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Modern Chinese characters (traditional Chinese: 現代漢字; simplified Chinese: 现代汉字; pinyin: xiàndài hànzì) are the Chinese characters used in modern languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.^[1] Chinese characters are composed of components, which are in turn composed of strokes.^[2] The 100 most frequently-used characters cover (i.e., having an accumulated frequency of) over 40% of modern Chinese texts. The 1000 most frequently-used characters cover approximately 90% of the texts.^[3] 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.^[4][5]

Background

Historical development

Since maturing as a complete writing system, Chinese characters have had an uninterrupted history of development over more than 3,000 years, with stages including

• Oracle bone script,
• Bronze script,
• Seal script,
• Clerical script, and
• Regular script,

leading to the modern written forms,^[6] as illustrated by the development of character 馬; 'horse':

Historical evolution of the character 馬 'horse'

Oracle	Bronze	Seal		Clerical	Regular
		Large	Small		Traditional	Simplified

In 1980, Zhou Youguang, often considered to be the "father of pinyin", published a paper entitled "Introduction to the Studies of Modern Chinese Characters"—within, he detailed aspects of the numbers, orders, forms, sounds, meanings, and pedagogy regarding the modern characters.^[7] His paper was followed by Gao Jiaying's "A Brief Discussion on the Establishment of Modern Chinese Character Studies", ^[8] and other related writings on the subject.^[9] At least five textbooks have been published in this area.^{[10][4][5][11][12]}

Regional varietiesedit

Chinese characters were originally invented for writing the Chinese language, and were later employed for other East Asian languages, developing as part of a shared orthographic tradition. Among other places, for ordinary and historical purposes, simplified characters are primarily used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, along with kanji in Japan, hanja in Korea, and chữ Hán in Vietnam.^[1] For example, the traditional character 廣; 'wide', 'broad' has the simplified form 广 and the shinjitai kanji form 広.

Characteristicsedit

In contrast with the Latin alphabet used to write many languages, including English, Chinese characters have many divergent properties, including:^[13]

• There are tens of thousands of different characters,
• A character is in a two-dimensional block structure,
• A character may have dozens of strokes,
• In most cases, the character denotes a morpheme.^[14]
• Monosyllabic, normally one character is read as one syllable.^[15]
• Texts written in Chinese characters are intelligible to readers of different dialects and different dynasties.

Sourcesedit

Modern Chinese characters include:^[16]

• Received characters as standardized during the Ming, known as jiu zixing, accounting for about 75% of modern characters, e.g. 日; 'Sun', 月; 'Moon', 金; 'metal', 木; 'wood', 水; 'water', 火; 'fire', and 土; 'earth';
• Newly coined characters, about 2.7% of the total number, e.g. 氨; 'ammonia', 碘}; 'iodine', 乒乓; 'ping pong', 甭; 'do not', and 煲; 'pot';
• Repurposed ancient characters, with pronunciations and meanings differing from ancient ones, e.g. 她; 'she', and 旮 (used in 旮旯; 'corner');
• Simplified forms, often derived from variants already in common use, about 20%, e.g. 汉语; 漢語; 'Chinese language', 学习; 學習; 'study');
• Modern dialect characters, such as the Cantonese characters included in Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set.

Number and setsedit

Due to the dynamic development of languages, there is no definite number of modern Chinese characters. However a reasonable estimation can be made by a survey of the character sets of relevant standard lists and influential dictionaries in the countries and regions where Chinese characters are used.^[17]

Mainland Chinaedit

The important standards in the People's Republic of China include List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese (现代汉语常用字表), totalling 3,500 characters,^[18] and List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese (现代汉语通用字表 with 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters in the previous list).^[19] But the current standard is Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, which was released by the State Council in June 2013 to replace the previous two lists and some other standards. It includes 8,105 characters of the Simplified Chinese writing system, 3,500 as primary, 3,000 as secondary, and 1,605 as tertiary. In addition, there are 2,574 Traditional characters and 1,023 variants.^[20] And the character sets of Xinhua Zidian^[21] and Xiandai Hanyu Cidian,^[22] the most popular modern Chinese character dictionary and word dictionary. They each includes over 13,000 characters of Simplified characters, Traditional characters and some variants.

Taiwanedit

In Taiwan, there are the Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters with 4,808 characters, and the Chart of Standard Forms of Less-Than-Common National Characters (次常用國字標準字體表), with 6,341 common national characters. Both lists were released by the Ministry of Education, with a total of 11,149 characters of the Traditional Chinese writing system.

Hong Kongedit

In Hong Kong, there is the List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters for elementary and junior secondary education, totally 4,762 characters. This list was released by the Education Bureau, and is very influential in the educational circles. Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Modern_Chinese_characters
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