Chinese written language
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Image:Shodo.jpg The Chinese written language consists of a writing system stretching back more than 3,600 years (from Erligang). Its logographic writing system employs a large number of symbols, known as characters, to represent individual words or morphemes. The writing system is considered to have also been a unifying force for much of Chinese history, transcending differences in spoken language. From the time of the Qín Dynasty onwards, a standard written language (at first Classical Chinese and later Vernacular Chinese) has always been in place to bridge the divergent spoken variants of Chinese.
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Written standards
One can classify Chinese writing into the following basic types:
- Wényán (文言) (Classical Chinese)
- Báihuà (白話/白话) (Vernacular Chinese)
- Written colloquial Chinese (in particular, written colloquial Cantonese)
- Poems and other Chinese constrained writings
The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. This complexity is compounded by the fact that the numerous variations of spoken Chinese have gone through centuries of evolution since at least the late Hàn Dynasty. However, written Chinese has changed much less than the spoken language.
Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wényán, translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from any of the spoken varieties of Chinese in much the same way that Classical Latin is different from modern Romance languages. Chinese characters that are closer to the spoken language were used to write informal works such as colloquial novels.
Since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to báihuà , or Vernacular Chinese, which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of Standard Mandarin, was based mostly on the dialects of modern spoken Mandarin. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese. Although few new works are now written in classical Chinese, it is still taught in middle and high school and forms part of college entrance examinations. Classical Chinese forms are also sometimes included in written works to give them a highly formal or archaic flavor.
Transcending intelligibility of speech
Chinese characters are understood as morphemes that are independent of phonetic change. Thus, although the number one is read as "yī" in Mandarin, "yat" in Cantonese and "tsit" in Hokkien, they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and still share an identical character: 一. Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialects are not identical. The vocabularies used in the different dialects have also diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is often shared among all dialects (at least in orthography), colloquial vocabularies vary widely. Colloquially written Chinese usually involves the use of "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in báihuà.
The complex interaction between the Chinese written and spoken languages can be illustrated with Cantonese, and Cantonese in the following illustration can be replaced with any spoken language of Chinese. Cantonese speakers are all taught standard written Chinese in school even though its grammar and vocabulary are based on Mandarin. In most written communication, Cantonese speakers will write in standard written Chinese, so Mandarin speakers typically can read such communication without much difficulty. In addition, every character in standard written Chinese has a Cantonese pronunciation so all writing can be read aloud using Cantonese pronunciation, despite it not being the same as spoken Cantonese. Colloquially spoken Cantonese features different grammar and vocabulary, which, if written down, can be largely unreadable by an untrained Mandarin speaker. Standard written Chinese essentially functions as a different register for Cantonese speakers, because they do not write in the way they usually speak. Standard written Chinese spoken aloud using Cantonese pronunciation (usually with some colloquial words substituted in) serves as an acrolect used in newscasts and other formal contexts.
Written colloquial Cantonese does exist however, and Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely used written colloquial standard. This is due in part to the fact that Hong Kong, a large Cantonese speaking city, was outside of Chinese control for over a hundred years before the British returned it to the People's Republic of China in 1997. In contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, and instant messaging. Even so, Cantonese speakers will use standard written Chinese in most formal written communications.
As with other aspects of the Chinese language, the contrast between different written standards is not sharp and there can be a socially accepted continuum between the written standards. For example, in writing an informal love letter, one may use informal báihuà . In writing a newspaper article, the language used is different and begins to include aspects of wényán. In writing a ceremonial document, one would use even more wényán. The language used in the ceremonial document may be completely different from that of the love letter, but there is a socially accepted continuum existing between the two. Pure wényán, however, is rarely used in modern times.
Chinese characters
Main articles: Chinese character, Punctuation: East Asian punctuation
The Chinese written language employs the Hàn characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin hànzì), which are named after the Hàn culture to which they are largely attributed. Many Chinese characters appear to have originated as depicting concrete objects. The first examples we have of Chinese characters are Shāng dynasty inscriptions on oracle bones, which are animal bones used in osteomancy (divination using bones). The materials used were, with very few exceptions, the scapulas of oxen (leading to the term scapulimancy), and turtle plastrons (lower shells; thus the term plastromancy). From these shells and bones is derived the modern Chinese term for the earliest Chinese writing: 甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén (lit. "shell-bone-script", see Oracle bone script).
Over the course of the Zhōu and Hàn dynasties, the characters became more and more stylized. Abstract symbols, such as those indicating up and down, combined characters and phonetic loans were already fully developed in even the earliest known oracle bones. For example, 人 rén, meaning "person", originated from a pictogram (象形字 xiàngxíngzì, lit. "like-shape-words") of a man; the concepts "trust", "trustworthiness" etc. are represented by 信, a combination of "man" and "speech/word"; and 九, the pictogram of a hand with the arm bent at the elbow, thus representing zhǒu "elbow", had already been borrowed for jiǔ "nine", which had the same or similar pronunciation. Also, additional components were added so that many characters contain one element that gives (or at least once gave) a fairly good indication of the pronunciation (the "phonetic component"), and another component (the "semantic" component) gives an indication of the general meaning of the character. Such 形聲字 xíngshēngzì, lit. "shape-sound-words" are termed picto-phonetic, phono-semantic, phonetic compounds, etc.. In the modern Chinese languages, the majority of characters are thusly phono-semantically based rather than logographically based. An example would be the character for the word 按 àn that means "to press down". It contains 安 ān (peace), which serves as its phonetic component, and 手 shǒu (hand), that indicates that the action is frequently one that is done using one's hand.
A number of Chinese characters are derived out of each other; as a result some classical dictionaries contain circular references of words having identical radicals and meanings. However, new meanings have been injected into these redundant words through popular usage. Some words were also "borrowed" (ie. additional meanings were attributed thereto) because they bore phonetic resemblance with a concept that had no assigned written character.
Many styles of Chinese calligraphic writing developed over the centuries, such as seal script (篆書, seal-script), cursive script (草書), clerical script (隸書) and regular script (楷書, aka kǎishū or standard script).
In Japan and Korea, Hàn characters were adopted and integrated into their languages and became Kanji and Hanja respectively, the names being Japanised and Koreanised pronunciations of 漢字. Japan still uses Kanji as an integral part of its writing system, while Korea's use of Hanja has diminished considerably: it was abolished in North Korea in the 1950s, but revived in the 1960's as cultural continuation proved inadequate without Chinese characters; South Korea has entirely deprecated Hanja use outside of obscure academic, medical or other jargon.
In the field of software and communications internationalization, CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and the rarer CJKV for the same plus Vietnamese, all of which are double-byte languages, as they have more than 256 characters in their "alphabet". The computerized processing of Chinese characters involves some special issues both in input and character encoding schemes, as the standard 100+ key keyboards of today's computers do not allow input of that many characters with a single key-press.
The Chinese writing system is mostly logographic, i.e., each character expresses a monosyllabic word part, also known as a morpheme. This is helped by the fact that over 90% of Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic. The majority of modern words, however, are multisyllable and multigraphic. Multisyllabic words have a separate logogram for each syllable. Most Han Chinese characters have forms that were based on their pronunciation plus meaning combined, rather than their meanings alone, and they do not directly express ideas.
Character forms
There are currently two standards for printed Chinese characters. One is the Traditional Chinese characters (繁體字 fántǐzì), used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Mainland China and Singapore use the Simplified Chinese characters (简体字 jiǎntǐzì) developed by the PRC government in the 1950s and finalised in the 1964 list. Many simplified versions were derived from historically-established, albeit sometimes obscure, simplifications, mostly calligraphic simplifications (through cursive script), others through the replacement of a complex part of a character with a phonetically-similar glyph. In Taiwan, some simplifications are used when characters are handwritten, for the sake of speed and convenience, but in printing traditional characters are the norm. In addition, most Chinese use some personal simplifications.
The simplification process is actually not restricted to the Simplified system. In order to computerize Chinese, the authorities in Taiwan have tried to "standardize" the glyphs of characters being used, in order to eliminate unnecessary variations. As a result, several characters are combined into one, and some characters have their written form altered to ease the glyph generation process by computing technologies at that time. However, these simplification processes are rather minor as compared to those done by the Mainland government.
Writing direction
Due to their unique block, square nature and the morphologically inactive nature of the language, Chinese characters are generally written without spaces at word boundaries, and can be written either horizontally or vertically. Traditionally, writing was done vertically, going from top to bottom and arranged in columns going from right to left; on signboards etc. which were horizontal, the columns were reduced to a character each, effectively resulting in horizontal right-to-left writing. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, television subtitles still ran from right to left.
After the modernisation efforts of the PRC government in those same decades took a stronger hold there, however, horizontal left-to-right writing à la Latin has become usual practice. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, a parallel process developed with increased exposure to the West, especially the United States, and especially with the advent of technology. Singapore, for its part, has been dually influenced by both its tradition of adopting PRC guidelines with regard to Chinese writing, and by its predominantly Anglophone society. Despite the rise of horizontal writing (which facilitates inclusion of Hindu-Arabic numerals and Roman-lettered acronyms, inter alia), vertical right-to-left writing has persisted in Taiwan and Hong Kong especially in literature, due to the absence of government official policy on adopting horizontal writing.
External links
- History of Chinese Writing System An Article about Chinese Writing History
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| Categories: |
Gan | Hakka | Hui | Jin | Mandarin | Min | Ping | Xiang | Wu | Cantonese | |||
| Subcategories of Min: | Min Bei | Min Dong | Min Nan | Min Zhong | Puxian | Qiongwen | Shaojiang | |||
| Subcategories of Mandarin: | Northeastern | Beijing | Ji-Lu | Jiao-Liao | Zhongyuan | Lan-Yin | Southwestern | Jianghuai | Dungan | |||
| Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many. The categories in italics are not universally acknowledged to be independent categories. | ||||
| Comprehensive list of Chinese dialects | ||||
| Official spoken varieties: | Standard Mandarin | Standard Cantonese | |||
| Historical phonology: | Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Proto-Min | Proto-Mandarin | Haner | |||
| Chinese: written varieties | ||||
| Official written varieties: | Classical Chinese | Vernacular Chinese | |||
| Other varieties: | Written Vernacular Cantonese | |||
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