Chinese characters

• 1. The Bones That Spoke

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  In 1899, fragments of bone were being sold in China as "dragon bones," ground up for medicine. Carved into them were symbols. Someone recognized those symbols as early forms of Chinese writing. By 1928 the source was traced to a village near Anyang in Henan, the site of Yin, the final capital of the Shang dynasty. A team led by Li Ji from the Academia Sinica excavated there between 1928 and 1937. To date, over 150,000 oracle bone fragments have been found. These are the oldest attested Chinese characters, made in the 13th century BCE. They record divinations conducted by the Shang royal house. But the oldest known inscriptions already form a well-developed writing system. That detail raises a question. If writing was already mature by then, where did it begin, and what was lost before it. Chinese characters are logographs, the symbols used to write Chinese and other languages across regions shaped by Chinese culture. Scholars accept four independently invented writing systems in human history. Three of them died. This one never stopped. Over more than three millennia, the way characters look and the way they are written changed enormously. The chapters that follow trace how a picture of a large man became a system of more than 100,000 distinct signs.

• 2. Meaning Without Sound

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  Unlike the letters of an alphabet, which represent the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes. A morpheme is the most basic unit of meaning in a language. In Chinese, these are almost always a single syllable long, which is why written Chinese is often called morphosyllabic. Writing the frequently used vocabulary of a language takes roughly 2,000 to 3,000 characters. The number that has been identified runs far higher. Despite their origins in picture-writing, characters are no longer ideographs that convey ideas directly. Reading them depends entirely on knowing the particular language being written. Most characters break down into smaller components, many of which are independent characters in their own right. A phonetic component hints at how the character sounds. A semantic component points to part of its meaning. Of the 3,500 characters used frequently in Standard Chinese, the phono-semantic compounds, which carry both kinds of clue, make up 58 percent. Pure semantographs, with forms wholly tied to meaning, are the rarest at about 5 percent. The 20th-century palaeographer Qiu Xigui organized character function into three principles. He described semantographs, phonographs that include a phonetic component, and loangraphs, existing characters borrowed to write other words. He also acknowledged classes that fall outside these principles, such as pure signs whose only job is to look distinct.

• 3. The Trick That Made Writing

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  A picture of a large man could mean the word for "large," but only if a reader already knew that specific meaning. Otherwise the sequence looked like a man standing next to a deer. This is the gap between proto-writing and writing. Proto-writing used pictographs depicting objects, or fixed signs standing for concepts by shared convention, and it could not carry the full meaning of spoken language by itself. The breakthrough was the rebus technique. With a rebus, the symbol for one word is reused to indicate a different word with a similar pronunciation, depending on context. This let people write down words that had no plausible picture for the first time. Abstract grammatical particles often entered writing this way, borrowed as loangraphs. The technique still works for foreign words. Buddhist terminology brought to China in antiquity was written with borrowed characters chosen for their sound. The same happens with brand names today, where Coca-Cola's Chinese name uses characters selected for both sound and connotation. The process of writing emerging from proto-writing took a long time. It was complete only when the purely pictorial use of symbols disappeared, leaving behind those that represented spoken words.

• 4. From Bone To Brush

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  Knotted cords kept records before writing, according to several Chinese classics, including chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching and the "Xici II" commentary to the I Ching. One tradition credits the invention of characters to Cangjie, a scribe of the legendary Yellow Emperor, in the 3rd millennium BCE. On the day the first characters were created, grain rained from the sky. That night people heard ghosts and demons wailing, lamenting that humans could no longer be cheated. The real evolution was gradual, not a tidy march of styles each suddenly replacing the last. After Qin's conquest unified the Chinese states in 221 BCE, Chancellor Li Si directed the standardization of small seal script across the country. Clerical script then matured by the Han dynasty, which ran from 202 BCE to 220 CE. A process called libian mutated and simplified character forms, consolidating, substituting, or omitting many components. As a result, clerical script lost much of the pictorial quality still visible in seal script. Regular script grew out of clerical and semi-cursive forms. Its innovations are traditionally credited to Zhong Yao, who lived in the state of Cao Wei and is often called the "father of regular script." Wang Xizhi, regarded as the most important calligrapher in Chinese history, copied his work. Regular script became the predominant form only during the Northern and Southern period, from 420 to 589. The Sui dynasty's imperial examinations, established between 581 and 618, required candidates to write in regular script, spreading its use through later Chinese history.

• 5. The Shape Of A Square

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  Each character of a text is written within a uniform square allotted to it. At the most basic level, characters are built from strokes written in a fixed order. In clerical and regular script, individual strokes traditionally fall into one of eight categories. Calligraphers practice technique through the Eight Principles of Yong, writing a single character that contains one stroke of each type. In ordinary writing that character now takes five strokes instead of eight. Some components shift shape depending on where they sit. The knife component appears one way on the right side of a character and another way at the top. The order of components is fixed, generally left to right, then top to bottom, with enclosing components started before and closed after whatever they surround. Characters change over time into variant forms with distinct structures that still represent the same morpheme. Before the Qin dynasty, the character for "bright" was written with either Sun or window on the left and Moon on the right. The Qin program promoted one form, some scribes ignored it, and a third variant spread with "eye" on the left. In the end the form with Sun and Moon became standard. Texts themselves were laid out vertically, top to bottom in columns running right to left, from the earliest inscriptions until the 20th century. Horizontal writing became predominant only in the 20th century through Western influence, which also brought the widespread use of punctuation in print.

• 6. Beyond China's Borders

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  Literary Chinese spread to Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, where local elites adopted writing for records, histories, and official communications. These languages belong to different families and function differently from Chinese and from one another. To bridge the gap, reading systems let non-Chinese speakers interpret Literary Chinese texts in their own languages. One striking result was brushtalk, where mutual literacy allowed speakers of different languages to hold face-to-face conversations on paper. In Japanese the characters are called kanji, and most carry both a Sino-Japanese reading and a native reading, known as on'yomi and kun'yomi. Characters invented for Japanese use are called kokuji, such as the one for "mountain pass" built from "mountain," "above," and "below." In Korean the characters are called hanja, and very few were invented locally, those being called gukja. Because spoken Korean lacks tones, many Sino-Korean words are homophones with identical hangul spellings, and one dictionary entry for gisa yields more than 30 different meanings. In Vietnamese, Literary Chinese gained official status in 1010, and a script for writing Vietnamese is first attested in an inscription dated 1209 at a pagoda. That script was so complex the literacy rate never exceeded 5 percent. By the late 20th century, characters had largely been replaced with alphabets in Korean and Vietnamese. That leaves Japanese as the only major non-Sinitic language typically written with Chinese characters today.

• 7. Cutting The Strokes

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  In 1909 the educator and linguist Lufei Kui formally proposed adopting simplified characters in education for the first time. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many intellectuals in China saw the writing system as an obstacle to mass literacy and modernization. Some wanted to replace Literary Chinese with writing closer to speech. Others pushed to abandon characters for an alphabet entirely. The Republican government published its first official list of simplified characters in 1935, comprising 324 forms collated by Peking University professor Qian Xuantong. Strong opposition within the party got the list rescinded in 1936. The project passed to the Communists after the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949. In 1951 Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the formation of a Script Reform Committee. A draft scheme appeared in 1956 and was largely ratified by a revised list of 2,235 characters in 1964. Most came from conventional abbreviations or ancient forms with fewer strokes. A second round of simplifications was promulgated in 1977, poorly received, and formally rescinded in 1986. Today mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore use simplified characters, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau use traditional ones. After World War II, the Japanese government simplified hundreds of forms called shinjitai, with some simplifications distinct from China's. The 2010 jōyō kanji list holds 2,136 characters, the baseline most readers learn before they ever reach the tens of thousands that wait beyond it.