In each historical case, this was accomplished by some form of the rebus technique, where the symbol for a word is used to indicate a different word with a similar pronunciation, depending on context. The severe limitations of this system compelled an innovation which allowed spoken language to be encoded directly in the written symbols. Due to this process of abstraction, as well as to make characters easier to write, pictographs gradually became more simplified and regularized-often to the extent that the original objects represented are no longer obvious. Firstly, pictographs became distinct from simple pictures in use and appearance: for example, the pictograph 大, meaning 'large', was originally a picture of a large man, but one would need to be aware of its specific meaning in order to interpret the sequence 大鹿 as signifying 'large deer', rather than being a picture of a large man and a deer next to one another. Qiu notes various innovations that were required for Chinese characters to emerge from proto-writing.

These systems are classified as proto-writing, because the techniques they used were insufficient to carry the meaning of spoken language by themselves. Ideographs could either be pictographs visually depicting objects or concepts, or fixed signs representing concepts only by shared convention. According to Qiu Xigui, in each instance writing evolved from a system using two distinct types of ideographs. Most characters are made of smaller components that may provide information regarding the character's meaning or pronunciation.Ĭhinese characters are accepted as representing one of four independent inventions of writing in human history. Characters are not ideographic, as they correspond to spoken morphemes, but not to the abstracted ideas themselves. In Chinese, morphemes are usually single syllables, characters may represent multi-syllable words when writing other languages. Writing systems that function this way are known as logographies. Unlike in alphabets, where letters correspond to a language's units of sound, called phonemes-Chinese characters correspond to morphemes, a language's smallest units of meaning. This has contributed to Chinese characters largely being replaced with alphabets in Korean and Vietnamese, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written with Chinese characters. These languages each belong to separate language families, and generally function differently from Chinese. Each of these countries used existing characters to write both native and Sino-Xenic vocabulary, and created new characters for their own use. In Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, Chinese characters are known as kanji, hanja, and chữ Hán respectively.

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.Īfter being introduced in order to write Literary Chinese, characters were later adapted to write the languages spoken in other countries throughout the Sinosphere. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. 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.

Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture.

Pictorial calligraphy examples