Written Chinese | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Chinese | 中文 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hanyu Pinyin | Zhōngwén | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Literal meaning | Chinese writing | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Han writing[a] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 汉文 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Traditional Chinese | 漢文 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hanyu Pinyin | Hànwén | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Literal meaning | Han writing | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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 correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation.[1] Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000.[2][3] This has led in part to the adoption of complementary transliteration systems (generally Pinyin)[4] as a means of representing the pronunciation of Chinese.[5]
Chinese writing is first attested during the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250 – c. 1050 BCE),[6][7][8] but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun centuries earlier during the Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age (c. 2500–2000 BCE).[9] After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE).[10] Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.[11] As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Literary Chinese.[12] In the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was replaced in large part with written vernacular Chinese, largely corresponding to Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.
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