CHINESE WRITING SYSTEM

basically logographic writing system using symbols of pictorial origin to represent words of the Chinese language. Dictionaries of Chinese record as many as 40,000 distinct symbols (usually called characters), but a corpus of about 10,000 (those used by Chinese telegraphers, who represent them by 4-unit code groups) is sufficient for practically all purposes. Knowledge of at least 2,000 characters is necessary to be functionally literate in Chinese. Particular words in most cases are represented either by one symbol intended to express the meaning of the word or by a combination of symbols. The Chinese writing system apparently began to develop in the early 2nd millennium BC. The earliest known inscriptions, each of which contains between 10 and 60 characters incised on pieces of bone and tortoiseshell that were used for oracular divination, date from the Shang (or Yin) dynasty (18th-12th century). Later stages in the development of Chinese writing include the ku-wen ("ancient figures") found in inscriptions from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1123) and the early years of the Chou dynasty that followed. The major script of the Chou dynasty, which ruled from 1111 to 225 BC, was the ta chuan ("great seal"), also called the Chou wen ("Chou script"). By the end of the Chou dynasty the ta chuan had degenerated to some extent; it was replaced c. 213 BC (during the Ch'in dynasty, which ruled from 221 to 206 BC) by the hsiao chuan ("lesser seal"). During this period the writing brush was invented, and the characters acquired a more modern appearance; from this basically modern script (called li shu or li tzu), many different styles, or "hands," have developed. The Chinese traditionally divide the characters into six types (called liu shu, "six scripts"), the most common of which is hsing sheng, the type of character that combines a semantic element (called a radical) with a phonetic element intended to remind the reader of the pronunciation of the word. The phonetic element is usually a contracted form of another character with the same pronunciation as that of the word intended. For example, the character for k'o "river" is composed of the radical shui "water" plus the phonetic ko, the meaning of which ("fruit") is irrelevant; the combined "water-ko" symbol suggests the word k'o meaning "river." Seventy-five percent of all Chinese characters are of this type. The other types of characters are hsiang hsing, characters that were originally pictographs (these have a semantic element originally expressed by a picture, such as the character for t'ien "field," which represents a field by means of a square divided into quarters); chih shih, characters intended to be symbolic of logical or abstract terms (e.g., erh, "two," is indicated by two horizontal lines); hui i, characters formed by a combination of elements thought to be logically associated (e.g., the symbols for "man" and "word" are combined to represent the word meaning "true, sincere, truth"); chuan chu, modifications or distortions of characters to form new characters, usually of somewhat related meaning (e.g., the character for shan "mountain" turned sideways means fou "tableland"); and chia chieh, characters borrowed from (or sometimes originally mistaken for) others, usually words of different meaning but similar pronunciation (e.g., the character for tsu "foot" is used for tsu "to be sufficient"). Chinese characters are arranged in dictionaries according to the radicals of which they are composed or with which they are traditionally associated. The 214 radicals are arranged in modern dictionaries according to the number of pen strokes used in writing them. Phonetic scripts for the language have been invented, based both on Chinese characters and on the Latin alphabet, and are now widely used. In an attempt to standardize the spelling of Chinese in Roman languages, the Chinese government adopted the Pinyin (q.v.) system of transliteration in 1958. This system is based on the phonetic transliteration of the Peking, or Northern Mandarin, dialect (the major dialect in China) and is gradually replacing the Wade-Giles system (q.v.) established in the 19th century.