Chinese characters for transcribing Slavonic were

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

created for the purpose of transcribing Slavonic sounds into Chinese. The

Russian Orthodox Church The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC; ;), also officially known as the Moscow Patriarchate (), is an autocephaly, autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodox Christian church. It has 194 dioceses inside Russia. The Primate (bishop), p ...

's mission in China had an interest in translating liturgical texts into Chinese and Japanese, and sought to devise new characters for this purpose. Many of these new characters were proposed by Archimandrite Gurias, the 14th head of the Russian mission from 1858–1864. They would have transcribed certain syllables normally not valid in

standard Chinese phonology The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties. Television and radio announcers are ch ...

, such as ''vin'', ''gi'', or ''reia''. These characters were later used for transcription into Japanese as well, with the character pronunciations changed to account for

Japanese phonology Japanese phonology is the system of sounds used in the pronunciation of the Japanese language. Unless otherwise noted, this article describes the standard variety of Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect. There is no overall consensus on the nu ...

. However, in both China and Japan, leaders of the Russian missions eventually decided to translate liturgical texts using standard

vernacular Chinese Written vernacular Chinese, also known as ''baihua'', comprises forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular varieties of the language spoken throughout China. It is contrasted with Literary Chinese, which was the predominant written form ...

and

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

, respectively. The majority of the new characters were composed through combining two existing characters side-by-side as radicals, which would also indicate their pronunciation. Unlike the typical rule of pronouncing the character based on the side radical, used in pronouncing phono-semantic compounds, the radicals are presented in

initial In a written or published work, an initial is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter (books), chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is ultimately derived from the Latin ''initiālis'', which means '' ...

- rime pairs. In a method similar to Fanqie, the right-hand character would indicate the syllable initial, while the left-hand character would be used as an indicator of the final. This approach to character formation was intended for vertical reading, where the flow of the text is from top-to-bottom, and ordered from right-to-left. Two exceptions were vertically-arranged characters used as abbreviations of "Christ" and "Jesus". Twenty Slavonic transcription characters were included in Unicode Standard version 10.0.

Examples

Notes

References

{{reflist Writing systems derived from Chinese characters Writing systems introduced in the 19th century Church Slavonic language