Chinese character

Chinese characters or Han characters (??/??) are logograms used in the written forms of the Chinese language, and to varying degrees in the Japanese and Korean languages (though the latter only in South Korea). Use of Chinese characters has disappeared from the Vietnamese language ? in which they were used until the 20th century ? and from North Korea, where in normal writing they have been completely replaced by Hangul.

Related Topics:
Logogram - Chinese language - Japanese - Korean - South Korea - Vietnamese language - 20th century - North Korea - Hangul

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Contrary to popular belief, only a small number of Chinese characters are pictograms. Most characters are based on other characters that were homonyms when the character was created.

Related Topics:
Pictograms - Homonyms

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Chinese characters are called hànzì in Mandarin Chinese, kanji in Japanese, hanja or hanmun in Korean, and hán t? (also used in the chu nom script) in Vietnamese. However, the last is considered an extremely sinified form and Chinese characters are normally called ch? nho (??). (Note that the morphemes are reversed as is common in Vietnamese borrowings from Chinese.) In modern written Chinese, characters are written either in Traditional Chinese characters (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) or Simplified Chinese characters (used in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore)

Related Topics:
Mandarin - Kanji - Hanja - Chu nom - Morpheme - Traditional Chinese characters - Taiwan - Hong Kong - Simplified Chinese characters - Mainland China - Malaysia - Singapore

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In Chinese, a word or phrase (?/? cí) (a unit of meaning) is composed of one or more characters (? zì), for instance the phrase ??/?? hànzì {{Audio2|zh-han4zi4.ogg}} is composed by two characters. Each Chinese character is read as a single syllabic unit in all spoken variants of Chinese still existing today, however in Japanese a kanji can be multisyllabic if it is read in the Kun'yomi. It is notable that unlike any of the modern Chinese spoken variants, Archaic Chinese has consonant clusters and lacks a tonal feature, for example ? ji?o is pronounced klak in Archaic Chinese.

Related Topics:
Syllabic - Spoken variants of Chinese - Kun'yomi - Archaic Chinese - Consonant clusters

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Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are not linguistically related to Chinese, and in order to make Chinese characters work in those languages with radically different grammar, many adaptations had to be made. In many cases in these languages, characters different from those used in Chinese are used for words or ideas of the same meaning. Also, many similar characters with identical meanings are written with slight differences. One example is black, which is written as ? (kuro and koku ) in Japanese, but as ? (h?i) in Chinese. In the twentieth century, thousands of simplified characters were created or adopted in mainland China, creating a distinction between, for example, ? in simplified characters used in mainland China and Singapore, and ? in traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Related Topics:
Black - Twentieth century - Simplified characters - Traditional characters

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For these reasons, particularly in China and Japan, where Chinese characters are used most often, it is frequently necessary to distinguish between Chinese Han characters and Japanese Han characters. In English, the distinction can often be made well enough by using the respective words hanzi and kanji.

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Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters occupying a roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters tend to occupy a more-or-less square area. Characters made up of multiple parts squash these parts together in order to maintain a uniform size and shape. Because of this, beginners often practise on squared or graph paper, and the Chinese sometimes call Han characters {{Unicode|??? f?ngkuài zì}} "square characters".

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