Ying Yuan ( Chinese : 郢 爰 ; pinyin : yǐng yuán ) were stamped blocks of gold bullion. This was an early form of currency that could be considered a precursor to gold coins . They were issued by the ancient Chinese state of Chu during the Warring States period between the 400s and late 200s BCE.
119-592: Because these gold blocks are inscribed with Chinese characters they are variously known as yin zi jin (Chinese: 印子金 ; pinyin: yìn zǐ jīn ), jin ban (Chinese: 金版 ; pinyin: jīn bǎn ), or gui bi (traditional Chinese: 龜幣 ; simplified Chinese: 龟币 ; pinyin: guī bì ). The oldest ones known are from about the 5th or 6th century BCE. They consist of sheets of gold 3-5mm thick, of various sizes, with inscriptions consisting of square or round stamps in which there are one or two characters. They have been unearthed in various locations south of
238-548: A | and single-storey | ɑ | forms both representing the Latin letter ⟨ A ⟩ . Variants also emerge for aesthetic reasons, to make handwriting easier, or to correct what the writer perceives to be errors in a character's form. Individual components may be replaced with visually, phonetically, or semantically similar alternatives. The boundary between character structure and style—and thus whether forms represent different characters, or are merely variants of
357-419: A Confucian philosophical worldview. Confucianism is a humanistic philosophy that believes that human beings are teachable, improvable, and perfectible through personal and communal endeavor, especially including self-cultivation and self-creation. Confucianism focuses on the cultivation of virtue and maintenance of ethics, the most basic of which are: Mid-Imperial Chinese philosophy is primarily defined by
476-437: A brush onto silk, bamboo, or paper, and being printed using woodblocks and moveable type . Technologies invented since the 19th century allowing for wider use of characters include telegraph codes and typewriters , as well as input methods and text encodings on computers. Chinese characters are accepted as representing one of four independent inventions of writing in human history. In each instance, writing evolved from
595-416: A character's meaning. Examples of phono-semantic compounds include 河 ( hé ; 'river'), 湖 ( hú ; 'lake'), 流 ( liú ; 'stream'), 沖 ( chōng ; 'surge'), and 滑 ( huá ; 'slippery'). Each of these characters have three short strokes on their left-hand side: 氵 , a simplified combining form of ⽔ 'WATER' . This component serves
714-505: A company's employees, where knowing one's place within the hierarchy, and showing respect for a person's age and status, are very important in Korean society. It is not uncommon for people in a Korean office to refer to others as their seniors ( seonbae ), or their juniors ( hubae ). And usually positions within a company is reflective of a person's age, and juniors tend to listen to their seniors without pause. Koreans place value on maintaining
833-851: A contemporary overseas Chinese population. The Sinosphere is different from the Sinophone world, which indicates regions where the Chinese language is spoken. Imperial China was a major regional power in Eastern Asia and exerted influence on tributary states and neighboring states, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. These interactions brought ideological and cultural influences rooted in Confucianism , Buddhism , and Taoism . The four cultures were ruled by their respective emperors under similar imperial systems. Chinese inventions influenced, and were in turn influenced by, innovations of
952-428: A few characters in length at their shortest, to several dozen at their longest. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors by means of scapulimancy , inquiring about subjects such as the royal family, military success, and the weather. Inscriptions were made in the divination material itself before and after it had been cracked by exposure to heat; they generally include a record of the questions posed, as well as
1071-719: A framework for his ethical philosophy. Elsewhere in East Asia, Japanese philosophy began to develop as indigenous Shinto beliefs fused with Buddhism, Confucianism, and other schools of Chinese philosophy . Similar to Japan, in Korean philosophy , elements of shamanism were integrated into the neo-Confucianism imported from China. In Vietnam, neo-Confucianism, along with Taoism and Buddhism, were also developed into Vietnam's own Tam giáo , which together with Vietnamese folk religion contributed to shaping Vietnamese philosophy . Though not commonly identified with that of East Asia,
1190-690: A given position in the compound. Components within a character may serve a specific function: phonetic components provide 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
1309-530: A group of centralized states that share a Confucian ethical philosophy. Reischauer states that this culture originated in northern China, comparing the relationship between northern China and East Asia to that of Greco-Roman civilization and Europe. The elites of East Asia were tied together through a common written language based on Chinese characters, much in the way that Latin had functioned in Europe. American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington considered
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#17327657549831428-399: A high value on interpersonal relationships . A leader of a Japanese company is typically valued on their ability to maintain social harmony, and to unify or bring together their employees, rather than simply being the top decision maker. Korean businesses, adhering to Confucian values, are structured around a patriarchal family governed by filial piety ( 孝順 ) between management and
1547-558: A language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes . Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore 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 characterized as morphosyllabic . Logographs may be contrasted with letters in an alphabet , which generally represent phonemes ,
1666-422: A line, and later evolved into their present forms with less potential for graphical ambiguity in context. More complex indicatives include 凸 ('convex'), 凹 ('concave'), and 平 ('flat and level'). Compound ideographs ( 会意 ; 會意 ; huìyì )—also called logical aggregates , associative idea characters , or syssemantographs —combine other characters to convey a new, synthetic meaning. A canonical example
1785-542: A mature form, also called 八分 ( bāfēn ). Bamboo slips discovered during the late 20th century point to this maturation being completed during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han ( r. 141–87 BCE ). This process, called libian ( 隶变 ; 隸變 ), involved character forms being mutated and simplified, with many components being consolidated, substituted, or omitted. In turn, the components themselves were regularized to use fewer, straighter, and more well-defined strokes. The resulting clerical forms largely lacked any of
1904-419: A model first popularized in the 2nd-century Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. More recent models have analysed 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
2023-699: A semantic component. Pictographs have often been extended from their original meanings to take on additional layers of metaphor and synecdoche , which sometimes displace the character's original sense. When this process results in excessive ambiguity between distinct senses written with the same character, it is usually resolved by new compounds being derived to represent particular senses. Indicatives ( 指事 ; zhǐshì ), also called simple ideographs or self-explanatory characters , are visual representations of abstract concepts that lack any tangible form. Examples include 上 ('up') and 下 ('down')—these characters were originally written as dots placed above and below
2142-571: A semantic function in each example, indicating the character has some meaning related to water. The remainder of each character is its phonetic component: 湖 ( hú ) is pronounced identically to 胡 ( hú ) in Standard Chinese, 河 ( hé ) is pronounced similarly to 可 ( kě ), and 沖 ( chōng ) is pronounced similarly to 中 ( zhōng ). The phonetic components of most compounds may only provide an approximate pronunciation, even before subsequent sound shifts in
2261-527: A similar percentage of Chinese loans to the core CJKV languages. Due to the common usage of Chinese characters across East Asian nations, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese people traditionally can engage in written communication using Literary Chinese without knowing other people's spoken language, called Brushtalk . As a result, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are also deemed Sino-Xenic languages that are highly influenced by ancient forms of Literary Chinese. Chinese characters are considered
2380-429: A stylus in clay moulds used to cast ritual bronzes . Characters have also been incised into stone, or written in ink onto slips of silk, wood, and bamboo. The invention of paper for use as a writing medium occurred during the 1st century CE, and is traditionally credited to Cai Lun ( d. 121 CE ). There are numerous styles, or scripts ( 书 ; 書 ; shū ) in which characters can be written, including
2499-540: A system using two distinct types of ideographs . Ideographs could either be pictographs visually depicting objects or concepts, or fixed signs representing concepts only by shared convention. These systems are classified as proto-writing , because the techniques they used were insufficient to carry the meaning of spoken language by themselves. Various innovations were required for Chinese characters to emerge from proto-writing. Firstly, pictographs became distinct from simple pictures in use and appearance: for example,
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#17327657549832618-545: A time and without indicating any greater context. Qiu concludes, "We simply possess no basis for saying that they were already being used to record language." A historical connection with the symbols used by the late Neolithic Dawenkou culture ( c. 4300 – c. 2600 BCE ) in Shandong has been deemed possible by palaeographers, with Qiu concluding that they "cannot be definitively treated as primitive writing, nevertheless they are symbols which resemble most
2737-832: A transitional form between clerical and regular script which remained in use through the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE) and beyond. Cursive script ( 草书 ; 草書 ; cǎoshū ) was in use as early as 24 BCE, synthesizing elements of the vulgar writing that had originated in Qin with flowing cursive brushwork. By the Jin dynasty (266–420), the Han cursive style became known as 章草 ( zhāngcǎo ; 'orderly cursive'), sometimes known in English as 'clerical cursive', 'ancient cursive', or 'draft cursive'. Some attribute this name to
2856-521: A village near Anyang in Henan —discovered to be the site of Yin , the final Shang capital—which was excavated by a team led by Li Ji (1896–1979) from the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. To date, over 150 000 oracle bone fragments have been found. Oracle bone inscriptions recorded divinations undertaken to communicate with the spirits of royal ancestors. The inscriptions range from
2975-485: A well-developed writing system, which suggests an initial emergence predating the late 2nd millennium BCE. Although written Chinese is first attested in official divinations, it is widely believed that writing was also used for other purposes during the Shang, but that the media used in other contexts—likely bamboo and wooden slips —were less durable than bronzes or oracle bones, and have not been preserved. As early as
3094-414: A word is used to indicate a different word with a similar pronunciation, depending on context. This allowed for words that lacked a plausible pictographic representation to be written down for the first time. This technique preempted more sophisticated methods of character creation that would further expand the lexicon. The process whereby writing emerged from proto-writing took place over a long period; when
3213-540: A writing system comprising thousands of distinct characters was non-trivial. Chinese characters are predominantly input on computers using a standard keyboard. Many input methods (IMEs) are phonetic, where typists enter characters according to schemes like pinyin or bopomofo for Mandarin, Jyutping for Cantonese, or Hepburn for Japanese. For example, 香港 ('Hong Kong') could be input as xiang1gang3 using pinyin, or as hoeng1gong2 using Jyutping. Sinosphere The Sinosphere , also known as
3332-627: Is 明 ('bright'), interpreted as the juxtaposition of the two brightest objects in the sky: ⽇ 'SUN' and ⽉ 'MOON' , together expressing their shared quality of brightness. Other examples include 休 ('rest'), composed of pictographs ⼈ 'MAN' and ⽊ 'TREE' , and 好 ('good'), composed of ⼥ 'WOMAN' and ⼦ 'CHILD' . Many traditional examples of compound ideographs are now believed to have actually originated as phono-semantic compounds, made obscure by subsequent changes in pronunciation. For example,
3451-478: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture . Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise
3570-471: Is a small set of minor languages that are comparable to the core East Asian languages, such as Zhuang and Hmong-Mien . They are often overlooked, since neither have their own country or heavily export their culture, but Zhuang has been written in Hanzi -inspired characters called Sawndip for over 1,000 years. Hmong, while having supposedly lacked a writing system until modern history, is also suggested to have
3689-481: Is given by Xu as 轉注 ( zhuǎnzhù ; 'reversed and refocused'); however, its definition is unclear, and it is generally disregarded by modern scholars. Modern scholars agree that the theory presented in the Shuowen Jiezi is problematic, failing to fully capture the nature of Chinese writing, both in the present, as well as at the time Xu was writing. Traditional Chinese lexicography as embodied in
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3808-399: Is not required, and character forms may be accentuated to evoke a variety of aesthetic effects. Traditional ideals of calligraphic beauty often tie into broader philosophical concepts native to East Asia. For example, aesthetics can be conceptualized using the framework of yin and yang , where the extremes of any number of mutually reinforcing dualities are balanced by the calligrapher—such as
3927-402: Is now written with five strokes instead of eight, and a system of five basic stroke types is commonly employed in analysis—with certain compound strokes treated as sequences of basic strokes made in a single motion. Characters are constructed according to predictable visual patterns. Some components have distinct combining forms when occupying specific positions within a character—for example,
4046-457: 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'). 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
4165-788: Is rid of the inherent suffering of the physical world. Buddhism in the Sinosphere or East Asian Buddhism is of or derived from the Mahayana Buddhism sect, which is seen to be intertwined within Taoism and Confucianism as well. It advocates for altruism and compassion, as well as understanding and escaping from suffering in relation to karma . Vegetarianism or veganism is also present for more monastic or devout Buddhists of this sect, or even among lay Buddhists, as it leads to compassion for all living, sentient beings. The countries of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam share
4284-639: Is the most popular religion in Xinjiang and has significant communities in Ningxia in China. On the other hand, no specific religious affiliation may also be practiced as well, and are often the most cited in several aforementioned countries. However, regardless of religious affiliations, most in the Sinosphere are entwined with traces of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, or native religions and philosophies. The following language families are found in and around
4403-514: Is unlikely to supersede the more natively rooted Buddhism, except for places like South Korea where Protestantism is more popular. In Vietnam , Roman Catholicism is prominent, and early Christian missionaries played a historical role in romanizing the Vietnamese language, before the time of French colonial rule . For Hinduism ; see Hinduism in Vietnam , Hinduism in China . Islam
4522-405: Is up to humans to integrate, through "non-action" ( wu wei ) and spontaneity ( zi ran ), to its flow and rhythms, to achieve happiness and a long life. Taoism is a combination of teachings from various sources, manifesting itself as a system that can be philosophical, religious, or ethical. The tradition can also be presented as a worldview and a way of life. Buddhist philosophy is guided by
4641-540: Is used. The Chinese 東亞文化圈 is translated in Vietnamese as Vùng văn hóa Á Đông 塳文化亞東 . In the Ryukyuan languages , 圏 ちん chin is not used to mean 'sphere', 'area', or 'domain' and only appears in kammun texts written by Ryukyuans. Instead, 世 yu is used to mean 'world' or 'sphere'. As such, 漢字文化圏 and 東亜文化圏 would be translated as 漢字一型ぬ世 kanjii tiigata nu yu and 東亜一型ぬ世 too-a tiigata nu yu respectively. Victor H. Mair discussed
4760-450: The I ;Ching . According to one tradition, Chinese characters were invented during the 3rd millennium BCE by Cangjie , a scribe of the legendary Yellow Emperor . Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called 字 ( zì ) due to his frustration with the limitations of knotting, taking inspiration from his study of the tracks of animals, landscapes, and the stars in the sky. On
4879-548: The ⼑ 'KNIFE' component appears as 刂 on the right side of characters, but as ⺈ at the top of characters. The order in which components are drawn within a character is fixed. The order in which the strokes of a component are drawn is also largely fixed, but may vary according to several different standards. This is summed up in practice with a few rules of thumb, including that characters are generally assembled from left to right, then from top to bottom, with "enclosing" components started before, then closed after,
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4998-646: 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
5117-449: The Chinese characters ying yuan (郢爰). Another inscription that is sometimes found on these ancient gold blocks is chen yuan (陳爰). Some specimens have been reported in copper, lead, or clay. It is probable that these were funeral money , not circulating currency, as they are found in tombs, but the gold ones are not. This coin-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This China -related article
5236-534: The Chinese cultural sphere , East Asian cultural sphere , or the Sinic world , encompasses multiple countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia that were historically heavily influenced by Chinese culture . The Sinosphere comprises Greater China , Japan , Korea , and Vietnam . Other definitions may include the regions of modern-day Mongolia and Singapore , due either to historical Chinese influence or
5355-678: The Chinese cursive script . Korea used to write in hanja but has invented an alphabetic system called hangul that is nowadays the majority script. However, hanja is a required subject in South Korea. Most names are also written in hanja. Hanja is also studied and used in academia, newspapers, and law—areas where a lot of scholarly terms and Sino-Korean loanwords are used and necessary to distinguish between otherwise ambiguous homonyms. Vietnam used to write in chữ Hán (Chinese characters) in Classical Chinese texts (Hán văn). In
5474-757: The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) led to considerable standardization in character forms, which prefigured later script reforms during the 20th century. This print orthography , exemplified by the 1716 Kangxi Dictionary , was later dubbed the jiu zixing ('old character shapes'). Printed Chinese characters may use different typefaces , of which there are four broad classes in use: Before computers became ubiquitous, earlier electro-mechanical communications devices like telegraphs and typewriters were originally designed for use with alphabets, often by means of alphabetic text encodings like Morse code and ASCII . Adapting these technologies for use with
5593-467: The Shuowen Jiezi describes 信 ('trust') as an ideographic compound of ⼈ 'MAN' and ⾔ 'SPEECH' , but modern analyses instead identify it as a phono-semantic compound—though with disagreement as to which component is phonetic. Peter A. Boodberg and William G. Boltz go so far as to deny that any compound ideographs were devised in antiquity, maintaining that secondary readings that are now lost are responsible for
5712-462: The Shuowen Jiezi has suggested implausible etymologies for some characters. Moreover, several categories are considered to be ill-defined: for example, it is unclear whether characters like 大 ('large') should be classified as pictographs or indicatives. However, awareness of the 'six writings' model has remained a common component of character literacy, and often serves as a tool for students memorizing characters. The broadest trend in
5831-523: The Shuowen Jiezi . For nearly two millennia, this scheme was the primary framework for character analysis used throughout the Sinosphere. Xu based most of his analysis on examples of Qin seal script that were written down several centuries before his time—these were usually the oldest specimens available to him, though he stated he was aware of the existence of even older forms. The first five categories are pictographs, indicatives, compound ideographs, phono-semantic compounds, and loangraphs. The sixth category
5950-517: The Sinosphere . In Japanese , Korean , and Vietnamese , Chinese characters are known as kanji , hanja , and chữ Hán respectively. Writing traditions also emerged for some of the other languages of China , like the sawndip script used to write the Zhuang languages of Guangxi . Each of these written vernaculars used existing characters to write the language's native vocabulary, as well as
6069-568: The Sui dynasty (581–618) required test takers to write in Literary Chinese using regular script, which contributed to the prevalence of both throughout later Chinese history. Each character of a text is written within a uniform square allotted for it. As part of the evolution from seal script into clerical script, character components became regularized as discrete series of strokes ( 笔画 ; 筆畫 ; bǐhuà ). Strokes can be considered both
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#17327657549836188-477: The katakana and hiragana scripts, Korea created hangul , and Vietnam developed chữ Nôm (now rarely used in lieu of the modern Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet ). Classical literature written in Chinese characters nonetheless remains an important legacy of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures. In the 21st century, ideological and cultural influences of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism remain visible in high culture and social doctrines. Ancient China
6307-470: The loanwords it borrowed from Chinese . In addition, each invented characters for local use. In written Korean and Vietnamese, Chinese characters have largely been replaced with alphabets, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written using them. At the most basic level, characters are composed of strokes that are written in a fixed order. Methods of writing characters have historically included being carved into stone, being inked with
6426-745: The "Far Eastern civilizations" (the Mainland and the Japanese ones). In the 1930s in A Study of History , the Sinosphere along with the Western , Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Indic, etc. civilizations is presented as among the major "units of study". British historian Arnold J. Toynbee listed the Far Eastern civilization as one of the main civilizations outlined in his book A Study of History . He included Japan and Korea in his definition of "Far Eastern civilization" and proposed that they grew out of
6545-577: The "Sinic civilization" that originated in the Yellow River basin. Toynbee compared the relationship between the Sinic and Far Eastern civilization with that of the Hellenic and Western civilizations, which had an "apparentation-affiliation". American sinologist and historian Edwin O. Reischauer also grouped China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam into a cultural sphere that he called the "Sinic world",
6664-461: The 7th century and possibly earlier, woodblock printing had been developed in China. At first, it was used only to copy Buddhist scriptures, but later secular works were also printed. By the 13th century, metal movable type was used by government printers in Korea but seems to have not been extensively used in China, Vietnam, or Japan. At the same time, manuscript reproduction remained important until
6783-518: The 8th century, they began inventing many of their own chữ Nôm characters. Since French colonization, they have switched to using a modified version of the Latin alphabet called chữ Quốc ngữ . However, Chinese characters still hold a special place in these cultures, as their history and literature have been greatly influenced by them. In Vietnam (and North Korea), chữ Hán can be seen in temples, cemeteries, and monuments as well as serving as decorative motifs in art and design. Zhuang people are similar to
6902-505: The 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') 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
7021-688: The East Asian cultural sphere. Some have historically contributed to the vocabulary or development of Sinitic languages, and others have been influenced to some degree by them. Only some of these languages are highly indebted to Literary Chinese and thus relevant to the East Asian cultural sphere. Core languages of the East Asian cultural sphere are predominantly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and their respective variants. These are well-documented to have historically used Chinese characters, with Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese each having roughly 60% of their vocabulary derived from Chinese. There
7140-457: The Qin small seal script was standardized for use throughout the entire country under the direction of Chancellor Li Si ( c. 280 – 208 BCE). It was traditionally believed that Qin scribes only used small seal script, and the later clerical script was a sudden invention during the early Han. However, more than one script was used by Qin scribes: a rectilinear vulgar style had also been in use in Qin for centuries prior to
7259-410: The Shang royal house. Contemporaneous inscriptions in a related but distinct style were also made on ritual bronze vessels. This oracle bone script ( 甲骨文 ; jiǎgǔwén ) was first documented in 1899, after specimens were discovered being sold as "dragon bones" for medicinal purposes, with the symbols carved into them identified as early character forms. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to
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#17327657549837378-586: The Shang, the oracle bone script existed as a simplified form alongside another that was used in bamboo books, in addition to elaborate pictorial forms often used in clan emblems. These other forms have been preserved in what is called bronze script ( 金文 ; jīnwén ), where inscriptions were made using a stylus in a clay mould, which was then used to cast ritual bronzes . These differences in technique generally resulted in character forms that were less angular in appearance than their oracle bone script counterparts. Study of these bronze inscriptions has revealed that
7497-620: The Sinic world as one of many civilizations in his book The Clash of Civilizations . He notes that "all scholars recognize the existence of either a single distinct Chinese civilization dating back to at least 1500 B.C. and perhaps a thousand years earlier, or of two Chinese civilizations, one succeeding the other, in the early centuries of the Christian epoch", Huntington's Sinic civilization includes China, North Korea, South Korea, Vietnam, and Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Of
7616-620: The Sinosphere during the 20th century as a result of Western influence. Many publications outside mainland China continue to use the traditional vertical writing direction. Western influence also resulted in the generalized use of punctuation being widely adopted in print during the 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to this, the context of a passage was considered adequate to guide readers; this was enabled by characters being easier than alphabets to read when written scriptio continua , due to their more discretized shapes. The earliest attested Chinese characters were carved into bone, or marked using
7735-422: The Sinosphere. The Taoist school of thought was created in China from the teachings of Lao Tse . It follows the search for the tao , a concept that is equivalent to a path or course and represents the cosmic force that creates the universe and all things. According to this belief, the wisdom of the tao is the only source of the universe and must be a natural path of life events that everyone should follow. Thus,
7854-560: The Vietnamese in that they used to write in Sawgun (Chinese characters) and have invented many of their own characters, called Sawndip . Sawndip is still used informally and in traditional settings, but in 1957, China introduced an alphabetical script for the language, which is what it officially promotes. The business cultures of East Asia are heavily influenced by Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Japan often features hierarchically organized companies , and Japanese work environments place
7973-487: The Yellow River indicating that they were products of the State of Chu. One of the characters in their inscription is often a monetary unit or weight which is normally read as yuan (Chinese: 爰 ; pinyin: yuán ). Pieces are of a very variable size and thickness, and the stamps appear to be a device to validate the whole block, rather than a guide to enable it to be broken up into unit pieces. Some ying yuan contain
8092-565: The adherents of Taoism follow the search for tao , which means path and represents the strength of the universe. The most important text in Taoism, the Tao Te Ching ("Book of the Way and Virtue", c. 300 BC), declares that the tao is the "source" of the universe, thus considered a creative principle, but not as a deity. Nature manifests itself spontaneously, without a higher intention, and it
8211-617: The ancient pictographic script discovered thus far in China... They undoubtedly can be viewed as the forerunners of primitive writing." The oldest attested Chinese writing comprises a body of inscriptions produced during the Late Shang period ( c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), with the very earliest examples from the reign of Wu Ding dated between 1250 and 1200 BCE. Many of these inscriptions were made on oracle bones —usually either ox scapulae or turtle plastrons—and recorded official divinations carried out by
8330-436: The answers as interpreted in the cracks. A minority of bones feature characters that were inked with a brush before their strokes were incised; the evidence of this also shows that the conventional stroke orders used by later calligraphers had already been established for many characters by this point. Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of later forms of written Chinese. The oldest known inscriptions already represent
8449-419: The apparent absence of phonetic indicators, but their arguments have been rejected by other scholars. Phono-semantic compounds ( 形声 ; 形聲 ; xíngshēng ) are composed of at least one semantic component and one phonetic component. They may be formed by one of several methods, often by adding a phonetic component to disambiguate a loangraph, or by adding a semantic component to represent a specific extension of
8568-549: The basic unit of handwriting, as well as the writing system's basic unit of graphemic organization. In clerical and regular script, individual strokes traditionally belong to one of eight categories according to their technique and graphemic function. In what is known as the Eight Principles of Yong , calligraphers practice their technique using the character 永 ( yǒng ; 'eternity'), which can be written with one stroke of each type. In ordinary writing, 永
8687-492: The calligrapher Zhong Yao ( c. 151 – 230), who was living in the state of Cao Wei (220–266); he is often called the "father of regular script". The earliest surviving writing in regular script comprises copies of Zhong Yao's work, including at least one copy by Wang Xizhi. Characteristics of regular script include the 'pause' ( 頓 ; dùn ) technique used to end horizontal strokes, as well as heavy tails on diagonal strokes made going down and to
8806-639: The character as 明 . However, the increased usage of 朙 was followed by the proliferation of a third variant: 眀 , with ⽬ 'EYE' on the left—likely derived as a contraction of 朙 . Ultimately, 明 became the character's standard form. From the earliest inscriptions until the 20th century, texts were generally laid out vertically—with characters written from top to bottom in columns, arranged from right to left. Word boundaries are generally not indicated with spaces . A horizontal writing direction—with characters written from left to right in rows, arranged from top to bottom—only became predominant in
8925-460: The character's meaning. The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang , Henan, as part of divinations conducted by the Shang dynasty royal house. Character forms were originally highly pictographic in style, but evolved over time as writing spread across China. Numerous attempts have been made to reform the script, including
9044-449: The common culture that unifies the languages and cultures of many East Asian nations. Historically, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam have used Chinese characters. Today, they are mainly used in China, Japan, and South Korea, albeit in different forms. Mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore use simplified characters , whereas Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau use Traditional Chinese . Japan still uses kanji but has also invented kana , inspired by
9163-403: The components they enclose. For example, 永 is drawn in the following order: Over a character's history, variant character forms ( 异体字 ; 異體字 ; yìtǐzì ) emerge via several processes. Variant forms have distinct structures, but represent the same morpheme; as such, they can be considered instances of the same underlying character. This is comparable to visually distinct double-storey |
9282-476: The cultures of the West. According to Nishijima, this cultural sphere—which includes China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—shared the philosophy of Confucianism , the religion of Buddhism , and similar political and social structures stemming from a background of historical Classical Chinese scholars. It has also been informally referred to as the " chopsticks sphere" due to perceived native use of these utensils across
9401-616: The day that these first characters were created, grain rained down from the sky; that night, the people heard the wailing of ghosts and demons, lamenting that humans could no longer be cheated. Collections of graphs and pictures have been discovered at the sites of several Neolithic settlements throughout the Yellow River valley, including Jiahu ( c. 6500 BCE ), Dadiwan and Damaidi (6th millennium BCE), and Banpo (5th millennium BCE). Symbols at each site were inscribed or drawn onto artefacts, appearing one at
9520-648: The development of neo-Confucianism . During the Tang dynasty , Buddhism from Nepal also became a prominent philosophical and religious discipline. Neo-Confucianism has its origins in the Tang dynasty; the Confucianist scholar Han Yu is seen as a forebear of the neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty. The Song dynasty philosopher Zhou Dunyi is seen as the first true "pioneer" of neo-Confucianism, using Taoist metaphysics as
9639-417: The distinct process of semantic extension, where a word acquires additional senses, which often remain written with 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. Loangraphs are also used to write words borrowed from other languages, such as
9758-519: 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 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
9877-439: The duality between strokes made quickly or slowly, between applying ink heavily or lightly, between characters written with symmetrical or asymmetrical forms, and between characters representing concrete or abstract concepts. Woodblock printing was invented in China between the 6th and 9th centuries, followed by the invention of moveable type by Bi Sheng (972–1051) during the 11th century. The increasing use of print during
9996-504: The evolution of Chinese characters over their history has been simplification, both in graphical shape ( 字形 ; zìxíng ), the "external appearances of individual graphs", and in graphical form ( 字体 ; 字體 ; zìtǐ ), "overall changes in the distinguishing features of graphic[al] shape and calligraphic style, [...] in most cases refer[ring] to rather obvious and rather substantial changes". The traditional notion of an orderly procession of script styles, each suddenly appearing and displacing
10115-406: The extent that the original objects represented are no longer obvious. This proto-writing system was limited to representing a relatively narrow range of ideas with a comparatively small library of symbols. This compelled innovations that allowed for symbols to directly encode spoken language. In each historical case, this was accomplished by some form of the rebus technique, where the symbol for
10234-557: The fact that the style was considered more orderly than a later form referred to as 今草 ( jīncǎo ; 'modern cursive'), which had first emerged during the Jin and was influenced by semi-cursive and regular script. This later form was exemplified by the work of figures like Wang Xizhi (303–361), who is often regarded as the most important calligrapher in Chinese history. An early form of semi-cursive script ( 行书 ; 行書 ; xíngshū ; 'running script') can be identified during
10353-586: The following religions have been influential in its history: Christianity is the most popular religion in South Korea followed by Buddhism. Significant Christian communities are also found in mainland China , Hong Kong , Macau , Taiwan , Singapore , Japan and Vietnam . In recent years, Christianity, mainly Protestant , Catholic (or Roman Catholic) , as well as other denominations has been gaining more popularity in these areas, due to its own version of spirituality and charitability . However, it
10472-460: The forms of pictographs have been simplified in order to make them easier to write. As a result, modern readers generally cannot deduce what many pictographs were originally meant to resemble; without knowing the context of their origin in picture-writing, they may be interpreted instead as pure signs. However, if a pictograph's use in compounds still reflects its original meaning, as with 日 in 晴 ('clear sky'), it can still be analysed as
10591-598: The historical forms like seal script and clerical script. Most styles used throughout the Sinosphere originated within China, though they may display regional variation. Styles that have been created outside of China tend to remain localized in their use: these include the Japanese edomoji and Vietnamese lệnh thư scripts. Calligraphy was traditionally one of the four arts to be mastered by Chinese scholars, considered to be an artful means of expressing thoughts and teachings. Chinese calligraphy typically makes use of an ink brush to write characters. Strict regularity
10710-401: The initial development of Chinese writing, and has remained common throughout its subsequent history. Some loangraphs ( 假借 ; jiǎjiè ; 'borrowing') are introduced to represent words previously lacking another written form—this is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as 之 and 其 . The process of characters being borrowed as loangraphs should not be conflated with
10829-565: The late 19th century. Japan's textual scholarship had Chinese origins, which made Japan one of the birthplaces of modern Sinology . Four Books and Five Classics are the authoritative books of Confucianism , where it was used to study for civil service examinations in China , Korea , and Vietnam . The Art of War , Tao Te Ching , I Ching , and Analects are classic Chinese texts that have been influential in East Asian history. Taoism has had an influence on countries throughout
10948-488: The late Han, with its development stemming from a cursive form of neo-clerical script. Liu Desheng ( 劉德升 ; c. 147 – 188 CE) is traditionally recognized as the inventor of the semi-cursive style, though accreditations of this kind often indicate a given style's early masters, rather than its earliest practitioners. Later analysis has suggested popular origins for semi-cursive, as opposed to it being an invention of Liu. It can be characterized partly as
11067-507: The mainstream script underwent slow, gradual evolution during the late Shang, which continued during the Zhou dynasty ( c. 1046 – 256 BCE) until assuming the form now known as small seal script ( 小篆 ; xiǎozhuàn ) within the Zhou state of Qin . Other scripts in use during the late Zhou include the bird-worm seal script ( 鸟虫书 ; 鳥蟲書 ; niǎochóngshū ), as well as
11186-442: The many civilizations that Huntington discusses, the Sinic world is the only one that is based on a cultural, rather than religious, identity. Huntington's theory was that in a post- Cold War world, humanity "[identifies] with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities [and] at the broadest level, civilizations". Yet, Huntington considered Japan as a distinct civilization. The cuisine of East Asia shares many of
11305-518: 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,
11424-405: The one previous, has been disproven by later scholarship and archaeological work. Instead, scripts evolved gradually, with several coexisting in a given area. Several of the Chinese classics indicate that knotted cords were used to keep records prior to the invention of writing. Works that reference the practice include chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching and the " Xici II" commentary to
11543-518: The only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes , the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate
11662-730: The origins of these 'culture sphere' terms. The Chinese wénhuà quān ( 文化圈 ) dates to a 1941 translation for the German term Kulturkreis , ('culture circle, field'), which the Austrian ethnologists Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt proposed. Japanese historian Nishijima Sadao [ ja ] coined the expressions Kanji bunka ken ( 漢字文化圏 , 'Chinese-character culture sphere') and Chuka bunka ken ( 中華文化圏 , 'Chinese culture sphere') , which China later re-borrowed as loanwords . The Sinosphere may be taken to be synonymous to Ancient China and its descendant civilizations as well as
11781-502: The other cultures in governance, philosophy, science, and the arts. Literary Chinese became the written lingua franca for bureaucracy and communications, and Chinese characters became locally adapted as kanji in Japan, hanja in Korea, and chữ Hán in Vietnam. In late classical history, the literary importance of classical Chinese diminished as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam each adopted their own writing systems. Japan developed
11900-405: The phonetic series of characters using 余 ( yú ; jyu4 ), a literary first-person pronoun. The Old Chinese pronunciations of these characters were similar, but the phonetic component no longer serves as a useful hint for their pronunciation due to subsequent sound shifts. The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in
12019-432: The pictograph 大 , meaning 'large', was originally a picture of a large man, but one would need to be aware of its specific meaning in order to interpret the sequence 大 鹿 as signifying 'large deer', rather than being a picture of a large man and a deer next to one another. Due to this process of abstraction, as well as to make characters easier to write, pictographs gradually became more simplified and regularized—often to
12138-495: The pictorial qualities that remained in seal script. Around the midpoint of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), a simplified and easier form of clerical script appeared, which Qiu terms 'neo-clerical' ( 新隶体 ; 新隸體 ; xīnlìtǐ ). By the end of the Han, this had become the dominant script used by scribes, though clerical script remained in use for formal works, such as engraved stelae . Qiu describes neo-clerical as
12257-531: The primary style used for characters since. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography , states using Chinese characters have standardized their forms: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China , Singapore , and Malaysia , while traditional characters are used in Taiwan , Hong Kong , and Macau . After being introduced in order to write Literary Chinese , characters were often adapted to write local languages spoken throughout
12376-460: The promotion of small seal script by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Clerical script , which had matured by the early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), abstracted the forms of characters—obscuring their pictographic origins in favour of making them easier to write. Following the Han, regular script emerged as the result of cursive influence on clerical script, and has been
12495-529: The purely pictorial use of symbols disappeared, leaving only those representing spoken words, the process was complete. Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of 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
12614-525: The quantities they represent. The Shuowen Jiezi is a character dictionary authored c. 100 CE by the scholar Xu Shen ( c. 58 – c. 148 CE ). In its postface, Xu analyses what he sees as all the methods by which characters are created. Later authors iterated upon Xu's analysis, developing a categorization scheme known as the 'six writings' ( 六书 ; 六書 ; liùshū ), which identifies every character with one of six categories that had previously been mentioned in
12733-474: The region. The term Sinosphere is derived from Sino- 'China' ( cf. Sinophone ) + -sphere , in the sense of the sphere of influence under the influence of a country. The CJK languages—Chinese, Japanese, Korean—each use cognate terms to translate English sphere : Unlike with the other languages of the Sinosphere, the corresponding Vietnamese cognate khuyên 圈 is not used to mean 'sphere' or 'area'. Instead, vùng 'region', 'area'
12852-423: The regional forms used in non-Qin states. Examples of these styles were preserved as variants in the Shuowen Jiezi . Historically, Zhou forms were collectively referred to as large seal script ( 大篆 ; dàzhuàn ), a term which has fallen out of favour due to its lack of precision. Following Qin's conquest of the other Chinese states that culminated in the founding of the imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BCE,
12971-472: The result of clerical forms being written more quickly, without formal rules of technique or composition: what would be discrete strokes in clerical script frequently flow together instead. The semi-cursive style is commonly adopted in contemporary handwriting. Regular script ( 楷书 ; 楷書 ; kǎishū ), based on clerical and semi-cursive forms, is the predominant form in which characters are written and printed. Its innovations have traditionally been credited to
13090-545: The right. It developed further during the Eastern Jin (317–420) in the hands of Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi (344–386). However, most Jin-era writers continued to use neo-clerical and semi-cursive styles in their daily writing. It was not until the Northern and Southern period (420–589) that regular script became the predominant form. The system of imperial examinations for the civil service established during
13209-426: The same character—is often non-trivial or unclear. For example, prior to the Qin dynasty the character meaning 'bright' was written as either 明 or 朙 —with either ⽇ 'SUN' or 囧 'WINDOW' on the left, and ⽉ 'MOON' on the right. As part of the Qin programme to standardize small seal script across China, the 朙 form was promoted. Some scribes ignored this, and continued to write
13328-481: The same ingredients and techniques. Chopsticks are used as an eating utensil in all of the core East Asian countries. The use of soy sauce, which is made from fermenting soybeans, is also widespread in the region. Rice is the staple food in all of East Asia and is a major focus of food security . People who have no rice are often seen as having no food. Moreover, in East Asian countries such as Japan ( 御飯 ; gohan ), Korea (밥; bap ), and Vietnam ( cơm; 𩚵 or 粓),
13447-503: The so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations , which provide clues to the pronunciation of Middle Chinese . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also borrowed extensively into the local vernaculars and today comprise over half their vocabularies. Vernacular or standard Chinese encompassing varieties of Chinese also developed in contrast to the use of Literary Chinese. Books in Literary Chinese were widely distributed. By
13566-414: The spoken language. Some characters may only have the same initial or final sound of a syllable in common with phonetic components. A phonetic series comprises all the characters created using the same phonetic component, which may have diverged significantly in their pronunciations over time. For example, 茶 ( chá ; caa4 ; 'tea') and 途 ( tú ; tou4 ; 'route') are part of
13685-487: The teachings of the Buddha, which lead the individual to enlightenment through meditative practices, mindfulness, and reflection on their daily actions. The belief is that physical and spiritual awareness leads to a state of enlightenment called nirvana , which, according to Buddha, is the highest state of meditation. In this state the individual finds peace and tranquility above the oscillations of thoughts and emotions and
13804-589: The wars of unification. The popularity of this form grew as writing became more widespread. By the Warring States period ( c. 475 – 221 BCE), an immature form of clerical script ( 隶书 ; 隸書 ; lìshū ) had emerged based on the vulgar form developed within Qin, often called "early clerical" or "proto-clerical". The proto-clerical script evolved gradually; by the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), it had arrived at
13923-575: The word for "cooked rice" can embody the meaning of food in general. Popular terms associated with East Asian cuisine include boba , kimchi , sushi , hot pot , tea, dim sum , ramen , as well as phở , sashimi , udon , and chả giò , among others. East Asian literary culture is based on the use of Literary Chinese , which became the medium of scholarship and government across the region. Although each of these countries developed vernacular writing systems and used them for popular literature, they continued to use Chinese for all formal writing until it
14042-513: Was one of the cradles of civilization , with the emergent cultures that arose from the migration of Han settlers from the Yellow River generally regarded as the origin of the East Asian world. Japanese historian Nishijima Sadao [ ja ] (1919–1998), professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo , coined the term Tōa bunka-ken ( 東亜文化圏 , 'East Asian Cultural Sphere') to refer to an East Asian cultural sphere distinct from
14161-543: Was swept away by rising nationalism around the end of the 19th century. Throughout East Asia, Literary Chinese was the language of administration and scholarship. Although Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their languages, these were limited to popular literature. Chinese remained the medium of formal writing until it was displaced by vernacular writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though they did not use Chinese for spoken communication, each country had its tradition of reading texts aloud,
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