Written Chinese

The Chinese Writing system is logographic, i.e. each character expresses a word part. Originally, the characters were actually little pictures depicting what was meant. This, however, proved inconvenient (as you can imagine - try to depict "philosophy"!). There are still a number of characters which can be traced back to such pictorial characters, but many characters used today are compositions of other, more simple characters. Chinese scholars identify several types of compounds, including "meaning-meaning" compounds, in which each element of the character contributes to the meaning, and "sound-meaning" compounds, in which one component indicates the kind of concept the character describes, and the other hints at the pronunciation (though, as the spoken language has evolved since the characters were standardized, these hints are often quite useless and sometimes directly misleading). For example, the character for "country" (國 'guo2') consists of the outer square (口) which represents the wall/fortress, the radical 'ge1' (戈 meaning lance, a weapon) which represents defense, the radical 'mouth' (口 kou3) which represents population, and a horizontal stroke (一) which represents land. This character falls in the meaning-meaning category. Another example, the character for "mother" (媽 'ma', 1. pitch, in Mandarin) consists of one component meaning "female (女)" and another one meaning "horse (馬)" - now this doesn't mean Chinese view mothers as female horses! The first component (or "radical") simply tells that the character denotes a female entity, whereas the second acts as a pronunciation guide by referring to the word for "horse", which is also pronounced 'ma', though in a different tone.

Every character has a "radical", or most fundamental component, and this design principle is exploited by Chinese dictionaries: full characters are ordered according to their initial radical (for which there are only about 200 possibilities) and the number of strokes they consist of (a more detailed discussion of this can be found in the entry on ideographic writing systems).

Also, this principle is exploited by everybody learning to write Chinese: The vast number of Chinese characters can be much more easily memorized if they are mentally decomposed into their constituting radicals. The question of how many characters there are is subject of a heated discussion. In the 18th century, European scholars claimed the total tally to be about 80,000. This number, however, is exaggerated, as the most concise dictionary (the Kangxi Dictionary 康熙字典) lists about 40,000 characters. One reason for large number of characters is that they include all of the different characters in the different variations of Chinese. Popular estimates say that about 3,000 characters are needed to read a Chinese newspaper, and 4,000 to 5,000 constitute a decent education.

Classification of characters

One can classify characters into character sets of which the following are in common use:

"bai hua" (白話)

"wen yan" (文言) -- Classical Chinese

"written colloquial Cantonese" - Cantonese is unique in that is it has a commonly used written character system which is different from "bai hua" or "wen yan"

"dialectal characters"

Character forms

There are currently two standards for printed Chinese characters. One is the Traditional Writing System, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and by Overseas Chinese. The Peoples's Republic of China (also Singapore) uses the Simplified Writing System, which uses simplified forms for some of the more complicated characters. In addition most Chinese in writing letters will use some personal simplications for cursive.

The Chinese characters are also used to write the Chinese numerals.

Transcription and Romanization

The official standard transcription of Putonghua into the Latin alphabet is Pinyin, though other systems are still sometimes used, such as the older Wade-Giles. Other Chinese languages are transliterated with more or less adhoc systems, sometimes without a clear standard, sometimes with several.