How Chinese language Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Previous Writing System
Contrary to somewhat popular perception, Chinese characters aren’t simply little pictures. The truth is, most of them aren’t pictures in any respect. The very outdatedest, whose evolution will be traced again to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched directly onto the stays of turtles and oxen, do bear traces of their pictograph ancestors. However most Chinese characters, or hanzi, are brandgraphic, which implies that every one represents a different morpheme, or distinct unit of language: a phrase, or a single a part of a phrase that has no independent implying. No one is aware of for certain what number of hanzi exist, however close toly 100,000 have been documented to date.
Not that it’s essential study all of them to achieve literacy: for that, a mere 3,000 to five,000 will do. Whereas it’s technically possible to memorize that many characters by rote, you’d do wagerter to start by familiarizing yourself with their primary nature and structure — and in so doing, you’ll naturally study greater than a little about their lengthy history.
The TED-Ed lesson on the high of the put up professionalvides a quick however illuminating overview of “how Chinese characters work,” utilizing animation to point out how historical symbols for concrete issues like a person, a tree, the solar, and water turned versatile sufficient to be combined into representations of eachfactor else — including summary concepts.
In the Mandarin Blueprint video simply above, host Luke Neale goes deeper into the structure of the hanzi in use immediately. Whether or not they be simplified versions of primaryland China or the traditional ones of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsethe place, they’re for probably the most half constructed not out of complete material, he stresses, however from a set of existing components. Which will make a prospective studyer really feel slightly much less daunted, as might the truth that toughly 80 percent of Chinese characters are “semantic-phowebic comkilos”: one component of the character professionalvides a clue to its implying, and another a clue to its professionalnunciation. (Not that it necessarily makes deciphering them an effortmuch less activity.)
Within the distant previous, hanzi had been additionally the one technique of fileing other Asian languages, like Vietnamese and Korean. Nonetheless immediately, they continue to be central to the Japanese writing system, however like all other cultural kind transplanted to Japan, they’ve laboriously gone unaltered there: the NativLang video simply above explains the transformation they’ve belowgone over millennia of interaction with the Japanese language. It wasn’t so very way back that, even of their residenceland, hanzi had been menaceened with the prospect of being scrapped within the dubious title of modern efficiency. Now, with these aforemalestioned almost-100,000 characters incorporated into Unicode, making them usable byout our Twenty first-century digital universe, it appears they’ll stick round — even longer, perhaps, than the Latin alphawager you’re learning proper now.
Related content:
What Historic Chinese Sounded Like — and How We Know It: An Animated Introduction
The Writing Systems of the World Defined, from the Latin Alphawager to the Abugidas of India
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
