|
Font: Chinese (Traditional)
Info on Script |
Font Samples
As one of the oldest scripts known to humankind, Chinese boasts a history of several thousand years. Naturally, such a long period involves many changes and developments. The modern form of Chinese script can be traced back to around 100 AD, coinciding with Xu Shan's writing of the first lexicon of the Chinese language. Comprising of about 9500 characters, this lexicon is the first historical attempt to analyze the form and structure of Chinese writing.
Chinese writing is often described as ideographic or pictographic. Many people ascribe to the myth that every Chinese character is a simplified picture of an object or a concept. If that were true, the task of learning to read Chinese would take a lifetime. In reality, Chinese script is a complex hybrid of ideograms, pictograms and semantic and phonetic components. All Chinese characters can be categorized into 5 main groups:
1. Pictograms
While certain Chinese characters descended from ancient drawings of everyday objects, their modern form has long been simplified and standardized. Usually, a trace of the pictorial element can still be seen in the character, but it is most commonly an abstract representation. There are only a few hundred pictographic characters in the Chinese repertoire. In relation to the tens of thousands of Chinese characters, pictographs are a small minority.
2. Ideograms
As the name implies, ideograms represent ideas or abstract concepts. For example, certain ideograms stand for concepts such as 'above' and 'below' or basic enumeration such as 'three' or 'four'.
3. Compound Ideograms The meaning of compound ideograms is inferred from the combination of its base parts. For example, the character for 'honest' is composed of two other characters, those for 'man' and 'word'. The symbol for 'sit' is made up of the character for 'man' placed over that for 'earth'.
4. Phonetic Loan Characters
In a rebus-like manner, loan characters borrow the phonetic value of a like-sounding character while disregarding its meaning.
5. Semantic-Phonetic Compounds Put as simply as possible, semantic-phonetic compounds combine two elements into one, taking the meaning from one and the phonetics from the other. Each of these parts can appear on its own as an independent character. For example, the character for 'sugar' combines a semantic classifier which means 'cereal' with the phonetic component [tang] which, on its own, could refer to the Tang dynasty. This last group of characters, the semantic-phonetic compounds, make up 90% of all Chinese symbols. It also makes possible the perpetual creation of new symbols. There are 8 basic strokes which are considered the basic elements for all Chinese characters. Each character is made up of one or more strokes which must be drawn in a particular sequence. Regardless of the number of constituent strokes, each character is drawn within the confines of an invisible square frame. Groups of strokes (or radicals) are used as the building blocks of all complex characters. Essential for locating words in Chinese dictionaries, 214 radicals are recognized in modern classification. Since the end of the 19th century, there has been a movement to simplify Chinese script. During the 1950s and 60s, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) instated a standard for a comprehensive simplification of the script. As a result, there are now two parallel schemes for Chinese script: Simplified and Traditional. The PRC, as well as Singapore, uses Simplified script, while Taiwan and the Chinese community worldwide use the Traditional script. It is estimated that about one-fourth of the world's population uses Chinese script.
|
