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Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally ...
Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture.Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention.
Standard Chinese is written with characters corresponding to syllables of the language, most of which represent a morpheme. In most cases, these characters come from those used in Classical Chinese to write cognate morphemes of late Old Chinese, though their pronunciation, and often meaning, has shifted dramatically over two millennia. [98]
An example of Chinese bronze inscriptions, on a bronze vessel dated to the early Western Zhou period, 11th century BC. The earliest known examples of Chinese writing are oracle bone script dating to c. 1200 BC, and uncovered at the site of Yin, the final capital of the Shang dynasty, near modern Anyang.
The Chinese Wikipedia ( traditional Chinese : 中 文 維 基 百 科; simplified Chinese : 中 文 维 基 百 科; pinyin : Zhōngwén Wéijī Bǎikē) is the written vernacular Chinese (a form of Mandarin Chinese) edition of Wikipedia. It is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started on 11 May 2001, [ 1 ] the Chinese Wikipedia currently has ...
Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets widely used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters.Their mass standardization during the 20th century was part of an initiative by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to promote literacy, and their use in ordinary circumstances on the mainland has been encouraged by the Chinese ...
Classical Chinese[ a] is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. [ 2] For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the ...
Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as 正體字; 正体字; zhèngtǐzì; 'orthodox characters'. [ 9] This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and ...