Chinese characters
Chinese characters[a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.
"Hanzi" redirects here. For the Chinese philosopher also known as "Hanzi", see Han Fei. For the anthology attributed to him, see Han Feizi.
Chinese characters
c. 13th century BCE – present
- Left-to-right
- Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left
- Chinese characters
Hani (500), Han (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja)
Han
U+4E00–U+9FFF CJK Unified Ideographs (full list)
汉字
漢字
Han characters
Hànzì
Hànzì
ㄏㄢˋ ㄗˋ
Hanntzyh
Han4-tzu4
Hàn-zìh
5Hoe-zy
Hon5-ci5
Hon55 sii55
Hon jih
Hon3 zi6
Hàn-jī
Hàn-jī
Hang3 ri7
Háng-cê
xanH dziH
- chữ Hán
- chữ Nho
- Hán tự
- 𡨸漢
- 𡨸儒
漢字
sawgun
𭨡倱[1]
한자
漢字
Hanja
Hanja
Hancha
漢字
kanji
kanji
kanzi
The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang, Henan, as part of divinations conducted by the Shang dynasty royal house. Character forms were originally highly pictographic in style, but evolved over time as writing spread across China. Numerous attempts have been made to reform the script, including the promotion of small seal script by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Clerical script, which had matured by the early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), abstracted the forms of characters—obscuring their pictographic origins in favour of making them easier to write. Following the Han, regular script emerged as the result of cursive influence on clerical script, and has been the primary style used for characters since. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, states using Chinese characters have standardised their forms: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
After being introduced in order to write Literary Chinese, characters were often adapted to write local languages spoken throughout the Sinosphere. In Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, Chinese characters are known as kanji, hanja, and chữ Hán respectively. Writing traditions also emerged for some of the other languages of China, like the sawndip script used to write the Zhuang languages of Guangxi. Each of these written vernaculars used existing characters to write the language's native vocabulary, as well as the loanwords it borrowed from Chinese. In addition, each invented characters for local use. These languages function differently from Chinese, which has contributed to the replacement of characters with alphabets designed to write Korean and Vietnamese, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written with characters.
At the most basic level, characters are composed of strokes that are written according to a fixed order. Methods of writing characters have historically included being carved into stone, being inked with a brush onto silk, bamboo, or paper, and being printed using woodblocks and movable type. Information technologies invented since the 19th century allowing for wider use of characters include telegraph codes and typewriters, as well as input methods and text encodings on computers.