Chinese characters
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Chinese characters, also known as Han characters, Chinese script or Hanzi, are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and other Far Eastern languages from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture such as Japanese, Korean and (pre-colonial) Vietnamese. Unlike letters in the alphabets of most languages, which only transcribe the phonetics (phonemes) of speech (i.e. are phonegraphs), Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the basic units of meaning in a language, thus making them the linguistic equivalent of words rather than letters, while the majority of "words" in the Chinese lexicon are in fact compounds and phrasemes (short phrases). The pronunciation of Chinese characters is transcribed phonetically via separate (usually romanized) transliteration systems such as the Pinyin, Zhuyin, Jyutping, Wade–Giles or Yale system. At the most basic level, Chinese characters are composed of strokes (the actual linguistic equivalent of letters), which are written in a fixed stroke order for each character. The strokes are then organized into radicals, which are the fundamental root components that represent either a semantic feature or a homophone (often based on the Middle Chinese pronunciations) of the character. Historically, methods of writing characters have included carving inscriptions on stone, animal bones (usually turtle shells) or bronze; drawing ink onto bamboo slips, fabric (typically silk) or paper; and printing with woodblocks or moveable type. Technologies invented since the 19th century to facilitate the use of characters include telegraph codes and typewriters, as well as input methods and text encodings on computers. Chinese characters constitute one of the four official working scripts of the United Nations, along with the Latin script (used by English, French and Spanish), Cyrillic script (by Russian) and Arabic script (by Arabic). Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by historical linguistics scholars (the other three being the now-extinct Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiforms and Mayan glyphs), they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use to modern times. Writing and reading of the frequently used daily vocabulary in the Chinese language requires literacy of roughly 3,000–3,500 characters, while literature and science professionals need around 5,000 characters; as of 2025, more than 100000 characters have been identified and included in The Unicode Standard. Over a recorded history spanning more than three millennia, the morphology, styles and meanings of Chinese writing characters have changed greatly. While Neolithic symbols has being discovered in pottery artefacts dated to as early as 6600 BCE, the first academically attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang, Henan province, used for divinations conducted by royal houses of the Shang dynasty. Character forms were originally ideographic or pictographic in style, but evolved as bronze script and seal script writings (including the large seal, tadpole and bird-worm variants) spread across China during the Zhou dynasty. Numerous attempts have been made to reform the script, including the promotion of small seal script by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), although the eventual winner was the clerical script, which had matured by the early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE). The transition from the cursive seal script to more squarish clerical script (a process known as Libian) abstracted the forms of characters, obscuring their pictographic origins in favour of easier writing on bamboo slips, fabric scrolls and later on paper with an ink brush, which was invented during the late Qin dynasty and subsequently adopted ubiquitously as the standard writing tool due to its convenience. After the Han dynasty, the regular script emerged as a more straight-stroked evolution of the clerical script, and has been the primary style used for traditional Chinese characters, while the more artistic semi-cursive and cursive variants have been practised in calligraphy, and the neater Song and Fangsong variants are used as the standard typefaces in printing. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, various countries of Greater China have standardized forms of Chinese characters used. While traditional characters are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and most of the overseas Chinese diaspora, simplified Chinese characters are used in Mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia. Historically during periods of Pax Sinica, Chinese characters were used to write Literary Chinese as an international lingua franca among various tributary states within the Chinese sphere of influence and trade network. Some of these non-Sinitic tributary states, particularly those heavily influenced by and actively borrowing from Chinese culture such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam, then adapted Chinese characters into their own local written languages, where the incorporated Chinese characters are known as kanji, hanja and Chữ Hán (as well as the variant Chữ Nôm) respectively. Writing traditions also emerged for some of the other minority 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 the loanwords borrowed from Chinese. In addition, each invented characters for local use. In modern Korean and Vietnamese writings, Chinese characters have largely been replaced with the phonographic Hangul and Latinized alphabet as part of the desinicization efforts, leaving written Japanese as the only major non-Sinitic language still using them alongside the phonographic hiragana and katagana.