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Kokuji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After World War II, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common commun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji''. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as ''hanja'', retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents, history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the '' chữ Hán'' and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hanja
Hanja (Hangul: ; Hanja: , ), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters () used in the writing of Korean. Hanja was used as early as the Gojoseon period, the first ever Korean kingdom. (, ) refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, which can be written with Hanja, and (, ) refers to Classical Chinese writing, although "Hanja" is also sometimes used to encompass both concepts. Because Hanja never underwent any major reforms, they are mostly resemble to ''kyūjitai'' and traditional Chinese characters, although the stroke orders for some characters are slightly different. For example, the characters and as well as and . Only a small number of Hanja characters were modified or are unique to Korean, with the rest being identical to the traditional Chinese characters. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding Hanja characters. In Japan, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Writing System
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use. Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others made in Japan are referred to as “Japanese kanji” ( ja, 和製漢字, wasei kanji, label=none; also known as “country’s kanji” ja, 国字, kokuji, label=none). Each character has an intrinsic me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Family Of Scripts
The Chinese family of scripts are writing systems descended from the Chinese oracle bone script and used for a variety of languages in East Asia. They include logosyllabic systems such as the Chinese script itself (or ''hanzi'', now in two forms, traditional and simplified), and adaptations to other languages, such as kanji ( Japanese), Hanja ( Korean), chữ Hán and chữ Nôm ( Vietnamese) and Sawndip ( Zhuang). More divergent are Tangut, Khitan large script, and its offspring Jurchen, as well as the Yi script, which were inspired by Chinese although not directly descended from it. The partially deciphered Khitan small script may be another. In addition, various phonetic scripts descend from Chinese characters, of which the best known are the various kana syllabaries, the zhuyin semi-syllabary, nüshu, and some influence on hangul. The Chinese scripts are written in various calligraphic hands, principally seal script, clerical script, regular script, semi-cursive script, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chữ Nôm
Chữ Nôm (, ; ) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters ('' Chữ Hán'') to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters created using a variety of methods, including phono-semantic compounds. This composite script was therefore highly complex, and was accessible only to the small proportion of the Vietnamese population who had mastered written Chinese. Although formal writing in Vietnam was done in classical Chinese until the early 20th century (except for two brief interludes), chữ Nôm was widely used between the 15th and 19th centuries by the Vietnamese cultured elite for popular works in the vernacular, many in verse. One of the best-known pieces of Vietnamese literature, ''The Tale of Kiều'', was written in chữ Nôm by Nguyễn Du. The Vietnamese alphabet created by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, with the earliest known ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logographic
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as are many Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyphic and cuneiform script, cuneiform characters. The use of logograms in writing is called ''logography'', and a writing system that is based on logograms is called a ''logography'' or ''logographic system''. All known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle. Alphabets and syllabaries are distinct from logographies in that they use individual written characters to represent sounds directly. Such characters are called ''Phonogram (linguistics), phonograms'' in linguistics. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not have any inherent meaning. Writing language in this way is called ''phonemic writing'' or ''orthographic writing''. Etymology Doulgas Harper's Online Etymo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tangut Script
The Tangut script ( Tangut: ; ) was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants. The Tangut characters are similar in appearance to Chinese characters, with the same type of strokes, but the methods of forming characters in the Tangut writing system are significantly different from those of forming Chinese characters. As in Chinese calligraphy, regular, running, cursive and seal scripts were used in Tangut writing. History According to the '' History of Song'' (1346), the script was designed by the high-ranking official Yeli Renrong in 1036. The script was invented in a short period of time, and was put into use quickly. Government schools were founded to teach the script. Official documents were written in the script (with diplomatic ones written bilingually). A great number of Buddhist scriptures were translated from Tibetan and Ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Literacy
Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, humans in literate societies have sets of practices for producing and consuming writing, and they also have beliefs about these practices. Reading, in this view, is always reading something for some purpose; writing is always writing something for someone for some particular ends. Beliefs about reading and writing and its value for society and for the individual always influence the ways literacy is taught, learned, and practiced over the lifespan. Some researchers suggest that the history of interest in the concept of "literacy" can be divided into two periods. Firstly is the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (word and letter recognition). Secondly is the period after 1950, when literacy slowly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shinjitai
are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in ''shinjitai'' are also found in Simplified Chinese characters, but ''shinjitai'' is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification. ''Shinjitai'' were created by reducing the number of strokes in '' kyūjitai'' ("old character form") or , which is unsimplified kanji (usually similar to Traditional Chinese characters). This simplification was achieved through a process (similar to that of simplified Chinese) of either replacing the ''onpu'' (, "sound mark") indicating the ''On'' reading with another ''onpu'' of the same ''On'' reading with fewer strokes, or replacing a complex component of a character with a simpler one. There have been a few stages of simplifications made since the 1950s, but the only changes that became official were the changes in the Jōyō Kanji List in 1981 and 2010. Background The following forms were esta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, massa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pronunciation
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language. Contested or widely mispronounced words are typically verified by the sources from which they originate, such as names of cities and towns or the word GIF. A word can be spoken in different ways by various individuals or groups, depending on many factors, such as: the duration of the cultural exposure of their childhood, the location of their current residence, speech or voice disorders, their ethnic group, their social class, or their education. Linguistic terminology Syllables are counted as units of sound (phones) that they use in their language. The branch of linguistics which studies these units of sound is phonetics. Phones which play the same role are grouped together into classes ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
