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82-810: Following widespread confusion and opposition, the second round of simplification was officially rescinded on 24 June 1986 by the State Council . Since then, the PRC has used the first-round simplified characters as its official script. Rather than ruling out further simplification, however, the retraction declared that further reform of the Chinese characters should be done with caution. Today, some second-round simplified characters, while considered non-standard, continue to survive in informal usage. The traditional relationship between written Chinese and vernacular Chinese varieties has been compared to that of Latin with

164-472: A factor. The exact circumstances surrounding the creation and release of the Second Scheme remain in mystery due to the still-classified nature of many documents and the politically sensitive nature of the issue. However, the Second Scheme is known to have encompassed only about 100 characters before its expansion to over 850. A two-year delay from 1975 to 1977 was officially blamed on Zhang Chunqiao ,

246-566: A few have been assigned invented Sino-Japanese readings. For example, the common character 働 has been given the reading dō , taken from 動 , and even borrowed into modern written Chinese with the reading dòng . The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in the initial development of Chinese writing, and has continued throughout its history. Some loangraphs ( 假借 ; jiǎjiè ; 'borrowing') are introduced to represent words previously lacking another written form—this

328-462: A few of these characters remain recognizable to modern Chinese readers. Over 90% of the characters used in modern written vernacular Chinese originated as phono-semantic compounds. However, as both meaning and pronunciation in the language have shifted over time, many of these components no longer serve their original purpose. A lack of knowledge as to the specific histories of these components often leads to folk and false etymologies . Knowledge of

410-564: A hint for the character's pronunciation, and semantic components indicate some element of the character's meaning. Components that serve neither function may be classified as pure signs with no particular meaning, other than their presence distinguishing one character from another. A straightforward structural classification scheme may consist of three pure classes of semantographs , phonographs and signs —having only semantic, phonetic, and form components respectively, as well as classes corresponding to each combination of component types. Of

492-556: A member of the Gang of Four ; however, there is little historical evidence to support this. Against the political backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, a special section known as the "748 Project" was formed with an emphasis on non-experts, under whose supervision the lists grew significantly. The bulk of the work is believed to have been performed by staffers without proper oversight. The Second Scheme's subsequent rejection by

574-444: A new character 麥 ( mài ) was devised for 'wheat'. When a character is used as a rebus this way, it is called a 假借字 ( jiǎjièzì ; 'borrowed character'), translatable as 'phonetic loan character' or ' rebus character'. The process of characters being borrowed as loangraphs should not be conflated with the distinct process of semantic extension, where a word acquires additional senses, which often remain written with

656-508: A phonetic compound. Notably, Christopher Button has shown how more sophisticated palaeographical and phonological analyses can account for the examples of Boodberg and Boltz without relying on polyphony. While compound ideographs are a limited source of Chinese characters, they form many kokuji created in Japan to represent native words. Examples include: As Japanese creations, such characters had no Chinese or Sino-Japanese readings, but

738-410: A semantic component. Indicatives ( 指事 ; zhǐshì ; 'indication') depict an abstract idea with an iconic form, including iconic modification of pictographs. In the examples below, the numerals representing small numbers are represented a corresponding number of strokes, directions are represented by a graphical indication above or below a line. Parts of a tree are communicated by indicating

820-524: A series of further reforms aided by the efforts of reformers like Qian Xuantong were ultimately thwarted by conservative elements in the new government and the intellectual class. Continuing the work of previous reformers, in 1956 the People's Republic of China promulgated the Scheme of Simplified Chinese Characters, later referred to as the "First Round" or "First Scheme". The plan was adjusted slightly in

902-501: A similar-sounding one (a rebus or phonetic loan ). This also results in mergers between previously distinct characters: The Second Scheme broke with a millennia-long cycle of variant forms coming into unofficial use and eventually being accepted (90 percent of the changes made in the First Scheme existed in mass use, many for centuries) in that it introduced new, unfamiliar character forms. The sheer number of characters it changed,

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984-518: A writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes —which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. Chinese characters are logographs , which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes . Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore

1066-613: Is appointed by the NPC upon the nomination by the president , though in practice the premier is chosen within the CCP leadership, including the Politburo Standing Committee . The vice premiers (one executive and generally three others), state councillors, and a secretary-general (who normally also serves as a state councillor) all assist the premier. Each vice premier oversees certain areas of administration in support of

1148-470: Is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as 之 and 其 . For example, the character 來 ( lái ) was originally a pictograph of a wheat plant, with the meaning * ‍ m-rˁək 'wheat'. As this was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese word * ‍ mə.rˁək 'to come', 來 was loaned to write this verb. Eventually, 'to come' became established as the default reading, and

1230-423: Is often used as a loangraph for its respective syllable. However, the barrier between a character's pronunciation and meaning is never total: when transcribing into Chinese, loangraphs are often chosen deliberately as to create certain connotations. This is regularly done with corporate brand names: for example, Coca-Cola 's Chinese name is 可口可乐 ; 可口可樂 ( Kěkǒu Kělè ; 'delicious enjoyable'). While

1312-487: Is probably a simplification of an attested alternative form 朙 , which can be viewed as a phono-semantic compound. Peter A. Boodberg and William G. Boltz have argued that no ancient characters were compound ideographs. Boltz accounts for the remaining cases by suggesting that some characters could represent multiple unrelated words with different pronunciations, as in Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs , and

1394-630: The Guangming Daily published the second-round simplifications along with editorials and articles endorsing the changes. Both newspapers began to use the characters from the first list the following day. The Second Scheme was received extremely poorly, and as early as mid-1978, the Ministry of Education and the Central Propaganda Department were asking publishers of textbooks, newspapers, and other works to stop using

1476-538: The ⼧   'ROOF' signific was later added to disambiguate the latter usage. In support of this second reading, he points to other characters with the same 女 component that had similar pronunciations in Old Chinese: 妟 ; yàn ← * ‍ ʔrans 'tranquil', 奻 ; nuán ← * ‍ nruan 'to quarrel' and 姦 ; jiān ← * ‍ kran 'licentious'. Other scholars reject these arguments for alternative readings and consider other explanations of

1558-713: The 3500 characters that are frequently used in Standard Chinese, pure semantographs are estimated to be the rarest, accounting for about 5% of the lexicon, followed by pure signs with 18%, and semantic–form and phonetic–form compounds together accounting for 19%. The remaining 58% are phono-semantic compounds. The Chinese palaeographer Qiu Xigui ( b.  1935 ) presents three principles of character function adapted from earlier proposals by Tang Lan  [ zh ] (1901–1979) and Chen Mengjia (1911–1966), with semantographs describing all characters whose forms are wholly related to their meaning, regardless of

1640-545: The CCP Central Committee 's leadership over the State Council. The amended law also stipulates the State Council must follow the CCP's ideology and policies. The State Council is composed of the premier , several vice premiers , several state councillors , ministers of ministries, directors of committees, the auditor general, and the secretary-general . The premier leads the State Council and

1722-531: The Central People's Government , is the chief administrative authority and the national cabinet of China . It is constitutionally the highest administrative organ of the country and the executive organ of the National People's Congress , the highest organ of state power . It is composed of the premier, vice premiers, state councilors, ministers, chairpersons of commissions, the auditor-general,

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1804-697: The Ministry for National Defense but does not control the People's Liberation Army, which is instead controlled by the Central Military Commission (CMC). The State Council previously had joint command over the People's Armed Police (PAP) together with the CMC, principally through the Ministry of Public Security , though 2018 reforms placed the PAP solely under CMC command. The plenary session of

1886-571: The Romance languages in the Renaissance era. The modern simplification movement grew out of efforts to make the written language more accessible, which culminated in the replacement of Classical Chinese with written vernacular Chinese in the early 20th century. The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and subsequent loss of prestige associated with classical writing helped facilitate this shift, but

1968-731: The Shang dynasty during the Late Shang period ( c.  1250  – c.  1050 BCE ). They primarily take the form of short inscriptions on the turtle shells and the shoulder blades of oxen, which were used in an official form of divination known as scapulimancy . Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of modern written Chinese, and is already a mature writing system in its earliest attestation. Roughly one-quarter of oracle bone script characters are pictographs, with rest either being phono-semantic compounds or compound ideographs. Despite millennia of change in shape, usage, and meaning,

2050-409: The structural composition of characters, while the other two refer to techniques of repurposing existing shapes. Modern scholars generally view Xu's categories as principles of character formation, rather than a proper classification. The earliest extant corpus of Chinese characters are in the form of oracle bone script , attested from c.  1250 BCE at the site of Yin , the capital of

2132-528: The NPC or its Standing Committee; and prepare the economic plan and the state budget for deliberation and approval by the NPC. The State Council has flexibility in decision-making, especially with regard to economic matters, but the Politburo has ultimate authority. In 2024, during the second session of the 14th National People's Congress , the Organic Law of the State Council was amended to mandate

2214-727: The State Council is hosted by the Premier, joined by Vice Premiers, State Councillors, Ministers in charge of Ministries and Commissions, the Governor of the People's Bank, the Auditor-General, and the Secretary-General. It usually runs bi-annually and when necessary, non-members can be invited to participate. Chinese character classification#Rebus (phonetic loan) characters Chinese characters are generally logographs , but can be further categorized based on

2296-434: The State Council meets every six months, composed of all members of the State Council. Between meetings it is guided by an Executive Meeting of the State Council  [ zh ] which is held two to three times a month, and can be called at the discretion of the premier. The Executive Meeting is composed of the premier, vice premiers, state councilors, and the secretary-general. (first-ranked) The Plenary Meeting of

2378-465: The ambiguity caused by phonetic loans. This process can be repeated, with a phono-semantic compound character itself being used as a phonetic in a further compound, which can result in quite complex characters, such as 劇 ( 豦 = 虍 + 豕 , 劇 = 刂 + 豦 ). Often, the semantic component is on the left, but there are other possible positions. As an example, a verb 'to wash oneself' is pronounced mù , which happens be homophonous with 'tree', which

2460-549: The better bargain." While the stated goal of further language reform was not changed, the 1986 conference which retracted the Second Scheme emphasized that future reforms should proceed with caution. It also "explicitly precluded any possibility of developing Hanyu Pinyin as an independent writing system ( wénzì )." The focus of language planning policy in China following the conference shifted from simplification and reform to standardization and regulation of existing characters, and

2542-554: The characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length. In some special cases, characters may denote non-morphemic syllables as well; due to this, written Chinese is often characterised as morphosyllabic . Logographs may be contrasted with letters in an alphabet , which generally represent phonemes , the distinct units of sound used by speakers of a language. Despite their origins in picture-writing, Chinese characters are no longer ideographs capable of representing ideas directly; their comprehension relies on

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2624-401: The closely related you and zhu . Since the phonetic elements of many characters no longer accurately represent their pronunciations, when the Chinese government simplified character forms, they often substituted phonetics that were simpler to write, but also more accurate to the modern Standard Chinese pronunciation. This has sometimes resulted in forms which are less phonetic than

2706-441: The compound characters are actually phono-semantic compounds based on an alternative reading that has since been lost. For example, the character 安 ; ān ← * ‍ ʔan 'peace' is often cited as a compound of ⼧   'ROOF' with 女 ; 'woman'. Boltz speculates that the character 女 could represent both the word nǚ ← * ‍ nrjaʔ 'woman' and the word ān ← * ‍ ʔan 'settled', and that

2788-422: The constituent departments are proposed by the premier and decided by the NPC or its Standing Committee. Bureaus and administrations rank below ministries. In addition to the ministries, there are 38 centrally administered government organizations that report directly to the state council. The heads of these organizations attend full meetings of the state committee on an irregular basis. The State Council controls

2870-574: The corresponding part of the pictogram meaning 'tree'. Compound ideographs ( 會意 ; huì yì ; 'joined meaning'), also called associative compounds , logical aggregates , or syssemantographs , are compounds of two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest the meaning of the word to be represented. Xu Shen gave two examples: Other characters commonly explained as compound ideographs include: Many characters formerly classed as compound ideographs are now believed to have been misidentified. For example, Xu's example 信 representing

2952-423: The data more likely, for example viewing 妟 as a reduced form of 晏 , which can be analysed as a phono-semantic compound with 安 as phonetic. They consider the characters 奻 and 姦 to be implausible phonetic compounds, both because the proposed phonetic and semantic elements are identical and because the widely differing initial consonants * ‍ ʔ- and * ‍ n- would not normally be accepted in

3034-418: The day-to-day work of the State Council. The State Council includes 26 constituent departments, and oversees the province-level governments throughout China. Each ministry supervises one sector. Commissions outrank ministries and set policies for and coordinate the related activities of different administrative organs. Offices deal with matters of ongoing concern. The establishment, dissolution, or merger of

3116-511: The distinction between simplifications intended for immediate use and those for review was not maintained in practice, and its release in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1978) have been cited among the chief reasons for its failure. As a result of the Cultural Revolution, trained experts were expelled and the Second Scheme was compiled by the committee and its staffers without outside consultation, which may also have been

3198-526: The earliest forms of characters, including Shang-era oracle bone script and the Zhou-era bronze scripts , is often necessary for reconstructing their historical etymologies. Reconstructing the phonology of Middle and Old Chinese from clues present in characters is a field of historical linguistics . In Chinese, historical Chinese phonology is called yinyunxue ( 音韻學 ). Derivative cognates ( 转注 ; 轉注 ; zhuǎnzhù ; 'reciprocal meaning') are

3280-448: The extended use would take over completely, and a new character would be created for the original meaning, usually by modifying the original character with a determinative . For instance, 又 ( yòu ) originally meant 'right hand', but was borrowed to write the abstract adverb yòu ('again'). Modern usage is exclusively the latter sense, while 右 ( yòu ), which adds the ⼝   'MOUTH' radical, represents

3362-685: The first list of second-round characters, and only partial support for the second list, with many such characters unencoded or yet to be standardized. Mojikyo supports the characters on the first list. From Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Second Round Simplified Chinese: State Council of the People%27s Republic of China The State Council of the People's Republic of China , also known as

Second round of simplified Chinese characters - Misplaced Pages Continue

3444-450: The first table (comprising 248 characters) was for immediate use, and the second table (comprising 605 characters) for evaluation and discussion. Of these characters, 21 from the first list and 40 from the second also served as components of other characters, which caused the Second Scheme to modify some 4,500 characters. On 20 December 1977, major newspapers such as the People's Daily and

3526-466: The following years, eventually stabilizing in 1964 with a definitive list of character simplifications. These are the simplified Chinese characters that are used today in mainland China and Singapore . Taiwan , Hong Kong , and Macau did not adopt the simplifications, and the characters used in those places are known as traditional Chinese characters . Also released in 1964 was a directive for further simplification in order to improve literacy, with

3608-401: The forms of Chinese characters should be kept stable. Later that year, a final version of the 1964 list was published with minor changes, and no further changes have been made since. The second round of simplification continued to use the methods used in the first round. For example: In some characters, the phonetic component of the character was replaced with a simpler one, while the radical

3690-449: The forms of pictographs have been simplified in order to make them easier to write. As a result, it is often no longer evident what thing was originally being depicted by a pictograph; without knowing the context of its origin in picture-writing, it may be interpreted instead as a pure sign. However, if its use in compounds still reflects a pictograph's original meaning, as with 日 in 晴 ('clear sky'), it can still be analysed as

3772-570: The foundation of traditional Chinese lexicography for the next two millennia. Xu was not the first to use the term: it first appeared in the Rites of Zhou (2nd century BCE), though it may not have originally referred to methods of creating characters. When Liu Xin ( d.  23 CE ) edited the Rites he used the term 'six categories' alongside a list of six character types, but he did not provide examples. Slightly different versions of

3854-507: The goal of eventually reducing the number of strokes in commonly used characters to ten or fewer. This was to take place gradually, with consideration for both "ease of production [writing] and ease of recognition [reading]." In 1975, a second round of simplifications, the Second Scheme, was submitted by the Script Reform Committee of China to the State Council for approval. Like the First Scheme, it contained two lists, where

3936-485: The governor of the People's Bank of China, and the secretary-general. The premier is responsible for the State Council and exercises overall leadership of its work. The secretary-general of the State Council, under the leadership of the premier, is responsible for handling the daily work of the State Council and heads the General Office of the State Council. The executive meeting of the State Council, consisting of

4018-476: The lack of differentiation and utility: "it was meaningless to lower the stroke count for its own sake." Thus, he believes simplification and reduction of the number of characters both amount to a zero-sum game —simplification in one area of use causing complication in another—and concludes that "the 'complex' characters in Japanese and Chinese, with their greater redundancy and internal consistency, may have been

4100-430: The manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideographs , but the vast majority are what are called phono-semantic compounds , which involve an element of pronunciation in their meaning. A traditional six-fold classification scheme

4182-518: The method by which the meaning was originally depicted, phonographs that include a phonetic component, and loangraphs encompassing existing characters that have been borrowed to write other words. Qiu also acknowledges the existence of character classes that fall outside of these principles, such as pure signs. Most of the oldest characters are pictographs ( 象形 ; xiàngxíng ), representational pictures of physical objects. Examples include 日 ('Sun'), 月 ('Moon'), and 木 ('tree'). Over time,

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4264-436: The methods used to create characters, how characters are structured, and how they function in a given writing system. Most characters can be analysed structurally as compounds made of smaller components ( 部件 ; bùjiàn ), which are often independent characters in their own right, adjusted to occupy a given position in the compound. Components within a character may serve a specific function: phonetic components provide

4346-425: The most dangerous stumbling-blocks in the interpretation of pre-Han texts is the frequent occurrence of loan characters." Phono-semantic compounds ( 形声 ; 形聲 ; xíngshēng ; 'form and sound' or 谐声 ; 諧聲 ; xiéshēng ; 'sound agreement') represent most of the modern Chinese lexicon. They are created as compounds of at least two components: As in ancient Egyptian writing, such compounds eliminated

4428-432: The notion that all characters should be reduced to ten or fewer strokes. He argues that a technical shortcoming of the Second Scheme was that the characters it reformed occur less often in writing than those of the First Scheme. As such it provided less benefit to writers while putting an unnecessary burden on readers in making the characters more difficult to distinguish. Citing several studies, Hannas similarly argues against

4510-513: The original ones in varieties of Chinese other than Standard Chinese. For the example below, many determinatives have also been simplified, usually by standardizing existing cursive forms. A technique used with chữ Nôm used to write Vietnamese and sawndip used to write Zhuang with no equivalent in China created compounds using two phonetic components. In Vietnamese, this was done because Vietnamese phonology included consonant clusters not found in Chinese, and were thus poorly approximated by

4592-485: The phonetic 俞 ( yú ; /y³⁵/ ; 'agree') but their pronunciations bear no resemblance to each other in Standard Chinese or any other variety. In Old Chinese, the phonetic has the reconstructed pronunciation *lo , while the phono-semantic compounds listed above have been reconstructed as *lo *l̥o and *l̥ˤo respectively. Nonetheless, all characters containing 俞 are pronounced in Standard Chinese as various tonal variants of yu , shu , tou , and

4674-577: The phonetic, which often results in errors. Since the sound changes that had taken place over the two to three thousand years since the Old Chinese period have been extensive, in some instances, the phono-semantic natures of some compound characters have been obliterated, with the phonetic component providing no useful phonetic information at all in the modern language. For instance, 逾 ( yú ; /y³⁵/ ; 'exceed'), 輸 ( shū ; /ʂu⁵⁵/ ; 'lose', 'donate'), 偷 ( tōu ; /tʰoʊ̯⁵⁵/ ; 'steal', 'get by') share

4756-507: The policies of the CCP. Aside from a few, members of the State Council are also members of the CCP's Central Committee . The State Council is described by the Chinese constitution as the executive organ of the National People's Congress (NPC), as well as the "highest state administrative organ". Constitutionally, the main functions of the State Council are to formulate administrative measures, issue decisions and orders, and monitor their implementation; draft legislative bills for submission to

4838-501: The premier, vice premiers, state councillors and the secretary-general, meets two to three times a month, while the plenary session, consisting of all members of the State Council, meets every six months. The State Council directly oversees provincial-level People's Governments, and in practice maintains membership with top levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The State Council is legally required to implement

4920-497: The premier. In practice, the vice premiers and State Councillors assume responsibility for one or more sectors or issues, and remain in contact with the various bodies responsible for policy related to that area. This allows the Standing Committee to oversee a wide range of government functions. Each State Councillor performs duties as designated by the Premier. The secretary-general heads the General Office which handles

5002-466: The public has been cited as a case study in a failed attempt to artificially control the direction of a language's evolution. It was not embraced by the linguistic community in China upon its release; despite heavy promotion in official publications, Rohsenow observes that "in the case of some of the character forms constructed by the staff members themselves" the public at large found proposed changes "laughable". Political issues aside, Chen Ping objects to

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5084-405: The quantities they represent. There are a class of characters formed as ligatures ( 合文 ; héwén ) of the characters making up multi-syllable words. These are distinct from ideographic compounds, which illustrate the meaning of single morphemes. More broadly, they represent an exception to the prevailing principle that characters represent individual morphemes. A ligature character often retains

5166-469: The reader's knowledge of the particular language being written. The areas where Chinese characters were historically used—sometimes collectively termed the Sinosphere —have a long tradition of lexicography attempting to explain and refine their use; for most of history, analysis revolved around a model first popularized in the 2nd-century Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. More recent models have analysed

5248-443: The same character. As both processes often result in a single character form being used to write several distinct meanings, loangraphs are often misidentified as being the result of semantic extension, and vice versa. As with Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform , early Chinese characters were used as rebuses to express abstract meanings that were not easily depicted. Thus, many characters represented more than one word. In some cases

5330-494: The second round split one family name into two. The first round of simplification had already changed the common surnames 蕭 ( Xiāo ; 30th most common in 1982 ) and 閻 ( Yán ; 50th) into 萧 and 阎 . The second round adjusted these further and combined them with other characters previously much less common as surnames: 肖 and 闫 . Similarly, 傅 ( Fù ; 36th) was changed to 付 . Most systems of Chinese character encoding , including Unicode and GB 18030 , provide full support for

5412-440: The second-round simplifications. Second-round simplifications were taught inconsistently in the education system, and people used characters at various stages of official or unofficial simplification. Confusion and disagreement ensued. The Second Scheme was officially retracted by the State Council on 24 June 1986. The State Council's retraction emphasized that Chinese character reform should henceforth proceed with caution, and that

5494-408: The sense meaning 'right'. This process of graphical disambiguation is a common source of phono-semantic compound characters. Loangraphs are also used to write words borrowed from other languages, such as the various Buddhist terminology introduced to China in antiquity, as well as contemporary non-Chinese words and names. For example, each character in the name 加拿大 ( Jiānádà ; 'Canada')

5576-635: The sixfold model are given in the Book of Han (1st century CE) and by Zheng Zhong , as quoted in Zheng Xuan 's 1st-century commentary of the Rites of Zhou . In the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi , Xu illustrated each character type with a pair of examples. While the traditional classification is still taught, it is no longer the focus of modern lexicography. Xu's categories are neither rigorously defined nor mutually exclusive: four refer to

5658-430: The smallest category, and also the least understood. They are often omitted from modern systems. Xu gave the example of 考 kǎo 'to verify' with 老 lǎo 'old', which had similar Old Chinese pronunciations of * ‍ khuʔ and * ‍ C-ruʔ respectively. These may have had the same etymological root meaning 'elderly person', but became lexicalized into two separate words. The term does not appear in

5740-523: The sound values of borrowed characters. Compounds used components with two distinct consonant sounds to specify the cluster, e.g. 𢁋 ( blăng ; 'Moon') was created as a compound of 巴 ( ba ) and 陵 ( lăng ). Some characters and components are pure signs , whose meaning merely derives from their having a fixed and distinct form. Basic examples of pure signs are found with the numerals beyond four, e.g. 五 ('five') and 八 ('eight'), whose forms do not give visual hints to

5822-424: The sounds of Old Chinese . Contemporary foreign pronunciations of characters are also used to reconstruct historical Chinese pronunciation, chiefly that of Middle Chinese . When people try to read an unfamiliar compound, they will typically assume that it is constructed on phono-semantic principles and follow the rule of thumb to youbian dubian "read the side, if there is a side", and take one component to be

5904-588: The topic of further simplification has since been described as "untouchable" in the field. However, the possibility of future changes remains, and the difficulties the Chinese writing system presents for information technology have renewed the Romanization debate. Today, second round characters are officially regarded as incorrect. However, some have survived in informal contexts; this is because some people who were in school between 1977 and 1986 received their education in second-round characters. In three cases,

5986-466: The water-related homophone 淋 ( lín ; 'to pour'). However, the phonetic is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically. It was also often the case that the determinative merely constrained the meaning of a word which already had several. 菜 ; cài ; 'vegetable' is a case in point. The determinative ⾋   'GRASS' for plants

6068-418: The word xìn ← *snjins 'truthful', is usually considered a phono-semantic compound, with 人 ; rén ← *njin as phonetic and ⾔   'SPEECH' as a signific. In many cases, reduction of a character has obscured its original phono-semantic nature. For example, the character 明 ; 'bright' is often presented as a compound of 日 ; 'sun' and 月 ; 'moon'. However this form

6150-824: The word jiajie has been used since the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), the related term tongjia ( 通假 ; 'interchangeable borrowing') is first attested during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The two terms are commonly used as synonyms, but there is a distinction between jiajiezi being a phonetic loan character for a word that did not originally have a character, such as using 東 ('a bag tied at both ends') for dōng ('east'), and tongjia being an interchangeable character used for an existing homophonous character, such as using 蚤 ( zǎo ; 'flea') for 早 ( zǎo ; 'early'). According to Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978), "One of

6232-430: The word's multi-syllable pronunciation, but can sometimes acquire additional single-syllable readings. Ligatures with pronunciations derived as contractions of the original word can be additionally characterized as portmanteaux . A common portmanteau is 甭 ( béng ; 'needn't'), which is a graphical ligature of 不用 ( bùyòng ) that is pronounced as a fusion of bù and yòng . However, this character

6314-463: Was also created at an earlier date as 甭 ( qì ; 'to abandon'), where it instead functions as a true compound ideograph that represents a single unrelated morpheme. 廿 ('twenty') is a common ligature of 二十 ( èrshí ), and is usually read as èrshí . While its alternate readings in other varieties are portmanteaux, the reading nián used in Mandarin is not, as it

6396-528: Was combined with 采 ; cǎi ; 'harvest'. However, 采 ; cǎi does not merely provide the pronunciation. In Classical texts, it was also used to mean 'vegetable'. That is, 采 underwent a semantic extension from 'harvest' to 'vegetable', and the addition of ⾋   'GRASS' merely specified that the latter meaning was to be understood. Originally characters sharing the same phonetic had similar readings, though they have now diverged substantially. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct

6478-428: Was historically changed to an unrelated syllable to avoid sounding like one of the variety's expletives . The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled c.  100 CE by Xu Shen . It divided characters into six categories ( 六書 ; liùshū ) according to what he thought was the original method of their creation. The Shuowen Jiezi ultimately popularized the six category model which would serve as

6560-523: Was originally popularized in the 2nd century CE, and remained the dominant lens for analysis for almost two millennia, but with the benefit of a greater body of historical evidence, recent scholarship has variously challenged and discarded those categories. In older literature, Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs", inheriting a historical misconception of Egyptian hieroglyphs . Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of

6642-493: Was unchanged. For example: In some characters, entire components were replaced by ones that are similar in shape: In some characters, components that are complicated are replaced with a simpler one not similar in shape but sometimes similar in sound: In some characters, the radical is simply dropped, leaving only the phonetic. This results in mergers between previously distinct characters: In some characters, entire components are dropped: Some characters are simply replaced by

6724-411: Was written with the pictograph 木 . The verb mù could have simply been written 木 , but to disambiguate it was compounded with the character for 'water', which gives some idea of the word's meaning. The result was eventually written as 沐 ( mù ; 'to wash one's hair'). Similarly, the ⽔   'WATER' determinative was combined with 林 ( lín ; 'woods') to produce

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