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( Chinese writing system)
Written Chinese (Chinese ??; pinyin zhongwén) comprises Chinese characters (simplified Chinese ??; traditional Chinese ??; pinyin hànzì) used to represent spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, each character generally represents either a complete one-syllable word (see logogram) or a single-syllable part of a word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions,[1] or pronunciation.[2] Written Chinese is one of the world's oldest active, continuously used writing systems.[3] Many current Chinese characters have been traced back to the ? Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BCE[4][5][6], but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier.[7] After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the ? Qín dynasty (221–206 BCE).[8] Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.[9] Despite historical changes in pronunciation, Chinese speakers in disparate dialect groups can communicate in writing.[10] Some of the characters have also been adopted as part of the writing systems in other East Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean.[11][12] Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters Educated Chinese know about 4,000,[13][14] while educated Japanese know about half that many.[12] The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.[15] Written Chinese is not based predominantly on an alphabet or a compact syllabary.[1] Instead, Chinese characters are glyphs whose components may depict objects or represent abstract notions. Occasionally, a character consists of only one component; more commonly, two or more components are combined, using a variety of different principles, to form more complex characters. The best known exposition of Chinese character composition is the ????/???? Shuowén Jiezì, compiled by ??/?? Xu Shèn around 120 CE. Since Xu Shen did not have access to Chinese characters in their earliest forms, his analysis cannot always be taken as authoritative.[16] Nonetheless, no later work has supplanted the Shuowen Jiezi in terms of breadth, and it is still relevant to etymological research today.[17]
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