ before the β b and a suffix -αν -an at the end. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the period ⟨. ⟩ marks syllable breaks, in practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. When a word comes in the middle of a syllable. The liaison tie is used to join lexical words into phonological words. In the typical theory of structure, the general structure of a syllable consists of three segments. e. Nucleus and coda are grouped together as a rime and onset are only distinguished at the second level, the nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and they are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda, in the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a, the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC, languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a languages phonotactics
30.
Tone (linguistics)
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages, the tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/. Tonal languages are common in Africa, East Asia, and Mexico. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, I versus you, many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone, unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance. Contour systems are typical of languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, including Tai–Kadai, Vietic, the Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are dominated by register systems. Many languages use tone in a limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch, such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal, notably excepting Swahili, most languages spoken in the Senegambia, Koyra Chiini and Fulani. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal and nontonal branches, numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China and Mainland Southeast Asia. Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai languages are tonal, including Thai, Lao. The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the most tonal languages in the world, Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Utsul. Tones in Vietnamese and Utsul may result from heavy Chinese influence on both languages, there were tones in Middle Korean. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, in Europe, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Lithuanian, Latvian and Luxemburgish have tonal characteristics. Among the Indo-European languages of Asia, three Indo-Aryan languages have tonality, Punjabi, Dogri and Lahnda, although the Austronesian language family has some tonal members such as New Caledonias Cèmuhî language, no tonal languages have been discovered in Australia. A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec, Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tone systems
31.
Woodblock printing
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Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Ukiyo-e is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print, most European uses of the technique for printing images on paper are covered by the art term woodcut, except for the block-books produced mainly in the 15th century. Prior to the invention of printing, seals and stamps were used for making impressions. The oldest of these came from Mesopotamia and Egypt. A few much larger brick stamps for marking clay bricks survive from Akkad from around 2270 BC. There are also Roman lead pipe inscriptions of some length that were stamped, however none of these used ink, which is necessary for printing, but stamped marks into relatively soft materials. In both China and Egypt, the use of stamps for seals preceded the use of larger blocks. In Europe and India, the printing of cloth certainly preceded the printing of paper or papyrus, the process is essentially the same—in Europe special presentation impressions of prints were often printed on silk until at least the 17th century. The block was cut along the grain of the wood and it is necessary only to ink the block and bring it into firm and even contact with the paper or cloth to achieve an acceptable print. The content would of course print in reverse or mirror-image, a further complication when text was involved, the art of carving the woodcut is technically known as xylography, though the term is rarely used in English. For colour printing, multiple blocks are used, each for one colour, multiple colours can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks. There are three methods of printing to consider, Stamping Used for many fabrics, and most early European woodcuts. These items were printed by putting paper or fabric on a table or a surface with the block on top, and pressing, or hammering. Rubbing Apparently the most common for Far Eastern printing, Used for European woodcuts and block-books later in the 15th century, and very widely for cloth. The block is placed face side up on a table, with the paper or fabric on top, the back of the paper or fabric is rubbed with a hard pad, a flat piece of wood, a burnisher, or a leather frotton. Printing in a press Presses only seem to have used in Asia in relatively recent times. Simple weighted presses may have used in Europe, but firm evidence is lacking. A deceased Abbess of Mechelen in Flanders in 1465 had unum instrumentum ad imprintendum scripturas et ymagines, cum 14 aliis lapideis printis which is probably too early to be a Gutenberg-type printing press in that location
32.
Traditional Chinese bookbinding
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Traditional Chinese bookbinding, also called stitched binding, is the method of bookbinding that the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese used before adopting the modern codex form. The earliest known form of bookbinding in China is butterfly binding, single-printed folio pages were pasted together and folded in a stack, creating a book in which pairs of printed pages alternated with blank ones. This was followed by wrapped back binding, in which the folios were complied with the image on the outside, stitched binding developed from wrapped back binding in the sixteenth century. The paper used as the leaves are usually xuan paper and this is an absorbent paper used in traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting. Stronger and better quality papers may be used for detailed works that involve multicoloured woodblock printing, the covers tend to be a stronger type of paper, dyed dark blue. Yellow silk can be used, which is predominant in imperially commissioned works. The cover is then backed by normal xuan paper to give it more strength, hardcovers are rare and only used in very important books, The silk cord is almost always white. The case for the books are made of wood or bookboard, covered with cloth or silk. The method of binding is in several stages, The first stage is to fold the printed paper sheets. The printing method was to print on a sheet, then fold it in half so the text appears on both sides. The second stage is to all the folded leaves into order and assemble the back. Important or luxury edition books have a single leaf inserted in the fold of the leaves. Front covers tend to be replaced over time if it gets damaged, for very old books, the front cover is usually not original, for facsimiles, it is most certainly not. The third stage is to punch holes at the spine edge, in China, six holes may be used on important books. If the book is a quality edition, the edges of the side are wrapped in silk which is stuck on to protect the edges. In Korea, an odd number of holes is normally used, the fourth stage is to stitch the whole book together using a thin double silk cord. The knot is tied and concealed in the spine, after a group of books are printed, they are often put in a case. This is a case that is constructed from boards that have a cloth upholstering
33.
Hardcover
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A hardcover or hardback book is one bound with rigid protective covers. It has a flexible, sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened, following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are printed on acid-free paper, and are much more durable than paperbacks. Hardcover books are more costly to manufacture. If brisk sales are anticipated, an edition of a book is typically released first. Some publishers publish paperback originals if slow hardback sales are anticipated, for very popular books these sales cycles may be extended, and followed by a mass market paperback edition typeset in a more compact size and printed on shallower, less hardy paper. In the past the release of an edition was one year after the hardback. It is very unusual for a book that was first published in paperback to be followed by a hardback, an example is the novel The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal, which had its revised edition of 1961 first published in paperback, and later in hardcover. Hardcover books are sold at higher prices than comparable paperbacks. Hardcovers typically consist of a block, two boards, and a cloth or heavy paper covering. The pages are sewn together and glued onto a flexible spine between the boards, and it too is covered by the cloth, a paper wrapper, or dust jacket, is usually put over the binding, folding over each horizontal end of the boards. On the folded part, or flap, over the front cover is generally a blurb, the back flap is where the biography of the author can be found. Reviews are often placed on the back of the jacket, bookbinding Paperback How to make a simple Hardcover book
34.
Internet
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The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite to link devices worldwide. The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States federal government in the 1960s to build robust, the primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. Although the Internet was widely used by academia since the 1980s, Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the two decades since then, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet, the Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries, the Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage, each constituent network sets its own policies. The term Internet, when used to refer to the global system of interconnected Internet Protocol networks, is a proper noun. In common use and the media, it is not capitalized. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, the Internet is also often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network. Historically, as early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, the designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, however, the World Wide Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services. The Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks, the term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user. The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, the third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah Graphics Department. In an early sign of growth, fifteen sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks, early international collaborations on the ARPANET were rare. European developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks, in December 1974, RFC675, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term internet as a shorthand for internetworking and later RFCs repeated this use. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation funded the Computer Science Network, in 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990
35.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
36.
Han-Han Dae Sajeon
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Han-Han Dae Sajeon is the generic term for Korean hanja-to-hangul dictionaries. There are several such dictionaries from different publishers, the most comprehensive one, published by Dankook University Publishing, contains 53,667 Chinese characters and 420,269 compound words. This dictionary was a project of the Dankook University Institute of Oriental Studies, which started in June 1977 and was completed 28 October 2008, the dictionary comprises 16 volumes totalling over 20,000 pages. In addition to the Han-Han Daesajeon, in 1966, Dankook University completed the Dictionary of Korean Chinese Characters. Composed of 4 volumes with more than 4,410 pages, with no Chinese dictionaries with Korean translations, most Korean scholars were resigned to relying on Chinese dictionaries in foreign languages to interpret original Chinese texts. Dr. Choong-sik Chang, the president of Dankook University, brought Lee Hee-seung, scholars were invited as advisers in 1977 and as editors to start compilation in 1978. Initially, the university turned down the project after financial difficulties. In 2009, Dankook University presented the first complete edition of the Han-Han Daesajeon,200,000 people worked on the dictionary for 132,800 days, and scholars at Dankook continue to revise and add footnotes to the dictionary. The first notable effort to compile a comprehensive classical Chinese character dictionary was made by Morohashi Tetsuji, Tetsuji recognized the need and grew determined to compile a Chinese–Japanese Dictionary while studying abroad in China. Taiwans Defense Committee followed suit with a 10-year effort, along with the Academia Sinica, to complete the Zhongwen Da Cidian, in 1975, China also made the compilation of a Chinese character dictionary a national project. Hanyu Da Zidian Zhonghua Da Zidian Dankook University Institute of Oriental Studies Han-Han Dae Sajeon Dankook University
37.
Hanyu Da Zidian
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The Hanyu dazidian is a reference work on Chinese characters. A group of more than 400 editors and lexicographers began compilation in 1979, a separate volume of essays documents the lexicographical complexities for this full-scale Chinese dictionary. Besides the weighty 5, 790-page first edition, there are 3-volume, a second edition was published in 2006, and has a list of radicals printed on the dust jacket of each volume for quicker character look up. The first edition of the Hanyu dazidian included 54,678 head entries for characters, and they give historical logographic forms such as oracle bone script, bronzeware script, and seal script. Pronunciation is glossed for Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, and Modern Standard Chinese, the chronologically numbered definitions cite early Chinese dictionaries and classic texts. Internal collating is by a 200 radical system, arranged by stroke count, volume 8 has appendices, including rime tables for Old and Middle Chinese, variant characters, indexes, and addenda. The Hanyu dazidian has become the standard reference for Chinese characters, for example, the Unihan Database. Dai Kan-Wa jiten Han-Han Dae Sajeon Hanyu Dacidian Kangxi Zidian Zhonghua da zidian Hanyu da zidian weiyuanhui 汉语大字典委员会, wuhan, Hubei cishu chubanshe and Sichuan cishu chubanshe. Hanyu da zidian weiyuanhui 汉语大字典委员会, eds, wuhan, Hubei cishu chubanshe and Sichuan cishu chubanshe. Li Gefei 李格非 and Zhao Chenduo 赵振铎, eds, ISBN 7-5403-0028-0 Sin, Chow Yiu 单周尧,2001. Sichuan Lexicalgraphical Press page, 2nd edition Chongwen shuju page, 2nd edition
38.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
39.
Chinese History: A New Manual
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Chinese History, A New Manual, written by Endymion Wilkinson, is an authoritative and often witty guide to Sinology and Chinese history for which he received the Prix Stanislas Julien for 2014. At over 1.5 million words, the New Manual comprises fourteen parts subdivided into a total of seventy-six chapters, books 10–13 present primary and secondary sources chronologically by period. The present fourth edition updates, expands, and corrects the third edition, some 9,800 primary, secondary, reference works, journals, and databases are introduced in the course of the discussion. In addition to the extended scope of the New Manual, new features are introductions to hundreds of digital resources. Other short essays address the uses of history and how to avoid errors in thought, there are chapters on translation into and out of Chinese. Throughout the New Manual lists of basic terms give standard translations, in an interview with Carla Nappi, an historian of China at the University of British Columbia, Wilkinson discussed his experience in the field and the books background. He became interested in China as an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the early 1960s and he earned a PhD from Princeton University with a dissertation on late Qing dynasty markets and prices, but when he began teaching he still felt unprepared. He did not know, he recalled, what to tell his students about the Zhou or Shang dynasties. On a research fellowship at Harvard University, Wilkinson mentioned to John Fairbank, a senior Harvard scholar, Fairbank offered to publish them, and the 1973 Research Guide appeared in due course. Wilkinson served in Beijing as the European Union Ambassador to China from 1994 to 2001, after he retired as EU Ambassador, Harvard invited Wilkinson to teach Chinese history, including a graduate seminar on sinological methods. For the next fifteen years he worked on the New Manual, in this way he was able to make full use of the Harvard-Yenching Library as well as all the scholarly resources that Beijing has to offer. James Cole published a supplement, Updating Wilkinson, the jacket of the 1998 Chinese History, A Manual was blue and designed to resemble a traditional Chinese book cover. The preface to the revised and enlarged edition, published in 2000, with a yellow cover, the New Manual was in effect a new work. Although adding a million words the typeface was shrunk and the page composition adjusted to keep the size to a single volume, the 2000 edition had established the manual as the top-selling title in the Harvard-Yenching Monograph Series. A record that the New Manual has maintained, the preliminary version of the manual was published by Harvards East Asia Research Center. From 1998 all later editions have been published by the Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and it is very much a unique resource for further inquiry. Professor Nappi judged the New Manual, “in every way, absolutely indispensable to work in Chinese history,1.6 billion minutes separate us from the Zhou conquest of the Shang, he informs us at the beginning of his Chinese History, A New Manual. Undaunted, he sets out to describe just about everything that has happened since
