Western alphabets have
anywhere between 20 and 50 letters. What about Chinese writing?
Can someone download the Chinese alphabet off the web, memorize it
and learn how to write Western names in Chinese? The truth is, one
cannot. Unlike other scripts with non-latin character sets,
Chinese characters are virtually unlimited in number. Moreover,
they do not simply stand for sounds like the letters of western
alphabets.
Chinese writing does not have an alphabet, instead, it uses
symbols, or Chinese characters (hanzi in Chinese, kanji in
Japanese). These characters are based on a phonetic instead of a
semantic system, that is, their primary function is to represent
not sound but meaning. This is why their number is much larger
than the number of letters in an alphabet. |
In Chinese, every
character is a syllable. It seems that originally Chinese language
was monsyllabic, in other words, words consisted only of a single
syllable. Starting around the beginning of the Han dynasty (3rd
century BC) the language started to use more and more words with
two or more syllables but by that time the structure of writing
has been already fully developed. Therefore, the structure of
writing system reflects the original monosyllabic stage. This
means that, at least in general, there was a symbol constructed
for every word. Because of this, the number of elements in the
script is not based on the number of sounds but on the number of
words in the language. And, as we all know, the number of words is
very large in any language.
Because of this, the number of characters in Chinese writing is
very high. It is estimated that to read a newspaper, one must
learn about 3,000 characters. College graduates know about
6-7,000, and there are very few people who manage to learn over
15,000. Nevertheless, the actual number of characters is much
larger. The Shuowen jiezi, the first surviving Chinese dictionary
complied by Xu Shen around 100 AD contains over 9,000 characters,
the Kangxi zidian from the 18th century has nearly 47,000. The
largest modern dictionaries have over 60,000. Even though most of
these symbols are never used, they are still part of the Chinese
script.
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