4.2: The form of characters

Characters are the primary unit for writing Chinese. Just as English letters may have several forms (eg g /g, a/a) and styles (eg italic), so Chinese characters also have various realizations. Some styles that developed in early historical periods survive to this day in special functions. Seals, for example, are still often inscribed in the ‘seal script’, first developed during the Qin dynasty (3rd C. BCE). Other impressionistic, running scripts, developed by calligraphers, are still used in handwriting and art. Advertisements and shop signs may stretch or contort graphs for their own design purposes. Manga style comics animate onomatopoeic characters – characters that represent sound – in idiosyncratic ways. Putting such variants aside, it is estimated that the number of characters appearing in modern texts is about 6-7000 (cf. Hannas 1997, pp 130-33, and particularly table 3). Though it is far fewer than the number cited in the largest historical dictionaries, which include characters from all historical periods, it is still a disturbingly large number.

Radicals and phonetics

There are ameliorating factors that make the Chinese writing system more learnable than it might otherwise be. One of the most significant is the fact that characters have elements in common; not just a selection of strokes, but also larger constituents. Between 2/3 and ¾ of common characters (cf. DeFrancis 1984, p. 110 and passim) consist of two elements, both of which can also stand alone as characters in their own right. Historically, these elements are either roots, in which case they are called ‘phonetics’, or classifiers, in which case they are called (paradoxically) ‘radicals’. Thus, 忘 wàng ‘forget’ contains 亡 as phonetic and 心 as classifier; 語 yǔ ‘language’ has 吾 and 言. The significance of the terms phonetic and classifier will be discussed in a later unit. For now, it is enough to know that the basic graphs are components of a large number of compound graphs: 亡 appears in 忙 and 氓, for example; 心 in 志 and 忠; 言 in 謝 and 說; 吾 in 悟 and 晤. Even this set of component graphs numbers in the high hundreds, but familiarity with them allows many characters to be learned as a pairing of higher order constituents rather than a composite of strokes.

Simplified characters

Chinese policy makers have also tried to make the writing system more learnable by introducing the Chinese equivalent of spelling reform, which takes the form of reducing the number of strokes in complicated characters: 國 becomes 国; 邊 becomes 边. The two sets are usually called ‘traditional’ and ‘simplified’ in English, fántǐzì (‘complicatedbody-characters’) and jiǎntǐzì (‘simple-body-characters’) in Chinese.

For almost 2000 years in China, serious genres of writing were written in the kǎishū script (‘model writing’) that first appeared in the early centuries of the first millennium. In the 1950s, the Mainland government, seeking to increase literacy, formalized a set of simplified characters to replace many of the more complicated of the traditional forms. Many of these simplified characters were based on calligraphic and other styles in earlier use; but others were novel graphs that followed traditional patterns of character creation.

For the learner, this simplification is a mixed blessing – and possibly no blessing at all. For while it ostensibly makes writing characters simpler, it also made them less redundant for reading: 樂 and 東 (used to write the words for ‘music’ and ‘east’, respectively) are quite distinct in the traditional set; but their simplified versions, 乐 and 东, are easy to confuse. Moreover, Chinese communities did not all agree on the new reforms. The simplified set, along with horizontal writing, was officially adopted by the PRC in the late 1950s and (for most purposes) by Singapore in the 1960s. But Taiwan, most overseas Chinese communities and, until its return to the PRC, Hong Kong, retained the traditional set of characters as their standard, along with vertical writing.

Jiǎntǐzì and fántǐzì should not be thought of as two writing systems, for not only are there many characters with only one form (也 yě, 很 hěn, 好 hǎo, etc), but of those that have two forms, the vast majority exhibit only minor, regular differences, eg: 说/說, 饭/飯. What remain are perhaps 3 dozen relatively common characters with distinctively divergent forms, such as: 这/這, 买/買. Careful inspection reveals that even they often have elements in common. For native Chinese readers, the two systems represent only a minor inconvenience, rather like the difference between capital and small letters in the Roman alphabet, though on a larger scale. Learners generally focus on one system for writing, but soon get used to reading in both.