Introduction to Chinese Characters

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Chinese characters, also known as Hanzi are one of the earliest forms of written language in the world, dating back approximately five thousand years. Nearly one-fourth of the world’s population still use Chinese characters today. As an art form, Chinese calligraphy remains an integral aspect of Chinese culture.To get more news about chinese alphabet a to z, you can visit shine news official website.

There are 47,035 Chinese characters in the Kangxi Dictionary , the standard national dictionary developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, but the precise quantity of Chinese characters is a mystery; numerous, rare variants have accumulated throughout history. Studies from China have shown that 90% of Chinese newspapers and magazines tend to use 3,500 basic characters.

Evolution of Chinese Characters

Chinese characters have evolved over several thousands of years to include many different styles, or scripts. The main forms are: Oracle Bone Inscriptions , Bronze Inscriptions, Small Seal Characters , Official Script , Regular Script , Cursive Writing or Grass Stroke Characters , and Freehand Cursive .
The presumed methods of forming characters was first classified by the Chinese linguist Xu Shen , whose etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi divides the script into six categories, or liushu : pictographic characters,, self-explanatory characters, associative compounds , pictophonetic characters , mutually explanatory characters , and phonetic loan characters . The first four categories refer to ways of composing Chinese characters; the last two categorizes ways of using characters.

It is a popular myth that Chinese writing is pictographic, or that each Chinese character represents a picture. Some Chinese characters evolved from pictures, many of which are the earliest characters found on oracle bones, but such pictographic characters comprise only a small proportion (about 4%) of characters. The vast majority are pictophonetic characters consisting of a “radical,” indicating the meaning and a phonetic component for the original sound, which may be different from modern pronunciation.