Chinese writing

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Chinese writing August 17, 2012

Chinese writing has truly ancient roots. Most of the Chinese characters are dated back to Shang Dynasty around 1200 to 1050 BCE. It is been said that the creation of Chinese characters started some centuries earlier. And after a lot of evolution Chinese characters came to its present form. It is a very complex language and literacy requires a person to memorize about 3,000 to 4,000 Chinese characters.

Commonly it is believed that all Chinese dialects are mutually clear and logical is a false belief. Some characters might be present in the different Chinese varieties yet they are different in their meanings. Chinese doesn’t consist of alphabets as an alternative the characters portray abstract thinking or represent an object. Showmen Jazz is considered the first most developed form of Chinese language that combined two or more characters together. Chinese character is written in such a way that it fits into a square. If the character is long then it is condensed to fit in a square. Usually the characters are not linked together unlike English alphabets that can be joined.
Chinese writing has been inspired a lot by their western equivalent. Traditionally Chinese is written in vertical columns but modern times, brought a change into it. Now the English language or the western form has inspired the Chinese language from right to left and top to bottom, which is followed in China. Moreover, Chinese writing has started to use punctuation marks, which were not used in the earlier times. Clearly their western counterparts also inspire this.
If we to date Chinese writing, it is one of the ancient writing system that is still in practice. Some of the early characters can still be found in today’s Chinese. In the Shang Dynasty, Chinese writing was found on bones and turtle shells.
Later on it evolved and slowly and gradually it became regular script. The regular script was developed in the last. It was further simplified by cutting the strokes in order to make it easier and faster to write and remember. Hayne pinyin was developed officially in China. Hayne Pinyin uses Latin Alphabets to portray the sounds of Mandarin Chinese for pronunciation. It is especially helpful for those who cannot read Chinese characters and are not familiar to them. Today Simplified Chinese is the standard that is used in Singapore, Malaysia, and China. By far Mandarin, is the most spoken and written dialect in Chinese due to its population and geography.
By far you would have understood that chinese writing is not based on alphabets, that’s why dictionaries are hard to make, order and it is impossible to list the characters in a dictionary. This led to other ways to index the character according to the strokes they contain. But now with the era of computer and as everything is shifting to computer, computerized dictionaries are introduced, making it easier for the people to use them. No one can directly look for Chinese characters in them.