Modern Chinese characters
Modern Chinese characters are the Chinese characters used in modern languages, mostly in modern Chinese, and additionally in modern Japanese and Korean. Chinese characters are composed of components, which are in turn composed of strokes.
The 100 most frequently used characters cover over 40% of modern Chinese texts. The 1000 most frequently used characters cover approximately 90% of the texts.
There are a variety of novel aspects of modern Chinese characters, including that of orthography, phonology, and semantics, as well as matters of collation and organization and statistical analysis, computer processing, and pedagogy.
Background
Historical development
Since maturing as a complete writing system, Chinese characters have had an uninterrupted history of development over more than 3,000 years, with stages includingleading to the modern written forms, as illustrated by the development of character :
In 1980, Zhou Youguang, often considered to be the "father of pinyin", published a paper entitled "Introduction to the Studies of Modern Chinese Characters"—within, he detailed aspects of the numbers, orders, forms, sounds, meanings, and pedagogy regarding the modern characters. His paper was followed by Gao Jiaying's "A Brief Discussion on the Establishment of Modern Chinese Character Studies", and other related writings on the subject. At least five textbooks have been published in this area.
Regional varieties
Chinese characters were originally invented for writing the Chinese language, and were later employed for other East Asian languages, developing as part of a shared orthographic tradition. Among the application places, for ordinary and historical purposes, simplified characters are primarily used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, along with kanji in Japan, hanja in Korea, and chữ Hán in Vietnam. For example, the traditional character has the simplified form and the kanji form 広.Characteristics
In contrast with the Latin alphabet used to write many languages, including English, Chinese characters have many divergent properties, including:- being in a two-dimensional block structure
- potentially having dozens of strokes
- denoting a morpheme in most cases
- Normally one character is read as one syllable.
- Texts written in Chinese characters are intelligible to readers of different dialects and different dynasties.
Number and sets
Due to the dynamic development of languages, there is no definite number of modern Chinese characters. However a reasonable estimation can be made by a survey of the character sets of relevant standard lists and influential dictionaries in the countries and regions where Chinese characters are used.Mainland China
The standards in the People's Republic of China include the List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese, totalling 3,500 characters, and the List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese.The current standard is the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters, which was released by the State Council in June 2013 to replace the previous two lists and other standards. It includes 8,105 characters of the Simplified Chinese writing system, 3,500 as primary, 3,000 as secondary, and 1,605 as tertiary. In addition, there are 2,574 traditional characters and 1,023 variants.
The character sets of Xinhua Zidian and Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, the most popular modern Chinese character dictionary and word dictionary, each include over 13,000 characters of Simplified characters, Traditional characters and variants.
Taiwan
In Taiwan, the standard is the Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters with 4,808 characters, and the Chart of Standard Forms of Less-Than-Common National Characters, with 6,341 common national characters. Both lists were released by the Ministry of Education, with a total of 11,149 characters of the Traditional Chinese writing system.Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, the standard is the List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters for elementary and junior secondary education, totally 4,762 characters. The list was released by the Education Bureau, and is very influential in educational circles.Japan
In Japan, the standard is the —a list of 2,136 frequently used characters designated by the Japanese Ministry of Education, as well as 983 jinmeiyō kanji for use in personal names.Korea
In Korea, the standard is the Basic [Hanja for educational use], and the Table of Hanja for Personal Name Use, published by the Supreme Court of Korea in March 1991. The list expanded gradually, and to year 2015 there were 8,142 hanja permitted to be used in Korean names.Overall estimates
With consideration of all the character sets mentioned above, the total number of modern Chinese characters in the world is over 10,000, probably around 15,000. Such an estimation should not be counted as too rough, considering that there are totally over 90,000 Chinese characters in Unicode, and more if every Chinese character ever appeared in the world is to be included.A college graduate who is literate in written Chinese knows between three and four thousand characters. Specialists in classical literature or history, who would often encounter characters no longer in use, are estimated to have a working vocabulary of between 5,000 and 6,000 characters.
Frequency
Chinese character frequencies are calculated on data of corpora. A corpus is a collection of texts representative of one or more languages. The frequency of a character is the ratio of the number of its occurrences in the corpus to the total number of characters of the corpus. The formula for calculating frequency is"", where is the number of times a certain Chinese character appears in the corpus, and is the total number of characters in the corpus.
Origins
The first person to make a statistic study on the frequency of Chinese characters was Chen Heqin. In the 1920s, he and his assistants spent two years manually counting the characters in a corpus of 554,478 characters, and obtained 4,261 different characters with frequency information. They then compiled a book, Applied Lexis of Vernacular Chinese.The 10 most frequently used characters in their corpus are, by descending frequency,
, , , , , , , , , .
CUHK survey
In 2001, the Chinese University of Hong Kong published a number of frequency lists on their website, entitled "Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan Chinese Frequency: a Trans-regional Diachronic Survey". The frequency data came from a grand corpus with a number of sub-corpora representing the Chinese languages in the three regions of Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan and in the two time periods of the 1960s and 1980s–90s. Each sub-corpus includes about 5,000 different characters, as shown by their frequency lists.From the data of these frequency lists, some important and interesting features of Chinese can be discovered:
- , and are the three most frequently used characters across the regions and time periods of the corpora. is number one in all the frequency lists.
- The 10 most frequently used characters across the three regions and two time periods are very consistent. That means a frequently used character in one region or period is very likely to be frequently used in another region or period.
- The 100 most frequently used characters in the 80s and 90s cover 41.00% of the Hong Kong texts of that period, 41.34% of the mainland texts, and 41.88% of the Taiwan texts. That is more than 4 out of every 10 characters for the three regions.
- The 1000 most frequently used characters in the 80s and 90s cover 89.25% of the Hong Kong texts of that period, 90.26% of the mainland texts, and 88.74% of the Taiwan texts.
Chinese government survey
Large-scale surveys by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission of PRC over the years have shown that the use of Chinese characters and words has a strong distribution pattern. The number of characters used in modern Chinese has stayed stable at about 10,000 for a few years. The number of most frequently used characters with a coverage rate of 80%, 90%, and 99% is about 590, 960, and 2,400 respectively.Chinese character frequency is essential to quantitative research of Chinese characters and has been applied to language teaching, dictionary composition, character lists compilation, Chinese character information processing, etc.
Orders
The orders or sorting methods of Chinese dictionaries and other lists of text entries are traditionally divided into three categories: form-based orders, sound-based orders and meaning-based orders. In modern Chinese, people also use frequency orders.Form-based
In form-based ordering, characters and words are sorted according to various features of the forms or shapes of Chinese characters. Compared to sound-based orders, form-based orders have the advantages of allowing lookup of characters and words without knowing their pronunciations, as well as effective collation of large character sets without support from other sorting methods. There are two subcategories of form-based orders: stroke-based orders and component-based orders, which further includes radical-based orders, etc.Sound-based
There are two major sound representation systems for Standard Chinese: pinyin and bopomofo. Accordingly, there is a pinyin alphabetical order and a bopomofo-based order.Meaning-based
Meaning-based orders, also called semantics-based orders, arrange characters and words in a hierarchical structure of semantic categories.Frequency-based
Frequency-based ordering arranges Chinese characters by their frequency of uses, normally in descending order. That means the most frequently used character is at the top of the list.Orders of words
Chinese words consist of one or more characters. Single-character words can be sorted by a character order, and multi-character words can be sorted character by character in a similar way.Forms
Modern Chinese characters appear in the form of square blocks. There are three layers or levels of structural units of Chinese characters: strokes, components, and whole characters. For example, has two components, each of which is composed of three strokes:Strokes
Strokes are the smallest writing units of Chinese characters. When writing a Chinese character, the trace of a dot or a line left on the writing material from pen-down to pen-up is called a stroke. Stroke number is the number of strokes of a Chinese character. It varies, for example, characters and have only one stroke, while character has 36 strokes, and consists of 48 strokes.Stroke forms refer to the shapes of strokes. The stroke forms of a standard Chinese character set can be classified into a table, for instance, the Unicode CJK strokes list has 39 types of strokes:
Stroke order is the order in which strokes are written to form a Chinese character. For example, the stroke order of is.
Components
Chinese characters are composed of components, which are in turn composed of strokes. In most cases, a component is larger than a stroke and smaller than the whole character. For example, in character, there are two components, and, each with more than one stroke. In the special cases of one-stroke characters, such as and, a stroke is a component and is a character.Chinese character component analysis is to divide or separate a character into components.
There are two ways for Chinese character dividing, hierarchical dividing and plane dividing. Hierarchical dividing separates layer by layer from larger to smaller components to get the primitive components. Plane dividing separates out the primitive components all at once.
A component that can independently form a character is a character component, or a component of independent character formation. For example, component formed character independently, and is a component in characters, and. A component that can not independently form a character is a non-character component, or a component of dependent character formation. For example, component in character, and.
A component that cannot be divided into smaller components by the rules is called a primitive component or basic component. Primitive components are the final-level components of hierarchical dividing. For example, components and in character. A component composed of two or more primitive components is a compound component. For example, component in character, and.
Whole characters
'Whole characters' lie at the final level of the stroke–component–character composition.A non-decomposable character consists of one primitive component, which is directly formed by strokes and can not be decomposed into smaller components. A decomposable character can be broken down into multiple components.
The structure of a Chinese character is the pattern or rule in which the character is formed by its components. Chinese character structures include:
- Single-component structure : The character is formed by a single primitive component, such as, and.
- Left–right structure: The character is formed by a component on the left and another one on the right, such as, and.
- Up–down structure: The character is formed by a component above another component, such as, and.
- Surrounding structure: One component is completely or partially surrounded by another component, such as,,,,, and.
- Song or Ming,
- Fangsong,
- Regular script,
- Clerical script,
- Hei or "black" and
- Wei.
Chinese characters with the combination of "implication" and
"graphic".
Phonology
The standard pronunciation of Chinese characters is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Normally, a character is read with one syllable. Some Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation. Some syllables correspond to more than one character.Polyphonic characters
Polyphonic characters are characters with two or more pronunciations, as opposed to monophonic characters with only one. A polyphonic monosemous character has two or more pronunciations of the same meaning. For example, the English word 'ton' is transliterated as, with two pronunciations of and coexisting in some old dictionaries, both sharing the meaning of 'ton'. Since is both a character and a word, it is a polyphonic monosemous character, as well as a polyphonic monosemous word.In December 1985, the Chinese government published the Table of Mandarin Words with Variant Pronunciation to define the standard pronunciations for polyphonic monosemous characters. In Taiwan, there is a similar official standard for Mandarin words with variant sounds, where pronunciations are expressed in bopomofo instead of pinyin.
A polyphonic polysemous character has two or more pronunciations, and different pronunciations represent different meanings. For example, character is pronounced with the meaning of 'long', or with the meaning of 'grow'. The simplified character is pronounced as from traditional character or as from traditional character. The pronunciation of such characters is determined by the meaning intended.
Polyphonic polysemous characters may hinder the learning and application of Chinese characters and should be reduced. There are two main methods:
- Change pronunciation. A common approach is to change rare and sub-frequent sounds to more frequent readings and change ancient pronunciations to modern pronunciations.
- Change form. It means changing some sounds and meanings to be expressed by other characters.
Homophones
Homophonic characters are those sharing the same pronunciation, as opposed to heterophonic characters. Homophonic characters are either narrowly understood as having identical initials, finals, and tones, or more broadly as merely having identical initials and finals, with tones possibly differing. For example, are all pronounced, while,,,, are homophones only in the broader sense. Usually, people understand homophony in characters as referring to the narrow sense.Homophonic characters are widespread in Mandarin: there are around 1,300 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions—excluding tones, the number of different syllables drops to 400. Meanwhile, the written language has more than 10,000 characters, for an average of 7.5 characters mapped to each syllable.
Zhou Youguang introduced two ways homophones have been historically reduced:
- Differentiate character pronunciations without changing the word. For example: was originally pronounced, later changed to due to confusion with );
- Differentiate words and pronunciation. For example: was confused with , later the synonym began to be used instead.
Others
There are two systems for phonetic notation of Chinese characters.In pinyin, either diacritics or numbers may be used to mark tones. The Jyutping system for Cantonese uses numbers, e.g.
Kun'yomi are readings of kanji using native Japanese words mapped to the meanings of borrowed Chinese characters. Characters have also been borrowed with on'yomi readings with borrowed Sino-Japanese pronunciations. For example, when Chinese character was borrowed to Japan, people read it with either a native kun'yomi pronunciation of, or with a Sino-Japanese on'yomi pronunciation of. These phenomena also appear in Mandarin and English, such as i.e. being read aloud as 'that is'. Qiu Xigui called it ).
Semantics
In modern Chinese, a character may represent a word, a morpheme in a compound word, or alternatively a meaningless syllable combined with some other syllables or characters to form a morpheme. In a language, morphemes are the minimal units of meaning. Some characters have only one meaning, some have multiple meanings, and some characters largely share the same meaning.Monosemous and polysemous characters
A character with only one meaning is a monosemous character, and a character with two or more meanings is a polysemous character. According to statistics from the Chinese Character Information Dictionary, among the 7,785 mainland standard Chinese characters in the dictionary, there are 4,139 monosemous characters, 3,053 polysemous characters and 593 meaningless characters.The meaning people assigned to a character when it was created is the original meaning of the character. For example, the original meaning of is 'weapon' being held with both hands ).
The meaning developed from the original meaning of a character through association is the extended meaning. For example, is an extended meaning of.
The meaning added through the loan of homonymous sounds is the phonetic-loan meaning. For example, the original meaning of is 'dustpan': its use as a third-person pronoun is due to a phonetic loan.
Synonyms
Synonym characters are a group of characters that have the same or similar meaning. The characters in a synonym group often differ in frequency of use and word-formation ability, and there are some differences in meaning and emotional color. The knowledge of synonym characters will help students write Chinese more correctly and express meanings more accurately.Both and have the meaning of 'face', but there are some differences. Generally, is not used as an independent word in Mandarin, but only in multi-character compounds. For example,,,,. The in these words cannot be equivocated with. In contrast, can usually be used alone in Mandarin as its own word, as well as in compounds such as,,, and,. The in these words cannot be replaced by.
Meanings of characters and words
The meaning of a single-character word is its character meaning. The meaning of a multi-character word is generally derived from the meanings of the characters. The relationships between the meaning of a compound word and of its characters are categorized as follows:- Synonyms, such as word = =
- Synthetic meaning, such as = +
- Expanded meaning, such as = + +
- Partial meaning, for example = but not , = but not .
- Complementary meaning, for example is not + .
Internal structures
In the analysis of internal structures, Chinese characters are decomposed into internal structural components or pianpangs in relations with the sound and meaning of the characters.Traditional classification
In Shuowen Jiezi, Xu Shen proposed six categories of Chinese characters, including- Pictograms, single-semantic-component characters which are drawings of the objects they represent.
- Simple ideograms, express an abstract idea with an iconic form.
- Compound ideographs, combine two or more semantic components to indicate the meaning of the character.
- Phono-semantic characters, consist of phonetic components and semantic components.
- Derivative cognates, two characters had similar Old Chinese pronunciations and may have had the same etymological root.
- Rebus characters, are characters borrowed to write other morphemes with similar pronunciations.
Modern classification
The traditional liushu presupposed that every internal component can either represent the sound or meaning of the character. But, after the long evolution of Chinese writing systems, quite a few components can no longer effectively play the roles and have become pure form components. From the internal structure point of view, modern Chinese characters are composed of semantic components, phonetic components and pure form components. And they have formed seven categories of modern Chinese characters:Semantic component characters are composed of semantic components and include:
- Pictograms, such as , , .
- Simple ideograms, such as , , .
- Compound ideographs. For example, : together to take; : something with two ; : one follows another person; : from .
- Special methods, such as : turn to the opposite side; : taken away .
- Phonetic-loan, for example, character has been borrowed to mean 'spending'.
- Used in a transliterated foreign word, e.g. the characters in words and .
- Multi-phonetic component characters, for example, was originally a semantic-phonetic character, but its modern meaning of "new" has nothing to do with the original semantic component of , but the sounds are similar. In this way, then has two phonetic components: and .
For example:
- : The character in modern regular script is no longer round like the sun.
- : The traditional character is with an effective phonetic component.
- : Oracle resembled a deer.
- Left meaning and right sound, such as , , ;
- Right meaning and left sound, such as , , ;
- Upper meaning and lower sound: , and ;
- Lower meaning and upper sound: , , ;
- Outer meaning and inner sounds: , , , , ;
- Inner meaning and outer sound: , , .
Many of these characters were originally semantic-phonetic characters. Due to subsequent changes in the pronunciation of the phonetic components or the characters, the phonetic components could not effectively represent the pronunciation of the character and became pure form. For example:
- : used to have signific and phonetic , the phonetic component is no longer.
- : used to have semantic and phonetic . Now the upper component no longer looks like.
- , is a , but not read as .
- : Originally refers to a kind of beautiful jade, with semantic component . Later, it was borrowed to represent a ball, and then extended to any spherical object, and became a pure form component, while remains a phonetic component.
- : Originally refers to the inner white layer of bamboo, with semantic component and phonetic . Later, the character was borrowed by sound to mean 'stupid'.
- : This is a simplified character with phonetic , and pure form component.
For example,
- : originally had the signific ⿱ and phonetic . In modern Chinese, ⿱ is not a character or radical with a sound or meaning, but can still express meaning, while remains a pure form component.
- : semantic and phonetic . In modern Chinese characters, the right part has become a pure form component.
According to Yang, among the 3,500 frequently used Chinese characters of their experiment, semantic component characters are the least, accounting for about 5%; pure form component characters account for about 18%; Semantic–form and phonetic–form characters account for about 19%. The largest group is semantic-phonetic characters, accounting for about 58%.
Simplification
Methods
The methods to simplify Chinese characters includeOmitting
Omitting is to omit some components of the character, for example:- Omit one side, such as →, →, →, → ;
- Omit both sides, such as →, → ;
- Omit a corner, such as → → ;
- Keep a corner, such as →, →,
- Omit inside, such as →, → ;
- Omit outside, such as → ;
- Omit strokes, such as →, →, → ;
- Others, such as →, →, →, →.
Reshaping
Reshaping is to change forms based on the original characters. For example,- Change one or both components of a semantic-phonetic character, such as →, →, →, →.
- Change to semantic-phonetic characters, such as →, →, →.
- Change components of multi-semantic characters, such as: →, →.
- Change to multi-semantic characters, such as: →, →, →.
- Keep outline, such as: →, →, →, →, →, →, →, →, →.
- Symbolize components, such as: →, →, →, →, →.
- Simplify radicals, such as: → , → （... → ）, → .
- Others: →, →, →.
Replacing
Replacing the whole character with a character of similar sound. For example,- → , → , → , → ;
- → , and → .
Different views
It has been claimed that the general trend in the development of Chinese characters is simplification. However, recent research reported that modern Chinese characters are higher in visual complexity than their earliest known counterparts.Rationalization
The goal of Chinese character rationalization or Chinese character optimization is to, in addition to Chinese character simplification, optimize the Chinese characters and set up one standard form for each of them.Processing variant characters
Variant Chinese characters are characters with the same pronunciation and meaning but different forms, such as and. The existence of variant characters results in multiple forms for one character, which increases the burden of language learning and application. In the process of Chinese characters application, people need to constantly process variant characters and eliminate inappropriate ones.There are two different principles for processing variant characters: One is conforming to the customs and simplicity. The other is to follow the original form and meaning, based on the character creation method and etymology, especially the Shuowen Jiezi.
There are two methods for processing variant characters. The selecting method is to select one of the variant characters as the standard character and eliminate the rest. The splitting method is to differentiate a group of variant characters in terms of usage to eliminate the variant relationship.
In December 1955, the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Reform Commission of PRC jointly announced the "First List of Processed Variant Characters". After some later adjustments, the list now has 796 groups of variant characters, and 1,027 characters have been eliminated.
Processing printing fonts
In January 1965, the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Reform Commission of PRC jointly issued the General Chinese Character Forms for Printing. The Font Table contains 6,196 commonly used Song-style characters for printing. In accordance with the principles of simplicity and convenience for learning and use, a standard form was specified for each common character, including the number of strokes, structure and stroke order. After the Cultural Revolution, the Font Table was formally published. The character forms specified by it are now customarily called "new character forms", while the fonts used before were called "old character forms". The "New and Old Character Form Comparison Table" in many language reference books including Xinhua Dictionary and Xiandai Hanyu Dictionary are compiled and printed based on the Font Table.Current font standards include:
- In Mainland China, the standard is the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters, issued by the State Council on June 5, 2013. The characters are in font Song.
- In Taiwan, the standard is the Standard Form of National Characters. The characters are in regular script.
- The standard adopted by the Hong Kong education sector is the List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters. The characters were originally handwritten, then changed to font Kai.
- The list of jōyō kanji for Japan.
- The Kangxi Dictionary for Korea.
Names of places
In order to make place names easier to use, the Chinese government started to process the uncommon characters used in place names in 1950s.The principles for choosing replacement characters are:
- Same pronunciation and clear,
- More commonly used,
- Simple and easy to write,
- A standard character that is popular in the local area,
- Not to be confused with other place names.
- "" was changed to "",
- "" was changed to "",
- "" was changed to "".
Measurement words
When the English units of measurement were translated into Chinese, there were inconsistencies in the use of characters. For example:mile: or.
foot:,.
kilowatt:,.
Therefore, the burden of language application was increased. etc. are specially created characters, and they also have poly-syllable sounds, which does not follow the monosyllable pattern of Chinese characters. In order to solve these problems, in July 1977, the Chinese Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Measures of PRC jointly issued the "Notice on the Uniform Use of Characters in the Names of Some Measurement Units", establishing the metric system as the basic measurement system.
Education
Chinese character education is the teaching and learning of Chinese characters. When written Chinese appeared in social communication, Chinese character teaching came into being. From ancient times to the present, the teaching of Chinese characters has always been the focus of Chinese language education.Ancient education
In ancient times, research on Chinese character teaching focused on the preparation of various centralized literacy textbooks and dictionaries. Among them, the ones with greater impact include:- Southern and Northern Dynasties: Thousand Character Classic, written in regular script, 502–549 AC
- Song Dynasty: Hundred Family Surnames, regular script, 960–1279
- Song Dynasty: Three Character Classic, regular script, 13th century.
Modern native language education
Modern Chinese character education is an important component of primary education in China, and an important part of literacy teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.The method is to use high-frequency characters according to frequency statistics. The important character lists include:
- "List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese", 3,500 characters.
- List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters
- Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters , including 4,808 commonly used Chinese characters.
Foreign language education
In the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced to Korea, thereafter to Japan, Vietnam and other countries.By 1989, there were more than 100 colleges and universities teaching Chinese as a foreign language in China.
From 1990 to 1991, the National Leading Group for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and the Chinese Proficiency Test Center of Beijing Language Institute jointly developed the "". The Chinese character outline contains 2,905 characters, divided into four grades: 800 Grade A characters, 804 Grade B characters, 601 Grade C characters, and 700 Grade D characters. Among them, 2,485 are first-level frequently used characters in the "". Teaching Chinese characters as a foreign language has received more and more attention, and many textbooks and elective courses in this area have appeared. There are now more than 200 Confucius Institutes teaching Chinese as a foreign language in the world.
Information technology
Chinese character Information Technology is the technology of computer processing of Chinese characters.While the English writing system makes use of a few dozen different characters, Chinese language needs a much larger character set. There are over ten thousand characters in the Xinhua Dictionary. In the Unicode multilingual character set of 149,813 characters, 98,682 are Chinese.
Chinese character input
Sound-based encoding is normally based on an existing Latin character scheme for Chinese phonetics, such as the pinyin Scheme for Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua, and the Jyutping Scheme for the Cantonese dialect. The input code of a Chinese character is its pinyin letter string followed by an optional number representing the tone. For example, the Putonghua Pinyin input code of 香港 is "xianggang" or "xiang1gang3", and the Cantonese Jyutping code is "hoenggong" or "hoeng1gong2", all of which can be easily input via an English keyboard.A Chinese character can alternatively be input by form-based encoding. Most Chinese characters can be divided into a sequence of components in writing order.
There are a few hundred basic components, much less than the number of characters. By representing each component with an English letter and putting them in writing order of the character, the input method creator can get a letter string ready to be used as an input code on the English keyboard. Of course the creator can also design a rule to select representative letters from the string if it is too long. For example, in the Cangjie input method, character 疆 is encoded as "NGMWM" corresponding to components "弓土一田一", with some components omitted.
Popular form-based encoding methods include Wubi in the Mainland and Cangjie in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The most important feature of intelligent input is the application of contextual constraints for candidate character selection. For example, on Microsoft Pinyin, when the user types input code "daxuejiaoshou", he/she will get "大学教授 / 大學教授", when types "daxuepiaopiao" the computer will suggest "大雪飘飘 / 大雪飄飄". Though the non-toned Pinyin letters of 大学 and 大雪 are both "daxue", the computer can make a reasonable selection based on the subsequent words.
Chinese character encoding for information interchange
Inside the computer or mobile phone each character is represented by an internal code. When a character is sent between two computers or other digital devices, it is in information interchange code. Nowadays, information interchange codes, such as ASCII and Unicode, are often directly employed as internal codes.The first GB Chinese character encoding standard is GB2312, which was released by the PRC in 1980. It includes 6,763 Chinese characters, with 3,755 frequently used ones sorted by Pinyin, and the rest by radicals. GB2312 was designed for simplified Chinese characters. Traditional characters which have been simplified are not covered. The code of a character is represented by a two-byte hexadecimal number, for instance, the GB codes of 香港 are CFE3 and B8DB respectively. GB2312 is still in use on some computers and the WWW, though newer versions with extended character sets, such as GB13000.1 and GB18030, have been released.
The latest version of GB encoding is GB18030, which supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and is consistent with the Unicode character set.
The standard of Big5 encoding was designed by five big IT companies in Taiwan in the early 1980s, and has been the de facto standard for representing traditional Chinese in computers ever since. Big5 is popularly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
The original Big5 standard included 13,053 Chinese characters, with no simplified characters of the Mainland. Each character is encoded with a two byte hexadecimal code, for example, 香 港 龍. Chinese characters in the Big5 character set are arranged in radical order.
Extended versions of Big5 include Big-5E and Big5-2003, which include some simplified characters and Hong Kong Cantonese characters.
The full version of the Unicode standard represents a character with a 4-byte digital code, providing a huge encoding space to cover all characters of all languages in the world. The Basic Multilingual Plane is a 2-byte kernel version of Unicode with 65,536 code points for important characters of many languages. There are 27,522 characters in the CJKV Ideographs Area, including all the simplified and traditional Chinese characters in GB2312 and Big5 traditional. In Unicode 15.0, there is a multilingual character set of 149,813 characters, among which overs 98,682 are Chinese sorted by Kangxi Radicals.
Chinese character output
Like English and other languages, Chinese characters are output on printers and screens in different fonts and styles. The most popular Chinese fonts are the Song, Kai, Hei and Fangsong families.Fonts appear in different sizes. In addition to the international measurement system of points, Chinese characters are also measured by size numbers invented by an American for Chinese printing in 1859.