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I'd like to propose that we split out the current history section (leaving an overview). Everything from the section History down to Modern history would go into a new article titled either "History of Chinese characters", "Development of the Chinese writing system" or whatever people feel is most suitable. Note that the section Written styles which appears in the middle of the history section for some reason would stay where it is.Philg88 (talk) 01:36, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

According to the link that the word "taito" leads to, that word is a JAPANESE word rather than a Chinese one... Vincent2128 (talk) 03:32, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Both the Japanese and Korean writing systems use Chinese characters (some of which have since evolved separately) so I'm not quite sure what your point is with this comment. Philg88  04:28, 28 March 2025 UTC [refresh]

There are reports that more and more people are forgetting characters as a result of reliance on mobile phones and computers. Would this warrant a new section, or perhaps even a new article?

• AFP, 29 August 2010, Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan, The Independent
• C. Custer, July 23, 2010, Is “Character Amnesia” a Problem?, ChinaGeeks
• Victor Mair, July 22, 2010, Character Amnesia, Language Log
• Jennifer Lee, 1 Feb 2001, In China, Computer Use Erodes Traditional Handwriting, Stirring a Cultural Debate
• Barbara Demick, July 12, 2010, China worries about losing its character(s), LA Times

Regards, -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:34, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ridiculous. Of course there needs no section for that because similar thing happens in every language. The only difference is character vs spelling. --Peterxj108 (talk) 14:24, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is not ridiculous. We write with 28 letters, they have to remember 40,000 characters! Just use your common sense. --Againme (talk) 17:59, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually I'm Chinese and don't think that problem is severe enough, though there was some news referring to that... It may be more accurate to say some Chinese are forgetting how to write some characters, not how to recognize them. As regards characters, 40,000 is exaggerating... once there was a survey indicating that one with the knowledge of 3,000 characters could conquer approximately 95% of newspapers and books...--Peterxj108 (talk) 02:08, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The HSK demands under 3000 characters (2633) for its most advanced students. On the other hand, native Chinese presumably need to learn more, recognize common traditional and seal forms, etc. 95% is still nothing like 100% and the last 5 will have a long tail. — LlywelynII 16:04, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also, fwiw, here at the English wiki we write with 26 letters. — LlywelynII 16:04, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think the topic is notable and interesting enough to have its own article. Perhaps the issue could be brieftly mentioned in this article too with a link to Character amnesia. If I had some time, I'd create the article. Laurent (talk) 15:54, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Benlisquare and myself have just written an article on this topic. see Character amnesia. read it and improve it. I'm not sure what should link to it, but it is related to stuff so shouldn't be left orphaned. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 03:32, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So far I've made it a See Also here. I think we could put it into context with the main article body - create a new section regarding the psychology behind Chinese characters, use and learning (e.g. motor-neural pathways, which side of the brain is used when writing Hanzi as opposed to Latin, etc. I can't recall where, but I remember reading an article that claimed that studies suggested that when reading the Latin alphabet, the logical side of the brain is used more, however for Hanzi the visual-spacial side is used more. Or something along those lines.), with a brief description with reliable sources, somehow incorporating a link. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 04:39, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, "character amnesia" is properly called dysgraphia. Recent Atlantic article here. — LlywelynII 16:04, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

BTW I just read a popular new book about science of reading called "Proust and the Squid" which cites some serious science and says that reading Hanzi is neurologically a similar but different process from reading alphabetic text. reading Chinese characters activates the parts of the brain associated with fine-motor control, i.e. to some extent reading chinese characters is like writing them. This just to say that there is some material to work with on this topic. But this article is already very long. I propose splitting off the History section to make room for a broader summary. According to WP:TOOLONG it's time we split off some content from this article. - Metal.lunchbox (talk) 05:56, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I give up: I tried various UTF encodings, but can't find the correct one to view this page. Best I can get (with UTF-8) is a table with empty squares instead of the characters. Help? And by the way: this info should be at the top of the article! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.108.26.179 (talk) 04:25, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

See this. The info is at the top right of the article. If you click "rendering support" in blue, you can jump to the page above. Oda Mari (talk) 05:01, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Will GB2312-80 or GBK do?--Peterxj108 (talk) 13:24, 26 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has been encoded using Unicode for a long time now. Most browsers will probably default to that setting. What computer and what browser are you using?

When a reasonably new browser opens a page it should see (and will see in Wikipedia) a part of the header information that says, basically, "This page uses Big5," or "This page uses UTF-8" or something like that. I ordinarily only have to intervene when viewing some old page (or page made by a clueless site owner) that does not have a "charset="XXX" setting. Every Wikipedia page will have: <meta charset="UTF-8" /> near the top.

If you have a web browser made in the last five or ten years or so, and you still cannot see the Chinese characters correctly, then maybe you do not have any good UTF-8 fonts. Your computer manufacturer should have provided you with some way to download the most recent fonts, and there are doubtless lots of free UTF-8 fonts around on the WWW.P0M (talk) 19:01, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I propose that we merge Chinese family of scripts into this article Chinese characters. Before anyone complains that this article is already too long, take a look at Chinese family of scripts. it is a Content fork which does not have a significant amount of information not already included in this article. I did not find anything and considered blanking the page with a redirect here, but figured this would be more polite. Even if further developed the article would not cover topics which this article does not. All in favor of blanking the page after double checking it doesn't have any unique info say "Aye". Metal.lunchbox (talk) 19:19, 6 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak oppose: Don't you think the article at Chinese character is getting a bit too long? Keep in mind that not everyone runs PCs with Intel i7s and 12GB of DDR3 RAM; there are your average elderly couples that browse Wikipedia too. At 91,432 bytes, loading this page becomes a bit choppy in Mozilla Firefox (because lol memory leak), and I can assume that even though I'm running a decent rig, someone else with an older PC might end up with more issues. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 02:44, 7 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd be surprised if ANY content from that article made it into this one in a merge. I agree that the article is already long. this will probably not make it longer.Metal.lunchbox (talk) 03:53, 7 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • I guess so. Hence, I'll redact my old !vote; currently I'm neutral since I don't have a strong opinion for either side. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 04:48, 7 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - while this article may or may not be too long, Chinese family of scripts is too short. Reading it, I would think the idea is the give an overview over how the Chinese branch of this script spawned off related scripts from Jurchen to Chu Nom. While that's not well covered yet, that's not a reason to nix the article. This article may be in need of a new name but if clearly follows the main trunk of the script tree, i.e. Chinese back then to Chinese now. Akerbeltz (talk) 09:58, 7 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 16:40, 7 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• I think it would be better to keep Chinese family of scripts (because it has potential) and get rid of Genealogy of sinitic scripts. Kanguole 19:48, 7 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• These are reasonable arguments and there is a consensus emerging in favor of not merging but somehow further developing the article. I'll go ahead and remove the merge tag at the top of the page. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 20:06, 7 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well it's barely been two days... no need to jump the horse yet, discussions like these usually take longer. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 10:51, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Withdrawn - If someone has something interesting to add then, by all means, continue discussing, but I am no longer pursuing a merger. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 16:57, 8 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As it now stands, this section does not seem to contain anything more than a random factoid, and needs to either be expanded into an explanation of foreign concepts of Chinese characters, or deleted as irrelevant to the content of the article. I've written to the editor who reverted the deletion inviting him to this discussion. Vanisaac (talk) 01:10, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I reinstated the section, as it was properly sourced, and had been deleted by an anon. user who supplied no explanatory wp:ES.

In the light of the above rationale, I now understand its removal. Trafford09 (talk) 01:20, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone know of any sources that could give us some more information to expand this section into at least a cursory introduction to foreign conceptions of the Chinese characters? Vanisaac (talk) 01:32, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The lead currently states that "some single characters can represent polysyllabic words". It seems to be based on the obscure "圕" character which is supposed to be pronounced "túshūguǎn" (library). According to Wiktionary (I have yet to check an actual Chinese dictionary), this character was invented by a librarian in 1914 and has yet to gain widespread acceptance (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9C%95). Since this is such a rare character and, really, an exception, I think it shouldn't be mentioned in the lead. Stating that "some single characters can represent polysyllabic words" is too vague - is it 2 or 3 characters? or 20% of the total characters? or 40%? Since we are not being explicit we let non-experts think that Chinese characters might be used like Kanjis in Japanese and represent more than one syllabus. I still think it's worth mentioning this example though, but not in the lead. So, if there's no objection, I'm going to move this statement from the lead to the body of the article. Please discuss here if you disagree. Laurent (talk) 05:40, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

""It's possible that the individual syllables in some words do not have a separate meaning, but are nonetheless written with separate character. Some single characters can represent polysyllabic words though this is very rare"

This section? I relent, I was nitpicking the details too much earlier on that the paragraph was gives the impression that everything was perfectly monosyllabic. Someone already wrote a paragraph Chinese_characters#Polysyllabic_words_and_polysyllabic_characters btw, so... just mentioning to save yourself the trouble -- Cold Season (talk) 06:08, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is fine actually, I saw the section after having written the talk page message. I just added "though it's rare" to make it clear it's for very special cases. Laurent (talk) 12:32, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In Classical Chinese, about 10% of native words are not monosyllabic, which is actually fairly common. Polysyllabic characters are less common, but I would hardly say they're "very rare". Are 'kilowatt' and 'kilogram' "very rare" words? "The exception" would be more like it. Certainly, there's a strong monosyllabic tendency in Chinese, but it's not overwhelming; there's also a tendency for it to be logographic. — kwami (talk) 12:40, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can we have some examples of "polysyllabic characters" because while I admittedly come at this from Cantonese rather than Mandarin, I cannot think of ANY character which indicates a more-than-one-syllable pronunciation. Sure enough, there are "names for things" which require more than one character and are seen as one "word" but they does not make the characters used to write them polysyllabic. Akerbeltz (talk) 14:52, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What's wrong with the examples we have? Library, kilowatt, socialism, bodhisattva. — kwami (talk) 15:19, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

They're not characters... a character is ONE of those boxy symbols. Each of those boxy things stands for one syllable max. Akerbeltz (talk) 19:10, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why not read the article? Each one of those words can be written with one of those "boxy things". — kwami (talk) 20:18, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I was reading the wrong section, mea culpa! Right, with you now, it's like 招財進寶. But that's very very rare and I agree that should be pointed out. I personally (yes, OR) wouldn't view most of them as single characters per se, more like shorthand or decorative fusions (like 招財進寶 on new year stationary). Even the Chinese article on kilowatt uses 千瓦 (though it does refer to the contraction). Calling that a character to me (yes, OR again) is a bit like calling ℥ a letter of the alphabet. Akerbeltz (talk) 00:45, 19 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, this is also covered at Typographic_ligature#Chinese_ligatures Akerbeltz (talk) 00:48, 19 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, Kǒng Mèng hàoxué is clever! I like it.

I wonder if there are any polysyllabic characters which are not ligatures?

I get the point about them being ligatures, but 社会主义 is so heavily abbreviated that it's stretching things a bit to call that a lig (OR). I suppose 菩薩 is just the two radicals combined? — kwami (talk) 02:47, 19 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the numbers can't really be considered ligatures, can they? 20 isn't written十十, so 廿 èrshí isn't a contraction or fusion of the normal phrase. The comments in Mair's site note another, 囍 shuāngxǐ. — kwami (talk) 05:44, 19 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

菩薩 Pusa is 十十十十, i.e. similar in structure to 㗊 but with "ten" (十) instead of "mouth" (口). -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:24, 19 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also, 廿 is not pronounced ershi; it is read as "niàn" in some regional dialects of Mandarin. The word does not exist in Standard Mandarin. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:28, 19 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there's also 卅 (30) in Cantonese (sà). 义 with a four syllable reading as also less of a four syllable word than perhaps a mnemonic or acronym. Take BBC which you can read as Bee bee cee or British Broadcasting Corporation. A bit like that. Akerbeltz (talk) 09:02, 19 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Except it's not "a bit" like that. It's exactly that. Plenty of people do read nian as ershi, but that doesn't make it a "multisyllabic character". — LlywelynII 16:16, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

True... it's just my tendency to avoid absolute statements (except when it comes to a certain Spanish geneticist but that's a different story). Akerbeltz (talk) 16:36, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

60.240.101.246 (talk) 02:26, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Was that supposed to be a question? Or a statement? Something we should fix? What? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:58, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think they mean we should add something about the fact that non-alphabetic scripts are processed using both sides of the brain vs just one in alphabetic scripts. Interesting point, I can't seem to find anything on this topic on Wikipedia. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:29, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In that case, it's quite well known that while reading utilizes diverse areas of the brain, reading Chinese makes unique usage of distinct parts of the frontal and temporal areas of the brain associated with motor memory, areas associated with handwriting. Reading Chinese characters utilises different parts of the brain when compared to reading the Latin alphabet.

• Tan, Li Hai; Laird, Angela R.; Li, Karl; Fox, Peter T. (2005). "Neuroanatomical correlates of phonological processing of Chinese characters and alphabetic words: A meta-analysis". Human Brain Mapping. 25 (1). Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company: 83–91. doi:10.1002/hbm.20134.
• Wen-Jui Kuo, Tzu-Chen Yeh, Chia-Ying Lee, Y. u-T. e Wu, Chi-Cher Chou, Low-Tone Ho, Daisy L. Hung, Ovid J. L. Tzeng, Jen-Chuen Hsieh (2003). "Frequency effects of Chinese character processing in the brain: an event-related fMRI study". NeuroImage. 18 (3): 720–730. doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00015-6.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Wen-Jui Kuo, Tzu-Chen Yeh, Jun-Ren Lee, Li-Fen Chen, Po-Lei Lee, Shyan-Shiou Chen, Low-Tone Ho, Daisy L. Hung, Ovid J. -L. Tzeng, Jen-Chuen Hsieh (2004). "Orthographic and phonological processing of Chinese characters: an fMRI study". NeuroImage. 21 (4): 1721–1731. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.12.007.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

This is already covered in other articles, but I don't see why this shouldn't have a mention within this article as well. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:32, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is? The a short section with a hatnote to the main article would be good cause I can't find anything. Akerbeltz (talk) 17:10, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Recent edits to the lead resulted in the following sentence:

Cognates in various East Asian languages and dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character, but correspondence between characters and morphemes is irregular, [10] with about 10% of Chinese words lacking a separate meaning for their individual syllables.

I challenge the author to explain, with examples, what this paragraph means. Specifically, what is the connection between the first statement (Cognates in various East Asian languages and dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character) and the second (correspondence between characters and morphemes is irregular, [10] with about 10% of Chinese words lacking a separate meaning for their individual syllables)?

For a start, a cognate is NOT a word 'with the same or similar meaning but different pronunciation'. Secondly, the fact that there are Chinese words lacking a separate meaning for their individual syllables (I assume this is referring to the 道 in 知道 and similar phenomena, although it's pretty hard to figure out what is actually being referred to) does not seem to have any connection with the issue of cognates. Thirdly, the sudden switch in focus from 'various East Asian languages and dialects' to '(10% of) Chinese words' makes the entire generalisation completely unfathomable.

A person who knew nothing about Chinese characters and came to this article for illumination would have no idea what is being talked about. A person who does know Chinese characters would still have no idea what is being talked about. Why is this quite opaque sentence presented in the lead as a general statement about Chinese characters?

221.222.125.240 (talk) 23:04, 29 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, I reverted to the original lead because of these problems. Unfortunately, as set out above, the new lead is virtually unfixable. Better to go back and start again.

221.222.125.240 (talk) 23:12, 29 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I took a stab at it. — kwami (talk) 08:16, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not bad! One sentence that I had trouble identifying support for in the cited source was: "the characters are largely morphosyllabic, each corresponding to a spoken syllable with a distinct meaning, though this is not systematic". The source as I read it doesn't seem to be saying that this feature is not systematic.

"About 10% of native words have two syllables without separate meanings, but they are nonetheless written with two characters". I assume you are referring to inherently polysyllabic words that are written with two characters, even though the characters don't have any meaning outside the compound. I wonder about the figure of 10%, though, although I haven't got access to the source.

" In other languages, most significantly today in Japanese, characters are used (1) to represent native words, ignoring the Chinese pronunciation, (2) to represent Chinese loanwords, and (3) as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese they were acquired from" (numbering added). I'm not sure how felicitous this is. (1) should add mention of the fact that usage to represent native words is based on the perceived meaning of the character. (2) is ok, but "based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese they were acquired from" actually belongs here, too. (3) as purely phonetic elements is a further elaboration, but is also quite well known in Chinese, so it is not just a feature of other languages.

120.193.153.170 (talk) 10:59, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

(A) Might need to move the ref over. What I meant was that the characters don't systematically have meaning. (B) The 10% figure is s.t. I read a long time ago. It was for Classical Chinese, actually. Yes, words like 'butterfly' and 'coral'. (C) Yeah, I wasn't too happy with this either. Edit as you like. The essential point is that characters have both nativized and Sino-xenic pronunciations in Japanese; Vietnamese and Zhuang, like Cantonese, invented new characters (I don't know if they had parallel native and Chinese readings as in Japanese); Korean has only Sino-xenic in most cases (except maybe place names?), etc. — kwami (talk) 11:24, 1 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the following paragraph from the section on rebus:

In this sense, Chinese characters may be seen as a case of arrested development in that as a system of writing single letters failed to be synthecized from the syllable as was the case with forms of writing derived from hieroglyphics.^[1] Some scholars view this fact as having adversely affected the capacity of the users of Chinese characters for abstract thought and creative endeavors in general since precisely this division of syllables into individual letters is seen as crucial to such a development.^[2]

Come on, does anyone really believe that the Chinese can't think straight because they don't have an alphabet? A logographic script might arguably cause various problems: difficulty in borrowing foreign words without assigning arbitrary meanings; serious difficulty achieving universal literacy (only a few years ago literacy in the PRC was at 10%, despite claims it was at 90%); a difficulty among the literate in distinguishing words from characters, etc. But incapable of abstract thought? And according to this wording, the Japanese would have the same problem because kana is syllabic. It sounds like old anti-Semites saying the Jews and Arabs are stuck in "arrested development" because only the Greeks developed a true alphabet.

This might be of interest as an example of silly academics, but IMO does not belong in an introductory article on Chinese characters, where people might take it seriously. — kwami (talk) 07:55, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I just watched a documentary on Chinese calligraphy. The presenter wrote some words he had learned and asked for the teachers opinion and was told that although the characters were correct he wrote like a sick student. Asked why, he stated that the brush strokes must be done in a specific order to be considered correct. Is this a rule, regional specific or no longer taught? Wayne (talk) 03:43, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Stroke order is an important part of learning to write Chinese characters. As far as I know, stroke order is important everywhere Chinese characters are used. Grayfell (talk) 04:52, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't know it had it's own article but from your answer it seems the importance of stroke order should be mentioned in this one. Wayne (talk) 05:10, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The title image on the right hand side which shows the words "漢子" in traditional and simplified should be rid of the simplified. Simplified Chinese is only used in the PRC. In Japan, another variant again is used for "漢" (I can't type it here, but the top right part is different), and as Japanese Kanji are just as much Chinese characters as any other, if the Simplified Chinese variant is included in the image, by that logic so should the Japanese variant. However, it would be much more logical to just include the orthodox form of the character in the image, as this is the parent form which is used for some purposes in all of the CJK countries. However the Simplified Chinese and Japanese Shinjitai variants are not, they are only used in their respective jurisdictions. Either way, include all three major standard variants if you are including any at all, or just do the simple thing and only use the traditional character from the parent system which has some use everywhere Chinese Characters are written. As it is now though, it does not fit with logic no matter how you look at it. I would keep the current image for the articles on "simplified chinese" and "traditional chinese" as this is where it is really relevant, to demonstrate the difference between the parent system of orthodox chinese characters and one of the its child systems currently in use in a particular jurisdiction. Saruman-the-white (talk) 10:38, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You're forgetting that 1.4 billion people use "汉字" (PRC+Singapore), whilst 158 million people use "漢字" (Taiwan+HK+Japan). Before you throw around the "which is more proper" argument, keep in mind that almost 89% of people in the world who use some variant of Chinese characters use the simplified variant, in comparison to 8% for Shinjitai and a mere 2% for traditional Chinese. And if you really want to desperately include the population for South Korea as well (which nowadays uses Chinese characters quite scarcely), those 48 million people don't change the proportions very much at all. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:55, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Finally, regarding what you mentioned about 漢 used in Japanese, consider having a look at Variant Chinese character and Han unification. They're not really "different" characters, and the typographic variance is minimal at most (compare with the two ways you can write the Latin lowercase letters "a" and "g" - specifically, the double-story and single story variants). -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 12:05, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Fact is there are three standard variants. Having been changed to a grass radical, it is certainly different. No matter how different you think the standards are, there are three official standards nonetheless and it is inconsistent and illogical to include two while leaving out the second most popular (used by a 6 trillion dollar 'economic powerhouse'). I am not arguing about which standard is more correct. That is subjective. Merely that there are three standards in current use. As such, there are two logical approaches to follow - one: include all three standards (not leaving out the one used by over 100 million people in one of the most powerful and influential nations/languages on earth), or two, include just the one parent standard which has quite prominent use in all three CJK nations, including HK, Macau and Taiwan, in both historial, cultural, artistic, scholarly, dictionary (see both forms in xinhua zidian, etc) and (ever increasingly) in popular cultural use, as anyone who has been to Mainland China will testify. Whichever way is chosen, it is clear that these are the only two consistent, logical options. On an unrelated note, which has no bearing on this recommendation which is merely a case of standards, do note that both jiantizi and shinjitai (and in many cases hangeul) are only child systems which are only understood through their relation to the traditional character, and not in themselves or on their own. This reality can be seen in reading any mainland dictionary where a simplified character is always supplemented by its traditional form, or by looking through premier mainland character dictionaries (ie Hanyu Da Zidian, the longest, and the "Oxford" of Chinese) or academic studies on hanzi, which always list characters by their traditional forms, and, if at all, list the simplified variant as a note along with other un-orthodox variants.Saruman-the-white (talk) 06:00, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Regional typographical variants are not standards. They are typographical variants that differ by region, solely for the reason of local conventions. Here are the variant characters for "turtle":

Are you telling me that there are six "standards", and that simplified and traditional are only two of the six? Because the answer is no: there are four commonly used variants that are supported by default operating system fonts (there are plenty more), one shinjitai variant and one simplified Chinese variant. Regarding the case of 漢, there is no shinjitai of 漢, the modern orthgraphy uses the same glyph as the kyujitai. Character dictionaries do not list the Japanese 漢 glyph as a shinjitai variant. It merely is that Japan uses a different glyph of 漢 because of regional variation. It has nothing to do with character simplification. There are many commonly used vulgar variants of characters that different from the Kangxi Dictionary forms - that does not make them standard unless the characters have been specifically simplified, a la 氣/気/气, where the characters are identified as simplified variants in character dictionaries and by databases such as Unihan. The Kangxi Dictionary 漢 is the standard; all other kyujitai/traditional glyphs are simply vulgar variants that differ typographically; 汉 on the other hand is by no means simply a typographic variant. Unihan (and Unicode itself) does not differentiate between the Kangxi and Japanese glyph variants of 漢 - there is only one unicode codepoint allocated for that character; this is not the same case for 汉, which has its own codepoint. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:44, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thus, in the image, it would be simple, inclusive and logical to merely use the Kangxi form of "漢子" as there is a very wide consensus that these represent the most "orthodox" forms and are free from interference by government simplifications of either the PRC, ROC, Japan, or the ROK. As Chinese Characters are a multi-national phenomenon that are in use over a wide area under many different jurisdictions, it would just be more simple, logical and inclusive to all to use the traditional character (in Kangxi form, to be more specific) as this is representative of all regions that use Chinese Characters and has the widest acceptance as the orthodox form. Saruman-the-white (talk) 09:43, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If you really want to go further with this proposal, why not start a WP:RFC to get a third opinion and wider consensus? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:51, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Should the Simplified Chinese characters within the infobox image be removed? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:53, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose: See rationale above. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:53, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Support See rationale above. Saruman-the-white (talk) 13:28, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose. There's no particular reason why the images at the top of the article need to be representative of all the standard Chinese character variants. The Japanese 漢 character is similar enough to the Chinese one that I don't think it would be of great benefit to put it right at the top. This would be better placed lower down in the article, if we need to make this distinction using an image. I do like having both the simplified and traditional characters at the top of the article, though, as the difference between them is quite striking. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 18:12, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose It is not true that simplified characters are only used in the PRC. Singapore of course uses them but they are increasingly used in the wider world. One reason is it's what most people emigrating from China now are familiar with, as opposed to those that emigrated a generation or more ago, or from Hong Kong. Another is almost everyone learning Chinese uses it. They appear in other forms of media, such as titles and subtitles of music videos, and of course in anything related officially to the PRC. More and more they are being used on menus, on signs, far away from the PRC and Singapore. See e.g. this picture I took last year in Chinatown, Newcastle.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 18:54, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose I'm from WikiProject Korea talk page, and I don't see any reason to remove the simplified Chinese from the infobox image. I agree with JohnBlackburne in that the simplified Chinese is becoming increasingly popular outside of traditional Chinese community and that people who study Chinese as a foreign language recognize the simplified version as the Chinese character. --- PBJT (talk) 00:27, 22 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose, then, I shall have to admit defeat with regard to this matter. With the post-80s and 90s generations in China's eastern provinces becoming increasingly in favour of traditional characters I guess we'll just have to stay tuned in the coming decades and see if they're repealed like the second round simplifications as the population becomes wealthier and more educated. Saruman-the-white (talk) 06:55, 22 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The article was rated C-class, for lack of sufficient in-line citations. There are many paragraphs, and even whole sections, without in-line citations.Boneyard90 (talk) 20:20, 20 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In the infobox it says direction: Left-to-right. I think they have usually been written top-to-bottom throughout history, left-to-right only applies to the modern era and specifically the internet. Siuenti (talk) 20:25, 22 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

They are both used. It should say left to right (more common today), followed by right to left top to bottom (used in formal writing, letters, some newspapers, and school essays/assignments in Taiwan, HK and Macau, as well as in Mainland China for historical and artistic purposes, book spines, and literary publications of older works). Saruman-the-white (talk) 00:48, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to complicate matters, but some people have written horizontally right to left. There is a story that some shopkeepers in Taiwan was so worried about government dictates (back in the 1970s) that they wrote their signs from right to left. Then for whatever reason some reporter asked Jiang Jingguo what he thought about the practice. He evidently had never heard of the policy and said, essentially, "What the hell difference does it make?" The next day worried shopkeepers went out and changed their signs to go from left to right.

I think I may have heard of inscriptions around the circumference of cups that could be made sense of regardless of which character one took to be the first character of the sentence. Maybe they could even be read in either direction too.

The only thing I have never heard of is anybody writing from bottom to top, or in vertical columns that proceed from left to right.P0M (talk) 19:12, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

More or less all books published in HK and Taiwan are printed top-to-bottom (which means that the lines are arranged right-to-left, also), and it's still not especially uncommon to find right-to-left signs in the mainland. I think the box should definitely read "Varied," especially since the article covers the history of the language. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to edit the box --- can anyone help?

68.173.112.178 (talk) 20:56, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Unlike in the West where there is no requirement on how many words a student at an elementary or secondary school must learn or memorize, such a requirement does exist with regard to Chinese characters in Mainland China. I am not sure about Taiwanese curriculum, though. Recently, the PRC government has undertaken a change in the national curriculum so that there is now a reduction in the number of Chinese characters a student must learn in Mainland Chinese schools. That caught my attention, hence the comments. There is apparently very little written on this topic in the article. So, can anyone find some reliable sources with information on this topic and add info into the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.244.24.47 (talk) 07:04, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thing is, there's a difference between words and characters. "康" by itself makes no sense in Vernacular Chinese, and is only used by itself in Classical Chinese, in personal names, or in a compound word; "健康" is a word. In the United States, I'm pretty sure students have to learn all 26 Roman letters. But yes, there is a threshold of characters that students have to learn in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan. I'm not sure on the figures for Taiwan though. In Japan students need to know at least the Jōyō kanji, and in mainland China the Xiandai Hanyu Changyong Zibiao, or at least (I'd assume) the figure is close to the highest level of the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (I don't think they'd need to know the entire Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao, not even archaeology professors do). -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 07:29, 23 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This is so wrong. Single character may not be as common as binary form, but the example you raise, 康 may still well deliver the meaning healthy. ChowHui (talk) 07:57, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I was eluding to the point that characters are not words. Character education is not the same as vocabulary development, and the two cannot be equated with one another. Nitpicking at how bad my example is doesn't change this. The original poster made mention of teaching "words" in the education of English. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 03:46, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Also, "康" by itself is not used in vernacular speech. You don't go up to an old lady and say "你康吗？" Like I said, it's used in compounds and classical literature. The reason for the development of compound words such as 健康 is due to the phonetic shift in modern times that make spoken Chinese different to that of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, and Classical Chinese literature written in that time was more concise because there were more sounds that the mouth could make. Words such as 健康 makes speech less ambigious, due to the number of homophones Chinese has following all sorts of phonetical merging and simplification (Modern Standard Mandarin only has vowel, "n", "ng" and "r" finals, after removal of the "p", "t", "m", "k", etc. finals), and even though 1,300 years ago people would actually use "康" in spoken language to mean "healthy", it is not the case today. "你康吗？" can be confused with all sorts of things, such as "你糠吗？" (are you like a sponge?) and "你慷吗？" (are you ardent?) -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 03:50, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You have confused words and characters. While I cant say about all of the European languages, which for example old Norse does have letters that represent an idea, a part of a word, a number or a phonetic alphabet but Chinese character has no equivalent in English language which i presume you took reference from. Character is the basic building block of Chinese language which is not equivalent to alphabet, but one or a combination of characters some what equivalent to words in English language. Indeed phonetic shift is responsible to popularized combination like 喜歡，傳遞，斟酌，健康，模擬... Some of these actually represents a complex idea beyond what the individual character may carry or simply a derivative from a literature passage. Present speakers used these combination same way as the predefine functions in programing languages to fit their real time needs. But look at 進食，文件，平等... combination of redundant meaning showed heavily influenced by phonetic shift because the combination did not surpass individual character in delivering bigger idea.

For example 斟酌. 斟 means to pour (liquid), which in today still can be used in the situation you insist, 我為你斟酒， I pour(serve) you wine. 酌 means measure, sometimes in expand of this concept it also means to take consideration, for example, commonly seen in product label, 請酌量使用, please take consideration of amount used, which in fact 酌 carries the same meaning as 斟酌 in this context. To sound the way you intend to describe Vernacular Chinese, the sentence can be expand into 請斟酌所使用的量. But again the fine definition between literature or classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese itself is debatable. The first grammar and construction style in today commonly accepted as the "formal style" which in technically stand point is an hybrid of the two grammars and construction principles. While the latter accepted as a casual style commonly heard in dialogs. Back to the 康 argument. For another example, 祝你身體安康, wish you (your body) peace and healthy. First four character can be used as words independently. The last two words can also be read in a word or two words independently understood to deliver different ideas or in this case wishes. 安 wishes you peace or peaceful life or to further extend this idea, in a state oppose to being threaten by. 康 wishes you in the state of positive which essentially means healthy in the context. Hence is all about context , contemporary taste and preference. Another example you raise, it appears independently in names. Chinese names usually carries hope and wishes the parent wanted their child to be. And the limitation to 1-2 words force them to construct it in a very effective way which pretty much turns them to the so called classical grammar and construction principle. Again demonstrate that the choice of vocab, construction and grammar depends greatly on real time situations, word count, time limitation(verbal response), formal/casual, communicate with kids/restarted vs sensible adults... Therefore to exercise contemporary application of Chinese language, one must be aware of current pop culture that affects the choice of words and vocab as well as certain style of construction.

Anyways, these are beyond the context of the original question.

My answer to the original question is the amount of word represent a rough figure an average user should master or at least exposed to. Some character which itself is a powerful word that delivers a complex idea is usually left out or forgotten due to limited or less frequent usage. But the main reason is, I think, as a tradeoff in the process of simplifying the language, we lost the discipline to use the language in the most effective way as possible. By effective I mean to deliver as much message as possible using the least word. Furthermore these powerful words became even less seen because people can go the around it by using hundred of words to deliver the message supposed to be delivered by one single character/word. ChowHui (talk) 22:14, 20 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Again, we're having this discussion because I chose a poor example. Take the Buddhist term 阿閦如來 - is 閦 (a character used to transliterate Sanskrit) by itself a word in Modern Standard Mandarin? I'm not disputing that in many cases characters can act as meaningful words - you are 100% correct in this aspect. What I am trying to say is that there is more to "words" than single, lone characters, and the original poster's question of comparing Chinese characters with English words has the issue of assuming that characters and words are equivalent, when the majority of Modern Standard Mandarin vocabulary is made up of compound words, as shown by most dictionaries of Modern Standard Mandarin. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 10:49, 21 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Furthermore, 安康 is a compound word according to CEDICT. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:06, 21 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

@ nobody in particular

It seems to me that the salient issue is how much effort has to go into learning reading and writing vocabulary for English (or some other Western language) and how much has to go into learning reading and writing vocabulary for Chinese. I just checked, and one source said "from 19,000 to 200,000 words for [American] college graduate students." I have heard that around 6,000 hanzi is typical for a Chinese grad student. But with those 6,000 hanzi in hand, being able to read a much larger number of 詞組 is not much of a problem. My guess is that a college freshman in China could handle 釀造學 even without much context, but I am pretty sure that most U.S. college students will go to a dictionary for "zymurgy." On the other hand, I was at a reading level where I could handle the Omaha World-Herald, (a respectable if not world-class newspaper) in second grade. Part of the reason I could do that was that my father was a lawyer and I had absorbed lots of vocabulary by listening in on conversations, telephone calls, and paid some attention to network news reports. Learning to read and write English is basically learning how to handle decoding skills. I do not think that many Chinese second graders are able to read a newspaper such as 時報 in second grade. The reason is that it take a great deal of time and energy to learn Chinese characters. The most intelligent of American college students learning Mandarin while taking a normal college load can manage about 25/week. That is about where the law of diminishing returns shows its ugly head. Maybe what I said about is wrong because a young student in China could probably absorb 1000 hanzi/year, so after two years of primary education s/he might be able to read almost all the characters on the first page of an ordinary newspaper. But to do so would require a great deal of work both to learn and to consolidate any number of hanzi.

So it looks like what would be needed would be measures of time spent to learn and also measures of competency that would work across the two languages, perhaps age-appropriate things like the events that transpire in a bicycle race would work best. But my expectations would probably be all wrong in regard to the Chinese educational system. So it would be very interesting to see what kinds of documents would appear on a Chinese-made reading test for grad students. Would the test try to determine the limits of a student's 單字 vocabulary? Or, would the test try to determine how well students could pull out the true structure of "spacey" sentences and so be able to read with comprehension? Similarly, would American educators test for competency in reading something by, e.g., Loren Eisley, or by Werner Heisenberg, or perhaps by some writer of atrocious academic prose that (rather than having the "spacey" or implicit structure of some difficult Chinese) throws readers' minds into turmoil? Kant, at least in the English translations, is not a good writer, but people still have to deal with it.

Just comparing vocabulary items strikes me as having limited utility.P0M (talk) 05:43, 22 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Not intend to pick on you, but again, you chose another bad example. As you said, its a character created for special purpose, its part of the creation of character which is far from the topic discussed here. The argument is not which example you chose, is that you sent a false message regarding the fundamental principle of Chinese Language, specifically because of this sentence "Thing is, there's a difference between words and characters". NO, this is plain wrong. Clearly you are confusing relationship between 字 and 詞. By definition of an English word, it is the basic unit of the language that represents an idea. As the way you insist to link it to the Chinese language, a character is a "word", a specific combination of characters is also a "word". Linking or naming 字 as character and 詞/詞組 as word or phrase is only for teaching purpose, but still fundamental priciple is very important and irresponsible to sent false message. ChowHui (talk) 07:44, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You two are having a discussion that will continue to go around in circles because you aren't being linguistically precise, which is understandable since it's a pretty specialized field with a good deal of jargon. Ben Li's description "...kang 康 makes no sense in Vernacular..." is extremely ambiguous, and as you see it has produced the confusion above. What you two are describing is, in linguistic terminology, not something to do with "words" or "字/词" but morphemes. Kang 康 makes perfect sense in modern Chinese, but it is what is called a "bound morpheme", meaning that while it has meaning is cannot occur without being a part of some other morpheme, which you two gave many examples of above (jiankang 健康, etc). Another example from modern Mandarin is mu 母 – no one in their right mind would argue that mu isn't a word, but it is most definitely a bound morpheme, and can never occur without being bound to another morpheme as in muqin 母亲. An example from English is the plural marker "-s", as in "cats". The "-s" has a very clear meaning, but it is a bound morpheme and cannot exist without another morpheme (in this case, a noun or gerund). One of the first things I learned in my first graduate Chinese linguistics course is to use proper terminology to avoid these types of befuddlements.  White Whirlwind  咨  08:10, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

母 cannot use without another morpheme? Seriously? So, should I pick on your bad example or should I just go straight and say you are fundamentally screwed up? Would be interesting to see how you explain 失敗乃成功之母。 ChowHui (talk) 08:28, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Vernacular Chinese =/= Classical Chinese. When I buy a Big Mac from McDonald's in Wangfujing, I don't say things like 乃 and 之. The key term here is Modern. In the west, schools don't each "the English language as it hath been in a numbere of century beforeth" unless you're specifically majoring in Shakespearean English. Let's move back to the original post, which is comparing education in elementary and secondary school, which wouldn't be Shakespearean or from the Han Dynasty. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 08:45, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So after showing fundamental misconception in character/words/phrase, you decided to exposes yet another confusion between Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese? Tell me, does this sounds right, 失敗是成功的母親. ChowHui (talk) 15:48, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's right, 失敗乃成功之母 is a Classical-style paraphrase of the English "necessity is the mother of invention" dating from the late 19th-century and is not standard Mandarin. Mu cannot occur as a free morpheme in standard Mandarin, ever. User:ChowHui is incorrect.  White Whirlwind  咨  18:48, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Let's all go back to the original point. Some IP apparently wanted a comparison between the demands that standard curriculums place on learners in mainland China, in Taiwan and other non-mainland places with their own ministries of education, and the U.S. As everybody has succeeded in demonstrating, one way or another, it is difficult to make that kind of a comparison if you are going to involve English in the same discussion as Chinese. The learning tasks for Chinese and for alphabetical languages are so different that even the brain structures are different, for one thing. Another thing is that the really important question is whether at the end of the education process as provided by schools (rather than experience and 自修) a student is prepared to handle the tough stuff. One part of that is whether the student can handle vocabulary present in his/her toughest technical readings. We all know that the learning tasks are different for Chinese and English, or even for Chinese and for a language like German that has a consistent spelling/decoding scheme. Everything that is discussed in the most technical discussion in a German graduate school could be turned into text by somebody who just has good command of stenographical skills, and anybody with a primary school education could read the text out although without much comprehension at all. The task for the grad student or professional is just to know the words as sounds and then to be able to deal with symbolic representation of those sounds. Chinese, on the other hand, requires a huge amount of work (especially in primary and secondary schools) just to learn to read and write the first few thousand characters on the frequency list.

The real problem, in both languages, is what one can do assuming the basic vocabulary problem is well enough in hand that the student does not have to be constantly running to a dictionary. Anybody who doesn't believe me can try reading and translating (白話 or English, it doesn't matter)《大小品對比要抄序》by 支遁. But that problem was not in the mind of the IP who started this discussion. I'm glad of that because I think there must be no known way to quantify the difficulty of, e.g., 支遁 vs. Kant.

The IP asked for a comparison of mainland vs. Taiwan of the curricular requirement. S/he used the word "words" when "hanzi" or perhaps "cizu" would have been more important. But surely it is within reason to dig out the requirements as they are stated by the two governments.P0M (talk) 18:38, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are indeed some characters that are variants of more commonly used, more widely accepted, characters. 說 vs. 説 would be an example. The text needs to give evidence when it says that most of the more than 40,000 characters are simply variants. P0M (talk) 20:17, 18 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have tried to quantify the number of variants. Based on a causal flipping through of the 中文大辭典, which has around 40,000 hanzi, there are indeed very many characters that are simply defined as "variant of character number xxx." So I took another tack. I have a copy of the 東方國語辭典 which claims to have all the characters students up through the undergraduate college level would need. It has about 10,000 characters.

Unfortunately, replacing an unsourced assertion with personal research isn't much of an improvement.P0M (talk) 04:27, 22 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Hanyu Dazidian 汉语大字典 has 55,000 or so characters, and might have a comment on this topic. I'll check my copy and see. The current form still has a WP:OR problem.  White Whirlwind  咨  06:11, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

http://books.google.com/books?id=odrkZvbqJQoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Jerezembel (talk) 19:54, 17 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I was hoping to find a Literacy in Chinese characters article on wikipedia but besides the rather tiny and unhelpful literacy sections at Written Chinese and Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters there does not appear to be much information. I would like to create a literacy article, but I don’t have access to the journal articles or other materials I would need to be able to do so. I’m hoping someone would be willing to do this. The article would deal with the following topics (and hopefully beyond the subjective and anecdotal):

• history of mass literacy movements for countries using Chinese characters
• the various national definitions of literacy in Chinese characters
• the various methods of measuring literacy and their levels of accuracy
• the difficulty of obtaining literacy in Chinese versus other scripts for young learners
• issues and learning difficulties specifically related to reading and writing in Chinese characters, like:

• the ease of relapse into illiteracy compared to other scripts
• Character amnesia, is Chinese easier to forget to write from disuse than a phonetic script?
• what forms of dyslexia and dysgraphia exist for Chinese characters?
• what cognitive processes are underlying 錯別字？
• how is the process of sound decoding and word recognition cognitively distinct from phonetic writing systems?
• is the difficulty of the system a deterrent for the semi-literate to obtain full literacy?

• how literacy in traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese vary

• is literacy in simplified Characters actually easier?
• is there scientific evidence the traditional is really 易讀難寫?

• the average time necessary to acquire literacy in teaching characters to/rate of character acquisition for non-native learners
• literacy issues with native adult learners
• literacy issues with non-native adult learners
• the average time spent teaching characters in compulsory education

• is the added time spent teaching this detrimental to students’ general education?

• does literacy in Japan and China vary? in China and Taiwan? China and Hong Kong? is it a result of the differing writing systems or other factors?
• levels of retained literacy in pinyin
• levels of literacy in Japan for kana only v. kana and kanji
• levels of character literacy in countries where they were formerly used
• the extent of digraphia in those countries and in mainland China (i.e. between simplified and traditional) and Japan

There are dozens of other things which might be included in this article. These are just some ideas. The current article on Chinese characters seems to be rather philologically oriented and lacking more practical aspects of education and literacy which should at least be added to it if others don't believe a literacy article is notable enough. Do others believe the creation of this article would be appropriate? Anyone willing to work on it? What other articles are there dealing with similar issues? -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 17:58, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In the table "Simplified in Mainland China and Japan, but differently," the Japanese variant of 歲 is included, but it is simply the variant that was standardized in Japan and was not simplified. Is its inclusion appropriate here? -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 18:06, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

i'd agree that it might be a variant. ShootingSky 04:05, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's not a simplification and I've deleted it, thanks for noticing. In fact, I believe that 歲/歳 is often simplified to 才 in Japanese writing (which is bizarre from a Chinese phonology standpoint), while 岁 is not used at all.  White Whirlwind  咨  10:58, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't what inspired the random commentary, but there is nothing bizarre about it. Besides Japanese, there are a few Southern Wu dialects I've researched in which they are near homophones (the grammatical 才 that is, can't speak for the other). Many sounds which are historically affricates in Chinese reduce to the fricative component, the /dz/ in 才 to /z/ and then become /s/ in the devoicing process. The MC voiced affricate initials in for example 睡、泉、秦、齊、存、磁、床、崇 (among dozens of others) are all loaned into Japanese with an /s/ phoneme as the initial in the Chinese readings. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 02:24, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Kan-on origins in these particular Southern Wu dialects would explain that. There are a few issues you'll want to be mindful of: 1) be careful with your identification of shuì 睡 as an MC affricate – the initials 船 and 禪 are given differently depending on whom one asks; 2) saying "all [MC affricates] loaned in Japanese with [devoiced]" is troublesome, as you're getting into Sino-Japanese issues of strata: Go-on readings of many of the type of words you mentioned are not devoiced in Japanese. Also, this affricate into fricative change is generally limited to certain of the Wu dialects, I believe. The case is certainly the opposite in many of the Min dialects, for instance.  White Whirlwind  咨  11:31, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hope you had a happy new year. I apologize to others here for turning this is into a discussion board. All I wanted to say is that the usage of 才 is not bizarre but appear to have been dramatically misunderstood. The devoiced Southern Wu dialects are all in relatively remote regions and the devoicing process has only begun in the last few generations so it is doubtful there is any connection between them and Japanese. If Wu dialects were a factor in the Japanese readings, then there is a possibility that the Japanese did not feel that the glottalic voicing of the Wu dialects they encountered seemed sufficiently analagous to the pulmonic voicing in Japanese on fricatives to borrow them that way, though this is little more than speculation on my part since I don't know the details of the loans into Japanese. I only know the results not the process of how they were obtained and do not claim to.

I don't believe there is any connection between devoiced Southern Wu dialects and any Japanese loan of any Chinese pronunciation and didn't mean to imply that, nor did I mean to say that devoicing has occurred in Japanese which if it has I don't know about. I simply observed early on that there is a correlation between some MC voiced coronal affricates (I never said all) and Japanese /s/, but I have no explanation for it and was not attempting to provide one. I only know it is a common correlation, I never meant to imply that it was a regular, absolute correlation, so please don't misunderstand me. It is common enough that it does not merit the label "bizarre" is all I intended to say, and it is less so by the fact that there is a precedent in Chinese dialects which is the only reason why Southern Wu was mentioned.

This observation was simply reinforced by my exposure to Wu and the many affricates in Min which are simply fricatives in Mandarin and other dialects. You are right in that deaffricatization is a typically Wu phenomenon for 從 initials, but citing Min as a dialect family for a sound change in Chinese dialects is incoherent since Min has undergone the least change and would of course not be subject to most claims about sound change in Chinese dialects. 禪 and 船 initials are a messy situation no doubt about it, but the vast majority of the time they are affricates in Southern Min, and there is therefore a decent probability that they were affricates in MC as well unless this is a later development with fricatives becoming affricates in Southern Min. Also, 磁 is ji in Japanese, surprised no one caught that. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 01:58, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Good observations. Avoid terming my usage of a Min example as "incoherent" because it "has undergone the least change" – that is yet another highly problematic characterization. Since you cite Southern Min twice later on, this may account for your characterization – you need to be extremely careful citing Southern Min as counterexamples for my earlier references to "Min dialects". That's a common problem, and it's reflected in a real world example: real progress on Min has only really taken off since Professor Norman (RIP) began his extensive work on Northern Min in the 1970's. Lastly, if you get some time consider exploring your last "unless this is a later development...." Check out Fuzhou and some Northern Min dialects (you can even look at some of the Hoisan 台山 Cantonese dialects). Happy Christmas/New Year to you as well!  White Whirlwind  咨  03:12, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have a question, but a little far-fetched (sorry for that). I remember in 韵图, 禅 is fricative and 船 is affricate. But many people think they should be the other way around. Is there consensus on this now?--Stellar-oscillation (talk) 04:59, 4 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is it not standard that Wikipedia articles be in the singular? Should this article not be named "Chinese character"? Curly Turkey (gobble) 07:32, 1 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]