2017年12月7日 星期四

About Chinese Characters


About Chinese Characters

Chinese characters In Standard Chinese, they are called hanzi (simplified Chinese: 汉字traditional Chinese: 漢字, lit "Han characters"). They have been adapted to write a number of other languages, including JapaneseKorean, and Vietnamese.

In Old Chinese (and Classical Chinese, which is based on it), most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words. In modern Chinese (esp. Mandarin Chinese), characters do not necessarily correspond to words; indeed the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters.

Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on meaning. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings; occasionally these correspond to different pronunciations.

Chinese characters represent words of the language using several strategies. A few characters, including some of the most commonly used, were originally pictograms, which depicted the objects denoted, or ideograms, in which meaning was expressed iconically. The vast majority were written using the rebus principle, in which a character for a similarly sounding word was either simply borrowed or (more commonly) extended with a disambiguating semantic marker to form a phono-semantic compound character. The traditional six-fold classification (liùshū 六书 / 六書 "six writings") was first described by the scholar 許慎Xu Shen in the postrace of his dictionary 說文解字Shuowen Jiezi in 100 AD.

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Dear students,
We organized some information about Chinese characters to help you have more understanding of our characters. ;)
** Information from Wikipedia.

Katrina Lee


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