Modern Chinese characters are the Chinese characters used in modern languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are composed of components, which are in turn composed of strokes. The 100 most frequently-used characters cover (i.e., having an accumulated frequency of) over 40% of modern Chinese texts. The 1000 most frequently-used characters cover approximately 90% of the texts.[1] There are a variety of novel aspects of modern Chinese characters, including that of orthography, phonology, and semantics, as well as matters of collation and organization and statistical analysis, computer processing, and pedagogy.
Since maturing as a complete writing system, Chinese characters have had an uninterrupted history of development over more than 3,000 years, with stages including
leading to the modern written forms, as illustrated by the development of character :
In 1980, Zhou Youguang, often considered to be the "father of pinyin", published a paper entitled "Introduction to the Studies of Modern Chinese Characters"—within, he detailed aspects of the numbers, orders, forms, sounds, meanings, and pedagogy regarding the modern characters. His paper was followed by Gao Jiaying's "A Brief Discussion on the Establishment of Modern Chinese Character Studies", and other related writings on the subject. At least five textbooks have been published in this area.
Chinese characters were originally invented for writing the Chinese language, and were later employed for other East Asian languages, developing as part of a shared orthographic tradition. Among other places, for ordinary and historical purposes, simplified characters are primarily used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, along with kanji in Japan, hanja in Korea, and chữ Hán in Vietnam. For example, the traditional character has the simplified form and the kanji form Japanese: 広.
In contrast with the Latin alphabet used to write many languages, including English, Chinese characters have many divergent properties, including:
Modern Chinese characters include:
See main article: Chinese character sets. Due to the dynamic development of languages, there is no definite number of modern Chinese characters. However a reasonable estimation can be made by a survey of the character sets of relevant standard lists and influential dictionaries in the countries and regions where Chinese characters are used.
The important standards in the People's Republic of China include List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese, totalling 3,500 characters,[2] and List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese (with 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters in the previous list).[3] But the current standard is Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, which was released by the State Council in June 2013 to replace the previous two lists and some other standards. It includes 8,105 characters of the Simplified Chinese writing system, 3,500 as primary, 3,000 as secondary, and 1,605 as tertiary. In addition, there are 2,574 Traditional characters and 1,023 variants.[4] And the character sets of Xinhua Zidian and Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, the most popular modern Chinese character dictionary and word dictionary. They each includes over 13,000 characters of Simplified characters, Traditional characters and some variants.
In Taiwan, there are the Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters with 4,808 characters, and the Chart of Standard Forms of Less-Than-Common National Characters, with 6,341 common national characters. Both lists were released by the Ministry of Education, with a total of 11,149 characters of the Traditional Chinese writing system.
In Hong Kong, there is the List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters for elementary and junior secondary education, totally 4,762 characters. This list was released by the Education Bureau, and is very influential in the educational circles.
In Japan, there are the —a list of 2,136 frequently used characters designated by the Japanese Ministry of Education, as well as 983 Japanese: [[jinmeiyō kanji]] for use in personal names.
In Korea, there are the Basic Hanja for educational use (Korean: 漢文敎育用基礎漢字, a subset of 1,800 Hanja defined in 1972 by a South Korea educational standard), and the Table of Hanja for Personal Name Use (Korean: 人名用追加漢字表), published by the Supreme Court of Korea in March 1991.[5] The list expanded gradually, and to year 2015 there were 8,142 hanja permitted to be used in Korean names.[6]
With consideration of all the character sets mentioned above, the total number of modern Chinese characters in the world is over 10,000, probably around 15,000.[7] Such an estimation should not be counted as too rough, considering that there are totally over 90,000 Chinese characters (CJK Unified Ideographs) in Unicode, and more if every Chinese character ever appeared in the world is to be included.[8]
A college graduate who is literate in written Chinese knows between three and four thousand characters. Specialists in classical literature or history, who would often encounter characters no longer in use, are estimated to have a working vocabulary of between 5,000 and 6,000 characters.
See main article: Chinese character frequency. Chinese character frequencies are calculated on data of corpora. A corpus is a collection of texts representative of one or more languages. The frequency of a character is the ratio of the number of its occurrences in the corpus to the total number of characters of the corpus. The formula for calculating frequency is,
where is the number of times a certain Chinese character appears in the corpus, and is the total number of (occurrences of) characters in the corpus.
The first person to make a statistic study on the frequency of Chinese characters was Chen Heqin . In the 1920s, he and his assistants spent two years manually counting the characters in a corpus of 554,478 characters, and obtained 4,261 different characters with frequency information. They then compiled a book Applied Lexis of Vernacular Chinese .The 10 most frequently-used characters in their corpus are, by descending frequency,
('of'), ('no', 'not'), ('one', 'an'),, (the copula), (I/me), (on, up),, (to have), ('person').
In 2001, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) published a number of frequency lists on the Web, entitled "Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan Chinese Frequency: a Trans-regional Diachronic Survey". The frequency data came from a grand corpus with a number of sub-corpora representing the Chinese languages in the three regions of Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan and in the two time periods of the 1960s and 1980s–90s. Each sub-corpus includes about 5,000 different characters, as shown by their frequency lists.
From the data of these frequency lists, some important and interesting features of Chinese can be discovered:
Large-scale surveys by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission of PRC over the years have shown that the use of Chinese characters and words has a strong distribution pattern. The number of characters used in modern Chinese is stable at about 10,000 for quite a few years. The number of most frequently-used characters with a coverage rate of 80%, 90%, and 99% is about 590, 960, and 2,400 respectively.
Chinese character frequency is essential to quantitative research of Chinese characters, and has been applied to language teaching, dictionary composition, character lists compilation, Chinese character information processing, etc.
See main article: Chinese character orders. The orders or sorting methods of Chinese dictionaries are traditionally divided into three categories: form-based orders, sound-based orders and meaning-based orders. In modern Chinese, people also use frequency orders.
In this category of orders, characters and words are sorted according to various features of the forms or shapes of Chinese characters. Comparing with sound-based orders, form-based orders have the advantages of allowing lookup of characters and words without knowing their pronunciations, as well as effective collation of large character sets without support from other sorting methods. There are two subcategories of form-based orders: stroke-based orders and component-based orders, which further includes radical-based orders, etc.
There are two major sound representation systems for Standard Chinese: pinyin and bopomofo. Accordingly, there is a pinyin alphabetical order and a bopomofo-based order.
Meaning-based orders, also called semantics-based orders, arrange characters and words in a hierarchical structure of semantic categories.
This category of orders have Chinese characters sorted by their frequency of uses, normally in descending order. That means the most frequently-used character is at the top of the list. A frequency list is created from a text corpus. In corpus linguistics, the frequency of a character is the ratio percentage of its number of occurrences in the corpus to the total number of characters of the corpus.
Chinese words consist of one or more characters. Single-character words can be sorted by a character order, and multi-character words can be sorted character by character in a similar way.
See main article: Chinese character forms. Modern Chinese characters appear in the form of square blocks. There are three layers or levels of structural units of Chinese characters: strokes, components, and whole characters. For example, (character) has two components, each of which is composed of three stokes:
| = : + : . |
See main article: Chinese character strokes.
Strokes are the smallest writing units of Chinese characters. When writing a Chinese character, the trace of a dot or a line left on the writing material (such as paper) from pen-down to pen-up is called a stroke. Stroke number is the number of strokes of a Chinese character. It varies, for example, characters and have only one stroke, while character has 36 strokes, and (composed of three) consists of 48 strokes.
Stroke forms refer to the shapes of strokes. The stroke forms of a standard Chinese character set can be classified into a table, for instance, the Unicode CJK strokes list has 36 types of strokes:[9]
Stroke order is the order in which strokes are written to form a Chinese character. For example, the stroke order of is .
See main article: Chinese character components.
Chinese characters are composed of components, which are in turn composed of strokes. In most cases, a component is larger than a stroke (i.e., consists of more than one stroke) and smaller than the whole character (combines with some other components to form a character). For example, in character, there are two components, and, each with more than one stroke (:, :). In the special cases of one-stroke characters, such as and, a stroke is a component and is a character.
Chinese character component analysis is to divide or separate a character into components. There are two ways for Chinese character dividing, hierarchical dividing and plane dividing. Hierarchical dividing separate layer by layer from larger to smaller components, and finally get the primitive components. Plane dividing separate out the primitive components all at once.
A component that can independently form a character is a character component, or a component of independent character formation . For example, component formed character independently, and is a component in characters, and . A component that can not independently form a character is a non-character component, or a component of dependent character formation . For example, component in character, and .
A component that cannot be (further) divided into smaller components by the rules is a primitive component, or basic component . Primitive components are the final-level components of hierarchical dividing. For example, components and in character . A component composed of two or more primitive components is a compound component . For example, component in character, and .
See main article: Chinese whole characters.
'Whole characters' lie at the final level of the stroke–component–character composition. A non-decomposable character consists of one primitive component, which is directly formed by strokes and can not be decomposed into smaller components. A decomposable character can be broken down into multiple components.
The structure of a Chinese character is the pattern or rule in which the character is formed by its (first level) components. Chinese character structures include:
Popular typefaces of modern Chinese characters include
In Chinese, in addition to the international point system, a unique 'number' system is used for character sizes. For example, the Simplified Chinese version of Microsoft Word allows setting font sizes by either points or numbers.
See main article: Chinese character sounds. The standard pronunciation of Chinese characters is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Normally, a character is read with one syllable. Some Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation (polyphonic characters). Some syllables correspond to more than one character (homophonic characters).
Polyphonic characters are characters with two or more pronunciations, as opposed to monophonic characters with only one. A polyphonic monosemous character has two or more pronunciations of the same meaning. For example, the English word 'ton' is transliterated as, with two pronunciations of and coexisting in some old dictionaries, both sharing the meaning of 'ton'. Since is both a character and a word, it is a polyphonic monosemous character, as well as a polyphonic monosemous word.
In December 1985, the Chinese government published the Table of Mandarin Words with Variant Pronunciation to define the standard pronunciations for polyphonic monosemous characters. In Taiwan, there is a similar official standard for Mandarin words with variant sounds, where pronunciations are expressed in bopomofo instead of pinyin.
A polyphonic polysemous character has two or more pronunciations, and different pronunciations represent different meanings. For example, character is pronounced with the meaning of 'long', or with the meaning of 'grow'. The simplified character is pronounced as from traditional character or as from traditional character . The pronunciation of such characters is determined by the meaning intended.
Polyphonic polysemous characters may hinder the learning and application of Chinese characters and should be reduced. There are two main methods:
Homophonic characters are those sharing the same pronunciation, as opposed to heterophonic characters . Homophonic characters are either narrowly understood as having identical initials, finals, and tones, or more broadly as merely having identical initials and finals, with tones possibly differing. For example, are all pronounced, while,,,, are homophones only in the broader sense. Usually, people understand homophony in characters as referring to the narrow sense.
Homophonic characters are widespread in Mandarin: there are around 1,300 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions—excluding tones, the number of different syllables drops to 400. Meanwhile, the written language has more than 10,000 characters, for an average of 7.5 characters mapped to each syllable.
Zhou Youguang introduced two ways homophones have been historically reduced:
There are two systems for phonetic notation of Chinese characters.
In pinyin, either diacritics (e.g.,) or numbers may be used to mark tones. The Jyutping system for Cantonese uses numbers, e.g.
Japanese: [[Kun'yomi]] are readings of kanji using native Japanese words mapped to the meanings of borrowed Chinese characters. Characters have also been borrowed with Japanese: [[on'yomi]] readings with borrowed Sino-Japanese pronunciations. For example, when Chinese character was borrowed to Japan, people read it with either a native Japanese: kun'yomi pronunciation of, or with a Sino-Japanese on'yomi pronunciation of . These phenomena also appear in Mandarin and English, such as i.e. being read aloud as 'that is'. Qiu Xigui called it).
See main article: Chinese character meanings.
In modern Chinese, a character may represent a word, a morpheme in a compound word, or alternatively a meaningless syllable combined with some other syllables or characters to form a morphine. In a language, morphemes are the minimal units of meaning. Some characters have only one meaning, some have multiple meanings, and some characters largely share the same meaning.
A character with only one meaning is a monosemous character, and a character with two or more meanings is a polysemous character. According to statistics from the Chinese Character Information Dictionary, among the 7,785 mainland standard Chinese characters in the dictionary, there are 4,139 monosemous characters, 3,053 polysemous characters and 593 meaningless characters.
The meaning people assigned to a character when it was created is the original meaning of the character. For example, the original meaning of is 'weapon' being held with both hands).
The meaning developed from the original meaning of a character through association is the extended meaning . For example, is an extended meaning of .
The meaning added through the loan of homonymous sounds is the phonetic-loan meaning . For example, the original meaning of is 'dustpan': its use as a third-person pronoun is due to a phonetic loan.
Synonym characters are a group of characters that have the same or similar meaning. The characters in a synonym group often differ in frequency of use and word-formation ability, and there are some (subtle) differences in meaning and emotional color. The knowledge of synonym characters will help students write Chinese more correctly and express meanings more accurately.For examples,
Both and have the meaning of 'face'. But there are some differences. Generally, is not used as an independent word in Mandarin, but only in multi-character compounds. For example,,,, . The in these words cannot be equivocated with . In contrast, can usually be used alone in Mandarin as its own word, as well as in compounds such as,,, and, . The in these words cannot be replaced by .
The meaning of a single-character word is its character meaning. The meaning of a multi-character word is generally derived from the meanings of the characters. The relationships between the meaning of a compound word and of its characters are categorized as follows:
According to sampling statistics, categories 2 and 3 account for 89.7% of the compound words.
See main article: Chinese character internal structures.
In the analysis of internal structures, Chinese characters are decomposed into internal structural components or pianpangs in relations with the sound and meaning of the characters.
In Shuowen Jiezi, Xu Shen proposed six categories of Chinese characters, including
The traditional liushu presupposed that every internal component can either represent the sound or meaning of the character. But, after the long evolution of Chinese writing systems, quite a few components can no longer effectively play the roles and have become pure form components. From the internal structure point of view, modern Chinese characters are composed of semantic components, phonetic components and pure form components. And they have formed seven categories of modern Chinese characters:
Semantic component characters are composed of semantic components and include:
Phonetic component characters are composed of phonetic components. For example,
Pure form characters are composed of form components, which neither represent the sound nor the meaning of the characters.For example:
The character in modern regular script is no longer round like the Sun.
The traditional character is .
Oracle resembled a deer.
Semantic-phonetic characters, also called "phono-semantic characters", consist of semantic components and phonetic components. There are six combinations:
Semantic-form characters are composed of semantic components and pure form components.Many of these characters were originally semantic-phonetic characters. Due to subsequent changes in the pronunciation of the phonetic components or the characters, the phonetic components could not effectively represent the pronunciation of the character and became pure form. For example:
used to have signific and phonetic, the phonetic component is no longer .
used to have semantic and phonetic . Now the upper component no longer looks like .
Phonetic-form characters are composed of phonetic components and pure form components. They mostly came from ancient semantic-phonetic characters, where the semantic components lost their functions and became pure form. For example,
Originally refers to a kind of beautiful jade, with semantic component }. Later, it was borrowed to represent a ball, and then extended to any spherical object, and became a pure form component, while remains a phonetic component.
Originally refers to the inner white layer of bamboo, with semantic component and phonetic . Later, the character was borrowed by sound to mean 'stupid'.
This is a simplified character with phonetic, and pure form component .
Semantic-phonetic-form characters consist of the three kinds of components. For example,
originally had the signific ⿱ and phonetic . In modern Chinese, ⿱ is not a character or radical with a sound or meaning, but can still express meaning, while remains a pure form component.
semantic and phonetic . In modern Chinese characters, the right part has become a pure form component.Semantic–phonetic–form characters are very rare and the examples above are not quite persuasive. Whether they can be justified as an internal structural category remains to be further studied. If not a category, then the classification above can also be called "New six writings".
According to Yang, among the 3,500 frequently used Chinese characters of their experiment, semantic component characters are the least, accounting for about 5%; pure form component characters account for about 18%; Semantic–form and phonetic–form characters account for about 19%. The largest group is semantic-phonetic characters, accounting for about 58%.
See also: Simplified Chinese characters.
The historical milestones of Chinese character simplification include:
In 1909, Lu Feikui published the article Vulgar Chinese Characters Should Be Used in General Education . The May Fourth Movement further promoted Chinese character simplification. In August 1935, the Ministry of Education of China in Nanjing published the List of the First Batch of Simplified Chinese Characters, which included 324 characters. In January 1956, the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme was approved by the State Council of China. In May 1964, the General List of Simplified Characters was published. A revised version was published in 1986. In June 2013, the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters was released by the State Council of China. It includes 8,105 characters of the Simplified Chinese writing system. In addition, there are 2,574 corresponding Traditional characters and 1,023 variants.
There are four main sources of simplified characters:
The methods to simplify Chinese characters include
That is, to omit some components of the character, for example:
That is to change forms based on the original characters. For example,
Usually replace the whole character with a character of similar sound. For example,
See main article: Chinese character rationalization.
The goal of Chinese character rationalization or Chinese character optimization is to, in addition to Chinese character simplification, optimize the Chinese characters and set up one standard form for each of them.
Variant Chinese characters are characters with the same pronunciation and meaning but different forms, such as and . The existence of variant characters results in multiple forms for one character, which increases the burden of language learning and application. In the process of Chinese characters application, people need to constantly process variant characters and eliminate inappropriate ones.
There are two different principles for processing variant characters:One is conforming to the customs and simplicity. The other is to follow the original form and meaning, based on the character creation method and etymology, especially the Shuowen Jiezi.
There are two methods for processing variant characters: The selecting method is to select one of the variant characters as the standard character and eliminate the rest. The splitting method is to differentiate a group of variant characters in terms of usage to eliminate the variant relationship.
In December 1955, the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Reform Commission of PRC jointly announced the "First List of Processed Variant Characters" . After some later adjustments, the list now has 796 groups of variant characters, and 1,027 characters have been eliminated.
In January 1965, the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Reform Commission of PRC jointly issued the General Chinese Character Forms for Printing (; Font Table in short). The Font Table contains 6,196 commonly-used Song-style characters for printing. In accordance with the principles of simplicity, convenience for learning and use, a standard form was specified for each common character, including the number of strokes, structure and stroke order. After the Cultural Revolution, the Font Table was formally published. The character forms specified by it are now customarily called "new character forms", while the fonts used before were called "old character forms". The "New and Old Character Form Comparison Table" in many language reference books including Xinhua Dictionary and Xiandai Hanyu Dictionary are compiled and printed based on the Font Table.
Current font standards include:
In order to make place names easier to use, the Chinese government started to process the uncommon characters used in place names in 1950s.
The principles for choosing replacement characters are:
From March 1955 to August 1964, 35 place names of county level or above were changed with the approval of the State Council. For example:
Later, in order to maintain the stability of place names, this work was suspended.
When the English units of measurement were translated into Chinese, there were inconsistencies in the use of characters. For example:mile: or .foot:, .kilowatt:, .Therefore, the burden of language application was increased. etc. are specially created characters, and they also have poly-syllable sounds, which does not follow the monosyllable pattern of Chinese characters. In order to solve these problems, in July 1977, the Chinese Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Measures of PRC jointly issued the "Notice on the Uniform Use of Characters in the Names of Some Measurement Units", establishing the metric system as the basic measurement system. [11]
See main article: Chinese character education.
Chinese character education is the teaching and learning of Chinese characters. When written Chinese appeared in social communication, Chinese character teaching came into being. From ancient times to the present, the teaching of Chinese characters has always been the focus of Chinese language education.
In ancient times, research on Chinese character teaching focused on the preparation of various centralized literacy textbooks and dictionaries. Among them, the ones with greater impact include:
The previous three books then developed into a set of teaching materials, collectively called "Three Hundred Thousand" (about 2,000 different characters), which were used for over 1000 years until the end of the Qing Dynasty, and still have a certain influence today. "Three Hundred Thousand" is arranged in rhyme form to make it catchy and easy to remember. Another influential literacy textbook is "Wenzi Mengqiu" compiled for children by the Qing Dynasty writer Wang Jun (1784－1854), which contains 2,049 characters.
Modern Chinese character education is an important component of primary education in China, and an important part of literacy teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.
The method is to use high-frequency characters according to frequency statistics. The important character lists include:
Chinese character literacy movement began in the early 20th century, when the literacy level of ordinary Chinese people was quite low. Intellectuals who cared about the country and its people advocated education to save the country and started a Chinese character literacy campaign. In June 1952, the Ministry of Education of China published a list of commonly used literacy characters, including 2,000 characters for use in literacy textbooks. In 1993, the State Language Commission published the "Character List for Literacy", which includes Table A and B. Table A contains 1,800 characters that are required for literacy in the country, and Table B contains 200 reference characters for literacy. According to UNESCO, by 2015, China's illiteracy rate had dropped to 3.6 percent.
In the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced to Korea, thereafter to Japan, Vietnam and other countries. Thus, teaching Chinese characters to foreigners began.By 1989, there were more than 100 colleges and universities teaching Chinese as a foreign language in China.
From 1990 to 1991, the National Leading Group for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and the Chinese Proficiency Test Center of Beijing Language Institute jointly developed the "" (Outline of the Graded Vocabulary and Characters for HSK). The Chinese character outline contains 2,905 characters, divided into four grades: 800 Grade A characters, 804 Grade B characters, 601 Grade C characters, and 700 Grade D characters. Among these 2,905 characters, 2,485 are first-level frequently-used characters in the "" (List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese). Teaching Chinese characters as a foreign language has received more and more attention, and many textbooks and elective courses in this area have appeared. There are now more than 200 Confucius Institutes teaching Chinese as a foreign language in the world.
See main article: Chinese character IT.
Chinese character Information Technology (IT) is the technology of computer processing of Chinese characters.While the English writing system makes use of a few dozen different characters, Chinese language needs a much larger character set. There are over ten thousand characters in the Xinhua Dictionary. In the Unicode multilingual character set of 149,813 characters, 98,682 (about two-thirds) are Chinese.[13]
Computer input of Chinese characters is by no means as easy as English. English is written with 26 letters and a handful of other characters, and each character is assigned to a key on the keyboard. Chinese can be input in a similar way. However that would involve a huge keyboard with at least thousands of keys. Searching for a character on the keyboard would be a daunting job. An alternative way is to encode each Chinese character in English characters, enabling Chinese input on an English keyboard. As a matter of fact, this method has become predominant for Chinese computer input.
Sound-based encoding is normally based on an existing Latin character scheme for Chinese phonetics, such as the pinyin Scheme for Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua, and the Jyutping Scheme for the Cantonese dialect. The input code of a Chinese character is its pinyin letter string followed by an optional number representing the tone. For example, the Putonghua Pinyin input code of Chinese: 香港 (Hong Kong) is "xianggang" or "xiang1gang3", and the Cantonese Jyutping code is "hoenggong" or "hoeng1gong2", all of which can be easily input via an English keyboard.
A Chinese character can alternatively be input by form-based encoding. Most Chinese characters can be divided into a sequence of components in writing order. There are a few hundred basic components, much less than the number of characters. By representing each component with an English letter and putting them in writing order of the character, the input method creator can get a letter string ready to be used as an input code on the English keyboard. Of course the creator can also design a rule to select representative letters from the string if it is too long. For example, in the Cangjie input method, character Chinese: 疆 (border) is encoded as "NGMWM" corresponding to components "弓土一田一", with some components omitted.Popular form-based encoding methods include Wubi (五笔) in the Mainland and Cangjie (倉頡) in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The most important feature of intelligent input is the application of contextual constraints for candidate character selection. For example, on Microsoft Pinyin, when the user types input code "daxuejiaoshou", he/she will get "Chinese: 大学教授 / 大學教授" (University Professor), when types "daxuepiaopiao" the computer will suggest "Chinese: 大雪飘飘 / 大雪飄飄" (heavy snow flying). Though the non-toned Pinyin letters of 大学 and 大雪 are both "daxue", the computer can make a reasonable selection based on the subsequent words.
Inside the computer or mobile phone each character is represented by an internal code. When a character is sent between two computers or other digital devices, it is in information interchange code. Nowadays, information interchange codes, such as ASCII and Unicode, are often directly employed as internal codes. The first GB Chinese character encoding standard is GB2312, which was released by the PRC in 1980. It includes 6,763 Chinese characters, with 3,755 frequently-used ones sorted by Pinyin, and the rest by radicals (indexing components). GB2312 was designed for simplified Chinese characters. Traditional characters which have been simplified are not covered. The code of a character is represented by a two-byte hexadecimal number, for instance, the GB codes of Chinese: 香港 (Hong Kong) are CFE3 and B8DB respectively. GB2312 is still in use on some computers and the WWW, though newer versions with extended character sets, such as GB13000.1 and GB18030, have been released.The latest version of GB encoding is GB18030, which supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and is consistent with the Unicode character set.[14]
The standard of Big5 encoding was designed by five big IT companies in Taiwan in the early 1980s, and has been the de facto standard for representing traditional Chinese in computers ever since. Big5 is popularly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.The original Big5 standard included 13,053 Chinese characters, with no simplified characters of the Mainland. Each character is encoded with a two byte hexadecimal code, for example, 香 (ADBB) 港 (B4E4) 龍 (C073). Chinese characters in the Big5 character set are arranged in radical order.Extended versions of Big5 include Big-5E and Big5-2003, which include some simplified characters and Hong Kong Cantonese characters.[15]
The full version of the Unicode standard represents a character with a 4-byte digital code, providing a huge encoding space to cover all characters of all languages in the world. The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) is a 2-byte kernel version of Unicode with 2^16=65,536 code points for important characters of many languages. There are 27,522 characters in the CJKV (China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam) Ideographs Area, including all the simplified and traditional Chinese characters in GB2312 and Big5 traditional. In Unicode 15.0, there is a multilingual character set of 149,813 characters, among which overs 98,682 (about 2/3) are Chinese sorted by Kangxi Radicals. Even very rarely-used characters are available. For example: H (0048) K (004B), 香 (9999), 港 (6E2F), 龍(9F8D), 龙 (9F99), 龖 (9F96), 龘 (9F98), (2A6A5).[13]
Unicode is becoming more and more popular. It is reported that UTF-8 (Unicode) is used by 98.1% of all the websites. It is widely believed that Unicode will ultimately replace all other information interchange codes and internal codes, and there will be no more code confusing.[16]
Like English and other languages, Chinese characters are output on printers and screens in different fonts and styles. The most popular Chinese fonts are the Song, Kai, Hei and Fangsong families.
Fonts appear in different sizes. In addition to the international measurement system of points, Chinese characters are also measured by size numbers invented by an American for Chinese printing in 1859.
etc.(Zhang 2016, and cbs517 have detailed introduction and experimental exercises.)
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