1.
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
2.
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
3.
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
4.
Typeface
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In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font was a set of type, one piece for each glyph. In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, font is frequently synonymous with typeface, in particular, the use of vector or outline fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. The word font derives from Middle French fonte melted, a casting, the term refers to the process of casting metal type at a type foundry. In a manual printing house the word font would refer to a set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. Unlike a digital typeface it would not include a definition of each character. A font when bought new would often be sold as 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase As, given the name upper and lowercase because of which case the metal type was located in, otherwise known as majuscule and minuscule. The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. Some metal type characters required in typesetting, such as dashes, spaces and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, line spacing is still often called leading, because the strips used for line spacing were made of lead. In the 1880s–90s, hot lead typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece or in entire lines of type at one time. In European alphabetic scripts, i. e. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, the main properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle. The regular or standard font is sometimes labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. The keyword for the default, regular case is often omitted for variants and never repeated, otherwise it would be Bulmer regular italic, Bulmer bold regular, Roman can also refer to the language coverage of a font, acting as a shorthand for Western European. Different fonts of the same typeface may be used in the work for various degrees of readability and emphasis. The weight of a font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height. A typeface may come in fonts of many weights, from ultra-light to extra-bold or black, four to six weights are not unusual, many typefaces for office, web and non-professional use come with just a normal and a bold weight which are linked together. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers support faking a bolder font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset, the base weight differs among typefaces, that means one normal font may appear bolder than some other normal font. For example, fonts intended to be used in posters are often quite bold by default while fonts for long runs of text are rather light, therefore, weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font
5.
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
6.
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
7.
Bopomofo
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Zhuyin fuhao, Zhuyin or Bopomofo is a system of phonetic notation for the transcription of spoken Chinese, particularly the Mandarin dialect. The first two are traditional terms, whereas Bopomofo is the term, also used by the ISO. Consisting of 37 characters and four marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Zhuyin was introduced in China by the Republican Government in the 1910s and used alongside the Wade-Giles system, the Wade system was replaced by Hanyu Pinyin in 1958 by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China, and at the International Organization for Standardization in 1982. The informal name Bopomofo is derived from the first four syllables in the ordering of available syllables in Mandarin Chinese. The four Bopomofo characters that correspond to these syllables are placed first in a list of these characters. The same sequence is used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems. The original formal name of the system was Guóyīn Zìmǔ and Zhùyīn Zìmǔ and it was later renamed Zhùyīn Fúhào, meaning phonetic symbols. In official documents, Zhuyin is occasionally called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I, in English translations, the system is often also called either Chu-yin or the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. A romanized phonetic system was released in 1984 as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Wu Zhihui from 1912 to 1913, created a system called Zhuyin Zimu, which was based on Zhang Binglins shorthand. A draft was released on July 11,1913, by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education and it was later renamed first Guoyin Zimu and then, in April 1930, Zhuyin Fuhao. The last renaming addressed fears that the system might independently replace Chinese characters. Zhuyin remains the predominant phonetic system in teaching reading and writing in school in Taiwan. It is also one of the most popular ways to enter Chinese characters into computers and smartphones, in elementary school, particularly in the lower years, Chinese characters in textbooks are often annotated with Zhuyin as ruby characters as an aid to learning. Additionally, one newspaper in Taiwan, the Mandarin Daily News. In teaching Mandarin, Taiwan institutions and some communities use Zhuyin as a learning tool. The Zhuyin characters were created by Zhang Binglin, and taken mainly from regularised forms of ancient Chinese characters, the modern readings of which contain the sound that each letter represents. It is to be noted that the first consonants are articulated from the front of the mouth to the back, /b/, /p/, /m/, /f/, /d/, /t/, /n/, Zhuyin is written in the same stroke order rule as Chinese characters
8.
Song dynasty
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The Song dynasty was an era of Chinese history that began in 960 and continued until 1279. It succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, coincided with the Liao and Western Xia dynasties and it was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or true paper money nationally and the first Chinese government to establish a permanent standing navy. This dynasty also saw the first known use of gunpowder, as well as the first discernment of true north using a compass, the Song dynasty is divided into two distinct periods, Northern and Southern. During the Northern Song, the Song capital was in the city of Bianjing. The Southern Song refers to the period after the Song lost control of its half to the Jurchen Jin dynasty in the Jin–Song Wars. During this time, the Song court retreated south of the Yangtze, the Southern Song dynasty considerably bolstered its naval strength to defend its waters and land borders and to conduct maritime missions abroad. To repel the Jin, and later the Mongols, the Song developed revolutionary new military technology augmented by the use of gunpowder, in 1234, the Jin dynasty was conquered by the Mongols, who took control of northern China, maintaining uneasy relations with the Southern Song. Möngke Khan, the fourth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire and his younger brother Kublai Khan was proclaimed the new Great Khan, though his claim was only partially recognized by the Mongols in the west. In 1271, Kublai Khan was proclaimed the Emperor of China, after two decades of sporadic warfare, Kublai Khans armies conquered the Song dynasty in 1279. The Mongol invasion led to a reunification under the Yuan dynasty, the population of China doubled in size during the 10th and 11th centuries. The Northern Song census recorded a population of roughly 50 million, much like the Han and this data is found in the Standard Histories. However, it is estimated that the Northern Song had a population of some 100 million people and this dramatic increase of population fomented an economic revolution in pre-modern China. The expansion of the population, growth of cities, and the emergence of a national economy led to the withdrawal of the central government from direct involvement in economic affairs. The lower gentry assumed a role in grassroots administration and local affairs. Appointed officials in county and provincial centers relied upon the gentry for their services, sponsorship. Social life during the Song was vibrant, citizens gathered to view and trade precious artworks, the populace intermingled at public festivals and private clubs, and cities had lively entertainment quarters. The spread of literature and knowledge was enhanced by the expansion of woodblock printing. Technology, science, philosophy, mathematics, and engineering flourished over the course of the Song, although the institution of the civil service examinations had existed since the Sui dynasty, it became much more prominent in the Song period
9.
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
10.
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
11.
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
12.
Kana
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Kana are syllabic Japanese scripts, a part of the Japanese writing system contrasted with the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji. There are three scripts, modern cursive hiragana, formerly known as a womens script, modern angular katakana. Hentaigana are historical variants of modern standard hiragana, in modern Japanese, hiragana and katakana have directly corresponding character sets. Katakana with a few additions is also used to write Ainu, Taiwanese kana was used in Taiwanese Hokkien as a gloss for Chinese characters during the Japanese administration of Taiwan. Each kana character corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language and this is always CV, such as ka, ki, etc. or V, such as a, i, etc. with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. Due to the number of phonemes in Japanese, as well as the relatively rigid syllable structure. The following table reads, in order, as a, i, u, e, o, then ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. N appears on its own at the end, there are presently no kana for ye, yi or wu, as corresponding syllables do not occur in Japanese natively. There was an archaic Hiragana ye, derived from the manyōgana kanji 江, which is encoded into Unicode at codepoint U+1B001, while there was a katakana wu, its usage ended due to that sound never having existed in Japanese, and it does not currently exist in Unicode. The sound is believed to have existed in pre-Classical Japanese, mostly prior to the advent of kana and it is believed that e and ye become both pronounced mostly as ye, and that the pronunciation e surpassed ye during the Edo period. In modern orthography, if necessary, may be written as いぇ, however, this usage is limited and nonstandard. Si, ti, tu, hu, wi, we and wo are often romanized respectively as shi, chi, tsu, fu, i, e and o instead, according to contemporary pronunciation. Syllables beginning with the consonants, and are spelled with kana from the corresponding unvoiced columns. Syllables beginning with are spelled with kana from the h column, zi, di, and du are often transcribed into English as ji, ji, and zu instead, respectively, according to contemporary pronunciation. Usually, are represented respectively by バ, ビ, ブ, ベ, and ボ, for example, in such as バイオリン, but the distinction can be preserved by using ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴ, ヴェ. Note that ヴ did not have a JIS-encoded Hiragana form until JIS X0213, syllables beginning with palatalized consonants are spelled with one of the seven consonantal kana from the i row followed by small ya, yu or yo. There are no digraphs for the y and w columns. The digraphs are usually transcribed with three letters, leaving out the i, CyV, for example, きゃ is transcribed as kya. si+y* and ti+y* are often transcribed sh* and ch* instead of sy* and ty*
13.
Romanization of Japanese
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The romanization of Japanese is the application of the Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is referred to in English as rōmaji. There are several different romanization systems, the three main ones are Hepburn romanization, Kunrei-shiki romanization, and Nihon-shiki romanization. Variants of the Hepburn system are the most widely used, Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Chinese and syllabic scripts which also ultimately derive from Chinese characters. It is also used to transliterate Japanese terms in text written in English on topics related to Japan, such as linguistics, literature, history, and culture. Rōmaji is the most common way to input Japanese into word processors and computers, all Japanese who have attended elementary school since World War II have been taught to read and write romanized Japanese. The word rōmaji literally means Roman letters, and in Japan it is often used to refer to the Latin alphabet itself than to any specific form of romanized Japanese. The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on the Portuguese orthography and it was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Yajiro. Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography. The most useful of these books for the study of early modern Japanese pronunciation and early attempts at romanization was the Nippo jisho, in general, the early Portuguese system was similar to Nihon-shiki in its treatment of vowels. The latter continued to be printed and read after the suppression of Christianity in Japan, the Hepburn system included representation of some sounds that have since changed. The Nihon-shiki romanization was an outgrowth of that movement, several Japanese texts were published entirely in rōmaji during this period, but it failed to catch on. Today, the use of Nihon-shiki for writing Japanese is advocated by the Oomoto sect, during the Allied occupation of Japan, the government of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers made it official policy to romanize Japanese. However, that failed and a more moderate attempt at Japanese script reform followed. Hepburn romanization generally follows English phonology with Romance vowels and it is an intuitive method of showing Anglophones the pronunciation of a word in Japanese. It was standardized in the USA as American National Standard System for the Romanization of Japanese, Hepburn is the most common romanization system in use today, especially in the English-speaking world. The Revised Hepburn system of romanization uses a macron to indicate long vowels. For example, the name じゅんいちろう, is written with the kana characters ju-n-i-chi-ro-u, without the apostrophe, it would not be possible to distinguish this correct reading from the incorrect ju-ni-chi-ro-u
14.
Chinese characters
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Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, and sometimes also in English, they are called hànzì. They have been adapted to write a number of languages including, Japanese, where they are known as kanji, Korean, where they are known as hanja. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters, in English, they are sometimes called Han characters. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world, Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan,2,136 are taught through secondary school, the characters used in Japan are distinct from those used in China in many respects. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, in South Korea, when Chinese characters are used they are of the traditional variant and are almost identical to those used in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Old Chinese, most words were monosyllabic and there was a correspondence between characters and words. Rather, a character almost always corresponds to a syllable that is also a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes. Modern Chinese has many homophones, thus the same syllable may be represented by many characters. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations and these foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations, and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic, increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day. The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones and it has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables. The most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, words have also been created by adding affixes, reduplication and borrowing from other languages. Polysyllabic words are written with one character per syllable
15.
Chinese script styles
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In Chinese calligraphy, Chinese characters can be written according to five major styles. These styles are intrinsically linked to the history of Chinese script, the Japanese syllabaries of katakana and hiragana are used in calligraphy, the katakana were derived from the shapes of regular script characters and hiragana from those of cursive script. In Korea, the post-Korean War period saw the use of hangul. The seal script is the script of the Qín system of writing. Today, this style of Chinese writing is used predominantly in seals, most people today cannot read the seal script, so it is considered an ‘ancient’ script, generally not used outside the fields of calligraphy and carved seals. Compared with the seal script, forms are strikingly rectilinear, however, some curvature. Seal script tended towards uniformity of stroke width, but clerical script gave the brush freer rein, most noticeable is the dramatically flared tail of one dominant horizontal or downward-diagonal stroke, especially that to the lower right. This characteristic stroke has famously been called silkworm head and wild goose tail due to its distinctive shape, the clerical script remains common as a typeface used for decorative purposes, but other than in artistic calligraphy, adverts and signage, it is not commonly written. The semi-cursive script approximates normal handwriting in which strokes and, more rarely, in writing in the semi-cursive script, the brush leaves the paper less often than in the regular script. Characters appear less angular and rounder, in general, an educated person in China or Japan can read characters written in the semi-cursive script with relative ease, but may have occasional difficulties with certain idiosyncratic shapes. Entire characters may be written without lifting the brush from the paper at all, strokes are modified or eliminated completely to facilitate smooth writing and to create a beautiful, abstract appearance. Characters are highly rounded and soft in appearance, with a lack of angular lines. The cursive script is the source of Japanese hiragana, as well as many modern simplified forms in Simplified Chinese characters and it emerged from a neatly written, early period semi-cursive form of clerical script. As the name suggests, the script is regular, with each of the strokes placed slowly and carefully. The regular script is also the most easily and widely recognized style, as it is the script to which children in East Asian countries and beginners of East Asian languages are first introduced. In the regular script samples to the right, the characters in the column are in Traditional Chinese while those to the right are in Simplified Chinese. These styles are not taught in Japanese calligraphy schools. Chinese and Korean people can read edomoji, but the style has a distinct Japanese feel to it and it is therefore commonly used in China and Korea to advertise Japanese restaurants
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Neolithic signs in China
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However, only isolated instances of these symbols have been found, and they show no indication of representing speech or of the non-pictorial processes that a writing system requires. These sites include those pertaining to the cultures of Yangshao, Liangzhu, Majiayao, proponents of the view that they are early Chinese writing tend to see evidence in comparisons of individual signs with individual oracle bone script characters. Others believe that Neolithic signs are part of an incipient semiotic system that led to the development of mature Chinese writing. As Qiu explains, Only when symbols. are consciously used to record words used to form sentences is there a true sign that the development of script has begun. It is still safe to conclude that the earliest known undisputed examples of writing in China are the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty. The earliest of Chinas Neolithic signs come from Jiahu, Dadiwan, Jiahu is a Neolithic site in Wuyang County, Henan Province, in the basin of the Yellow River, dated to 6600–6200 BCE. This site has yielded turtle plastrons that were pitted and inscribed with markings known as the Jiahu symbols, what did persist through these long periods was the idea of sign use. We should not assume there was a single path or pace for the development of a script. It seems astonishing that they would be connected, We cant call it writing until we have more evidence, Dadiwan is a Neolithic site discovered in Qinan County, in the province of Gansu. Its earliest phase has yielded symbols painted on the surfaces of pottery basins. More recent excavations there have also uncovered a handful of Neolithic symbols and these are reputed to be similar to some of the oracle bone characters, which is to be expected given that the oracle bones, which are true writing, still retain a significant pictorial flavor. As the Banpo symbols were discovered early and are relatively numerous. Still others feel they may be ownership mark or potters marks, finally, some scholars sound a note of caution, calling such conclusions unwarranted or premature. This is because all the Banpo-type symbols occur singly, on pottery and pottery fragments, unlike written words, thus, there is no context from which to conclude that the symbols are actually being used to represent language. Furthermore, there is no evidence of the phonetic loan usage, thus, leading scholar Qiu Xigui argues that, What these symbols represent definitely cannot be a fully formed system of writing, this much is quite clear. Is there any possibility that they are primitive writing and we simply possess no basis for saying that they were already being used to record language. Nor viewed from the standpoint of the symbols of this type that continued to be used following the creation of Chinese script do they even resemble script. Quite a number of people, basing themselves on the Banpo-type symbols, have said that the history of Chinese writing goes back more than 6,000 years
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Oracle bone script
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The vast majority were found at the Yinxu site. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BCE or 1200 BCE. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c.1046 BCE, divining with milfoil became more common and it is also the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script. The term oracle bone was first coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing, because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script. As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty and it is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script, because of its mature nature. However, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered, the oracle bone script of the late Shang appears pictographic, as does its contemporary, the Shang writing on bronzes. The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period, additionally, the writing of characters in vertical columns, from top to bottom, is for the most part carried over from the bamboo books to oracle bone inscriptions. The vertical columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally ordered from right to left and this level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. Compare, for instance, the third and fourth graphs in the row below, without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented 豕 shĭ swine and 犬 quǎn dog respectively. By the late Shang oracle bone script, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds, and associative compounds were already common. Although it was a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script was not fully standardized, a graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. These irregularities persisted until the standardization of the script in the Qin dynasty. Of the thousands of characters found from all the fragments so far. One reason for this is that components of certain oracle bone script characters may differ in later script forms, such differences may be accounted for by character simplification and/or by later generations misunderstanding the original graph, which had evolved beyond recognition. Another reason is that some characters exist only in oracle bone script, in such cases, context - when available - may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character. One good example is shown in the fragment below, labeled oracle bone script for Spring, the top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an isosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the oracle bone script character for 王 wáng, the numbers of oracle bones with inscriptions contemporaneous with the end of Shang and the beginning of Zhou is relatively few in number compared with the entire corpus of Shang inscriptions
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Chinese bronze inscriptions
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Early bronze inscriptions were almost always cast, while later inscriptions were often engraved after the bronze was cast. The bronze inscriptions are one of the earliest scripts in the Chinese family of scripts, for the early Western Zhou to early Warring States period, the bulk of writing which has been unearthed has been in the form of bronze inscriptions. As a result, it is common to refer to the variety of scripts of this period as bronze script, the term usually includes bronze inscriptions of the preceding Shang dynasty as well. In addition, artistic scripts also emerged in the late Spring and Autumn to early Warring States, such as Bird Script, also called Bird Seal Script, and Worm Script. 寅 Yín in Four Different Scripts on Shang–Zhou bronzes Of the abundant Chinese ritual bronze artifacts extant today and these have been periodically unearthed ever since their creation, and have been systematically collected and studied since at least the Song dynasty. Examples, Of the 12,000 inscribed bronzes extant today, roughly 3,000 date from the Shang dynasty,6,000 from the Zhou dynasty, and the final 3,000 from the Qin and Han dynasties. As in the oracle bone script, characters could be written facing left or right, turned 90 degrees, for instance, and both represent the modern character xū 戌, while and are both hóu 侯 marquis. This was true of normal as well as extra complex identificational graphs, such as the hǔ 虎 tiger clan emblem at right and these inscriptions are almost all cast, and are relatively short and simple. Western Zhou dynasty characters basically continue from the Shang writing system, although most are not pictographs in function, the early Western Zhou bronze inscriptions have been described as more pictographic in flavor than those of subsequent periods. During the Western Zhou, many begin to show signs of simplification and linearization, with the result being a decrease in pictographic quality. Some flexibility in orientation of graphs continues in the Western Zhou, the graphs start to become slightly more uniform in structure, size and arrangement by the time of the third Zhou sovereign, King Kāng, and after the ninth, King Yì, this trend becomes more obvious. Some have used the term large seal to refer to the script of this period. This term dates back to the Han dynasty, when seal script, in the Eastern Zhou, the various states initially continued using the same forms as in the late Western Zhou. However, regional forms then began to diverge stylistically as early as the Spring and Autumn period, in the same areas, in the late Spring and Autumn to early Warring States, scripts which embellished basic structures with decorative forms such as birds or worms also appeared. Some bronzes of the period were incised in a rough, casual manner and it is thought that these reflected the popular writing of the time which coexisted with the formal script. Seals have been found from the Warring States period, mostly cast in bronze and these form an additional, valuable resource for the study of Chinese bronze inscriptions. It is also from this period that the first surviving bamboo, in the early Warring States period, typical bronze inscriptions were similar in content and length to those in the late Western Zhou to Spring and Autumn period. One of the most famous sets of bronzes ever discovered dates to the early Warring States, the total length of the inscriptions on this set was almost 2,800 characters
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Seal script
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Seal script is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, arising in the Warring State of Qin, there are two uses of the word seal script, the Large or Great Seal script and the lesser or Small Seal Script, the latter is also called simply seal script. The Large Seal script was originally a later, vague Han dynasty reference to writing of the Qin system similar to and it has also been used to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bones as well. There were several different variants of seal script which developed in each kingdom independently during the warring state period and spring, the birds and worms script was used in the Kingdoms of Wu, Chu, and Yue. It was found on several artifacts including the Spear of Fuchai, on one side of the blade of Goujian, eight characters were written in an ancient script. The script was found to be the one called 鳥蟲文 birds and worms characters, initial analysis of the text deciphered six of the characters, 越王 and 自作用劍. As a southern state, Chu was close to the Wu-Yue influences, Chu produced broad bronze swords that were similar to Wuyue swords, but not as intricate. Chu also used the Birds and Worms style, which was borrowed by the Wu, the script of the Qin system had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance and this was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian and their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish. The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin, not long after, however, the Shuowen Jiezi, the lifework of Xu Shen, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, entries are categorized under 540 section headers. It has been anticipated that the Small Seal script will some day be encoded in Unicode, codepoints U+34000 to U+368FF have been tentatively allocated. Old Texts Phags-pa Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Qin Yun Song, Big Seal Script Banner Script translation Richard Sears on seal script
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Bird-worm seal script
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Bird-worm seal script is a type of ancient seal script originated in China. The Chinese character 鸟 means bird, the Chinese character 虫 means any creature that looks like a worm, including invertebrate worms and reptiles such as snakes and lizards. The character 篆 means seal script, other names for this kind of seal script, Niao-Chong Script. The Chinese character 书 here means script, the Chinese character 文 here means character. There are two subcategories, Bird seal script In this style, some parts of characters have a bird-like head, the bird style sign is a combination of two parts, a complete seal script character and one bird shape. Worm seal script In this style, some or all the strokes are winding, thus producing a worm-like character and this kind of seal script first appeared in the middle era of the Spring and Autumn period. It then became popular during the late Spring and Autumn period and it was often seen in southern kingdoms, such as the Wu Kingdom, Yue Kingdom, Chu Kingdom, Cai Kingdom, Xu Kingdom, and the Song Kingdom. Each state in China during the Warring States Period had its own variety of script, the bird seal script is often seen on bronze and iron antiques of the Yue Kingdom. The script was used on bronze and iron weapons, like swords, the characters engraved on the famous Sword of Goujian provide a fine example. A few examples of the seal script can be seen in or on containers. The bird seal script was used occasionally in the Han Dynasty seals, as well as a few eaves tiles. The worm seal script is more common, and probably originated from the Wu Kingdom or Chu Kingdom, examples can be seen on antique bronze weapons, containers, jades, and seals, and constructional or decorative parts like tiles, etc. The characters on the famous Spear of Fuchai would be an example of this category of seal script. Bronze inscriptions Seal script Large Seal Script Small Seal Script Seal Shuowen Jiezi, by Xu Shen. 《鸟虫书通考》, by CAO Jinyan, 《鸟虫篆大鉴》, by Xu Gupu, ISBN 7-80569-368-4, Shanghai Bookstore Press
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Large seal script
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The term is in contrast to the name of the official script of the Qin dynasty, which is often called Small or Lesser Seal Script. However, due to the lack of precision in the term, scholars often avoid it and instead refer more specifically to the provenance of particular examples of writing. At that time, there was knowledge of even older, often more complex graphs which differed from the Qin seal script forms. As a result, two terms emerged to describe them, greater seal script for the complex, earlier forms. It is only recently that the term greater seal script has been extended to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bone script. Xu Shen, the author of Shuowen, included these when they differed from the structures of the Qin seal script and this name comes from the name of the book and not the name of a script. Thus, it is not correct to refer to the ca.800 BCE Zhoū dynasty script as Zhòuwén, similarly, the Zhòu graphs are merely examples of large seal script when that term is used in a broad sense. Seal Script Small Seal Script Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Translation of 文字學概要 by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
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Small seal script
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Small Seal Script, formerly romanized as Hsiao-chuan and also known as Seal Script, Lesser Seal Script and Qin Script, is an archaic form of Chinese calligraphy. It was standardized and promulgated as a standard by Li Si, prime minister under Shi Huangdi. Hence coaches, roads, currency, laws, weights, measures, characters which were different from those found in Qin were discarded and Li Sis small seal characters became the standard for all regions within the empire. This policy came in about 220 BC, the year after Qins unification of the Chinese states, the small cursive form clerical script came after the small script. Li Sis compilation is only through Chinese commentaries through the centuries. It is stated to contain 3,300 characters, small Seal Script has been proposed for inclusion in Unicode
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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
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Regular script
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Regular script, also called 正楷, 真書, 楷體 and 正書, is the newest of the Chinese script styles, hence most common in modern writings and publications. Regular script came into being between the Eastern Hàn and Cáo Wèi dynasties, and its first known master was Zhōng Yáo and he is known as the “father of regular script”, and his famous works include the Xuānshì Biǎo, Jiànjìzhí Biǎo, and Lìmìng Biǎo. Qiu Xigui describes the script in Zhong’s Xuānshì Biǎo as, …clearly emerging from the womb of early period semi-cursive script. However, other than a few literati, very few wrote in this script at the time, most continued writing in neo-clerical script, or a form of semi-cursive. Thus, regular script has parentage in early semi-cursive as well as neo-clerical scripts and those in between are usually called medium regular script, or zhongkai. What these are relative to other characters, the Eight Principles of Yong are said to contain a variety of most of the strokes found in regular script. The most common printed typeface styles Ming and sans-serif are based on the structure of regular script, the Japanese textbook typefaces are based on regular script, but modified so that they appear to be written with a pencil or pen. They also follow the character forms prescribed in the Jōyō kanji. Zhuyin Fuhao characters, although not true Chinese characters, are always written with regular script strokes. Translation of 文字學概論 by Mattos and Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, regular Script tao te king CHAPTER LVII More on Standard Script In English, at BeyondCalligraphy. com
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Cursive script (East Asia)
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Cursive script, often mistranslated as grass script, is a style of Chinese calligraphy. Cursive script is faster to write than other styles, but difficult to read for those unfamiliar with it and it functions primarily as a kind of shorthand script or calligraphic style. People who can read standard or printed forms of Chinese may not be able to comprehend this script, the character 書 means script in this context, and the character 草 means quick, rough or sloppy. Thus, the name of this script is literally rough script or sloppy script, the same character 草 appears in this sense in the noun rough draft, and the verb to draft. The other indirectly related meaning of the character 草 is grass, cursive script originated in China during the Han dynasty through the Jin period, in two phases. First, a form of cursive developed as a cursory way to write the popular. Faster ways to write characters developed through four mechanisms, omitting part of a graph, merging strokes together, replacing portions with abbreviated forms, or modifying stroke styles. This evolution can best be seen on extant bamboo and wooden slats from the period, on which the use of early cursive, modern cursive evolved from this older cursive in the Wei Kingdom to Jin dynasty with influence from the semi-cursive and standard styles. Beside zhāngcǎo and the cursive, there is the wild cursive which is even more cursive. When it was developed by Zhang Xu and Huaisu in the Tang dynasty, cursive, in this style, is no longer significant in legibility but rather in artistry. Cursive scripts can be divided into the style where each character is separate. Many of the simplified Chinese characters are modeled on the forms of the cursive forms of the corresponding characters. Cursive script forms of Chinese characters are also the origin of the Japanese hiragana script, which developed from cursive forms of the manyōgana script. In Japan, cursive script was considered to be suitable for women, and was called women’s script, whereas the clerical style was considered to be suitable for men, the Art of Japanese Calligraphy,1973, author Yujiro Nakata, publisher Weatherhill/Heibonsha, ISBN 0-8348-1013-1. Translation of 文字學概要 by Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
26.
Imitation Song
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Imitation Song is a style of Chinese typefaces modeled after a type style in Linan in the Southern Song Dynasty. They are technically a type of regular script typeface, the name of this kind of typeface varies across regions that use Chinese characters. In Chinese, it is called fǎng Sòngtǐ, in Japanese, it is called Sōchōtai. Characteristics of imitation Song typefaces include, The basic structure of regular script, relatively straight strokes, with horizontal strokes slanting up slightly. Low stroke width variation between horizontal and vertical strokes, with strokes usually being relatively thin, many publishers were established in Linan, including Chén zhái shūjí bù established by Chen Qi, from which publications used a distinct style of regular script with orderly, straight strokes. Modern typefaces of this style are classified as imitation Song typefaces
27.
East Asian gothic typeface
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Gothic typefaces are a type style characterised by strokes of even thickness and lack of decorations akin to sans serif styles in Western typography. It is the second most commonly used style in East Asian typography, similar to Ming and Song typefaces, sans-serif typefaces were designed for printing, but they were also designed for legibility. They are commonly used in headlines, signs, and video applications, square sans, the classic sans-serif style in which the lines of the characters have squared ends. Overlapping square sans - This style is similar to the square sans, but in places where strokes overlap, square new book - Uses narrow horizontal and thick vertical strokes, similar to typefaces such as Optima. Round sans, has rounded ends and corners to the lines of the characters, in some cases, short protruding stroke ends at intersections are eliminated to make glyphs look rounder. This is the style of typeface used for Japanese road signs, overlapping round sans - This is similar to the round sans, but in places where strokes overlap, a margin is inserted between the strokes to distinguish the strokes. Rounded new book - Uses narrow horizontal and thick strokes, along with rounded line ends. Mixed art - Curved strokes are replaced by angled strokes with sharp or round corners, in Japanese computing, the use of sans-serif typefaces is common, with a number of default system fonts being sans-serif. Also, many Korean computing environments use Gulim which includes soft curves but is a sans-serif typeface, in Chinese versions of Microsoft Windows XP and older, the default interface typefaces are seriffed, which is inconsistent with the sans-serif styling use in most other regions of the product. Ming Nihongo resources, Japanese typefaces sci. lang. japan FAQ list of Japanese writing styles Sorting It All Out, The big font list in Windows Sorting It All Out, What are the fonts in Vista
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Stroke (CJKV character)
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CJKV strokes are the calligraphic strokes needed to write the Chinese characters in regular script used in East Asia. CJK strokes are the set of line patterns that may be arranged and combined to form Chinese characters in use in China, Japan, Korea. For example, is classified as a basic stroke because it is a stroke that forms a line moving in one direction. Is classified as a compound stroke because it is a stroke that forms a line that includes one or more abrupt changes in direction. This example is a sequence of three basic strokes written without lifting the instrument from the writing surface. CJK strokes are an attempt to identify and classify all single-stroke components that can be used to write Han radicals, there are some thirty distinct types of strokes recognized in Chinese characters, some of which are compound strokes made from basic strokes. The compound strokes comprise more than one movement of the writing instrument, a basic stroke is a single calligraphic mark moving in one direction across a writing surface. The following table lists a selection of basic strokes divided into two groups, simple and combining. Simple strokes can be written alone, combining strokes never occur alone, but must be paired with at least one other stroke forming a compound stroke. Thus, they are not in themselves individual strokes, note, the basic stroke Diǎn Dot is rarely a real dot. Instead it usually takes the shape of a small line pointing in one of several directions. A compound stroke is produced two or more basic strokes are combined in a single stroke written without lifting the writing instrument from the writing surface. The character 永 eternity described in detail below demonstrates one of these compound strokes. The centre line is a stroke that combines three stroke shapes in a single stroke. Basics for making compound strokes In most cases, concatenating basic strokes together form a compound stroke, for example, Shù combined with Gōu produce. A stroke naming convention sums the names of the basic strokes, an exception to this applies when a stroke makes a turn of 90°. For example, an initial Shù followed by an abrupt turn right produces, in the same way, an initial Shù followed by an abrupt turn right followed by a second turn down produces. Nearly all complex strokes can be named using this simple scheme, organization systems used to describe and differentiate strokes may include the use of roman letters, Chinese characters, numbers, or a combination of these devices
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Stroke order
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Stroke order refers to the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character are written. A stroke is a movement of an instrument on a writing surface. Chinese characters are used in forms in Chinese, Japanese, Korean. They are known as Hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Chinese characters are basically logograms constructed with strokes. Over the millennia a set of agreed rules have been developed by custom. This promotes writing speed, accuracy, and readability and this idea is particularly important since as learners progress, characters often get more complex. Since stroke order also aids learning and memorization, students are taught about it from a very early age in schools. The Eight Principles of Yong uses the single character 永, meaning eternity, in ancient China, the Jiǎgǔwén characters carved on ox scapula and tortoise plastrons showed no indication of stroke order. The characters show huge variations from piece to piece, sometimes even within one piece, during the divination ceremony, after the cracks were made, the characters were written with a brush on the shell or bone. In early Imperial China, the script was the Xiaozhuan style. About 220 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first to all of China, imposed Li Sis character uniformisation. Its graphs on old steles — some dating from 200 BC — reveal indications of the order of the time. However, stroke order could not yet be ascertained from the steles. The true starting point of order is the Lìshū style which is more regularized. Kǎishū style — still in use today — is more regularized, the stroke order 1000 years ago was similar to that toward the end of Imperial China. For example, the order of 广 is clear in the Kangxi dictionary of 1716, but in a modern book. The Kangxi and current shapes have tiny differences, while current stroke order is still the same, however, the stroke orders implied by the Kangxi dictionary are not necessarily similar to nowadays norm. Cursive styles such as Xíngshū and Cǎoshū show stroke order more clearly than Regular Script, the modern governments of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan have standardized official stroke orders to be taught in schools
30.
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
31.
Chinese character classification
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All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs and a number which are ideographic in origin, including compound ideographs, the other categories in the traditional system of classification are rebus or phonetic loan characters and derivative cognates. Modern scholars have proposed various revised systems, rejecting some of the traditional categories, traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories. This classification is known from Xu Shens second century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, the phrase first appeared in the Rites of Zhou, though it may not have originally referred to methods of creating characters. When Liu Xin edited the Rites, he glossed the term with a list of six types without examples. Slightly different lists of six types are given in the Book of Han of the first century CE, Xu Shen illustrated each of Lius six types with a pair of characters in the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi. The traditional classification is still taught but is no longer the focus of modern lexicographic practice, some categories are not clearly defined, nor are they mutually exclusive, the first four refer to structural composition, while the last two refer to usage. For this reason, some scholars view them as six principles of character formation rather than six types of characters. The earliest significant, extant corpus of Chinese characters is found on turtle shells and the bones of livestock, chiefly the scapula of oxen, for use in pyromancy and these ancient characters are called oracle bone script. Roughly a quarter of these characters are pictograms while the rest are either phono-semantic compounds or compound ideograms, despite millennia of change in shape, usage and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to the modern reader of Chinese. At present, more than 90% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, however, as both the meanings and pronunciations of the characters have changed over time, these components are no longer reliable guides to either meaning or pronunciation. The failure to recognize the historical and etymological role of these components leads to misclassification. A study of the earliest sources is necessary for an understanding of the true composition. Reconstructing Middle and Old Chinese phonology from the present in characters is part of Chinese historical linguistics. In Chinese, it is called Yinyunxue, roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms — stylised drawings of the objects they represent. These are generally among the oldest characters, a few, indicated below with their earliest forms, date back to oracle bones from the twelfth century BCE. The table below summarises the evolution of a few Chinese pictographic characters, where no modern simplified form is provided, it is identical to the traditional character. Ideograms express an idea through an iconic form, including iconic modification of pictographic characters
32.
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
33.
Kangxi Dictionary form
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Variant Chinese characters are Chinese characters that are homophones and synonyms. Almost all variants are allographs in most circumstances, such as casual handwriting, some contexts require the usage of certain variants, such as in textbook editing. Variant Chinese characters exist within and across all regions where Chinese characters are used, whether Chinese-speaking, Japanese-speaking, some of the governments of these regions have made efforts to standardize the use of variants, by establishing certain variants as standard. The choice of which variants to use has resulted in some divergence in the forms of Chinese characters used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, other variants are known as vulgar characters. Unicode deals with variant characters in a manner, as a result of the process of Han unification. Other variants that are more divergent are encoded in different code points, the following are some examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with different code points and language tags. The following are examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with the same code points. For a set of variants to be allographs, someone who could read one should be able to read the others, an example is 搜 and 蒐, where someone who is able to read 搜 might not be able to read 蒐. Another example is 㠯, which is a variant of 以, ryakuji Han unification Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants
34.
Xin Zixing
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The xin zixing is a standardized form of Chinese characters set in mainland China. Note, Viewing this section correctly requires certain standard typefaces to be installed, the xin zixing has adopted various vulgar variants of its characters. For example, 群 The orthodox form of character has 君 above 羊, i. e. 羣. 峰 The orthodox form of character has 山 above 夆, i. e. 峯. 令 The orthodox form of character has 亼 above 卩, i. e. 令. 青 幾 The orthodox form of character is 幾. 卬 The orthodox form of character is 卭. 印 The orthodox form of character is 印. 熙 The orthodox form of character is 煕. List of character forms of General Used Chinese characters for Publishing is the first version of xin zixing, List of General Used Characters in Modern Chinese defines the amount of Chinese characters that should be used and the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. The second version of xin zixing is defined in the appendix of Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao, List of Generally Used Standardized Chinese characters defines the amount of Chinese characters that should be used and the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. The third version of xin zixing is defined in the appendix of List of Generally Used Standardized Chinese characters
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Table of General Standard Chinese Characters
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The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters is a standard list of 8,105 Chinese characters. Of these,6,500 are designated as common, a reduction from the 7,000 in the earlier List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese, ministry of Education of the Peoples Republic of China. Central Peoples Government of the Peoples Republic of China, the New Table of General Standard Chinese Characters Issued. School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, Table of General Standard Chinese Characters mapped with code points
36.
Standard Form of National Characters
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The Standard Form of National Characters or the Standard Typefaces for Chinese Characters is the standardized form of Chinese characters set by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China. Note, Viewing this section correctly requires certain standard typefaces to be installed, the Standard Form of National Characters tends to adopt orthodox variants for most of its characters, but it still adopts many common vulgar variants. For example, 群 The orthodox form of character has 君 above 羊, i. e. 羣. 峰 The orthodox form of character has 山 above 夆, i. e. 峯. 裡 The orthodox form of character has 里 inside 衣, i. e. 裏. Other vulgar variants which are common in handwriting have been adopted. For example, 為 The orthodox form of character is 爲 with the second. 令 The orthodox form of character has 亼 above 卩, i. e. 令. Some forms which were standardized have never used or are extremely rare. For example, 寺 Before this standard was created, the horizontal stroke was almost always the longest. 有青能 Whenever there is a radical resembling ⺼ or 月 under other components, most standards write the first stroke as a vertical stroke, some components are differentiated where most other standards do not differentiate. For example, 朠脈 The radical on the left in 朠 is 月 and they are differentiated in that 月 has two horizontal strokes where ⺼ has two dots resembling 冫. 草夢 The radical at the top of 草 is 艹, while the radical at the top of 夢 is 卝 and they are differentiated in that the horizontal strokes of 卝 do not pass through the vertical strokes. 次冰 The radical on the left in 次 is 二, while the radical on the left in 冰 is 冫. 冬致瓊 The radical on the top in 冬 is 夂, the radical on the right in 致 is 夊, and the radical on the bottom right of 瓊 is 攵. This standard tends to follow a rule of writing regular script where there should be no more than one of ㇏, long horizontal stroke, 樂業央 The first horizontal stroke in these characters are long horizontal strokes. Therefore, the last stroke cannot be ㇏, other standards use ㇏ as the last stroke, e. g. Mainland China and Japan. 七 This character has a horizontal stroke, so it cannot have a hook to the right
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Grapheme
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In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Greek γράφω, meaning write, the study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is an one and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the corresponding to the abstract concept of the Arabic numeral one has two distinct glyphs in the fonts Times New Roman and Helvetica. Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩ and this is analogous to the slash notation used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for phonetic transcriptions. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all semantically equivalent, for example, in written English, there are many different physical representations of the lowercase letter a, such as a, ɑ, etc. But because the substitution of any of these for any other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, italic and bold face are also allographic. There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower-case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes, some linguists consider digraphs like the ⟨sh⟩ in ship to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Ligatures, however, such as ⟨æ⟩, are distinct graphemes, as are letters with distinctive diacritics. For a full discussion of the different types, see Writing system § Functional classification, there are additional graphemic components used in writing, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, word dividers such as the space, and other typographic symbols. As mentioned in the section, in languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In practice, however, the orthographies of such languages entail at least an amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph, as the digraph sh represents a sound in English. Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, for more examples, see Alphabetical order § Language-specific conventions. Conversion of scripts Character Grapheme–color synesthesia Grapheme–color ideasthesia Sign
38.
Chinese Character Simplification Scheme
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The Chinese Character Simplification Scheme is the standardised simplification of Chinese characters promulgated in the 1950s by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China. It contains the existing Simplified Chinese characters that is in use today, to distinguish from the later Second round of simplified Chinese characters, this reform is also known as the First Chinese Character Simplification Scheme. The modified draft was reviewed by the State Councils Committee for the Application of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, the 23rd State Council Plenary Meeting passed the Resolution Regarding the Promulgation of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme on 28 January 1956. On 31 January 1956, the Peoples Daily published in full about the Resolution Regarding the Promulgation of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, the first list of the scheme was used nationwide on 1 February 1956, and the rest was put into use in batches later. On 21 November 1955, more than two earlier, the Ministry of Education issued a Notice Regarding the Implementation of Simplified Chinese Character in All Schools. The Peoples Liberation Army General Political Department made similar notices in the same month, significant changes were subsequently made to this scheme, in particular the introduction of the principle of simplification by analogy. In May 1964, the Language Reform Committee published the List of Simplified Chinese Characters to address the defects found in the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme and it is divided into three parts. There are a total of 2,238 characters, the Language Reform Committee of China proposed the Second Chinese Character Simplification Scheme on 20 December 1977, rescinded in 1986. The Chinese Character Simplification Scheme is divided into three parts, the first part consists of 230 simplified characters, the second part consists of 285 simplified characters, the third part consists of 54 simplified radicals. The simplification of Chinese characters met strong resistance from the public, the prominent scholar Chen Mengjia was one of the outspoken critics of the scheme. When the Anti-Rightist Movement began in 1957, Chen was labeled a Rightist, in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Chen was again severely persecuted for his ideas and committed suicide. Simplified Chinese characters Second round of simplified Chinese characters
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Second round of simplified Chinese characters
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It was intended to replace the existing simplified Chinese characters that were already in use. The complete proposal contained a list of 248 characters that were to be simplified, of these,21 from the first list and 40 from the second served as components of other characters, amplifying the impact on written Chinese. Following widespread confusion and opposition, the round of simplification was officially rescinded on 24 June 1986 by the State Council. Since then, the PRC has used the simplified characters as its official script. Rather than ruling out further simplification, however, the retraction declared that further reform of the Chinese characters should be done with caution, today, some second-round simplified characters, while considered nonstandard, continue to survive in informal usage. The issue of whether and how simplification should proceed remains a matter of debate, the traditional relationship between written Chinese and vernacular Chinese has been compared to that of Latin with the Romance languages in the Renaissance era. Continuing the work of reformers, in 1956 the Peoples Republic of China promulgated the Scheme of Simplified Chinese Characters. The plan was adjusted slightly in the years, eventually stabilizing in 1964 with a definitive list of character simplifications. These are the simplified Chinese characters that are used today in Mainland China, taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau did not adopt the simplifications, and the characters used in those places are known as traditional Chinese characters. Also released in 1964 was a directive for further simplification in order to improve literacy and this was to take place gradually, with consideration for both ease of production and ease of recognition. In 1975, a round of simplifications, the Second Scheme, was submitted by the Script Reform Committee of China to the State Council for approval. Like the First Scheme, it contained two lists, one for use and another for evaluation and discussion. Of these,21 from the first list and 40 from the second served as components of other characters. On 20 December 1977, major such as the Peoples Daily. Both newspapers began to use the characters from the first list on the following day, second-round simplifications were taught inconsistently in the education system, and people used characters at various stages of official or unofficial simplification. The Second Scheme was officially retracted by the State Council on 24 June 1986, the State Councils retraction also emphasized that Chinese character reform should henceforth proceed with caution, and that the forms of Chinese characters should be kept stable. Later that year, a version of the 1964 list was published with minor changes. The second round of simplification continued to use the used in the first round
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Japanese script reform
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The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the kokugo kokuji mondai, the reforms led to the development of the modern Japanese written language, and explain the arguments for official policies used to determine the usage and teaching of kanji rarely used in Japan. Japanese script has undergone reforms dating at least to 1900, in the 1900 spelling reforms, hentaigana were eliminated, though historical kana orthography was retained. A separate character for ん was also prescribed, previously it had written as む and ん was a hentaigana for both these sounds. A proposal to eliminate certain kanji from use was implemented in a number of regions and overseas territories in the 1920s and this group of characters formed the basis for the tōyō kanji list, which eventually developed into the modern jōyō kanji list. In December,1923, the committee approved a set of reforms for kana usage, the reforms made after the Second World War have had a particularly significant impact on accepted kanji usage in the modern Japanese language. The report pointed out the difficulties concerning kanji use, and advocated the use of rōmaji, as a result, the gradual abolition of kanji became official policy for the SCAP, and the tōyō kanji list and modern kana usage proposals were drawn up in accordance with this policy. The tōyō kanji list, containing 1850 characters, was published by the cabinet on 16 November 1946 with the intention of abolishing the use of kanji in the future. The list reduced the number of kanji deemed appropriate for daily use, in Japan, changes were only made to complex characters that needed to be abbreviated. Another separate attempt was made to limit the number of kanji readings, for instance, the character 魚 had its readings limited to gyo and uo when the most common reading, sakana, was not officially recognized by the list. These shortcomings were acknowledged in the revised list of tōyō kanji and this use of alternative, common kanji in place of rarer ones was called kakikae. Different spellings for words were unified using characters from the tōyō kanji list, the list below shows some examples, with the non-tōyō kanji placed in brackets. 骨格 kokkaku 奇形 kikei Other words that used kanji that were not included in the list were given phonetic substitutes, the Japanese media has increasingly used non-approved kanji with furigana to aid the reader in place of mazegaki. On 16 February 1948,881 of the kanji were designated to be taught during primary education. In the same year, Article 50 of the family register law made it illegal to name a child using characters not on the official list. When this law first came into effect, the Ministry of Justice declared that all newborn babies must be registered in the koseki with a name used only hiragana, katakana or tōyō kanji. However, in 1951, an additional 92 characters were approved by the government as jinmeiyō kanji, kanji acceptable for use in names and this list was modified in 1997 to increase to a total of 285 characters. At the time, eight characters from the original jinmeiyō kanji list were added to the jōyō kanji list,578 characters were initially added, though some characters unsuitable for names such as 怨, 痔 and 屍 were removed as a result of public feedback
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Shinjitai
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Shinjitai are the forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in simplified Chinese, shinjitai were created by reducing the number of strokes in kyūjitai, unsimplified kanji equivalent to Traditional Chinese characters, also called seiji. There have been a few stages of simplifications made since the 1950s, the following forms were established as a result of the postwar character reforms. However, they were not completely created anew, as many were based on widely used handwritten abbreviations from the prewar era, due to the complexity of kanji, many abbreviations were used in handwriting, whose status rose to become official characters in the postwar reforms. Attention was paid to the balance of the characters in their new form. In almost all cases, characters in the new standard have fewer strokes than old forms, though in a few cases they have the same number, the most radical simplification was 廳→庁, removing 20 strokes. For example, the character 擧 was simplified as 挙, but the character 欅 which also contained 擧, simplified forms of hyōgaiji do exist, and are referred to as extended shinjitai. However, they are unofficial, a position reiterated in the National Language Council’s 2000 report on Characters Not Listed in the Jōyō Kanji Table, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper is thorough in its simplification of hyōgaiji, and its in-house simplifications are called Asahi characters. For example, 痙攣 is simplified following the model of 經→経 and this is also said to have been done because in the age of typewriter-based printing, more complicated kanji could not be clearly printed. Cursive script and semi-cursive script forms of kanji were adopted as shinjitai, examples include, 圖→図 觀→観 示 →礻 晝→昼 The aforementioned 门 handwritten simplification also originated from semi-cursive, but is not generally accepted in official Japanese writing. Characters in which there were two or more variants were standardized under one form, the character 島 also had the variant forms 嶋 and 嶌, but the 島 form became standard. The 辶 radical was once printed with two dots but was written one, so the written form with one dot became standard. The upper 丷 portion of the characters 半, 尊, and 平 was once printed as 八 and written 丷, Characters of the keisei monji group each contain a semantic part and a phonetic part. The choice was made to swap the phonetic parts with homophones which had fewer strokes, for example, 圍 was changed to 囲, because 韋 and 井 were homophones. Other simplifications of this method include 竊→窃, 廳→庁, 擔→担, there are also colloquial handwritten simplifications based on this model, in which various non-kanji symbols are used as onpu, for example 魔, 慶, 藤, and 機. In some cases, a character was replaced with a simpler character which neither had graphical resemblance, nor was homophonic. Examples include 登 → 正 and 登 → 丁, some kanji were simplified by removing entire components. Firstly, only a group of characters was simplified, with many characters outside this group retaining their earlier form
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Ryakuji
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Ryakuji are colloquial simplifications of kanji. Ryakuji are not covered in the Kanji Kentei, nor are officially recognized. Some Ryakuji were adopted as Shinjitai, some simplifications are commonly used as special Japanese typographic symbols. Of these, only 〆 for 締 and ヶ for 箇 are generally recognized as being simplifications of kanji characters, replacements of complex characters by simpler standard characters is instead a different phenomenon of kakikae. For example, in writing 年齢43歳 as 年令43才, 齢 is replaced by the component 令 and 歳 is replaced by 才, in both cases with the same pronunciation but different meanings. The 齢 to 令 is a simplification, while 歳 and 才 are graphically unrelated. Other examples include simplifying 醤油 shōyu to 正油, Ryakuji are primarily used in individual memos, notes and other such forms of handwriting. They have declined in use in recent years, possibly due to the emergence of computer technology, despite this, the ryakuji for 門 is still widely used in handwriting. In all case discussed in article, individual characters are simplified. Of these, several are seen in signs, 2門 12品 12器 are very commonly seen, particularly simplifying 間 in store signs, while 1第 and 5曜 are also relatively common. Other characters are commonly seen in public, instead being primarily found in private writing. 1第, 2門 – These are perhaps the most commonly used Ryakuji,1 is present in Unicode as U+3427, but is not supported by the MS Gothic or Mincho family of typefaces, or Arial Unicode MS. According to the original Japanese article,1 has been seen on roadsigns on the Keihin #3 Road,2 is present in Unicode as U+95E8, it is unified with the closely related Simplified Chinese abbreviation 门. The Japanese form may be induced with the sequence U+95E8 U+E0100. 3点 – An abbreviation of the four dots in the character 点 is present in Unicode as 奌 U+594C. It does appear in Arial Unicode, Sim Sun, Sim Hei, MingLiU, KaiU, another simplification of this sort can be seen for the bottom four dots of 魚. The bottom of the characters 熱 and 馬, however, are simplified using a horizontal line. 4職 – Also used often, but somehow not applied to the related characters 織 and 識, 5曜 – Also often written as 旺, but the dot is used to distinguish
