Traditional Chinese | |
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Script type | |
Published | |
Direction |
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Official script | |
Languages | Chinese languages |
Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Oracle bone script
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Sister systems | |
ISO 15924 | |
ISO 15924 | Hant(502),Han (Traditional variant) |
Traditional Chinese characters | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Traditional Chinese | 正 體 字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 正 体 字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Literal meaning | Orthodox form characters | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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Alternative rendering | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Traditional Chinese | 繁 體 字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 繁 体 字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Literal meaning | Complex form characters | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to write Chinese languages. In Taiwan, the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in the Standard Form of National Characters . These forms were predominant in written Chinese until the middle of the 20th century, [1] [2] when various countries that use Chinese characters began standardizing simplified sets of characters, often with characters that existed before as well-known variants of the predominant forms. [3] [4]
Simplified characters as codified by the People's Republic of China are predominantly used in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore. "Traditional" as such is a retronym applied to non-simplified character sets in the wake of widespread use of simplified characters. Traditional characters are commonly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as in most overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia. [5] As for non-Chinese languages written using Chinese characters, Japanese kanji include many simplified characters known as shinjitai standardized after World War II, sometimes distinct from their simplified Chinese counterparts. Korean hanja, still used to a certain extent in South Korea, remain virtually identical to traditional characters, with variations between the two forms largely stylistic.
There is a long-running debate about traditional and simplified Chinese characters within and between Chinese communities. [6] [7] Because the simplifications are fairly systematic, it is possible to convert computer-encoded characters between the two sets, with the main issue being the merger of traditional characters into single simplified representations, which creates ambiguity when converting simplified characters to traditional characters. Many Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between these character sets. [8]
Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as 正體字; 正体字; zhèngtǐzì; 'orthodox characters'. [9] This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and traditional, from other variants and idiomatic characters. [10] Users of traditional characters elsewhere, as well as those using simplified characters, call traditional characters 繁體字; 繁体字; fántǐzì; 'complex characters', 老字; lǎozì; 'old characters', or 全體字; 全体字; quántǐzì; 'full characters' to distinguish them from simplified characters.
Some argue that since traditional characters are often the original standard forms, they should not be called 'complex'. Conversely, there is a common objection to the description of traditional characters as 'standard', due to them not being used by a large population of Chinese speakers. Additionally, as the process of Chinese character creation often made many characters more elaborate over time, there is sometimes a hesitation to characterize them as 'traditional'. [11]
Some people refer to traditional characters as 'proper characters' (正字; zhèngzì or 正寫; zhèngxiě) and to simplified characters as 簡筆字; 简笔字; jiǎnbǐzì; 'simplified-stroke characters' or 減筆字; 减笔字; jiǎnbǐzì; 'reduced-stroke characters', owing to the fact that the words for simplified and reduced are homophonous in Standard Chinese, both pronounced as jiǎn.
The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han dynasty c. 200 BCE, with the sets of forms and norms more or less stable since the Southern and Northern dynasties period c. the 5th century.
This article needs attention from an expert in China. The specific problem is: The differences between traditional characters as used in Taiwan versus in Hong Kong.(September 2023) |
In Hong Kong and Macau, traditional characters were retained during the colonial period, while the mainland adopted simplified characters. Simplified characters are contemporaneously used to accommodate immigrants and tourists, often from the mainland. [12] The increasing use of simplified characters has led to concern among residents regarding protecting what they see as their local heritage. [13] [14]
Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters. The use of simplified characters in government documents and educational settings is discouraged by the government of Taiwan. [15] [16] [17] [18] Nevertheless, with sufficient context simplified characters are likely to be successfully read by those used to traditional characters, especially given some previous exposure. Many simplified characters were previously variants that had long been in some use, with systematic stroke simplifications used in folk handwriting since antiquity. [19] [20]
Traditional characters were recognized as the official script in Singapore until 1969, when the government officially adopted Simplified characters. [21] Traditional characters still are widely used in contexts such as in baby and corporation names, advertisements, decorations, official documents and in newspapers. [8]
The Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative in Southeast Asia regarding simplification.[ citation needed ] Although major public universities teach in simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications such as the Chinese Commercial News , World News , and United Daily News all use traditional characters, as do some Hong Kong-based magazines such as Yazhou Zhoukan . The Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified characters. DVDs are usually subtitled using traditional characters, influenced by media from Taiwan as well as by the two countries sharing the same DVD region, 3.[ citation needed ]
With most having immigrated to the United States during the second half of the 19th century, Chinese Americans have long used traditional characters. When not providing both, US public notices and signage in Chinese are generally written in traditional characters, more often than in simplified characters. [22]
In the past, traditional Chinese was most often encoded on computers using the Big5 standard, which favored traditional characters. However, the ubiquitous Unicode standard gives equal weight to simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and has become by far the most popular encoding for Chinese-language text.
There are various input method editors (IMEs) available for the input of Chinese characters. Many characters, often dialectical variants, are encoded in Unicode but cannot be inputted using certain IMEs, with one example being the Shanghainese-language character U+20C8E𠲎CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-20C8E—a composition of 伐 with the ⼝ 'MOUTH' radical—used instead of the Standard Chinese 嗎; 吗.[ citation needed ]
Typefaces often use the initialism TC
to signify the use of traditional Chinese characters, as well as SC
for simplified Chinese characters. In addition, the Noto family of typefaces, for example, also provides separate fonts for the traditional character set used in Taiwan (TC
) and the set used in Hong Kong (HK
). [23]
Most Chinese-language webpages now use Unicode for their text. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends the use of the language tag zh-Hant
to specify webpage content written with traditional characters. [24]
In the Japanese writing system, kyujitai are traditional forms, which were simplified to create shinjitai for standardized Japanese use following World War II. Kyūjitai are mostly congruent with the traditional characters in Chinese, save for minor stylistic variation. Characters that are not included in the jōyō kanji list are generally recommended to be printed in their traditional forms, with a few exceptions. Additionally, there are kokuji , which are kanji wholly created in Japan, rather than originally being borrowed from China.
In the Korean writing system, hanja—replaced almost entirely by hangul in South Korea and totally replaced in North Korea—are mostly identical with their traditional counterparts, save minor stylistic variations. As with Japanese, there are autochthonous hanja, known as gukja .
Traditional Chinese characters are also used by non-Chinese ethnic groups. The Maniq people living in Thailand and Malaysia use Chinese characters to write the Kensiu language. [25] [26]
Several input methods allow the use of Chinese characters with computers. Most allow selection of characters based either on their pronunciation or their graphical shape. Phonetic input methods are easier to learn but are less efficient, while graphical methods allow faster input, but have a steep learning curve.
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, modern states using Chinese characters have standardised their forms and pronunciations: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a feature shared in common by written Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), Korean (hanja) and Vietnamese.
Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets widely used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters. Their mass standardization during the 20th century was part of an initiative by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to promote literacy, and their use in ordinary circumstances on the mainland has been encouraged by the Chinese government since the 1950s. They are the official forms used in mainland China and Singapore, while traditional characters are officially used in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.
In computing, Chinese character encodings can be used to represent text written in the CJK languages—Chinese, Japanese, Korean—and (rarely) obsolete Vietnamese, all of which use Chinese characters. Several general-purpose character encodings accommodate Chinese characters, and some of them were developed specifically for Chinese.
Stroke order is the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character are written. A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument on a writing surface.
GB/T 2312-1980 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. GB refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准), whereas the T suffix denotes a non-mandatory standard.
Ming or Song is a category of typefaces used to display Chinese characters, which are used in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. They are currently the most common style of type in print for Chinese and Japanese. For Japanese text, they are commonly called Mincho typefaces.
The Chinese Character Code for Information Interchange or CCCII is a character set developed by the Chinese Character Analysis Group in Taiwan. It was first published in 1980, and significantly expanded in 1982 and 1987.
Chinese characters may have several variant forms—visually distinct glyphs that represent the same underlying meaning and pronunciation. Variants of a given character are allographs of one another, and many are directly analogous to allographs present in the English alphabet, such as the double-storey ⟨a⟩ and single-storey ⟨ɑ⟩ variants of the letter "A", with the latter more commonly appearing in handwriting. Some contexts require usage of specific variants.
The debate on traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters is an ongoing dispute concerning Chinese orthography among users of Chinese characters. It has stirred up heated responses from supporters of both sides in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese communities with its implications of political ideology and cultural identity. Simplified characters here exclusively refer to those characters simplified by the People's Republic of China (PRC), instead of the concept of character simplification as a whole. The effect of simplified characters on the language remains controversial, decades after their introduction.
The Chinese family of scripts includes writing systems used to write various East Asian languages, that ultimately descend from the oracle bone script invented in the Yellow River valley during the Shang dynasty. These include written Chinese itself, as well as adaptations of it for other languages, such as Japanese kanji, Korean hanja, Vietnamese chữ Hán and chữ Nôm, Zhuang sawgun and sawndip, and Bai bowen. More divergent are Tangut, Khitan large script and its offspring Jurchen, as well as the Yi script, Sui script, and Geba syllabary, which were inspired by written Chinese but not descended directly from it. While written Chinese and many of its descendant scripts are logographic, others are phonetic, including the kana, Nüshu, and Lisu syllabaries, as well as the bopomofo semi-syllabary.
Radical 23 or radical hidingenclosure (匸部) is one of the 23 Kangxi radicals composed of two strokes.
Radical 63 or radical door (戶部) meaning "door" is one of the 34 Kangxi radicals composed of 4 strokes.
Radical 162 or radical walk (辵部) meaning "walk" is one of the 20 Kangxi radicals composed of 7 strokes. When used as a component, this radical character transforms into ⻍, ⻌, or ⻎.
Source Han Sans is a sans-serif gothic typeface family created by Adobe and Google. It is also released by Google under the Noto fonts project as Noto Sans CJK. The family includes seven weights, and supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It also includes Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters from the Source Sans family.
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 over 40% of modern Chinese texts. The 1000 most frequently-used characters cover approximately 90% of the texts. 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.
Chinese computational linguistics is the scientific study and information processing of the Chinese language by means of computers. The purpose is to obtain a better understanding of how the language works and to bring more convenience to language applications. The term Chinese computational linguistics is often employed interchangeably with Chinese information processing, though the former may sound more theoretical while the latter more technical.
A Chinese character set is a group of Chinese characters. Since the size of a set is the number of elements in it, an introduction to Chinese character sets will also introduce the Chinese character numbers in them.
若寫作測驗文章中出現簡體字,在評閱過程中可能被視為「錯別字」處理,但寫作測驗的評閱方式,並不會針對單一錯字扣分……然而,當簡體字影響閱讀理解時,文意的完整性亦可能受到影響,故考生應盡量避免書寫簡體字
The standard language for translation is Traditional Chinese