Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, they are called hànzì. Find the latest business news on Wall Street, jobs and the economy, the housing market, personal finance and money investments and much more on ABC News. The "Most Anticipated Indian Movies and Shows" widget tracks the real-time popularity of relevant pages on IMDb, and displays those that are currently generating the.

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Chinese characters - Wikipedia. Unless otherwise specified, Chinese text in this article is written in the format (Simplified Chinese / Traditional Chinese; Pinyin).

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If the Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters are identical, they are written only once. For the species of moth known as "Chinese Character", see Cilix glaucata.

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, they are called hanzi (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字, lit "Han characters").[2][3][4] They have been adapted to write a number of other languages, including Japanese, where they are known as kanji (漢字); Korean, where they are known as hanja (漢字); and Vietnamese, in a system known as chữ Nôm.

Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.[5] By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan, 2,1. 36 are taught through secondary school (the Jōyō kanji); hundreds more are in everyday use.

The characters used in Japan are distinct from those used in China in many respects. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia; the corresponding traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and to a limited extent in South Korea. Watch Smurfs: The Lost Village HDQ'>Watch Smurfs: The Lost Village HDQ. In Japan, common characters are written in post- WWII Japan- specific simplified forms (shinjitai), which are closer to traditional forms than Chinese simplifications, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms (kyūjitai), which are virtually identical to Chinese traditional forms. Watch Free Ghost Whisperer Season 5 there.

In South Korea, when Chinese characters are used they are of the traditional variant and are almost identical to those used in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. Teaching of Chinese characters in South Korea starts in the 7th grade and continues until the 1. In Old Chinese (and Classical Chinese, which is based on it), most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words.

In modern Chinese (esp. Mandarin Chinese), characters do not necessarily correspond to words; indeed the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters because of the merging and loss of sounds in the Chinese language over time.[7] Rather, a character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme.[8] However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes (written with two characters), bimorphemic syllables (written with two characters) and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase.[9]Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on meaning.

A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings; occasionally these correspond to different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character.

They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations. In other languages, most significantly today in Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords, to represent native words independently of the Chinese pronunciation (e.

Japanese), and as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino- Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. Function[edit]When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic, and each character denoted a single word. Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day.

It is estimated that about 2. Warring States period was polysyllabic, though these words were used far less commonly than monosyllables, which accounted for 8. Moral Orel Season 3 Episodes. The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones. It has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,0.

Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables. The most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, written with the characters of the constituent words.

Words have also been created by adding affixes, reduplication and borrowing from other languages. Polysyllabic words are generally written with one character per syllable.[b] In most cases the character denotes a morpheme descended from an Old Chinese word. Many characters have multiple readings, with instances denoting different morphemes, sometimes with different pronunciations. In modern Standard Chinese, one fifth of the 2,4. For the 5. 00 most common characters, the proportion rises to 3.

Often these readings are similar in sound and related in meaning. In the Old Chinese period, affixes could be added to a word to form a new word, which was often written with the same character.

In many cases the pronunciations diverged due to subsequent sound change. For example, many additional readings have the Middle Chinese departing tone, the major source of the 4th tone in modern Standard Chinese. Scholars now believe that this tone is the reflex of an Old Chinese *- s suffix, with a range of semantic functions.

For example,传/傳 has readings OC *drjon > MC drjwen > Mod. H > zhuàn 'a record'. Middle Chinese forms are given in Baxter's transcription, in which H denotes the departing tone.)磨 has readings *maj > ma > mó 'to grind' and *majs > ma. H > mò 'grindstone'.宿 has readings *sjuk > sjuwk > sù 'to stay overnight' and *sjuks > sjuw. H > xiù 'celestial "mansion"'.说/説 has readings *hljot > sywet > shuō 'speak' and *hljots > sywej. H > shuì 'exhort'.