A Chinese character, also known as a Han character (汉字 / 漢字; Hànzì), is a logogram A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories used in writing Chinese Chinese or the Sinitic language (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中国话／中國話 Zhōngguóhuà; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan (hanzi), Japanese Japanese (日本語?, [nihonɡo] ) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative (kanji Kanji (漢字?) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (ひらがな, 平仮名), katakana (カタカナ, 片仮名), Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet (known as the Romanization of Japanese, or "Rōmaji"). The Japanese term kanji (), less frequently Korean Korean is the official language of Korea, both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers. In the 15th century a national writing system was commissioned by Sejong the Great, the system being currently called Hangul. Prior to the (hanja Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation. Hanja-mal or hanja-eo refers to words which can be written with hanja, and hanmun refers to Classical Chinese writing, although "hanja" is), and formerly Vietnamese Vietnamese , formerly known under French colonization as Annamese (see Annam), is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic (hán tự), and other languages. Chinese characters are also known as sinographs, and the Chinese writing system as sinography.
The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary The Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kangxi Emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty ordered its compilation in 1710 and it was published in 1716. The dictionary is named after the Emperor's era name is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely used variants accumulated throughout history. Studies carried out in China China is an ancient civilization extending over a large area in East Asia seen variously as a nation or multinational entity[citation needed] have shown that literacy in the Chinese language Chinese or the Sinitic language (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中国话／中國話 Zhōngguóhuà; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.[1]
In the Chinese writing system Written Chinese comprises the written symbols used to represent spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. These symbols are commonly known as Chinese characters (traditional/simplified Chinese: 漢字/汉字; pinyin: hànzì). Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the, the characters are morphosyllabic, each usually corresponding to a spoken syllable with a basic meaning. However, although Chinese words may be formed by characters with basic meanings, a majority of words A word is the smallest free form in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme (e.g. wolf), but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form (e.g. the English plural morpheme -s) in Mandarin Chinese The latter grouping is defined and used mainly by linguists, and is not commonly used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of non-Standard Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Southwestern Mandarin or Northeastern require two or more characters to write (thus are poly-syllabic) but have meaning that is distinct from the characters they are made from.[2] Cognates An example of cognates within the same language would be English shirt and skirt, the former from Old English scyrte, the latter loaned from Old Norse skyrta, both from the same Common Germanic *skurtjōn-. Words with this type of relationship within a single language are called doublets. Further cognates of the same word in other Germanic in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character.
Chinese characters have also been used and in some cases continue to be used in other languages, most significantly Japanese (where a single character can represent several spoken syllables), Korean, and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are used both by meaning to represent native words, ignoring the Chinese pronunciation, and by meaning and sound, to represent Chinese loanwords By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept, whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. These foreign pronunciations of Chinese characters are known as Sinoxenic pronunciations, and have been useful in the reconstruction of Ancient Chinese.
PR Web (press release)
Andy Chuang, president of Good Characters , says that anyone wishing to truly celebrate as the Chinese do should decorate their homes or offices with spring ...
jinmiaomiao
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:39:46 GM
godfather: . Chinese. Pinyin: jiao4 fu4 (Source: about.com)
