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The development of Chinese characters

The development of Chinese characters. Facts. Capital and Major Cities: Capital: Beijing, population 11 million. Major Cities: Shanghai, population 15 million. Shenzhen, population 12 million. Guangzhou, population 7 million. Hong Kong, population 7 million. Government:

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The development of Chinese characters

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  1. The development of Chinese characters

  2. Facts • Capital and Major Cities: • Capital: • Beijing, population 11 million. • Major Cities: • Shanghai, population 15 million. • Shenzhen, population 12 million. • Guangzhou, population 7 million. • Hong Kong, population 7 million.

  3. Government: • The People's Republic of China is a socialist republic ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of China. • The official language of the PRC is Mandarin, a tonal language in the Sino-Tibetan family. Within China • Population: • China has the largest population of any country on Earth, with more than 1.35 billion people.

  4. Over the past 25 years, China has had the fastest-growing major economy in the world • since the 1970s the PRC has remade its economy into a capitalist powerhouse.

  5. Chinese characters can be dated back to about 5,000 years that carved by the ancients of the Shang Dynasty. • Cangjie created the earliest written characters.

  6. The earliest forms of Chinese written characters is pictographs but only a couple hundred are actual pictographs. • It is the earliest method by which Chinese characters were designed and from which the other methods were subsequently.

  7. Oracle Bone Inscriptions • Oracle bone inscriptions, the earliest Chinese writing scripts, are the ancient Chinese characters carved on toroise shells and animal scapulas.

  8. Chinese Dialect Groups • There are seven dialect groups in China. • Mandarin- 70% of population in China. Language spoken by government officials. • Putonghua, hanzi, zhong wen, hua wen, hua ye, beijing hua, guo yu.

  9. Sound system • Four tones • Pinyin in PRC • National phonetic alphabet in ROC

  10. Grammar • Use of word order and auxiliary words to indicate grammatical relations. • 你好吗？ • 你是谁？

  11. Number of Characters • Chinese dictionary has 49,888 characters • Simplied character has about 6502 characters. • A person needs to only master about 3,000- 4,000 characters or reading a newspaper. • 1,500 to 2,000 characters for daily life usage.

  12. What are simplified characters? • In 1949, after the revolution, the new government considered eliminating character in favor of an alphabet, but decided instead to simplify many of the characters. • The emphasis in all these cases was on reducing the number of strokes. It was politicized. • The simplify characters are now used in China and Singapore. • Taiwan, Hong Kong are most overseas Chinese communities continue to use the traditional forms.

  13. Direction for reading Chinese characters • Traditionally Chinese characters were written vertically in columns with columns written from right to left. This is still the most common method. • In China most writing is now the same as in English. • Japan and Korea has adapted Chinese characters.

  14. What are radicals? • Chinese dictionaries arrange characters according to radicals. A term which is usually translated as radical. • The number of radical used in dictionaries from mainland China has recently been further reduced to 178.

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