Introduction to the writing chinese system
The origins of the Chinese writing system
Writing was probably invented in China during the latter half of the 2nd millenium BC. The earliest recognisable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 BC (Shang dynasty) and were inscribed on turtle shells used for divination. The turtle shells were heated, then inspected, the resulting cracks determining answers to one's questions.
In the beginning of the 20 th century, Wang Yirong discovered on a turtle shell that he had been prescribed by a pharmacy, symbols that looked like writing on some "dragon bones". He was the first to discover these oracle bones, which have been preciously collected as testimony of the beginning of the chinese writing.
How many characters?
The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms. To be able to read a normal book or newspaper you have to know about 2000 characters. However the knowledge of the 1,000 most frequent Chinese characters allows you to be able to start reading a Chinese newspaper and understand most of its contents.
How does that work ?
Unlike English or any western language, Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet (a complete standardized set of letters, each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language). The chinese writing system employs about 5,000 commonly used characters that each represent a Chinese morpheme. A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. A morpheme differs from a word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. For instance, the word "unbreakable" has three morphemes : "un-", (meaning not x) a bound morpheme, "-break-" a free morpheme, and "-able".
In the same way, in chinese, a word is generally composed of two characters , though words can commonly be made up of one, three, four or more characters.
| Examples of Chinese words | |||||||
| Character | Meaning | ||||||
| 车 | carriage (chē) | ||||||
| 汽 车 | steam carriage (qìchē) | ||||||
| 公 共 汽 车 | bus (gōng gòng qìchē) | ||||||
| 火 车 | Train (hǔo chē) | ||||||
| 电 车 | electric carriage (diàn chē) | ||||||
The structure of chinese characters
The Strokes
Each character is composed of strokes. For instance , the following character 女 meaning "woman" is composed of 3 strokes. 田, meaning field, is composed of 5 strokes. There exists a total of 8 basic types of strokes.
Chinese characters can be classified into two kinds: one-component characters and compounds characters.
one-component characters
人 (man), 女 (woman), 子 (child) are one-component characters. Among these one-component characters, we can distinguish special characters called radicals. Radicals can be considered as the most basic components of chinese characters. These chinese radicals are roughly equivalent to the letters of the alphabetic system. The most commonly accepted table of radicals for traditional Chinese characters consists of 214 entries. One-component characters can be further categorized into pictograms and symbols .
A pictogram represents in stylized form the object it refers to. 人 (man), 木 (tree),(mouth) , 日 (sun), 月 (moon) are pictograms.
A symbolic character is a symbol for the concept it refers to. 上 (above), 下(under), 中 (middle) are symbolic characters.
Compounds characters
However, Most characters can be broken down into radicals and basic components. These characters are called compounds characters. For instance, 好 (well, good), 从 (to follow), 明 (bright) and 林 (forest) are composed characters.
These characters can be further rougly categorized into ideograms and picto-phonograms
An ideogram comes from the combination of two or more meaningful components to create a new character with a new meaning. 明 (bright) is composed of the 日 (sun) and 月 (moon) character. 林 (forest) is composed of the 木 (tree) and 木 (tree) character. 男 (male) is composed of 田 (field) and 力 (strength).
picto-phonograms are composed of two components:
- one component indicates the meaning,
- the other indicates its pronunciation.
For instance, the character 媽 (mother) is pronounced "mā". The 女(woman) is the meaning component, 馬 (horse), that pronounces "mǎ" is the phonetic component.
Compounds characters can be further classified under the phonetic-loans and reclarified categories.
The Chinese writing system and the language
In China, the official language is the mandarin or putonghua, a dialect spoken in the north of the country. However, about a dozen dialect is spoken , the most important being the Cantonese.
Everybody in China uses the same set of characters to communicate, whatever his native dialect is. This is made possible by the relative independance between the characters and the language.
The pinyin system
Pinyin is a system of romanization for Mandarin, where pin means "spell" and yin means "sound". With this system, one's can use western letters instead of characters to write Chinese. Pinyin was adopted in 1979 by the government of People's Republic of China.
In mandarin, there are a total of four tones. For instance, the syllable ma can be pronounced :
- mā. This is the flat tone or high Level Tone, also called the first tone (ma1),
- má. This is the Rising or High-Rising Tone also called the second tone (ma2),
- mǎ. This is the Falling-Rising or Low Tone also called the third tone (ma3),
- mà. This is the Falling or High-Falling Tone also called the fourth tone (ma4),
- ma. This is the fifth tone or neutral tone (ma).