26 Facts About Written Chinese

Written Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary.

The large number of Written Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets or other complementary systems as auxiliary means of representing Written Chinese.

Some Chinese characters have been adopted into writing systems of other neighbouring East Asian languages, but are currently used only in Japanese and to a lesser extent in Korean, as Vietnamese is written using alphabetic script.

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or a compact syllabary.

Traditionally, Chinese text was written in vertical columns which were read from top to bottom, right-to-left; the first column being on the right side of the page, and the last column on the left.

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Text written in Classical Chinese uses little or no punctuation, with sentence and phrase breaks being determined by context and rhythm.

The punctuation marks used in Simplified Written Chinese are clearly influenced by their Western counterparts, although some marks are particular to Asian languages: for example, the double and single quotation marks ; the hollow period dot, which is otherwise used just like an ordinary period full-stop; and a special kind of comma called an enumeration comma, which is used to separate items in a list, as opposed to clauses in a sentence.

Traditional Written Chinese retains the use of these quotation marks while Simplified Written Chinese has abandoned them for western ones.

Written Chinese is one of the oldest continually-used writing-systems still in use.

The earliest generally accepted examples of Written Chinese writing date back to the reign of the Shang Dynasty king Wu Ding .

Regular script is considered the archetype for Written Chinese writing and forms the basis for most printed forms.

Little systematic research has been conducted to prove that simplified Written Chinese has affected literacy rates in any way as the only studies conducted in mainland China focused on arbitrary statistics quantifying the number of strokes saved on average in samples of running text.

The spoken language has since become polysyllabic, but because modern polysyllabic words are usually composed of older monosyllabic words, Written Chinese characters have always been used to represent individual Written Chinese syllables.

Over two thousand years, the prevailing written standard was a vocabulary and syntax rooted in Chinese as spoken around the time of Confucius, called Classical Chinese, or ??? wenyanwen.

However, Ghil'ad Zuckermann's exploration of phono-semantic matching in Standard Written Chinese concludes that the Written Chinese writing system is multifunctional, conveying both semantic and phonetic content.

Written Chinese characters were first introduced into Japanese sometime in the first half of the first millennium AD, probably from Written Chinese products imported into Japan through Korea.

At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and Chinese characters were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations.

Written Chinese characters are called hanzi in Mandarin, after the Han Dynasty of China; in Japanese, this was pronounced kanji.

When used for Korean, Written Chinese characters are called hanja, which served as the first writing system for the language.

Many Written Chinese characters were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese.

Written Chinese characters are used within China to write non-Han languages.

The majority of modern Written Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Written Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known.

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or syllabary, so Chinese dictionaries, as well as dictionaries that define Chinese characters in other languages, cannot easily be alphabetized or otherwise lexically ordered, as English dictionaries are.

Every Written Chinese character falls under the heading of exactly one of these 214 radicals.

Written Chinese characters do not reliably indicate their pronunciation, even for one dialect.

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However, transliteration was not always considered merely a way to record the sounds of any particular dialect of Written Chinese; it was once considered a potential replacement for the Written Chinese characters.