Talk:Chinese characters

History split

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)

Rare and Complex Characters

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)

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^contact 14:12, February 29, 2012 (UTC) ()

Chinese character amnesia

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘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)

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)

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

Hanzi neurologically distinct

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)

Which encoding?

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)

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)

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

Proposal to merge Chinese family of scripts into Chinese character

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)

• 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)
  • 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)
    • 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)

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)

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

• 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)

• 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)
  • 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)

• 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)

Appraisal and criticism

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)

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)

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)

"some single characters can represent polysyllabic words" in the lead

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)

""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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Brain lateralisation in the processing of Chinese characters?

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

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)

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)

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 (Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company) 25 (1): 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. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811903000156. 
• 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. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811903007687. 

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)

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)

Recent edits to the lead

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)

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)

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

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)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ (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)

silly paragraph

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. 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.

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)