Contrary to somewhat popular perception, Chinese characters aren’t simply little pictures. The truth is, most of them aren’t pictures in any respect. The very previousest, whose evolution may be traced again to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched directly onto the stays of turtles and oxen, do bear traces of their pictograph ancestors. However most Chinese characters, or hanzi, are emblemgraphic, which implies that every one represents a different morpheme, or distinct unit of language: a phrase, or a single a part of a phrase that has no independent implying. No person is aware of for certain what number of hanzi exist, however close toly 100,000 have been documented up to now.
Not that it’s worthwhile to be taught all of them to achieve literacy: for that, a mere 3,000 to five,000 will do. Whereas it’s technically possible to memorize that many characters by rote, you’d do wagerter to start by familiarizing yourself with their fundamental nature and structure — and in so doing, you’ll naturally be taught greater than a little about their lengthy history.
The TED-Ed lesson on the high of the publish professionalvides a short however illuminating overview of “how Chinese characters work,” utilizing animation to point out how historical symbols for concrete issues like a person, a tree, the solar, and water grew to become versatile sufficient to be combined into representations of eachfactor else — including summary concepts.
In the Mandarin Blueprint video simply above, host Luke Neale goes deeper into the structure of the hanzi in use at this time. Whether or not they be simplified versions of predominantland China or the traditional ones of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsethe place, they’re for essentially the most half constructed not out of entire material, he stresses, however from a set of existing components. Which will make a prospective be taughter really feel slightly much less daunted, as might the truth that toughly 80 percent of Chinese characters are “semantic-phowebic comkilos”: one component of the character professionalvides a clue to its implying, and another a clue to its professionalnunciation. (Not that it necessarily makes deciphering them an effortmuch less activity.)
Within the distant previous, hanzi had been additionally the one technique of fileing other Asian languages, like Vietnamese and Korean. Nonetheless at this time, they continue to be central to the Japanese writing system, however like all other cultural kind transplanted to Japan, they’ve onerously gone unaltered there: the NativLang video simply above explains the transformation they’ve underneathgone over millennia of interaction with the Japanese language. It wasn’t so very way back that, even of their residenceland, hanzi had been menaceened with the prospect of being scrapped within the dubious identify of modern efficiency. Now, with these aforemalestioned almost-100,000 characters incorporated into Unicode, making them usable by way ofout our Twenty first-century digital universe, it appears they’ll stick round — even longer, perhaps, than the Latin alphawager you’re learning proper now.
Related content:
What Historic Chinese Sounded Like — and How We Know It: An Animated Introduction
The Writing Systems of the World Defined, from the Latin Alphawager to the Abugidas of India
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly generally known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
