38 Facts About Han characters

Vietnam once used the chu Han characters and developed chu Nom to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet.

Chinese Han characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.

In Japan, common Han characters are often written in post-Toyo kanji simplified forms, while uncommon Han characters are written in Japanese traditional forms.

Some Han characters retained their phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in a historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired.

Many Han characters have multiple readings, with instances denoting different morphemes, sometimes with different pronunciations.

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Chinese Han characters represent words of the language using several strategies.

Peter Boodberg and William Boltz go so far as to deny that any of the compound Han characters devised in ancient times were of this type, maintaining that now-lost "secondary readings" are responsible for the apparent absence of phonetic indicators, but their arguments have been rejected by other scholars.

Also, a few Han characters coined in China in modern times, such as platinum, "white metal" belong to this category.

Chinese Han characters used purely for their sound values are attested in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period manuscripts, in which was used to write and vice versa, just lines apart; the same happened with ? for, with the Han characters in question being homophonous or nearly homophonous at the time.

Chinese Han characters are used rebus-like and exclusively for their phonetic value when transcribing words of foreign origin, such as ancient Buddhist terms or modern foreign names.

All these Han characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes, which is a reduced form of the character ? shui meaning "water", indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water.

Occasionally a bisyllabic word is written with two Han characters that contain the same radical, as in "butterfly", where both Han characters have the insect radical.

The legend relates that on the day the Han characters were created, grain rained down from the sky and that night the people heard ghosts wailing and demons crying because the human beings could no longer be cheated.

Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese Han characters were blamed for the economic problems in China during that time.

Since the education of Chinese Han characters is not mandatory in South Korea, the usage of Chinese character is rapidly disappearing.

Chinese Han characters adapted to write Japanese words are known as kanji.

Chinese Han characters are sometimes used to this day for either clarification in a practical manner, or to give a distinguished appearance, as knowledge of Chinese Han characters is considered by many Koreans a high class attribute and an indispensable part of a classical education.

In South Korea, educational policy on Han characters has swung back and forth, often swayed by education ministers' personal opinions.

Therefore, a good working knowledge of Chinese Han characters is still important for anyone who wishes to interpret and study older texts from Korea, or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities.

Chinese Han characters are thought to have been first introduced to the Ryukyu Islands in 1265 by a Japanese Buddhist monk.

In Vietnam, Chinese characters are now limited to ceremonial uses, but they were once in widespread use.

Similar to Zhuang Sawndip, the Nom script and its Han characters formed by fusing phonetic and semantic values of Chinese Han characters that resemble Vietnamese syllables.

The Mongols, Manchu, and Japanese constantly select unaspirated Han characters to represent the sounds g, d, b, and j of their languages.

Use of traditional Chinese Han characters versus simplified Chinese Han characters varies greatly, and can depend on both the local customs and the medium.

Some simplified Chinese Han characters adopted by the People's Republic of China, and some simplified Han characters used in Japan, are derived from the cursive script.

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Nature of Chinese Han characters makes it very easy to produce allographs for many Han characters, and there have been many efforts at orthographical standardization throughout history.

Just as each region that uses Chinese Han characters has standardized character forms, each has standardized stroke orders, with each standard being different.

Some Han characters are written with different stroke orders due to character simplification.

Chinese Han characters are primarily morphosyllabic, meaning that most Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic and are written with a single character, though in modern Chinese most words are disyllabic and dimorphemic, consisting of two syllables, each of which is a morpheme.

Some can be considered logograms, where characters represent whole words rather than syllable-morphemes, though these are generally instead considered ligatures or abbreviations, and as non-standard.

However, in the 19th century these were often written via compound Han characters, pronounced disyllabically, such as for or for – some of these Han characters were used in Japan, where they were pronounced with borrowed European readings instead.

Since polysyllabic Han characters are often non-standard, they are often excluded in character dictionaries.

In most other languages that use the Chinese family of scripts, notably Korean, Vietnamese, and Zhuang, Chinese Han characters are typically monosyllabic, but in Japanese a single character is generally used to represent a borrowed monosyllabic Chinese morpheme, a polysyllabic native Japanese morpheme, or even a foreign loanword.

Newspapers have dealt with this problem in varying ways, including using software to combine two existing, similar Han characters, including a picture of the character, or, especially as is the case with Yu Shyi-kun, simply substituting a homophone for the rare character in the hope that the reader would be able to make the correct inference.

One of the most complex Han characters found in modern Chinese dictionaries is, meaning "snuffle", with "just" thirty-six strokes.

Chinese Han characters are theoretically an open set and anyone can create new Han characters, though such inventions are rarely included in official character sets.

However, when no obvious cognate could be found for a word, due to factors like irregular sound change or semantic drift in the meanings of characters, or the word originates from a non-Chinese source like a substratum from an earlier displaced language or a later borrowing from another language family, then characters are borrowed and used according to the rebus principle or invented in an ad hoc manner to transcribe it.

In Japan, in the Meiji era, new Han characters were coined for some SI units, such as for kilometer.