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.

Number of Chinese characters

The question of how many characters there are is still the subject of debate. In the 18th century, European scholars claimed the total tally to be about 80,000. This number, however, is thought to be exaggerated as the character count varies by dictionary and its comprehensiveness. For example, the Kangxi Dictionary lists about 40,000 characters, while the modern Zhonghua Zihai lists in excess of 80,000. One reason for the overwhelming number of characters is due to the existence of rarely-occurring variant and obscure characters (many of which are unused, even in Classical Chinese). Note, however, that no two characters are ever contextually identical.

Related Topics:
European - Kangxi Dictionary - Classical Chinese - Contextually

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The large number of Chinese characters is due to their logographic nature — for every morpheme there must be a symbol, and sometimes there are variant characters have developed for the same morpheme. It has also been claimed that the sheer number of characters is used as a way to separate scholars from the ordinary, and perhaps even to keep certain texts from being read by but the most scholarly.

Related Topics:
Morpheme

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Chinese

It is usually said that about 3,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), and a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Note that it is not necessary to know a character for every known word of Chinese, as the majority of modern Chinese words are compounds made of two or more morphemes, and are thus written not with a single unique character, but with multiple, usually common, characters. There are 6763 code points in GB2312, an early version of the national standard used in the People's Republic of China. GB18030 has a much higher number. The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi proficiency test covers approximately 5000 hanzi.

Related Topics:
Morphemes - GB2312 - People's Republic of China - GB18030 - Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi

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There are 4808 characters in Taiwanese Ministry of Education's list of regularly used Chinese characters. (常用國字標準字體表) The Chinese Standard Interchange Code (CNS11643) - the official national standard - supports 48027 characters, while the most widely-used encoding scheme, BIG-5, supports only 13053.

Related Topics:
CNS11643 - BIG-5

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In addition, there are a large number of dialect characters which are not used in formal Chinese written language, but are used to represent colloquial terms in non-Mandarin Chinese spoken forms.

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Japanese

In Japanese there are 1945 "daily use kanji" (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) designated by the Japanese Ministry of Education. These are taught during primary and secondary school. Publications which include characters which fall outside this list should print furigana or rubi over the characters as a phonetic guide, it is not necessary and often omitted for those characters that many are familiar with.

Related Topics:
Kanji - Jōyō kanji - Furigana - Rubi

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There are also 2928 government-designated "name kanji" (jinmeiyō kanji 人名用漢字) used in personal and geographical names. For further information, see the Names section of the main Kanji article. (There is also some speculation that the "odd" kanji being added to the names list are being done so in an attempt to make a de-facto expansion of the Jouyou Kanji List, rather than with the serious idea that anyone will use them in names. The idea of reducing the number of kanji in use has been a politically contentious issue, with many conservatives believing that kanji are culturally Japanese and that people should use them frequently.)

Related Topics:
Jinmeiyō kanji - Names section of the main Kanji article

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A well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3500 kanji. The Kanji kentei (日本漢字能力検定試験 Nihon kanji nōryoku kentei shiken or Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude) tests the ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the Kanji kentei tests the ability to read and write 6000 kanji, though in practice few people attain this level as Japanese generally uses fewer Chinese characters than Chinese does, and literacy in Japanese requires knowledge of fewer Chinese characters than literacy in Chinese.

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Korean

In South Korea, middle and high school students learn 1,800 to 2,000 basic characters (Hanja), but most people use Hangul exclusively in their day-to-day lives. Hanja are still used to some extent, particularly in newspapers, weddings, place names and calligraphy. Hanja is also extensibly used in situations where ambiguity must be avoided, such as high-level corporate reports and government documents.

Related Topics:
Hanja - Hangul - Calligraphy

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In North Korea, Hanja is rarely used.

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Vietnamese

Although now nearly extinct in Vietnamese, varying scripts of Chinese characters were used to write the language, with use of Chinese characters becoming limited to ceremonial uses beginning in the 19th century. Similarly to Japan and Korea, Chinese was used by the ruling classes, and the characters were eventually adopted to write Vietnamese. To express native Vietnamese words which had different pronunciations than the Chinese, Vietnamese developed the Chu Nom script which added diacritical marks to distinguish native (Vietnamese) words from Chinese.

Related Topics:
19th century - Chu Nom

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