1.
Logogram
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In written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or phrase. Chinese characters and Japanese kanji are logograms, some Egyptian hieroglyphs, the use of logograms in writing is called logography. A writing system that is based on logograms is called a logographic system, in alphabets and syllabaries, individual written characters represent sounds rather than concepts. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not necessarily have meaning by themselves, Writing language in this way is called phonemic orthography. Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems, the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, a more recent attempt is Zlango, intended for use in text messaging, currently including around 300 icons. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the domain is the syllable. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ duck and sȝ son, though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants and this can be illustrated with Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes, some morphemes are composed of more than one character, for example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū with the bug determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately, in Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse, a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king, in modern Mandarin, bimorphemic syllables are always written with two characters, for example 花儿 huār flower. These logograms, called hozwārishn, were dispensed with altogether after the Arab conquest of Persia, logograms are used in modern shorthand to represent common words. In addition, the numerals and mathematical symbols used in systems are logograms—1 one,2 two, + plus, = equals, and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for and and et, % for percent, # for number, § for section, $ for dollar, € for euro, £ for pound, ° for degree, @ for at, etc. All historical logographic systems include a dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component, called determinatives in the case of Egyptian and radicals in the case of Chinese. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters hanzi into six types by etymology. The first two types are single-body, meaning that the character was created independently of other characters, single-body pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms
2.
Oracle bone script
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The vast majority were found at the Yinxu site. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BCE or 1200 BCE. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c.1046 BCE, divining with milfoil became more common and it is also the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script. The term oracle bone was first coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing, because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script. As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty and it is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script, because of its mature nature. However, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered, the oracle bone script of the late Shang appears pictographic, as does its contemporary, the Shang writing on bronzes. The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period, additionally, the writing of characters in vertical columns, from top to bottom, is for the most part carried over from the bamboo books to oracle bone inscriptions. The vertical columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally ordered from right to left and this level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. Compare, for instance, the third and fourth graphs in the row below, without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented 豕 shĭ swine and 犬 quǎn dog respectively. By the late Shang oracle bone script, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds, and associative compounds were already common. Although it was a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script was not fully standardized, a graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. These irregularities persisted until the standardization of the script in the Qin dynasty. Of the thousands of characters found from all the fragments so far. One reason for this is that components of certain oracle bone script characters may differ in later script forms, such differences may be accounted for by character simplification and/or by later generations misunderstanding the original graph, which had evolved beyond recognition. Another reason is that some characters exist only in oracle bone script, in such cases, context - when available - may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character. One good example is shown in the fragment below, labeled oracle bone script for Spring, the top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an isosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the oracle bone script character for 王 wáng, the numbers of oracle bones with inscriptions contemporaneous with the end of Shang and the beginning of Zhou is relatively few in number compared with the entire corpus of Shang inscriptions
3.
Seal script
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Seal script is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, arising in the Warring State of Qin, there are two uses of the word seal script, the Large or Great Seal script and the lesser or Small Seal Script, the latter is also called simply seal script. The Large Seal script was originally a later, vague Han dynasty reference to writing of the Qin system similar to and it has also been used to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bones as well. There were several different variants of seal script which developed in each kingdom independently during the warring state period and spring, the birds and worms script was used in the Kingdoms of Wu, Chu, and Yue. It was found on several artifacts including the Spear of Fuchai, on one side of the blade of Goujian, eight characters were written in an ancient script. The script was found to be the one called 鳥蟲文 birds and worms characters, initial analysis of the text deciphered six of the characters, 越王 and 自作用劍. As a southern state, Chu was close to the Wu-Yue influences, Chu produced broad bronze swords that were similar to Wuyue swords, but not as intricate. Chu also used the Birds and Worms style, which was borrowed by the Wu, the script of the Qin system had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance and this was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian and their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish. The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin, not long after, however, the Shuowen Jiezi, the lifework of Xu Shen, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, entries are categorized under 540 section headers. It has been anticipated that the Small Seal script will some day be encoded in Unicode, codepoints U+34000 to U+368FF have been tentatively allocated. Old Texts Phags-pa Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Qin Yun Song, Big Seal Script Banner Script translation Richard Sears on seal script
4.
Clerical script
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Due to its high legibility to modern readers, it is still used for artistic flavor in a variety of functional applications such as headlines, signboards, and advertisements. This legibility stems from the rectilinear structure, a feature shared with modern regular script. Clerical script is popularly but mistakenly thought to have developed or been invented in the early Han dynasty from the seal script. Another traditional account is that it was invented by government scribes, in particular involved in the justice. Furthermore, rather than being established by government scribes, it has argued that clerical script was already in popular use. The popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing became more widespread. The Qín bamboo script is an example of this transition, having evolved from vulgar Qín writing. The etymology of the Chinese name for the script lìshū is uncertain, during Warring States, proto-clerical script emerged in casual, informal usage. During the Qin dynasty it appears to have also used in some scribal capacity. Thus, the evolution from clerical script to standard script was not a step as commonly supposed. Translation of 文字學概論 by Mattos and Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
5.
Jurchen script
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Jurchen script was the writing system used to write the Jurchen language, the language of the Jurchen people who created the Jin Empire in northeastern China in the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Chinese, the script has only been decoded to a small extent. The Jurchens were the ancestors of the Manchu people and spoke a related to the Manchu language. The Jurchen script, however, is not ancestral to the Manchu script, according to the Sino-Jurchen glossary, the Jurchen script contains 720 characters. These comprise a mixture of logograms, which represent whole words without any element, and phonograms. Compound words consisting of two or more characters were also used, the Jurchen characters have a system of radicals similar to Chinese characters and are ordered according to radical and stroke count. The Jurchen script is part of the Chinese family of scripts, after the Jurchen rebelled against the Khitan Liao Dynasty and established the new Jin dynasty in 1115, they were using the Khitan script. In 1119 or 1120, Wanyan Xiyin, the chancellor of the early Jin Empire, acting on the orders of the first emperor, Wanyan Aguda, invented the first Jurchen script, known as the large script. The second version, the small script, was promulgated in 1138 by the Xizong Emperor. According to the Jin Shi, in 1145 the small script characters were used officially the first time. There is no information about any original books that were written in Jurchen. The translation program started in 1164, among the translations were Confucian and Taoist classics, histories, unfortunately, not even a single fragment of any of the books survived. Most of the samples of the Jurchen writing available to researchers are epigraphic ones, as well as a few short inscriptions on seals, mirrors, ceramics, graffiti. A total of nine epigraphic inscriptions are known so far and it is apparently an abbreviated translation of the Chinese text on the front of the stele. However, the inscription from Qingyuan in northern Korea is now thought to be older. The only inscription dating from after the end of the Jin dynasty is the one on the stele erected in 1413 by the Ming eunuch admiral Yishiha on the Tyr Cliff, on the lower Amur River. No paper or silk manuscripts in Jurchen were known until 1968, kychanov among the Tangut papers in the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies. It is written on two sheets of paper and dates to 1217, writing in 1990, Herbert Franke describes the Leningrad document as unique and not yet deciphered
6.
Simplified Chinese characters
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Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
7.
Tangut script
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The Tangut script was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia Dynasty. According to the latest count,5863 Tangut characters are known, as in Chinese calligraphy, regular, running, cursive and seal scripts were used in Tangut writing. According to the History of Song, the script was designed by the high-ranking official Yeli Renrong under Western Xia Emperor Li Yuanhaos supervision in 1036, the script was invented in a short period of time, and was put into use quickly. Government schools were founded to teach the script, official documents were written in the script. A great number of Buddhist scriptures were translated from Tibetan and Chinese, although the dynasty collapsed in 1227, the script continued to be used for another few centuries. The last example of the script occurs on a pair of Tangut dharani pillars found at Baoding,6,125 characters of the Tangut script were included in Unicode version 9.0 in June 2016 in the Tangut block. 755 Radicals and components used in the study of Tangut were added to the Tangut Components block. Tangut characters can be divided into two classes, simple and composite, the simple characters can be either semantic or phonetic. None of the Tangut characters are pictographic, while some of the Chinese characters were at the time of their creation, most composite characters comprise two components. A few comprise three or four, a component can be a simple character, or part of a composite character. The composite characters include semantic-semantic ones and semantic-phonetic ones, a few special composite characters were made for transliterating Chinese and Sanskrit. There are a number of pairs of special composite characters worth noting, the members of such a pair have the same components, only the location of the components in them is different. The members of such a pair have very similar meanings, tangutology List of Tangutologists List of Tangut books Chinese family of scripts Grinstead, Eric. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series No.10, Tangut, in Peter T. Daniels & William Bright, The Worlds Writing Systems, New York, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-507993-0, pp. 228–9. Seika moji, sono kaidoku no purosesu, lüelun Xixia wenzi de gouzao, in Minzu yuwen lunji, Beijing, Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, pp. 192–226. Tangut script at Omniglot Tangut script, by Andrew West Sample Tangut characters at Mojikyo 大西 磨希子・北本 朝展，『文字が語りかける民族意識：カラホトと西夏文字』，ディジタル・シルクロード 史金波
8.
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
