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Did someone remove the picture & section that compared the different styles of script? (ie. cursive, semi cursive, clerical, etc) That picture/section were very informative, so if someone could please restore it, that would be very helpful. Intranetusa (talk) 19:05, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Chinese characters are employed to one degree or another in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, as well as Vietnamese before its colonization.

Also after -- the people who take orders at the Vietnamese place my girlfriend and I like use Chinese characters (as I discovered when they got our order wrong) --Charles A. L. 19:28, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)

A minority of Vietnamese are actually Vietnamese with Chinese ancestry (how ever "far back" or not). I think a number of Vietnamese Americans are like this. These people at the take-out restaurant may therefore be "Chinese-Vietnamese Americans".

I think this is quite likely. Something that I found is many Vietnamese-Americans actually speak very good Mandarin because they were Sino-Vietnamese and learned Chinese in Chinese school in Vietnam. -RR

You could make a conversation with them about this. But my understanding is that Vietnamese schools don't teach Chinese anymore, so most have no way to learn them unless their parents know how to and are interested in teaching their children Chinese. --Menchi 02:42, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Or they be just Chinese Americans who happen to specialize in Vietnamese cuisine. I know many sushi stores are actually owned by Chinese. And probably most pizzerias are not owned by Italians. --Menchi 02:47, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Modern Vietnamese does not use Chinese characters. Most people do not know one character from another, save the characters on Chinese chess pieces. The restaurant might be owned by a Chinese person, or is specializing in Chinese cuisine.

Actually, I don't mean to pick at small details, but very few Chinese, much less Vietnamese, who were raised in Vietnam can speak Mandarin. The majority falls under Cantonese, and they speak it even if they're not. It just so happens that Cantonese sounds quite like Vietnamese (it's like German and English). See this and Hoa. ★Dasani★ 23:23, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know where to add this, but someone might want to mention that Chinese characters range in complexity from one stroke (一), meaning "one", to sixty-four strokes (File:Tie4b.png), an ancient character meaning "Verbose". -Spencer195 19:44, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It's in Unicode as 𪚥 (U+2A6A5) although I don't think anyone has a font to display the extended Unihan characters yet. DopefishJustin 01:12, Apr 15, 2004 (UTC)

This character was added to unicode around the year 2000, a number of fonts have it, the free font Hannom B, has all the Extension B characters in it.Johnkn63 (talk) 13:13, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I have now added this. — Chameleon 16:24, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am bilingual. I lived and studied in China and Hong Kong for much of my life so I would say I speak better Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese than English. I did not recognize any of those characters as being actual words, the first three appear to be nothing more than compounds of 1 or 2 words written multiple times combined together.

For example:

Zhé, "verbose" - This is the character meaning "dragon" written 4 times...

"Taito," the appearance of a dragon in flight - It is essentially the two words "cloud" and "dragon" written 3 times each and stack on top of one another... this is a word either written by mistake with a chinese word processor or simply a hoax, this is not a word in Chinese

Nàng, "poor enunciation due to snuffle" - I have never seen this interpretation of this word in my life. The "character" is 2 characters combined together essentially meaning the tip of one's nose or the ball of the tip of the nose.

"Biáng," a kind of noodle - I don't know this word either

What I am trying to say is, while these may be words, they are certainly not words nor never were words in Chinese. They may be Japanese or Korean characters however, so I believe someone should say that. It should not be in the Chinese character list, they are not Chinese characters. I think many fluent Chinese speaking people would agree with me.

Thank you for your time Cclinke (talk) 17:14, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't see how having spent time in China automatically entitles you to say they ... certainly ... never were words in Chinese. I don't claim to know any more than you on the subject, but I see no reason to believe they never were. And aren't "characters" and "words" fundamentally different? (A Guide to Reading Chinese, Third Edition) elvenscout742 (talk) 18:17, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, so because the characters are funny and you've never seen them before, they're suddenly no longer words for all 1.4 billion Chinese? I don't think those complex words are hoaxes at all. You yourself seem like a hoax because of you saying that you've had too much experience in Chinese countries and then denying existence of such characters. Look, if you think those are bad, that's just for starters. There's more obsolete words in Kangxi Dictionary (although not as complex in writing). The articles even point out, although there's around 49,000 Chinese words, many people only know up to 5,000 or 6,000. ★Dasani★ 23:28, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

the important thing is to remember WP:V. While the passage seems credible and well-informed, I must note that no source is cited. I have added ((fact)) tags at the appropriate positions. dab (𒁳) 18:36, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Cclinke, the language is full of many obsolete forms, so I can show you tens of thousands of characters from the Hanyu Da Zidian which you assuredly won't know. But just because you don't know them doesn't mean they're not there. Nang4, for instance, is in a number of my dictionaries, so it is likely to have been in real use at some point. Like you, I am a bit suspicious about some of these. For instance, I suspect that Taito was created on the whim of some calligrapher at one point, and was never in any real use at all. The Biang example might occur on a few shop signs in some isolated region of China, but again it was never in any real widespread use. However, it has been used, even if only in limited form, and it is certainly a visually arresting and fun example so I see no harm in leaving it in place. To strengthen the section a bit I have added a few examples which are in widespread use. Dragonbones (talk) 14:47, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

As for the rare characters in celebrity names: I don’t think this is a good enough set of examples of rare characters in names. First, although the 镕 róng (朱镕基 Zhū Róngjī) and 煊 xuān (王建煊, pinyin Wáng Jiànxuān) are not well known characters, the pronunciation is obvious because 容 róng and 宣 xuān are very regular, reliable phonetic elements. When you see a character containing them, you’re reasonably assured that the pronunciation is the same, although the latter might be fourth instead of first tone. And they’re both easy enough to type (and not even buried very far down in the IME I’m using, being only the fifth characters on the list in both cases). Next, the 錫 xí in 游錫堃Yóu Xīkūn should be marked 2nd tone; the character is a poyinzi and it is 2nd tone based on the pronunciation here in Taiwan; while it is a first-tone character in the China, the person in question is Taiwanese, so Romanization should reflect that. The only two good examples in this set are the 堃 kūn in the latter name; it is not common and many have not encountered it until this person’s name. The pronunciation is not obvious, and although it types easily enough in my IME, it is not even listed in one of my smaller dictionaries. (I should note that he is well known enough that now most people know the character, but the example is still a fair one.) David Tao’s example is good too; most people don’t know 喆 zhé, and its pronunciation is not obvious either, as it comprises two jí.Dragonbones (talk) 14:49, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

All languages have their obselete terms. I've never heard anyone use the english word "verbose" in everyday life, for instance. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs 23:56, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

(Not directly about this article just a good place to open the topic.)

Hi,

I changed the tree root to Oracle Bone Script. The Parent systems tree should display scripts that lead to the development of the current script. "Chinese" is not a script it is a word description of the whole tree (and more - see article) and if it would be a script it would not be the root ;) As a comparison you can see others like Arabic_alphabet where Proto-Canaanite_alphabet is a specific script :) The tree elements are all right - see Oracle Bone Script , Seal Script , regular script or Clerical Script. All have Oracle Bone script as root. Even "Chinese" names it as root ;)

So it is a simple error. But as I will change more than one article I wanted to explain myself a lil longer. Many Chinese articles have this "wrong" root (possibly a very early error) so if you see one please change it and link here.

If you don't think its right feel free to write

Best wishes Moooitic (talk) 21:46, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Support. kwami (talk) 22:25, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I couldn't find a definite guide on when to include tone marks, but in other articles they seem to be mostly left out for common place names like Xi'an, dynasty names etc. This article however includes them extensively (though not consistently). Should this be cleaned up? Taniquetil (talk) 10:56, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

What is a sinograph? It is used in the article, but Sinograph also directs to this article. I am German, and a dictionary I have doesn't help. Please explain sinograph in this article, or split into two. TheReincarnator (talk) 19:44, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

It just means "Chinese character", and as one author I can't recall says, its only virtue is that it is one word rather than two. It is not in wide use. It should probably be attributed to a specific author who uses it rather than be assumed to be a generally known term. --JWB (talk) 14:22, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

KOREANS CONSIDER CHINESE CHARACTER TO BE LATIN OR GREEK. KOREANS DON'T DENY SOME KOREAN VOCABULARY CAME FROM CHINESE CHARACTERS. EVEN BEFORE KOREAN ALPHABET CREATION KOREANS HAD SPOKEN LANGUAGE BUT WRITTEN LANGUAGE WASN'T INVENTED UNTIL 13TH CENTURY. IN KOREA EVERYTHING IS WRITTEN IN KOREAN ALPHABET NOT CHINESE CHARACTERS. KOREANS DO NOT RELY ON CHINESE CHARACTERS. KOREAN LANGUAGE CONSIST 70 PERCENT KOREAN VOCABULARY REST OF 30 PERCENT VOCABULARY ARE CHINESE, ENGLISH, JAPANESE, EUROPEAN, RUSSIAN VOCABULARY.

KOREAN LANGUAGE RELATE TO ALTAIC ROOTS NOT CHINESE. KOREAN WRITTEN AND GRAMMAR LANGUAGE IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM CHINESE. IF CHINESE HAD GREAT CULTURAL INFLUENCE OVER KOREAN PEOPLE THEN KOREAN GRAMMAR MUST RELATE TO CHINESE BUT IT DOESN'T. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hangul1 (talk • contribs) 10:56, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

LOL, 10/10 FOR CAPSLOCK, IT'S CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:37, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Of course, Hanja are not used in everyday life the way they are in China or Japan, but they are used more than just "primarily for emphasis and for names." They are used quite a bit in academic literature (much to my frustration, since I don't want to spend 5 minutes looking up a character in an Okpyeon every time I see a new one I don't know, especially when after all my deciphering, it turns out it's a word I knew all along, but only in its Hangul spelling!); and also in dictionaries, railway signs, and anywhere disambiguation is necessary. Perhaps you were thinking of the use of Hanja in newspaper headlines or shop signs, but this is more for the purpose of instant disambiguation and recognition than for emphasis. --Sewing 02:19, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The Japanese-style form with mixed Hangul and Hanja is still used in the constitution and some important laws. So lawyers study Hanja for work. --Nanshu 03:49, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Just remember that Koreans were using Chinese characters before the Japanese even knew what they were. Up until the 20th century, almost all writing was done exclusively in Hanja. Writing with mixed Hangul and Hanja is called "mixed script," not "Japanese-style" writing. --Sewing 19:34, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That can be called "Japanese-style." There were Classical Chinese and X-eongae but they don't have the mixed writing style. Hangul was used mostly by itself. The new writing style was implanted from Japanese one. So Japanese can guess what old Korean newspapers say. --Nanshu 04:14, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hangul-hanja mixed script is not Japanese-style. In the Japanese-style, some native Japanese morphemes are written in kanji, but in hangul-hanja mixed script (as opposed to idu & hyangchal), all native Korean morphemes are written in hangul. --AZ, 09 Sept 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.167.225 (talk) 10:30, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Nanshu's so called Japanese-style,is neither Japan's original nor particular one. All the countries which influenced from Chinese culture,have their own mixed script system. It's not Eongae but Eonhae(諺解), and in here, you can see the sample.[1]. After the Hangul's invention, there exist numerous mixed script style documents like this. And, Before the invention of Hangul, Another mixed style like Gugyeol and Idu already exist. It's totally nonsence to call such a mixed script style to Japanese-style. What Nanshu's so called Japanese-style derived from Classical chinese style only plus katakana annotation. That has no originality except for the fact that Japanese still keeping such a mixed script while other countries already abandoned. What we can called "Japanese-style" limited only their sino-japanese words which translating from Europian languages. These words' originality exist in Europe languages, not Japanese. Iziizi (talk) 07:34, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

The paragraph that starts with 'In Korea, 한자 hanja have become a politically contentious issue, with some Koreans urging a "purification" of the national language and culture by totally abandoning their use' seems too biased to me. One of the arguments in favour of Hangeul-only orthography was that Hangeul can be typed purely mechanically on a typewriter, whereas Chinese characters cannot. This was an important issue at the period in which Korean orthographical standardisation took place, as it overlapped social instabilities circa the Korean War, and the military use of typewriters was considered vital.[2] Given today's technology, I guess this is no longer much of an issue, but it still is appealing that Hangeul-only system, unlike those of Chinese or Japanese, does not need to go through an input method editor (IME).[3] Anyways, I just thought the paragraph was misleading, because it seems to portray the people in favour of Hangeul-only orthography as ideological bigots. --AZ 28 August 2008

At least today, using mostly Hangeul is simply the norm, so how contentious can it be? At least the tense of the sentence seems misleading. In the past, there certainly was a strong movement to get away from Japanese conventions, in both China and Korea. Although Japanese telegrams used katakana until 1988, so maybe this isn't such an un-Japanese idea.

Hangeul input actually does have to go through an IME because Korean character codes encode a whole syllable block, not individual letters. The IME has to map the letter sequence to the code. It is true the user should never have to make a choice between different character strings pronounced the same way, as with Chinese characters.

Graphically, Hangeul letters usually change size to make the syllable fit in a standard square space. I guess the mechanical Hangeul typewriters did not do this? I know some fonts today use fixed-size letters, though their use seems mostly decorative. --JWB (talk) 04:18, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah, while IME does exist for Hangeul, it actually turns out that this is not necessary! This technique is known as 직결 (jiggyeol, trans.: "direct connection"), and follows the principle of mechanical Hangeul typewriter. A few Korean speakers use this when traveling in foreign countries and need to type Hangeul on computers without a Korean IME. The second website I linked above has a free license font called "direct.ttf" that exemplifies this. And yes, mechanical Hangeul typewriters did not fit syllables in a square. These fonts are known as 탈네모글꼴 (trans.: "square-escaped font") and are not all purely decorative. At least one major South Korean newspaper[4] uses it. --AZ 30 August 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.79.211.220 (talk) 22:25, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok, but when you type something using jiggyeol, you do not wind up with Korean coded in the normal character codes, right? If you try to display the file on a normal system, it should look like garbage.

Thanks for telling me the term "ttalnemogeulkkol" - I brought up that kind of font recently at Talk:Abugida#Description and Hangul#Block shape but did not know what they are called.

Where are they used on the hani site? The text there looks like normal fonts. --JWB (talk) 06:20, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Right, when you type with jiggyeol on an English operating system without a jiggyeol font, you would just get a string of gibberish ASCII characters. This is a problem of the OS rather than jiggyeol, since the OS is responsible for translating keyboard scan codes into character codes. So, in practice, if one were to use jiggyeol, she would either have to have or know where to get a jiggyeol font, or she would use a web-font-supporting web browser and use web apps that allow one to type jiggyeol.

Hani uses a talnemo font on actual printed newspaper. It's not open license, but you can download and use it without cost.[5] It is talnemo, but not a typewriter font. --AZ, 31 August 2008

I checked out Talk:Abugida#Description and Hangul#Block shape and I appreciate your contributions. But I want to point out that talnemo fonts are not that recent. Since the first typewriter fonts were talnemo, they are at least 60 years old. As for computer fonts, the oldest I could find was an article dated 1989.[6] --AZ, 31 August 2008

Thanks, please feel free to contribute additional information in those articles!

I downloaded the font but was not able to get talnemo text to display. --JWB (talk) 18:51, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Is the font same as the one the web page is in? If so, it is talnemo, albeit rather moderate. -- AZ, 09 Sept 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.167.225 (talk) 10:36, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

A user added this to the external links section:

Learn Chinese - Your Most Faithful Chinese Guide

I went to fix it up so it was less advertise-y then I noticed the hidden comment to discuss the addition of all such links before adding them to the page. I don't really have an opinion either way; not knowing the language, I find it difficult to judge if the site is good or not. JazzMan 18:51, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Another new external link

Skritter is a tool focused pretty much exclusively for learning Chinese (and Japanese) characters which I think makes it a useful and relevant link and have added it. Let me know here if you don't think that's a good idea (and why!) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.68.40.206 (talk) 01:46, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

The tool is good, but you can't link this site from Wikipedia. Please read the relevant paragraph of guidelines. Thanks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links#Sites_requiring_registration —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cababunga (talk • contribs) 22:04, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Another suggested external link

I found this article under "Recent Changes", and noticed that a new link had been added. I was curious so I visited the site (ArchChinese.com), and was impressed with the animation. I checked other wikipedia articles, to try to make sure Arch Chinese was felt to be a legitimate (non-spam) site, and found what seemed to be a better description in the link within another article, so I edited the line here, just trying to be helpful. Then I looked further, and saw that the same anon. IP user who added the link today had tried to add the same link a month ago, and the link had been removed because there had been no prior discussion to establish a consensus whether it was an appropriate link. The Arch Chinese site looks useful to me, but I am just an English-speaking user who has an interest in languages in general, with no knowledge of Chinese characters or pronunciation. The site doesn't look like a commercial one to me, but I have only checked a few pages and I may have missed something. I apologize for not checking the talk page first. I have not been a contributor here before, so I will delete the link and the change I made, to show good faith. As I understand the previous discussion, what is desired is that before an external link is added, there should be discussion first. I propose that if this external site is deemed useful and appropriate, that the link be added here. NameIsRon (talk) 17:29, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

I can't access the site archchinese.com either because it is no longer there or because I reside behind the GFC and it has been blocked for some reason. If it has no advertising, no registration requirements and is a non-commercial site then under WP:ELNO it can go in the article. Philg88 ^contact

I erred -- the site doesn't work with the address I gave -- it needs the "www": www.archchinese.com. I looked into the site further, and I see that they do solicit memberships. That is, in order to use some of the site's enhanced capabilities, you have to pay something like 2 USD per month. I can't tell how useful the site is if you do not pay the membership fee. I invite subject matter experts to check it out. NameIsRon (talk) 23:16, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

The table at the beginning of this section says that the Han-Han Dae Sajeon has 53,667 characters, but the next paragraph states that it has over 57,000. 75.17.159.55 (talk) 23:08, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to propose that we split out the current history section (leaving an overview). Everything from the section History down to Modern history would go into a new article titled either "History of Chinese characters", "Development of the Chinese writing system" or whatever people feel is most suitable. Note that the section Written styles which appears in the middle of the history section for some reason would stay where it is.Philg88 (talk) 01:36, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

According to the link that the word "taito" leads to, that word is a JAPANESE word rather than a Chinese one... Vincent2128 (talk) 03:32, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Both the Japanese and Korean writing systems use Chinese characters (some of which have since evolved separately) so I'm not quite sure what your point is with this comment. Philg88 ^contact 10:01, 6 September 2024 UTC [refresh]

There are reports that more and more people are forgetting characters as a result of reliance on mobile phones and computers. Would this warrant a new section, or perhaps even a new article?

• AFP, 29 August 2010, Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan, The Independent
• C. Custer, July 23, 2010, Is “Character Amnesia” a Problem?, ChinaGeeks
• Victor Mair, July 22, 2010, Character Amnesia, Language Log
• Jennifer Lee, 1 Feb 2001, In China, Computer Use Erodes Traditional Handwriting, Stirring a Cultural Debate
• Barbara Demick, July 12, 2010, China worries about losing its character(s), LA Times

Regards, -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:34, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Ridiculous. Of course there needs no section for that because similar thing happens in every language. The only difference is character vs spelling. --Peterxj108 (talk) 14:24, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Is not ridiculous. We write with 28 letters, they have to remember 40,000 characters! Just use your common sense. --Againme (talk) 17:59, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually I'm Chinese and don't think that problem is severe enough, though there was some news referring to that... It may be more accurate to say some Chinese are forgetting how to write some characters, not how to recognize them. As regards characters, 40,000 is exaggerating... once there was a survey indicating that one with the knowledge of 3,000 characters could conquer approximately 95% of newspapers and books...--Peterxj108 (talk) 02:08, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

The HSK demands under 3000 characters (2633) for its most advanced students. On the other hand, native Chinese presumably need to learn more, recognize common traditional and seal forms, etc. 95% is still nothing like 100% and the last 5 will have a long tail. — LlywelynII 16:04, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Also, fwiw, here at the English wiki we write with 26 letters. — LlywelynII 16:04, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I think the topic is notable and interesting enough to have its own article. Perhaps the issue could be brieftly mentioned in this article too with a link to Character amnesia. If I had some time, I'd create the article. Laurent (talk) 15:54, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Benlisquare and myself have just written an article on this topic. see Character amnesia. read it and improve it. I'm not sure what should link to it, but it is related to stuff so shouldn't be left orphaned. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 03:32, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

So far I've made it a See Also here. I think we could put it into context with the main article body - create a new section regarding the psychology behind Chinese characters, use and learning (e.g. motor-neural pathways, which side of the brain is used when writing Hanzi as opposed to Latin, etc. I can't recall where, but I remember reading an article that claimed that studies suggested that when reading the Latin alphabet, the logical side of the brain is used more, however for Hanzi the visual-spacial side is used more. Or something along those lines.), with a brief description with reliable sources, somehow incorporating a link. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 04:39, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

For what it's worth, "character amnesia" is properly called dysgraphia. Recent Atlantic article here. — LlywelynII 16:04, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

BTW I just read a popular new book about science of reading called "Proust and the Squid" which cites some serious science and says that reading Hanzi is neurologically a similar but different process from reading alphabetic text. reading Chinese characters activates the parts of the brain associated with fine-motor control, i.e. to some extent reading chinese characters is like writing them. This just to say that there is some material to work with on this topic. But this article is already very long. I propose splitting off the History section to make room for a broader summary. According to WP:TOOLONG it's time we split off some content from this article. - Metal.lunchbox (talk) 05:56, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I give up: I tried various UTF encodings, but can't find the correct one to view this page. Best I can get (with UTF-8) is a table with empty squares instead of the characters. Help? And by the way: this info should be at the top of the article! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.108.26.179 (talk) 04:25, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

See this. The info is at the top right of the article. If you click "rendering support" in blue, you can jump to the page above. Oda Mari (talk) 05:01, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Will GB2312-80 or GBK do?--Peterxj108 (talk) 13:24, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia has been encoded using Unicode for a long time now. Most browsers will probably default to that setting. What computer and what browser are you using?

When a reasonably new browser opens a page it should see (and will see in Wikipedia) a part of the header information that says, basically, "This page uses Big5," or "This page uses UTF-8" or something like that. I ordinarily only have to intervene when viewing some old page (or page made by a clueless site owner) that does not have a "charset="XXX" setting. Every Wikipedia page will have: <meta charset="UTF-8" /> near the top.

If you have a web browser made in the last five or ten years or so, and you still cannot see the Chinese characters correctly, then maybe you do not have any good UTF-8 fonts. Your computer manufacturer should have provided you with some way to download the most recent fonts, and there are doubtless lots of free UTF-8 fonts around on the WWW.P0M (talk) 19:01, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

I propose that we merge Chinese family of scripts into this article Chinese characters. Before anyone complains that this article is already too long, take a look at Chinese family of scripts. it is a Content fork which does not have a significant amount of information not already included in this article. I did not find anything and considered blanking the page with a redirect here, but figured this would be more polite. Even if further developed the article would not cover topics which this article does not. All in favor of blanking the page after double checking it doesn't have any unique info say "Aye". Metal.lunchbox (talk) 19:19, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

• Weak oppose: Don't you think the article at Chinese character is getting a bit too long? Keep in mind that not everyone runs PCs with Intel i7s and 12GB of DDR3 RAM; there are your average elderly couples that browse Wikipedia too. At 91,432 bytes, loading this page becomes a bit choppy in Mozilla Firefox (because lol memory leak), and I can assume that even though I'm running a decent rig, someone else with an older PC might end up with more issues. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 02:44, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
  • I'd be surprised if ANY content from that article made it into this one in a merge. I agree that the article is already long. this will probably not make it longer.Metal.lunchbox (talk) 03:53, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
    • I guess so. Hence, I'll redact my old !vote; currently I'm neutral since I don't have a strong opinion for either side. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 04:48, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Oppose - while this article may or may not be too long, Chinese family of scripts is too short. Reading it, I would think the idea is the give an overview over how the Chinese branch of this script spawned off related scripts from Jurchen to Chu Nom. While that's not well covered yet, that's not a reason to nix the article. This article may be in need of a new name but if clearly follows the main trunk of the script tree, i.e. Chinese back then to Chinese now. Akerbeltz (talk) 09:58, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 16:40, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

• I think it would be better to keep Chinese family of scripts (because it has potential) and get rid of Genealogy of sinitic scripts. Kanguole 19:48, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

• These are reasonable arguments and there is a consensus emerging in favor of not merging but somehow further developing the article. I'll go ahead and remove the merge tag at the top of the page. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 20:06, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Well it's barely been two days... no need to jump the horse yet, discussions like these usually take longer. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 10:51, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

• Withdrawn - If someone has something interesting to add then, by all means, continue discussing, but I am no longer pursuing a merger. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 16:57, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

As it now stands, this section does not seem to contain anything more than a random factoid, and needs to either be expanded into an explanation of foreign concepts of Chinese characters, or deleted as irrelevant to the content of the article. I've written to the editor who reverted the deletion inviting him to this discussion. Vanisaac (talk) 01:10, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

I reinstated the section, as it was properly sourced, and had been deleted by an anon. user who supplied no explanatory wp:ES.

In the light of the above rationale, I now understand its removal. Trafford09 (talk) 01:20, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Does anyone know of any sources that could give us some more information to expand this section into at least a cursory introduction to foreign conceptions of the Chinese characters? Vanisaac (talk) 01:32, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

The lead currently states that "some single characters can represent polysyllabic words". It seems to be based on the obscure "圕" character which is supposed to be pronounced "túshūguǎn" (library). According to Wiktionary (I have yet to check an actual Chinese dictionary), this character was invented by a librarian in 1914 and has yet to gain widespread acceptance (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9C%95). Since this is such a rare character and, really, an exception, I think it shouldn't be mentioned in the lead. Stating that "some single characters can represent polysyllabic words" is too vague - is it 2 or 3 characters? or 20% of the total characters? or 40%? Since we are not being explicit we let non-experts think that Chinese characters might be used like Kanjis in Japanese and represent more than one syllabus. I still think it's worth mentioning this example though, but not in the lead. So, if there's no objection, I'm going to move this statement from the lead to the body of the article. Please discuss here if you disagree. Laurent (talk) 05:40, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

""It's possible that the individual syllables in some words do not have a separate meaning, but are nonetheless written with separate character. Some single characters can represent polysyllabic words though this is very rare"

This section? I relent, I was nitpicking the details too much earlier on that the paragraph was gives the impression that everything was perfectly monosyllabic. Someone already wrote a paragraph Chinese_characters#Polysyllabic_words_and_polysyllabic_characters btw, so... just mentioning to save yourself the trouble -- Cold Season (talk) 06:08, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this is fine actually, I saw the section after having written the talk page message. I just added "though it's rare" to make it clear it's for very special cases. Laurent (talk) 12:32, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

In Classical Chinese, about 10% of native words are not monosyllabic, which is actually fairly common. Polysyllabic characters are less common, but I would hardly say they're "very rare". Are 'kilowatt' and 'kilogram' "very rare" words? "The exception" would be more like it. Certainly, there's a strong monosyllabic tendency in Chinese, but it's not overwhelming; there's also a tendency for it to be logographic. — kwami (talk) 12:40, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Can we have some examples of "polysyllabic characters" because while I admittedly come at this from Cantonese rather than Mandarin, I cannot think of ANY character which indicates a more-than-one-syllable pronunciation. Sure enough, there are "names for things" which require more than one character and are seen as one "word" but they does not make the characters used to write them polysyllabic. Akerbeltz (talk) 14:52, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

What's wrong with the examples we have? Library, kilowatt, socialism, bodhisattva. — kwami (talk) 15:19, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

They're not characters... a character is ONE of those boxy symbols. Each of those boxy things stands for one syllable max. Akerbeltz (talk) 19:10, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

Why not read the article? Each one of those words can be written with one of those "boxy things". — kwami (talk) 20:18, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

I was reading the wrong section, mea culpa! Right, with you now, it's like 招財進寶. But that's very very rare and I agree that should be pointed out. I personally (yes, OR) wouldn't view most of them as single characters per se, more like shorthand or decorative fusions (like 招財進寶 on new year stationary). Even the Chinese article on kilowatt uses 千瓦 (though it does refer to the contraction). Calling that a character to me (yes, OR again) is a bit like calling ℥ a letter of the alphabet. Akerbeltz (talk) 00:45, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally, this is also covered at Typographic_ligature#Chinese_ligatures Akerbeltz (talk) 00:48, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Oh, Kǒng Mèng hàoxué is clever! I like it.

I wonder if there are any polysyllabic characters which are not ligatures?

I get the point about them being ligatures, but 社会主义 is so heavily abbreviated that it's stretching things a bit to call that a lig (OR). I suppose 菩薩 is just the two radicals combined? — kwami (talk) 02:47, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, the numbers can't really be considered ligatures, can they? 20 isn't written十十, so 廿 èrshí isn't a contraction or fusion of the normal phrase. The comments in Mair's site note another, 囍 shuāngxǐ. — kwami (talk) 05:44, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

菩薩 Pusa is 十十十十, i.e. similar in structure to 㗊 but with "ten" (十) instead of "mouth" (口). -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:24, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Also, 廿 is not pronounced ershi; it is read as "niàn" in some regional dialects of Mandarin. The word does not exist in Standard Mandarin. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:28, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, there's also 卅 (30) in Cantonese (sà). 义 with a four syllable reading as also less of a four syllable word than perhaps a mnemonic or acronym. Take BBC which you can read as Bee bee cee or British Broadcasting Corporation. A bit like that. Akerbeltz (talk) 09:02, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Except it's not "a bit" like that. It's exactly that. Plenty of people do read nian as ershi, but that doesn't make it a "multisyllabic character". — LlywelynII 16:16, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

True... it's just my tendency to avoid absolute statements (except when it comes to a certain Spanish geneticist but that's a different story). Akerbeltz (talk) 16:36, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

60.240.101.246 (talk) 02:26, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Was that supposed to be a question? Or a statement? Something we should fix? What? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:58, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

I think they mean we should add something about the fact that non-alphabetic scripts are processed using both sides of the brain vs just one in alphabetic scripts. Interesting point, I can't seem to find anything on this topic on Wikipedia. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:29, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

In that case, it's quite well known that while reading utilizes diverse areas of the brain, reading Chinese makes unique usage of distinct parts of the frontal and temporal areas of the brain associated with motor memory, areas associated with handwriting. Reading Chinese characters utilises different parts of the brain when compared to reading the Latin alphabet.

• Tan, Li Hai; Laird, Angela R.; Li, Karl; Fox, Peter T. (2005). "Neuroanatomical correlates of phonological processing of Chinese characters and alphabetic words: A meta-analysis". Human Brain Mapping. 25 (1). Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company: 83–91. doi:10.1002/hbm.20134.
• Wen-Jui Kuo, Tzu-Chen Yeh, Chia-Ying Lee, Y. u-T. e Wu, Chi-Cher Chou, Low-Tone Ho, Daisy L. Hung, Ovid J. L. Tzeng, Jen-Chuen Hsieh (2003). "Frequency effects of Chinese character processing in the brain: an event-related fMRI study". NeuroImage. 18 (3): 720–730. doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00015-6.((cite journal)): CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Wen-Jui Kuo, Tzu-Chen Yeh, Jun-Ren Lee, Li-Fen Chen, Po-Lei Lee, Shyan-Shiou Chen, Low-Tone Ho, Daisy L. Hung, Ovid J. -L. Tzeng, Jen-Chuen Hsieh (2004). "Orthographic and phonological processing of Chinese characters: an fMRI study". NeuroImage. 21 (4): 1721–1731. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.12.007.((cite journal)): CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

This is already covered in other articles, but I don't see why this shouldn't have a mention within this article as well. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:32, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

It is? The a short section with a hatnote to the main article would be good cause I can't find anything. Akerbeltz (talk) 17:10, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Recent edits to the lead resulted in the following sentence:

Cognates in various East Asian languages and dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character, but correspondence between characters and morphemes is irregular, [10] with about 10% of Chinese words lacking a separate meaning for their individual syllables.

I challenge the author to explain, with examples, what this paragraph means. Specifically, what is the connection between the first statement (Cognates in various East Asian languages and dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character) and the second (correspondence between characters and morphemes is irregular, [10] with about 10% of Chinese words lacking a separate meaning for their individual syllables)?

For a start, a cognate is NOT a word 'with the same or similar meaning but different pronunciation'. Secondly, the fact that there are Chinese words lacking a separate meaning for their individual syllables (I assume this is referring to the 道 in 知道 and similar phenomena, although it's pretty hard to figure out what is actually being referred to) does not seem to have any connection with the issue of cognates. Thirdly, the sudden switch in focus from 'various East Asian languages and dialects' to '(10% of) Chinese words' makes the entire generalisation completely unfathomable.

A person who knew nothing about Chinese characters and came to this article for illumination would have no idea what is being talked about. A person who does know Chinese characters would still have no idea what is being talked about. Why is this quite opaque sentence presented in the lead as a general statement about Chinese characters?

221.222.125.240 (talk) 23:04, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Incidentally, I reverted to the original lead because of these problems. Unfortunately, as set out above, the new lead is virtually unfixable. Better to go back and start again.

221.222.125.240 (talk) 23:12, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

I took a stab at it. — kwami (talk) 08:16, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Not bad! One sentence that I had trouble identifying support for in the cited source was: "the characters are largely morphosyllabic, each corresponding to a spoken syllable with a distinct meaning, though this is not systematic". The source as I read it doesn't seem to be saying that this feature is not systematic.

"About 10% of native words have two syllables without separate meanings, but they are nonetheless written with two characters". I assume you are referring to inherently polysyllabic words that are written with two characters, even though the characters don't have any meaning outside the compound. I wonder about the figure of 10%, though, although I haven't got access to the source.

" In other languages, most significantly today in Japanese, characters are used (1) to represent native words, ignoring the Chinese pronunciation, (2) to represent Chinese loanwords, and (3) as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese they were acquired from" (numbering added). I'm not sure how felicitous this is. (1) should add mention of the fact that usage to represent native words is based on the perceived meaning of the character. (2) is ok, but "based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese they were acquired from" actually belongs here, too. (3) as purely phonetic elements is a further elaboration, but is also quite well known in Chinese, so it is not just a feature of other languages.

120.193.153.170 (talk) 10:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

(A) Might need to move the ref over. What I meant was that the characters don't systematically have meaning. (B) The 10% figure is s.t. I read a long time ago. It was for Classical Chinese, actually. Yes, words like 'butterfly' and 'coral'. (C) Yeah, I wasn't too happy with this either. Edit as you like. The essential point is that characters have both nativized and Sino-xenic pronunciations in Japanese; Vietnamese and Zhuang, like Cantonese, invented new characters (I don't know if they had parallel native and Chinese readings as in Japanese); Korean has only Sino-xenic in most cases (except maybe place names?), etc. — kwami (talk) 11:24, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

I removed the following paragraph from the section on rebus:

In this sense, Chinese characters may be seen as a case of arrested development in that as a system of writing single letters failed to be synthecized from the syllable as was the case with forms of writing derived from hieroglyphics.^[1] Some scholars view this fact as having adversely affected the capacity of the users of Chinese characters for abstract thought and creative endeavors in general since precisely this division of syllables into individual letters is seen as crucial to such a development.^[2]

Come on, does anyone really believe that the Chinese can't think straight because they don't have an alphabet? A logographic script might arguably cause various problems: difficulty in borrowing foreign words without assigning arbitrary meanings; serious difficulty achieving universal literacy (only a few years ago literacy in the PRC was at 10%, despite claims it was at 90%); a difficulty among the literate in distinguishing words from characters, etc. But incapable of abstract thought? And according to this wording, the Japanese would have the same problem because kana is syllabic. It sounds like old anti-Semites saying the Jews and Arabs are stuck in "arrested development" because only the Greeks developed a true alphabet.

This might be of interest as an example of silly academics, but IMO does not belong in an introductory article on Chinese characters, where people might take it seriously. — kwami (talk) 07:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I just watched a documentary on Chinese calligraphy. The presenter wrote some words he had learned and asked for the teachers opinion and was told that although the characters were correct he wrote like a sick student. Asked why, he stated that the brush strokes must be done in a specific order to be considered correct. Is this a rule, regional specific or no longer taught? Wayne (talk) 03:43, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Stroke order is an important part of learning to write Chinese characters. As far as I know, stroke order is important everywhere Chinese characters are used. Grayfell (talk) 04:52, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Didn't know it had it's own article but from your answer it seems the importance of stroke order should be mentioned in this one. Wayne (talk) 05:10, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

The title image on the right hand side which shows the words "漢子" in traditional and simplified should be rid of the simplified. Simplified Chinese is only used in the PRC. In Japan, another variant again is used for "漢" (I can't type it here, but the top right part is different), and as Japanese Kanji are just as much Chinese characters as any other, if the Simplified Chinese variant is included in the image, by that logic so should the Japanese variant. However, it would be much more logical to just include the orthodox form of the character in the image, as this is the parent form which is used for some purposes in all of the CJK countries. However the Simplified Chinese and Japanese Shinjitai variants are not, they are only used in their respective jurisdictions. Either way, include all three major standard variants if you are including any at all, or just do the simple thing and only use the traditional character from the parent system which has some use everywhere Chinese Characters are written. As it is now though, it does not fit with logic no matter how you look at it. I would keep the current image for the articles on "simplified chinese" and "traditional chinese" as this is where it is really relevant, to demonstrate the difference between the parent system of orthodox chinese characters and one of the its child systems currently in use in a particular jurisdiction. Saruman-the-white (talk) 10:38, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

You're forgetting that 1.4 billion people use "汉字" (PRC+Singapore), whilst 158 million people use "漢字" (Taiwan+HK+Japan). Before you throw around the "which is more proper" argument, keep in mind that almost 89% of people in the world who use some variant of Chinese characters use the simplified variant, in comparison to 8% for Shinjitai and a mere 2% for traditional Chinese. And if you really want to desperately include the population for South Korea as well (which nowadays uses Chinese characters quite scarcely), those 48 million people don't change the proportions very much at all. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:55, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Finally, regarding what you mentioned about 漢 used in Japanese, consider having a look at Variant Chinese character and Han unification. They're not really "different" characters, and the typographic variance is minimal at most (compare with the two ways you can write the Latin lowercase letters "a" and "g" - specifically, the double-story and single story variants). -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 12:05, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Fact is there are three standard variants. Having been changed to a grass radical, it is certainly different. No matter how different you think the standards are, there are three official standards nonetheless and it is inconsistent and illogical to include two while leaving out the second most popular (used by a 6 trillion dollar 'economic powerhouse'). I am not arguing about which standard is more correct. That is subjective. Merely that there are three standards in current use. As such, there are two logical approaches to follow - one: include all three standards (not leaving out the one used by over 100 million people in one of the most powerful and influential nations/languages on earth), or two, include just the one parent standard which has quite prominent use in all three CJK nations, including HK, Macau and Taiwan, in both historial, cultural, artistic, scholarly, dictionary (see both forms in xinhua zidian, etc) and (ever increasingly) in popular cultural use, as anyone who has been to Mainland China will testify. Whichever way is chosen, it is clear that these are the only two consistent, logical options. On an unrelated note, which has no bearing on this recommendation which is merely a case of standards, do note that both jiantizi and shinjitai (and in many cases hangeul) are only child systems which are only understood through their relation to the traditional character, and not in themselves or on their own. This reality can be seen in reading any mainland dictionary where a simplified character is always supplemented by its traditional form, or by looking through premier mainland character dictionaries (ie Hanyu Da Zidian, the longest, and the "Oxford" of Chinese) or academic studies on hanzi, which always list characters by their traditional forms, and, if at all, list the simplified variant as a note along with other un-orthodox variants.Saruman-the-white (talk) 06:00, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Regional typographical variants are not standards. They are typographical variants that differ by region, solely for the reason of local conventions. Here are the variant characters for "turtle":

Are you telling me that there are six "standards", and that simplified and traditional are only two of the six? Because the answer is no: there are four commonly used variants that are supported by default operating system fonts (there are plenty more), one shinjitai variant and one simplified Chinese variant. Regarding the case of 漢, there is no shinjitai of 漢, the modern orthgraphy uses the same glyph as the kyujitai. Character dictionaries do not list the Japanese 漢 glyph as a shinjitai variant. It merely is that Japan uses a different glyph of 漢 because of regional variation. It has nothing to do with character simplification. There are many commonly used vulgar variants of characters that different from the Kangxi Dictionary forms - that does not make them standard unless the characters have been specifically simplified, a la 氣/気/气, where the characters are identified as simplified variants in character dictionaries and by databases such as Unihan. The Kangxi Dictionary 漢 is the standard; all other kyujitai/traditional glyphs are simply vulgar variants that differ typographically; 汉 on the other hand is by no means simply a typographic variant. Unihan (and Unicode itself) does not differentiate between the Kangxi and Japanese glyph variants of 漢 - there is only one unicode codepoint allocated for that character; this is not the same case for 汉, which has its own codepoint. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:44, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Thus, in the image, it would be simple, inclusive and logical to merely use the Kangxi form of "漢子" as there is a very wide consensus that these represent the most "orthodox" forms and are free from interference by government simplifications of either the PRC, ROC, Japan, or the ROK. As Chinese Characters are a multi-national phenomenon that are in use over a wide area under many different jurisdictions, it would just be more simple, logical and inclusive to all to use the traditional character (in Kangxi form, to be more specific) as this is representative of all regions that use Chinese Characters and has the widest acceptance as the orthodox form. Saruman-the-white (talk) 09:43, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

If you really want to go further with this proposal, why not start a WP:RFC to get a third opinion and wider consensus? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:51, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Should the Simplified Chinese characters within the infobox image be removed? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:53, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose: See rationale above. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:53, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
• Support See rationale above. Saruman-the-white (talk) 13:28, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose. There's no particular reason why the images at the top of the article need to be representative of all the standard Chinese character variants. The Japanese 漢 character is similar enough to the Chinese one that I don't think it would be of great benefit to put it right at the top. This would be better placed lower down in the article, if we need to make this distinction using an image. I do like having both the simplified and traditional characters at the top of the article, though, as the difference between them is quite striking. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 18:12, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose It is not true that simplified characters are only used in the PRC. Singapore of course uses them but they are increasingly used in the wider world. One reason is it's what most people emigrating from China now are familiar with, as opposed to those that emigrated a generation or more ago, or from Hong Kong. Another is almost everyone learning Chinese uses it. They appear in other forms of media, such as titles and subtitles of music videos, and of course in anything related officially to the PRC. More and more they are being used on menus, on signs, far away from the PRC and Singapore. See e.g. this picture I took last year in Chinatown, Newcastle.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 18:54, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose I'm from WikiProject Korea talk page, and I don't see any reason to remove the simplified Chinese from the infobox image. I agree with JohnBlackburne in that the simplified Chinese is becoming increasingly popular outside of traditional Chinese community and that people who study Chinese as a foreign language recognize the simplified version as the Chinese character. --- PBJT (talk) 00:27, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

I suppose, then, I shall have to admit defeat with regard to this matter. With the post-80s and 90s generations in China's eastern provinces becoming increasingly in favour of traditional characters I guess we'll just have to stay tuned in the coming decades and see if they're repealed like the second round simplifications as the population becomes wealthier and more educated. Saruman-the-white (talk) 06:55, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

The article was rated C-class, for lack of sufficient in-line citations. There are many paragraphs, and even whole sections, without in-line citations.Boneyard90 (talk) 20:20, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

In the infobox it says direction: Left-to-right. I think they have usually been written top-to-bottom throughout history, left-to-right only applies to the modern era and specifically the internet. Siuenti (talk) 20:25, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

They are both used. It should say left to right (more common today), followed by right to left top to bottom (used in formal writing, letters, some newspapers, and school essays/assignments in Taiwan, HK and Macau, as well as in Mainland China for historical and artistic purposes, book spines, and literary publications of older works). Saruman-the-white (talk) 00:48, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry to complicate matters, but some people have written horizontally right to left. There is a story that some shopkeepers in Taiwan was so worried about government dictates (back in the 1970s) that they wrote their signs from right to left. Then for whatever reason some reporter asked Jiang Jingguo what he thought about the practice. He evidently had never heard of the policy and said, essentially, "What the hell difference does it make?" The next day worried shopkeepers went out and changed their signs to go from left to right.

I think I may have heard of inscriptions around the circumference of cups that could be made sense of regardless of which character one took to be the first character of the sentence. Maybe they could even be read in either direction too.

The only thing I have never heard of is anybody writing from bottom to top, or in vertical columns that proceed from left to right.P0M (talk) 19:12, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

More or less all books published in HK and Taiwan are printed top-to-bottom (which means that the lines are arranged right-to-left, also), and it's still not especially uncommon to find right-to-left signs in the mainland. I think the box should definitely read "Varied," especially since the article covers the history of the language. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to edit the box --- can anyone help?

68.173.112.178 (talk) 20:56, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Unlike in the West where there is no requirement on how many words a student at an elementary or secondary school must learn or memorize, such a requirement does exist with regard to Chinese characters in Mainland China. I am not sure about Taiwanese curriculum, though. Recently, the PRC government has undertaken a change in the national curriculum so that there is now a reduction in the number of Chinese characters a student must learn in Mainland Chinese schools. That caught my attention, hence the comments. There is apparently very little written on this topic in the article. So, can anyone find some reliable sources with information on this topic and add info into the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.244.24.47 (talk) 07:04, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Thing is, there's a difference between words and characters. "康" by itself makes no sense in Vernacular Chinese, and is only used by itself in Classical Chinese, in personal names, or in a compound word; "健康" is a word. In the United States, I'm pretty sure students have to learn all 26 Roman letters. But yes, there is a threshold of characters that students have to learn in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan. I'm not sure on the figures for Taiwan though. In Japan students need to know at least the Jōyō kanji, and in mainland China the Xiandai Hanyu Changyong Zibiao, or at least (I'd assume) the figure is close to the highest level of the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (I don't think they'd need to know the entire Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao, not even archaeology professors do). -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 07:29, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

This is so wrong. Single character may not be as common as binary form, but the example you raise, 康 may still well deliver the meaning healthy. ChowHui (talk) 07:57, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

I was eluding to the point that characters are not words. Character education is not the same as vocabulary development, and the two cannot be equated with one another. Nitpicking at how bad my example is doesn't change this. The original poster made mention of teaching "words" in the education of English. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 03:46, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Also, "康" by itself is not used in vernacular speech. You don't go up to an old lady and say "你康吗？" Like I said, it's used in compounds and classical literature. The reason for the development of compound words such as 健康 is due to the phonetic shift in modern times that make spoken Chinese different to that of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, and Classical Chinese literature written in that time was more concise because there were more sounds that the mouth could make. Words such as 健康 makes speech less ambigious, due to the number of homophones Chinese has following all sorts of phonetical merging and simplification (Modern Standard Mandarin only has vowel, "n", "ng" and "r" finals, after removal of the "p", "t", "m", "k", etc. finals), and even though 1,300 years ago people would actually use "康" in spoken language to mean "healthy", it is not the case today. "你康吗？" can be confused with all sorts of things, such as "你糠吗？" (are you like a sponge?) and "你慷吗？" (are you ardent?) -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 03:50, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

You have confused words and characters. While I cant say about all of the European languages, which for example old Norse does have letters that represent an idea, a part of a word, a number or a phonetic alphabet but Chinese character has no equivalent in English language which i presume you took reference from. Character is the basic building block of Chinese language which is not equivalent to alphabet, but one or a combination of characters some what equivalent to words in English language. Indeed phonetic shift is responsible to popularized combination like 喜歡，傳遞，斟酌，健康，模擬... Some of these actually represents a complex idea beyond what the individual character may carry or simply a derivative from a literature passage. Present speakers used these combination same way as the predefine functions in programing languages to fit their real time needs. But look at 進食，文件，平等... combination of redundant meaning showed heavily influenced by phonetic shift because the combination did not surpass individual character in delivering bigger idea.

For example 斟酌. 斟 means to pour (liquid), which in today still can be used in the situation you insist, 我為你斟酒， I pour(serve) you wine. 酌 means measure, sometimes in expand of this concept it also means to take consideration, for example, commonly seen in product label, 請酌量使用, please take consideration of amount used, which in fact 酌 carries the same meaning as 斟酌 in this context. To sound the way you intend to describe Vernacular Chinese, the sentence can be expand into 請斟酌所使用的量. But again the fine definition between literature or classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese itself is debatable. The first grammar and construction style in today commonly accepted as the "formal style" which in technically stand point is an hybrid of the two grammars and construction principles. While the latter accepted as a casual style commonly heard in dialogs. Back to the 康 argument. For another example, 祝你身體安康, wish you (your body) peace and healthy. First four character can be used as words independently. The last two words can also be read in a word or two words independently understood to deliver different ideas or in this case wishes. 安 wishes you peace or peaceful life or to further extend this idea, in a state oppose to being threaten by. 康 wishes you in the state of positive which essentially means healthy in the context. Hence is all about context , contemporary taste and preference. Another example you raise, it appears independently in names. Chinese names usually carries hope and wishes the parent wanted their child to be. And the limitation to 1-2 words force them to construct it in a very effective way which pretty much turns them to the so called classical grammar and construction principle. Again demonstrate that the choice of vocab, construction and grammar depends greatly on real time situations, word count, time limitation(verbal response), formal/casual, communicate with kids/restarted vs sensible adults... Therefore to exercise contemporary application of Chinese language, one must be aware of current pop culture that affects the choice of words and vocab as well as certain style of construction.

Anyways, these are beyond the context of the original question.

My answer to the original question is the amount of word represent a rough figure an average user should master or at least exposed to. Some character which itself is a powerful word that delivers a complex idea is usually left out or forgotten due to limited or less frequent usage. But the main reason is, I think, as a tradeoff in the process of simplifying the language, we lost the discipline to use the language in the most effective way as possible. By effective I mean to deliver as much message as possible using the least word. Furthermore these powerful words became even less seen because people can go the around it by using hundred of words to deliver the message supposed to be delivered by one single character/word. ChowHui (talk) 22:14, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Again, we're having this discussion because I chose a poor example. Take the Buddhist term 阿閦如來 - is 閦 (a character used to transliterate Sanskrit) by itself a word in Modern Standard Mandarin? I'm not disputing that in many cases characters can act as meaningful words - you are 100% correct in this aspect. What I am trying to say is that there is more to "words" than single, lone characters, and the original poster's question of comparing Chinese characters with English words has the issue of assuming that characters and words are equivalent, when the majority of Modern Standard Mandarin vocabulary is made up of compound words, as shown by most dictionaries of Modern Standard Mandarin. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 10:49, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Furthermore, 安康 is a compound word according to CEDICT. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:06, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

@ nobody in particular

It seems to me that the salient issue is how much effort has to go into learning reading and writing vocabulary for English (or some other Western language) and how much has to go into learning reading and writing vocabulary for Chinese. I just checked, and one source said "from 19,000 to 200,000 words for [American] college graduate students." I have heard that around 6,000 hanzi is typical for a Chinese grad student. But with those 6,000 hanzi in hand, being able to read a much larger number of 詞組 is not much of a problem. My guess is that a college freshman in China could handle 釀造學 even without much context, but I am pretty sure that most U.S. college students will go to a dictionary for "zymurgy." On the other hand, I was at a reading level where I could handle the Omaha World-Herald, (a respectable if not world-class newspaper) in second grade. Part of the reason I could do that was that my father was a lawyer and I had absorbed lots of vocabulary by listening in on conversations, telephone calls, and paid some attention to network news reports. Learning to read and write English is basically learning how to handle decoding skills. I do not think that many Chinese second graders are able to read a newspaper such as 時報 in second grade. The reason is that it take a great deal of time and energy to learn Chinese characters. The most intelligent of American college students learning Mandarin while taking a normal college load can manage about 25/week. That is about where the law of diminishing returns shows its ugly head. Maybe what I said about is wrong because a young student in China could probably absorb 1000 hanzi/year, so after two years of primary education s/he might be able to read almost all the characters on the first page of an ordinary newspaper. But to do so would require a great deal of work both to learn and to consolidate any number of hanzi.

So it looks like what would be needed would be measures of time spent to learn and also measures of competency that would work across the two languages, perhaps age-appropriate things like the events that transpire in a bicycle race would work best. But my expectations would probably be all wrong in regard to the Chinese educational system. So it would be very interesting to see what kinds of documents would appear on a Chinese-made reading test for grad students. Would the test try to determine the limits of a student's 單字 vocabulary? Or, would the test try to determine how well students could pull out the true structure of "spacey" sentences and so be able to read with comprehension? Similarly, would American educators test for competency in reading something by, e.g., Loren Eisley, or by Werner Heisenberg, or perhaps by some writer of atrocious academic prose that (rather than having the "spacey" or implicit structure of some difficult Chinese) throws readers' minds into turmoil? Kant, at least in the English translations, is not a good writer, but people still have to deal with it.

Just comparing vocabulary items strikes me as having limited utility.P0M (talk) 05:43, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Not intend to pick on you, but again, you chose another bad example. As you said, its a character created for special purpose, its part of the creation of character which is far from the topic discussed here. The argument is not which example you chose, is that you sent a false message regarding the fundamental principle of Chinese Language, specifically because of this sentence "Thing is, there's a difference between words and characters". NO, this is plain wrong. Clearly you are confusing relationship between 字 and 詞. By definition of an English word, it is the basic unit of the language that represents an idea. As the way you insist to link it to the Chinese language, a character is a "word", a specific combination of characters is also a "word". Linking or naming 字 as character and 詞/詞組 as word or phrase is only for teaching purpose, but still fundamental priciple is very important and irresponsible to sent false message. ChowHui (talk) 07:44, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

You two are having a discussion that will continue to go around in circles because you aren't being linguistically precise, which is understandable since it's a pretty specialized field with a good deal of jargon. Ben Li's description "...kang 康 makes no sense in Vernacular..." is extremely ambiguous, and as you see it has produced the confusion above. What you two are describing is, in linguistic terminology, not something to do with "words" or "字/词" but morphemes. Kang 康 makes perfect sense in modern Chinese, but it is what is called a "bound morpheme", meaning that while it has meaning is cannot occur without being a part of some other morpheme, which you two gave many examples of above (jiankang 健康, etc). Another example from modern Mandarin is mu 母 – no one in their right mind would argue that mu isn't a word, but it is most definitely a bound morpheme, and can never occur without being bound to another morpheme as in muqin 母亲. An example from English is the plural marker "-s", as in "cats". The "-s" has a very clear meaning, but it is a bound morpheme and cannot exist without another morpheme (in this case, a noun or gerund). One of the first things I learned in my first graduate Chinese linguistics course is to use proper terminology to avoid these types of befuddlements.  White Whirlwind  咨  08:10, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

母 cannot use without another morpheme? Seriously? So, should I pick on your bad example or should I just go straight and say you are fundamentally screwed up? Would be interesting to see how you explain 失敗乃成功之母。 ChowHui (talk) 08:28, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Vernacular Chinese =/= Classical Chinese. When I buy a Big Mac from McDonald's in Wangfujing, I don't say things like 乃 and 之. The key term here is Modern. In the west, schools don't each "the English language as it hath been in a numbere of century beforeth" unless you're specifically majoring in Shakespearean English. Let's move back to the original post, which is comparing education in elementary and secondary school, which wouldn't be Shakespearean or from the Han Dynasty. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 08:45, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

So after showing fundamental misconception in character/words/phrase, you decided to exposes yet another confusion between Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese? Tell me, does this sounds right, 失敗是成功的母親. ChowHui (talk) 15:48, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

That's right, 失敗乃成功之母 is a Classical-style paraphrase of the English "necessity is the mother of invention" dating from the late 19th-century and is not standard Mandarin. Mu cannot occur as a free morpheme in standard Mandarin, ever. User:ChowHui is incorrect.  White Whirlwind  咨  18:48, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Let's all go back to the original point. Some IP apparently wanted a comparison between the demands that standard curriculums place on learners in mainland China, in Taiwan and other non-mainland places with their own ministries of education, and the U.S. As everybody has succeeded in demonstrating, one way or another, it is difficult to make that kind of a comparison if you are going to involve English in the same discussion as Chinese. The learning tasks for Chinese and for alphabetical languages are so different that even the brain structures are different, for one thing. Another thing is that the really important question is whether at the end of the education process as provided by schools (rather than experience and 自修) a student is prepared to handle the tough stuff. One part of that is whether the student can handle vocabulary present in his/her toughest technical readings. We all know that the learning tasks are different for Chinese and English, or even for Chinese and for a language like German that has a consistent spelling/decoding scheme. Everything that is discussed in the most technical discussion in a German graduate school could be turned into text by somebody who just has good command of stenographical skills, and anybody with a primary school education could read the text out although without much comprehension at all. The task for the grad student or professional is just to know the words as sounds and then to be able to deal with symbolic representation of those sounds. Chinese, on the other hand, requires a huge amount of work (especially in primary and secondary schools) just to learn to read and write the first few thousand characters on the frequency list.

The real problem, in both languages, is what one can do assuming the basic vocabulary problem is well enough in hand that the student does not have to be constantly running to a dictionary. Anybody who doesn't believe me can try reading and translating (白話 or English, it doesn't matter)《大小品對比要抄序》by 支遁. But that problem was not in the mind of the IP who started this discussion. I'm glad of that because I think there must be no known way to quantify the difficulty of, e.g., 支遁 vs. Kant.

The IP asked for a comparison of mainland vs. Taiwan of the curricular requirement. S/he used the word "words" when "hanzi" or perhaps "cizu" would have been more important. But surely it is within reason to dig out the requirements as they are stated by the two governments.P0M (talk) 18:38, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

There are indeed some characters that are variants of more commonly used, more widely accepted, characters. 說 vs. 説 would be an example. The text needs to give evidence when it says that most of the more than 40,000 characters are simply variants. P0M (talk) 20:17, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

I have tried to quantify the number of variants. Based on a causal flipping through of the 中文大辭典, which has around 40,000 hanzi, there are indeed very many characters that are simply defined as "variant of character number xxx." So I took another tack. I have a copy of the 東方國語辭典 which claims to have all the characters students up through the undergraduate college level would need. It has about 10,000 characters.

Unfortunately, replacing an unsourced assertion with personal research isn't much of an improvement.P0M (talk) 04:27, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

The Hanyu Dazidian 汉语大字典 has 55,000 or so characters, and might have a comment on this topic. I'll check my copy and see. The current form still has a WP:OR problem.  White Whirlwind  咨  06:11, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

http://books.google.com/books?id=odrkZvbqJQoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Jerezembel (talk) 19:54, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

I was hoping to find a Literacy in Chinese characters article on wikipedia but besides the rather tiny and unhelpful literacy sections at Written Chinese and Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters there does not appear to be much information. I would like to create a literacy article, but I don’t have access to the journal articles or other materials I would need to be able to do so. I’m hoping someone would be willing to do this. The article would deal with the following topics (and hopefully beyond the subjective and anecdotal):

• history of mass literacy movements for countries using Chinese characters
• the various national definitions of literacy in Chinese characters
• the various methods of measuring literacy and their levels of accuracy
• the difficulty of obtaining literacy in Chinese versus other scripts for young learners
• issues and learning difficulties specifically related to reading and writing in Chinese characters, like:

• the ease of relapse into illiteracy compared to other scripts
• Character amnesia, is Chinese easier to forget to write from disuse than a phonetic script?
• what forms of dyslexia and dysgraphia exist for Chinese characters?
• what cognitive processes are underlying 錯別字？
• how is the process of sound decoding and word recognition cognitively distinct from phonetic writing systems?
• is the difficulty of the system a deterrent for the semi-literate to obtain full literacy?

• how literacy in traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese vary

• is literacy in simplified Characters actually easier?
• is there scientific evidence the traditional is really 易讀難寫?

• the average time necessary to acquire literacy in teaching characters to/rate of character acquisition for non-native learners
• literacy issues with native adult learners
• literacy issues with non-native adult learners
• the average time spent teaching characters in compulsory education

• is the added time spent teaching this detrimental to students’ general education?

• does literacy in Japan and China vary? in China and Taiwan? China and Hong Kong? is it a result of the differing writing systems or other factors?
• levels of retained literacy in pinyin
• levels of literacy in Japan for kana only v. kana and kanji
• levels of character literacy in countries where they were formerly used
• the extent of digraphia in those countries and in mainland China (i.e. between simplified and traditional) and Japan

There are dozens of other things which might be included in this article. These are just some ideas. The current article on Chinese characters seems to be rather philologically oriented and lacking more practical aspects of education and literacy which should at least be added to it if others don't believe a literacy article is notable enough. Do others believe the creation of this article would be appropriate? Anyone willing to work on it? What other articles are there dealing with similar issues? -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 17:58, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

In the table "Simplified in Mainland China and Japan, but differently," the Japanese variant of 歲 is included, but it is simply the variant that was standardized in Japan and was not simplified. Is its inclusion appropriate here? -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 18:06, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

i'd agree that it might be a variant. ShootingSky 04:05, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it's not a simplification and I've deleted it, thanks for noticing. In fact, I believe that 歲/歳 is often simplified to 才 in Japanese writing (which is bizarre from a Chinese phonology standpoint), while 岁 is not used at all.  White Whirlwind  咨  10:58, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't what inspired the random commentary, but there is nothing bizarre about it. Besides Japanese, there are a few Southern Wu dialects I've researched in which they are near homophones (the grammatical 才 that is, can't speak for the other). Many sounds which are historically affricates in Chinese reduce to the fricative component, the /dz/ in 才 to /z/ and then become /s/ in the devoicing process. The MC voiced affricate initials in for example 睡、泉、秦、齊、存、磁、床、崇 (among dozens of others) are all loaned into Japanese with an /s/ phoneme as the initial in the Chinese readings. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 02:24, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, Kan-on origins in these particular Southern Wu dialects would explain that. There are a few issues you'll want to be mindful of: 1) be careful with your identification of shuì 睡 as an MC affricate – the initials 船 and 禪 are given differently depending on whom one asks; 2) saying "all [MC affricates] loaned in Japanese with [devoiced]" is troublesome, as you're getting into Sino-Japanese issues of strata: Go-on readings of many of the type of words you mentioned are not devoiced in Japanese. Also, this affricate into fricative change is generally limited to certain of the Wu dialects, I believe. The case is certainly the opposite in many of the Min dialects, for instance.  White Whirlwind  咨  11:31, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Hope you had a happy new year. I apologize to others here for turning this is into a discussion board. All I wanted to say is that the usage of 才 is not bizarre but appear to have been dramatically misunderstood. The devoiced Southern Wu dialects are all in relatively remote regions and the devoicing process has only begun in the last few generations so it is doubtful there is any connection between them and Japanese. If Wu dialects were a factor in the Japanese readings, then there is a possibility that the Japanese did not feel that the glottalic voicing of the Wu dialects they encountered seemed sufficiently analagous to the pulmonic voicing in Japanese on fricatives to borrow them that way, though this is little more than speculation on my part since I don't know the details of the loans into Japanese. I only know the results not the process of how they were obtained and do not claim to.

I don't believe there is any connection between devoiced Southern Wu dialects and any Japanese loan of any Chinese pronunciation and didn't mean to imply that, nor did I mean to say that devoicing has occurred in Japanese which if it has I don't know about. I simply observed early on that there is a correlation between some MC voiced coronal affricates (I never said all) and Japanese /s/, but I have no explanation for it and was not attempting to provide one. I only know it is a common correlation, I never meant to imply that it was a regular, absolute correlation, so please don't misunderstand me. It is common enough that it does not merit the label "bizarre" is all I intended to say, and it is less so by the fact that there is a precedent in Chinese dialects which is the only reason why Southern Wu was mentioned.

This observation was simply reinforced by my exposure to Wu and the many affricates in Min which are simply fricatives in Mandarin and other dialects. You are right in that deaffricatization is a typically Wu phenomenon for 從 initials, but citing Min as a dialect family for a sound change in Chinese dialects is incoherent since Min has undergone the least change and would of course not be subject to most claims about sound change in Chinese dialects. 禪 and 船 initials are a messy situation no doubt about it, but the vast majority of the time they are affricates in Southern Min, and there is therefore a decent probability that they were affricates in MC as well unless this is a later development with fricatives becoming affricates in Southern Min. Also, 磁 is ji in Japanese, surprised no one caught that. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 01:58, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Good observations. Avoid terming my usage of a Min example as "incoherent" because it "has undergone the least change" – that is yet another highly problematic characterization. Since you cite Southern Min twice later on, this may account for your characterization – you need to be extremely careful citing Southern Min as counterexamples for my earlier references to "Min dialects". That's a common problem, and it's reflected in a real world example: real progress on Min has only really taken off since Professor Norman (RIP) began his extensive work on Northern Min in the 1970's. Lastly, if you get some time consider exploring your last "unless this is a later development...." Check out Fuzhou and some Northern Min dialects (you can even look at some of the Hoisan 台山 Cantonese dialects). Happy Christmas/New Year to you as well!  White Whirlwind  咨  03:12, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I have a question, but a little far-fetched (sorry for that). I remember in 韵图, 禅 is fricative and 船 is affricate. But many people think they should be the other way around. Is there consensus on this now?--Stellar-oscillation (talk) 04:59, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Is it not standard that Wikipedia articles be in the singular? Should this article not be named "Chinese character"? Curly Turkey (gobble) 07:32, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I'll be modifying the Ideograms sub-section to clear it of characters whose applicability is dubious or clearly lacking. It will make for a disconcertingly short sub-section, but there's little else to say.

上 and 下 can remain. 林 and 刃 do not withstand close inspection, IMO. 森 absolutely does not belong.

林 is not a doubling of 木, as I pointed out in the Talk Page post above this one. 林 may be regarded as a pictograph representing two trees (and by extension suggesting a larger number of trees that encompass certain spaces/places), or as an ideogram functioning for the same purpose. I incline to the former, and am removing 林 from this category.

森, as I noted in the earlier Talk Page post, is a phono-semantic compound. The article suggested it is interesting to note that 林 and 森 have the same reconstructed Old Chinese final *-ǐǝm. What interests me is that somebody would find that interesting. Consonant shift in the initial is a common factor in compound character formation in Old Chinese; in this case, the initial *l- of 林 became initial *s- in 森.

Consonant shift also hints at the proper category for 刃. At present the article explains 刃 in terms of the marking of a blade. I submit that the (phonetic) evidence strongly suggests the single-stroke element was a once-independent character indicating adherence. The element is also present in 千 (added to 人) and may well be identical with the single-stroke source character seen below 日 in 旦 and above 大 in 天, the function in the latter two characters being to indicate adherence to the horizon. Note how 刃, 千, 旦 and 天 have in common the final *-n. (For the record, the initials for 刃, 千, 旦 and 天 are *n-, *s-, *t- and *t-, respectively.) In short, 刃 should be regarded as having been devised as a phono-semantic compound, with 刀 the semantic indicator and the remaining stroke the phonetic indicator.

If someone presents a compelling argument for the ideogrammatic nature of 林 and restores it on that basis, fine with me. The same for 刃, though I imagine a compelling counter-argument will be hard to find. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 04:25, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

This sub-section contains two arguments offered in support of the notion that certain of the compound characters created in ancient times were devised as ideogrammic compounds. Both arguments are problematic.

First: However, there is evidence that 女 was once a polyphone with a secondary reading of *an, as may be gleaned from the set 妟 yàn "tranquil", 奻 nuán "to quarrel", and 姦 jiān "licentious".

I submit that regarding 妟 as an abbreviated, variant form of 晏, 奻 as 女 + an abbreviated form of phonetic indicator 安, and 姦 as phonetic indicator 奻 + 女 is much closer in line with the formative and transformative principles governing compound characters. Which of course contraindicates the supposition that 女 serves as the phonetic indicator in these three compounds.

That said, if an authority acceptable to the editors is on record as maintaining that the presence of 女 in 妟, 奻 and 姦 constitutes evidence that 女 was once a polyphone with a secondary reading of *an, so be it. But the statement requires sourcing, does it not?

Second: It is doubtful that secondary readings can be found for many cases, and the characters 明, 休, and 好 are all attested in oracle bone script, with the same components as the modern forms.

While it's true we find 月 paired with 日 in oracle bone script, we also find examples of 月 paired with 向. Here, 向 functions as the phonetic indicator via consonant shift in the initial, making the character a standard phono-semantic compound.

Two considerations weigh in favor of the precedence of the 月 + 向 form.

First is the overwhelming statistical preponderance in favor of phono-semantic compounds in the Chinese character corpus. And that's assuming for the sake of the argument the possibility that some characters were in fact devised as ideogrammic compounds. The phono-semantic model is normative.

Second, the sheer numbers aside, one-by-one inspection of the forms and sounds of characters alleged to be ideogrammic compounds reveals that all lost or had their phonetic indicators obscured according to various processes. Among these processes are those seen in 妟 (entire character is an abbreviated variant of a more complex one), 奻 (use of an abbreviated form of an element) and 明 (replacement of the original phonetic indicator). Other processes include consonant shift in the initial or final, one character being subsumed by another with a similar/identical meaning (as in 子), an element lost in character simplification, a character being created from part of a phono-semantic compound, the dying out and subsequent lack of recognition of a phonetic indicator etc.

Accordingly, it is simplistic, to say the least, for the article to present 明 as an ideogrammic compound in the absence of a certain amount of background information.

That leaves 休 and 好. These are among a handful of characters traditionally regarded as ideogrammic compounds that are attested in the oracle bone script solely with their modern forms. That fact no more supports designating 休 and 好 as ideogrammic compounds than does the presence of 明 in the oracle bone script, the reason being that 休 is consistent with the transformation pattern observed in 奻 (use of an abbreviated form of an element) and 好 is consistent with the secondary readings phenomenon.

In sum, the two arguments discussed here lack substance and/or require clarification. If there is consensus to amend portions of this sub-section, I will return with specific proposals for a partial rewrite. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 05:12, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Whether it stands as-is or is rewritten as you may propose, it'll need citations. If you've got the cites, just go ahead and do it. It doesn't really require discussing here unless there's some kind of dispute—say, if two reliable sources contradict each other; even then, both sources/theories could/should be stated noting the discrepancy. Curly Turkey (gobble) 05:35, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

OK. Didn't want to step on any toes. I'll upload something soon. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 02:27, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

As Curly Turkey says above, this needs citations to the literature. Where the scholars disagree, we need to report that as well, e.g. the source for 妟/奻/姦 is Boltz (1994), pp106–110; not everyone accepts it, but it's an influential view. The mention of "consonant shift" is alarming as well. Kanguole 20:17, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

The article says 酵 is a Japanese kokuji, despite it appearing in the Kangxi dictionary (compiled in C.E. 1710). This seems to be a mistake. Note that 醗 is not a kokuji either (酉 + shinjitai 発) as 醱 exists with the kyujitai phonetic 發. 130.216.218.72 (talk) 10:01, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Done.  White Whirlwind  咨  21:55, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

There are four similar colours in this map :

Dark Green

Medium Green

Green

Light Green

Everybody has not a perfect eye-view like a machine ! Why use colours that are not distinguishable ?

--AXRL (talk) 17:12, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

On 6 May 2013‎ Curly Turkey with no discussion moved page "Chinese characters" to "Chinese character", giving the reason "Singular is standard."

This was a well-intentioned misunderstanding.

Reasons to return to the long-standing "Chinese characters" in ascending order of importance:

• The move resulted in the first sentence: "Chinese characters are logograms," not following the rule that the title of the article should be in the first sentence (it would be almost impossible to fashion a lead sentence which does follow the rule).
• WP:SINGULAR specifically exempts "the names of classes of objects (e.g. Arabic numerals or Bantu languages)."
• The guideline WP:NCWS#Unspecified says "Exceptions may also occur where a different technical term is widely used," and lists the specific example "Chinese characters" as acceptable.

Since "Chinese characters" is specifically mentioned as acceptable, there doesn't seem to be a need for discussion, so I moved the article back to the longstanding title, "Chinese characters." Cheers ch (talk) 18:09, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

A number of issues with this rationale:

1. There is no "rule that the title of the article should be in the first sentence". See WP:LEADSENTENCE.
2. When a title is not in sungular it causes unnecessary extra work for editors. For eample, if an edit were to wrtite a sentence such as "X is written with the Chinese character Y", they have to link thus: [[Chinese characters|Chinese character]]. Whereas is the title were singular, one could write "LANGUAGE X uses [[Chinese character]]s", and not have to type a single extra character—which I believe is why singular is standard in the first place.
3. The talk page of WP:NCWS#Unspecified has someone raising concerns that WP:NCWS was raised to guideline status with little broad discussion. It also shows that Chinese character was originally singular before the guideline made it plural.

Curly Turkey (gobble) 21:07, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Your second point doesn't work, as [[Chinese character]] works fine. I don't think you've addressed CWH's point about WP:SINGULAR, as "Arabic numerals" or "Egyptian hieroglyphs" seem closely analoguous with Chinese characters. Kanguole 22:25, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

• Chinese character "works fine" because the page has been made a redirect to Chinese characters. There are bots that go around "fixing" these redirects so that we end up with [[Chinese characters|Chinese character]], when [[Chinese character]] and [[Chinese character]]s are cleaner and easier for later editors to parse.
• Exceptions to WP:SINGULAR should be a last resort: in the case of Bantu languages, if it were Bantu language it would give the impression of a single language called "Bantu", analogous to Japanese language. There are no such extenuating circumstances with regards to "Chinese character".
• Are there any advatages to this article being in the plural? I've not seen one put forward.

Curly Turkey (gobble) 23:01, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there are any bots that do that – which ones are you thinking of? Any bot proposal doing that would not get approved, per WP:NOTBROKEN. Kanguole 01:34, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

I've had any number of redirects "fixed" for me. Whether they were bots or not, in the end, is irrelevant. I'd argue that Chinese character wasn't broken when it was originally or subsequently moved. Curly Turkey (gobble) 02:12, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Glad to respond.

Policies and guidelines should not be passed over easily, but I completely agree that they can be trumped by WP:COMMONSENSE, so I take your argument seriously now that you have stated it (it would have been helpful if you had stated it to begin with before summarily moving the article).

I take your primary argument to be:

When a title is not in sungular it causes unnecessary extra work for editors. For eample, if an edit were to wrtite a sentence such as "X is written with the Chinese character Y", they have to link thus: Chinese character. Whereas is the title were singular, one could write "LANGUAGE X uses Chinese characters", and not have to type a single extra character—which I believe is why singular is standard in the first place.

This by your own evidence is not the case: "X is written with Chinese character Y" simply redirects to "Chinese characters." An editor can write either "Chinese character" or "Chinese characters."

Next, a few comments on the rules and guidelines:

• I agree that it is not an overriding argument, but WP:BEGIN does in fact say "If possible, the page title should be the subject of the first sentence. However, if the article title is merely descriptive—such as Electrical characteristics of dynamic loudspeakers—the title does not need to appear verbatim in the main text."

• WP:SINGULAR says nothing of "last resort" but clearly describes this situation, that is, "classes of things."
• "The talk page of WP:NCWS#Unspecified has someone raising concerns that WP:NCWS was raised to guideline status with little broad discussion. It also shows that Chinese character was originally singular before the guideline made it plural.

I don't see the relevance of this comment.

The positive advantages to "Chinese Characters":

• It is the subject of the article in both common and specialist usage.Search Wikipedia for "Chinese character", that is, search for the singular, finds even in Wikipedia the use of "Chinese characters" is predominant, with the exceptions being, for instance, "Chinese character dictionary." In those cases, as you point out, "Chinese character" redirects to "Chinese characters."
• "Chinese character" is meaningless in this context.
• Avoids confusion for readers who might think it concerns Chinese psychology (Chinese national character).

In short, 1) There is no advantage to "Chinese character." 2) "Chinese characters" is completely acceptable.

Hope this helps! ch (talk) 00:20, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

• "An editor can write either "Chinese character" or "Chinese characters."": How is this an argument in favour of either form? If your argument is that it makes no difference to you, and my arguement is that it does make a difference to me, then how is it rational to move to the form that hinders me without helping you?
• WP:SINGULAR at no point says that groups must, should, or would be good to be in the plural. They are granted as an exception, and should only be used in exceptional cases. "Chinese character" is not in the least bit exceptional.
• "I don't see the relevance of this comment.": Then I suggest you read it again and give it some thought.
• "It is the subject of the article in both common and specialist usage.": What is the point of this? That specialists commonly use the plural in contexts that require the plural? Specialists normally refer to "dogs" rather that dog as well, for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with Wikipedia article titling.
• "Avoids confusion for readers who might think it concerns Chinese psychology (Chinese national character).": Has this ever been an issue for anyone? Even once? Reality and plausibility trump fantasy—in reality linking to this article is a frequent issue for me.
• "In short, 1) There is no advantage to "Chinese character."": Seriously, this is the attitude you've chosen to take? Normally one would weigh the advantages and disadvantages, not pretend there are no advantages. Myself, I never claimed there were no advantages; I only wrote: "Are there any advatages to this article being in the plural? I've not seen one put forward." At that point in the discussion none had been put forward, only misreadings of guidelines, including a guideline that never existed—no argument specific to why this article should be an exception had been given (that's an empirical fact). Please change your attitude. Curly Turkey (gobble) 02:12, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

The guideline WP:NCWS#Unspecified says "Exceptions may also occur where a different technical term is widely used," and lists the specific example "Chinese characters" as acceptable. Q.E.D. ch (talk) 02:36, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

This "argument" is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going "LALALALAAAaaa!" Curly Turkey (gobble) 03:23, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't see how Wikipedia:Naming conventions (writing systems) applies. The writing system is not "Chinese characters". It's Written Chinese, for which you use Chinese characters; depending where you are these are either Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters. Those are plural as they are particular sets or systems, two different ways of representing Chinese characters. But "Chinese characters" here is just a plural, not the name of a system. Many other English terms are normally used as plural but their article is singular lentil, ant, byte. Chinese character is consistent with this and WP:SINGULAR would seem the most appropriate guideline.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 03:00, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Dear JohnBlackburne -- You pose a useful question. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (writing systems) applies because it specifically gives "Chinese characters" as a Common Sense exception to the general rule, one which is used in parallel to Arabic numerals, among others, including your examples, Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters. I do not think they should be moved to the singular but that "Chinese characters" needs to be plural to be parallel and consistent (among other reasons). ch (talk) 03:36, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Again I don't think that guideline applies, for the reasons I gave, so the example there is misplaced. Looking at the talk page there is also some doubt over what support it has a a guideline. Another example: one might remark, on reading some text, that "those are Chinese characters, but I don't know if it's written in Chinese or Japanese". Here the writing system is (written) Chinese or (written) Japanese. "Chinese characters" refers to neither system but the Hanzi or Kanji that they include.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 12:59, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Dear CurlyTurkey: You say: "This "argument" is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going "LALALALAAAaaa!" Since you are an experienced and caring editor whom I respect for trying to improve Wikipedia, I expect an apology for this uncivil outburst. ch (talk) 03:45, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

What is uncivil is your condescending tone and refusal to consider the concerns of your fellow editors who have been put out by your move and your refusal to take the points they've raised seriously. What I wrote was a statement of fact, and not anything to apologize for. Curly Turkey (gobble) 03:55, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly apologize if I have given the appearance of condescension, though for future reference it would help if you could point to specific examples. My intention was to reply to your original point that policy required that articles be named in the singular, which appeared to me to be a misunderstanding. I characterized this as well intentioned, but the policy allows for exceptions, and the guideline gave "Chinese characters" as one. You then mentioned that the singular title "hindered" you, which Kanguole and I pointed out was not the case. An editor does not have to type extra input or rely on bots. This appears to me to be responsive to your concerns and, more important, in line with Wikipedia policy and the needs of readers. An article about Chinese characters should be titled "Chinese characters." Again, if you can point me to where I have been uncivil, I sincerely apologize. ch (talk) 04:28, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Let's be absolutely crystal clear on this, as there are editors who pull these mind & word games all the time and it drives me up the wall that they are allowed to get away with this behaviour: never in my entire life have I been in a real-life^[a] conversation with anyone in which "Q.E.D." was intended to mean anything but "So, F.U." The game? If anyone calls you out on it, you can respnd by linking to Q.E.D., a cute dodge which allows you to appear superficially to have been "the civil one" in the conversation and humiliate your "opponent" at the same time.

My response to this mind game was to point out that you were ignoring valid arguments: This "argument" is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going "LALALALAAAaaa!"—pretty spot-on exactly what you did. Not nice to pull open the Wizard's curtain, but certainly not anything like the "incivility" you demanded I apologize for.

As to the validity of the "argument" itself, I'd like to point out a very recent discussion at Talk:Claude Monet. Not long ago, there were extensive galleries in the article: 28 images in one gallery, 40 in another. Attempts to do something about these sprawling galleries were met with resistance from editors who insisted the Visual Arts Manual of Style used the Monet article specifically to excuse such galleries^[b] (déjà vu?) After several long and often acrimonious discussions involving over a dozen editors the consensus fell strongly in favour of reducing the number of images and rearranging the remaining ones into smaller, easier-to-navigate and higher-context galleries.

The fact that "Chinese characters" has been chosen as an example for the guideline in and of itself means little, especially given there is little evidence that much discussion went into its selection—the fact that it was moved specifically to be made the example sets an awful lot of bells ringing (Merry Christmas!). Just how valid, or even thought-out, was that decision?

Now if you could get around to responding to my concerns, we can let this ugly tangent die an ugly death. Maybe you can even get consensus on the side of your argument—as it stands, that's not the case.

Curly Turkey (gobble) 06:15, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm struggling to see any pertinent considerations in the above discussion, and I'm not too worried about what may be written in various guidelines (where examples tend to be picked after the fact), but I would note that Letter (alphabet), Symbol, Character (symbol) all have singular titles; this one seems to be more or less analogous. I would be happy to draw what is admittedly a very fine line, between Chinese character, which is the English name for that type of object, and Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters, which are slightly more descriptive names for what are slightly more like sets of objects (more like Arabic numerals). That said, I'm not even totally convinced by my own arguments, and it maybe doesn't matter very much. W. P. Uzer (talk) 09:30, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

• Comment I support the current plural, partially per the comment in the next section that "Chinese character" reads like "the character of the Chinese people". Articles with similar plurals include Post-nominal letters, Code letters, Block letters, Latin letters used in mathematics, Claudian letters, and Hillside letters, ASA carriage control characters, Unicode compatibility characters. Bad titles elsewhere are not an argument for a bad title here, but would we be comfortable with moving those other articles to the singular? — kwami (talk) 19:58, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
  • It would be helpful if you could tell us what problem is being solved by requiring "Code letter" or "Block letter" to be in the plural. Is this not a case of instruction creep? Curly Turkey (gobble) 21:23, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I'd be happy w those in the sg. But for some of the others the sg seems inappropriate. — kwami (talk) 07:04, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

The problem there is, if it "seems" inappropriate to you, but it "seems" appropriate to Joe Bleaugh (or Curly Turkey), then what basis do we have for determining which is correct? When new to Wikipedia (I remember those times) it "seemed" inappropriate to me to have, say, "dog" in the singular—after all, if I were to write a book or article on the subject, I'd be certain to put "dog" in the plural. Curly Turkey (gobble) 08:49, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Post-nominal letters and Code letters ought to be plural since they are specifically used in groups of more than one. Latin letters used in mathematics is obviously a descriptive title, where the plural is natural. Claudian letters, Hillside letters, ASA carriage control characters and Unicode compatibility characters are delimited sets of objects. Block letters is more about that style of writing than the letters themselves. I don't quite see that Chinese character(s) satisfies any of those criteria for being pluralized, though I admit the criteria as I've expressed them aren't very rigorously defined, and views may differ. W. P. Uzer (talk) 09:56, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Friends--

Here is a summary of what I take to be the state of discussion. Since the discussion has clarified policy and changed my thinking on several points, I will leave out intermediate steps.

1) WP:SINGULAR specifically exempts "the names of classes of objects (e.g. Arabic numerals or Bantu languages). The guideline WP:NCWS#Unspecified says "Exceptions may also occur where a different technical term is widely used," and lists the specific example "Chinese characters" as acceptable.)"

Reply: This guideline was not widely discussed.

2) Linking to this article is a frequent issue and "Chinese characters" creates unnecessary extra work.

Reply: Linking the phrase "Chinese character" links to "Chinese characters" article, with no extra work.

3) This article should be an exception to the general rule on plurals. There are several reasons, in addition to the guideline:

* An article about "Chinese characters" (and which uses that phrase in the lede and throughout) should be titled "Chinese characters."

* "Chinese characters" is the common phrase or term for this meaning, both in Wikipedia and in general usage; "Chinese character" in this sense is hard to find, though it is used adjectively, as in "Chinese character dictionary."

Reply There should be exceptions only in extreme circumstances, and this is not extreme.

4) The exception is not unusual: plural is used for parallel articles Simplified Chinese characters, Arabic numerals, and a number of other.

Reply: 1) Many parallel articles are in the singular. 2) Exceptions do not justify further exceptions.

5) "Chinese character" gives the impression that it concerns Chinese psychology (Chinese national character).

Objection: This is not a common confusion.

Reply to objection: Several editors said that they had this impression.

6)"Chinese characters" was the long standing title, 2011-2013.

Reply: For many years it was not.

My own view at this point is that #1 is not as strong an argument as I originally thought, though still clearly in favor of the plural; #2 is a reasonable objection but has been met; #3 & #4 are the strongest arguments & leave me in favor of the plural; #5 is not powerful, but still in favor of plural; #6 is not powerful either way. Therefore, on balance, I am still in favor of the move to the plural.

Respectfully submitted ch (talk) 23:03, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

You seem to have omitted all of my arguments - is that just because they tend to lead to the opposite conclusion from the one you want to draw, or because I haven't expressed them well enough to make them look like arguments? W. P. Uzer (talk) 08:55, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Apologies. My "summary" was too condensed. I meant to briefly represent your argument by saying "many articles are in the singular." I would be happy to add or to have you add a few more words indicated by something like "added". Would this be ok? ch (talk) 15:47, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

OK, I guess my position is already reasonably summed up by "There should be exceptions only in extreme circumstances, and this is not extreme." Although I wouldn't myself say "extreme", just that there should be exceptions only for specific reasons, and I haven't yet seen anything sufficiently specific (that wouldn't also take in a whole lot of other articles that Wikipedia routinely titles in the singular). But as I say, I don't have very strong feelings about it. Happy New Year everyone! W. P. Uzer (talk) 16:24, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

That pretty much echoes my sentiments, the question I posed to Kwakikagami: is requiring the plural not just a case of instruction creep? Was the singular causing any editor or reader any practical problems whatsoever? What does the requirement seek to resolve?

I can sympathize with the alleged "Chinese national character" confusion, but it appears to me strictly hypothetical: when linked, the surrounding context makes the meaning obvious ("X is spelt with the Chinese character Y" will obviously not be misunderstood as having anything to do with psychology), and I would predict that the ratio of those searching "Chinese character" who intend the written characters to dwarf by enormous margins those who are searching for the psychological concept, assuming there is a significant (or even existent) number of readers who would use those search words at all for the psychological concept. Given the number of readers who come to Wikipedia for pop culture trivia, I would expect "Chinese characters" (read "Chinese fictional characters") to be at least equally problematic, anyways. Curly Turkey (gobble) 22:46, 31 December 2013 (UTC)