characters

Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. 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. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.
The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions dating to the 13th century BCE, which were made as part of divinations practised by the Shang dynasty royal house in what is now Anyang, Henan. Their style was originally pictographic, but gradually evolved over time as their use spread across China. Numerous attempts were made by the state to reform the script, including the promotion of the small seal script during the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Clerical script, which had matured by the early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), abstracted character forms and obscured their pictographic origins in favour of ease of writing. Regular script emerged following the Han as the result of cursive influence on clerical script, and has been the primary style used for characters since. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, modern states using Chinese characters have standardised their forms: 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.
After being introduced to other countries in order to write Literary Chinese, characters were eventually adapted to write the local languages spoken throughout the Sinosphere. In Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, Chinese characters are known as kanji, hanja, and chữ Hán respectively. Each of these countries used existing characters to write both native and Sino-Xenic vocabulary, and created new characters for their own use. These languages each function differently from Chinese, which contributed to Korean and Vietnamese largely replacing Chinese characters with alphabets, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written with Chinese characters.
At the most basic level, characters are composed of strokes that are written according to a conventional order. Methods of writing have historically included characters being carved into stone, being inked with a brush onto silk, bamboo, or paper, and being printed using movable type. Modern information technologies have been adapted for characters, including the introduction of input methods and text encodings for use with computers.

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