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Font: Simplified Chinese
As one of the oldest scripts known to humankind, Chinese boasts a
history of several thousand years. Naturally, such a long period
involves many changes and developments. The modern form of Chinese
script can be traced back to around 100 AD, coinciding with Xu
Shan's writing of the first lexicon of the Chinese language.
Comprising of about 9500 characters, this lexicon is the first
historical attempt to analyze the form and structure of Chinese
writing.
Chinese writing is often described as ideographic or
pictographic. Many people ascribe to the myth that every Chinese
character is a simplified picture of an object or a concept. If that
were true, the task of learning to read Chinese would take a
lifetime. In reality, Chinese script is a complex hybrid of
ideograms, pictograms and semantic and phonetic components. All
Chinese characters can be categorized into 5 main groups:
1. Pictograms
While certain Chinese characters
descended from ancient drawings of everyday objects, their modern
form has long been simplified and standardized. Usually, a trace of
the pictorial element can still be seen in the character, but it is
most commonly an abstract representation. There are only a few
hundred pictographic characters in the Chinese repertoire. In
relation to the tens of thousands of Chinese characters, pictographs
are a small minority.
2. Ideograms
As the name implies, ideograms represent
ideas or abstract concepts. For example, certain ideograms stand for
concepts such as 'above' and 'below' or basic enumeration such as
'three' or 'four'.
3. Compound Ideograms The meaning of compound ideograms is
inferred from the combination of its base parts. For example, the
character for 'honest' is composed of two other characters, those
for 'man' and 'word'. The symbol for 'sit' is made up of the
character for 'man' placed over that for 'earth'.
4. Phonetic Loan Characters
In a rebus-like manner,
loan characters borrow the phonetic value of a like-sounding
character while disregarding its meaning.
5. Semantic-Phonetic Compounds Put as simply as possible,
semantic-phonetic compounds combine two elements into one, taking
the meaning from one and the phonetics from the other. Each of these
parts can appear on its own as an independent character. For
example, the character for 'sugar' combines a semantic classifier
which means 'cereal' with the phonetic component [tang] which, on
its own, could refer to the Tang dynasty. This last group of
characters, the semantic-phonetic compounds, make up 90% of all
Chinese symbols. It also makes possible the perpetual creation of
new symbols. There are 8 basic strokes which are considered the
basic elements for all Chinese characters. Each character is made up
of one or more strokes which must be drawn in a particular sequence.
Regardless of the number of constituent strokes, each character is
drawn within the confines of an invisible square frame. Groups of
strokes (or radicals) are used as the building blocks of all complex
characters. Essential for locating words in Chinese dictionaries,
214 radicals are recognized in modern classification. Since the end
of the 19th century, there has been a movement to simplify Chinese
script. During the 1950s and 60s, the government of the People's
Republic of China (PRC) instated a standard for a comprehensive
simplification of the script. As a result, there are now two
parallel schemes for Chinese script: Simplified and Traditional. The
PRC, as well as Singapore, uses Simplified script, while Taiwan and
the Chinese community worldwide use the Traditional script. It is
estimated that about one-fourth of the world's population uses
Chinese script.
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