Chinese Characters

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• Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world, with a history of at least four thousand years. 

• The numbers of Chinese character strokes are as high as from 47 to 172 strokes. Because these characters are relatively rare, they are the ancient characters, so the computer can't type them  at all; Chinese characters are about 7762 years old, and the Jiahu engraved Fu is physically determined by carbon 14  , About 7762 years (±128 years) of history, etc., are the characters that have been used continuously for the longest time so far, and they are also the only characters that have been passed down to the present in the major writing systems of the ancient times. Chinese characters have been used as the main official characters in all the dynasties of China.

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Chinese characters, also called Hanzi (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字; pinyin: Hànzì; lit. 'Han characters'), are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese.They have been adapted to write other Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as kanji. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.

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The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graphic variants, or were used historically and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature. A college graduate who is literate in written Chinese knows between three and four thousand characters, though more are required for specialized fields.[6] In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school (the Jōyō kanji); hundreds more are in everyday use. Due to post-WWII simplifications of characters in Japan as well as in China, the kanji used in Japan today are distinct from Chinese simplified characters in several respects. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia; traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and to a limited extent in South Korea. In Japan, common characters are written in post-WWII Japan-specific simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms, which are virtually identical to Chinese traditional forms.[citation needed]

In modern Chinese, most words are compounds written with two or more characters.Unlike an alphabetic system, a character-based writing system associates each logogram with an entire sound and thus may be compared in some aspects to a syllabary. A character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme.However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes (written with two characters), bimorphemic syllables (written with two characters) and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase.

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Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by one of many characters, depending on meaning. A particular character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, which might have different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. In other languages, most significantly in modern Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords or to represent native words independent of the Chinese pronunciation (e.g., kunyomi in Japanese). Some characters retained their phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in a historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

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Pictograms

• 象形字 xiàngxíngzì

Pictograms are highly stylized and simplified pictures of material objects. Examples of pictograms include 日 rì for "sun", 月 yuè for "moon", and 木 mù for "tree" or "wood". Xu Shen placed approximately 4% of characters in this category. Though few in number and expressing literal objects, pictograms and ideograms are nonetheless the basis on which all the more complex characters such as associative idea characters (会意字) and pictophonetic characters (形声字) are formed.

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Pictograms are primary characters in the sense that they, along with ideograms (indicative characters i.e. symbols), are the building blocks of compound characters (意意字) and picto-phonetic characters (形声字).

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Over time pictograms were increasingly standardized, simplified, and stylized to make them easier to write. Furthermore, the same kangxi radical character element can be used to depict different objects. Thus, the image depicted by most pictograms is not often immediately evident. For example, 口 may indicate the mouth, a window as in 高 which depicts a tall building as a symbol of the idea of "tall" or the lip of a vessel as in 富 a wine jar under a roof as symbol of wealth. That is, pictograms extended from literal objects to take on symbolic or metaphoric meanings; sometimes even displacing the use of the character as a literal term, or creating ambiguity, which was resolved though character determinants, more commonly but less accurately known as "radicals" i.e. concept keys in the phono-semantic characters.

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From Wikipedia, 

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