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 Japanese, Korean,
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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