Chinese Beginners: Writing

2011年6月25日星期六

Chinese Writing System

The earliest fully developed Chinese writing that we know of today is the inscriptions on turtle shells and oxen shoulder blades, commonly known as oracle-bone script that appeared in the mid-second millennium BCE during the Late Shang dynasty.

Unlike a phonographic writing such as that of English where each letter of the alphabet encodes a phone, Chinese writing is a logographic system with each grapheme (or character) simultaneously encoding sounds and meaning at the level of the syllable. As a logographic system, Chinese writing has the great advantage that it is not necessary for a person who knows how to decode the writing system to learn to pronounce the characters in order to read the messages written in them.

Chinese writing is, nevertheless, not just a system of visual signs, or ideographs, representing various concepts or ideas totally divorced from pronunciation. A literary speaker of any Chinese dialect can immediately pronounce a Chinese character in her/his own dialect. The character, as a logographic form with a single-graph structure, does not represent any given phone within a word, but a syllable associated with a morpheme, Chinese writing as a system of morpheme–syllable representation is systematically phoneticized, i.e., the characters are readable.

In modern Chinese, graphemes, or characters, are known as hanzi, literally “Han-character” bearing the name of the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE). It was during the Han dynasty that Chinese writing was to a large extent standardized at a time when writing brushes, ink, ink stone and paper, wenfang sibao “four treasures in a study,” became the standard tools in Chinese writing.

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2011年6月24日星期五

The Strokes of Chinese Writing

The Chinese character for “cloud” was written as in oracle-bone script and in bronze script, both of which have a curvy line in the bottom somewhat resembling a piece of floating cloud. However, after Chinese script was standardized after the Han dynasty, various Chinese graphemes can be analyzed in terms of strokes, i.e., lines, dots, and hooks that are draw non a piece of paper with a writing instrument, forming Chinese characters to codify words. For example, in standard script, the earlier undulant and angular lines were replaced by straighter and more regular lines that are more compatible with brushwork techniques. In so doing different kinds of strokes can be easily identified. A Chinese character is supposed to be written stroke by stroke. Chinese children are taught to write different strokes in each Chinese character by strictly following stroke order rules.

There are many practical reasons for students to learn these stroke-order rules. For example, writing is considered to be a form of art in Chinese culture. These rules may help students develop some necessary skills in placing various strokes proportionally to produce aesthetically acceptable Chinese characters. Moreover, one could not use many Chinese dictionaries effectively without knowing the order of strokes, as most dictionary index systems draw on stroke-order rules as a useful way to help users find the relevant entries of a given Chinese character. Even after the romanized spelling system was adopted, most Chinese dictionaries still provide an index relying on the number of strokes because there are many people who may not be familiar with either the romanized system adopted in a given dictionary or the pronunciation, or pronunciations, of a given Chinese character. For example, in the most widely used The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary in China, there is a two-step index system that is divided into two sections, “initial radical” and “radicals guide,” both of which depend heavily on the number of strokes. In this dictionary, that contains over 56,000 words, about 200 initial radicals are recognized. A user needs to count the number of strokes in the initial radical of a Chinese character, or the first Chinese character if the word has more than one Chinese character, to find the section that has all the Chinese characters with the same initial radical. Then, the user needs to count the number of strokes in the remainder of the Chinese character to find the page number where all the relevant entries beginning with the Chinese character will be listed.