Member 4017381 6-Feb-13 0:16 6-Feb-13 0:16 Hi Steve, Great article, I used your method to try to chanage font for a TextBox in a existing PDF, but PDF always gets updated withdefault fonts only. Is there any extra sateps which we have to take to update a existing PDF?
Main article: In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at sites in China, including (c. 6500 BC), and from the 6th millennium BC, and (5th millennium BC). Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years.
However, because these marks occur singly, without any implied context, and are made crudely and simply, concluded that 'we do not have any basis for stating that these constituted writing nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to Chinese characters.' They do however demonstrate a history of sign use in the valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period.
Oracle bone script. Ox scapula with oracle bone inscription The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions carved on from the late (c. 1200–1050 BC). In 1899, pieces of these bones were being sold as 'dragon bones' for medicinal purposes, when scholars identified the symbols on them as Chinese writing. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to a village near in, which was excavated by the between 1928 and 1937. Over 150,000 fragments have been found.
Oracle bone inscriptions are records of divinations performed in communication with royal ancestral spirits. The shortest are only a few characters long, while the longest are thirty to forty characters in length. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors on topics relating to the royal family, military success, weather forecasting, ritual sacrifices, and related topics by means of, and the answers would be recorded on the divination material itself. The is a well-developed writing system, suggesting that the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the late second millennium BC.
Although these divinatory inscriptions are the earliest surviving evidence of ancient Chinese writing, it is widely believed that writing was used for many other non-official purposes, but that the materials upon which non-divinatory writing was done – likely wood and bamboo – were less durable than bone and shell and have since decayed away. Bronze Age: parallel script forms and gradual evolution. Main article: The traditional picture of an orderly series of scripts, each one invented suddenly and then completely displacing the previous one, has been conclusively demonstrated to be fiction by the archaeological finds and scholarly research of the later 20th and early 21st centuries.
Gradual evolution and the coexistence of two or more scripts was more often the case. As early as the Shang dynasty, oracle-bone script coexisted as a simplified form alongside the normal script of books (preserved in typical ), as well as the extra-elaborate pictorial forms (often clan emblems) found on many bronzes. See also: The Chinese script spread to together with from the 2nd century BC to 5th century AD. The Japanese were adopted for recording the Japanese language from the 5th century AD.
Chinese characters were first used in Vietnam during the starting in 111 BC. They were used to write Classical Chinese and adapted around the 13th century to create the script to write Vietnamese. Currently, the only non-Chinese language outside of China that regularly uses Chinese characters is Japanese. Vietnam abandoned their use in the early 20th century in favour of a Latin-based script, and Korea in the late 20th century in favour of its homegrown script, although as Korea switched much more recently, many Koreans still learn them to read texts written before then, or in some cases to disambiguate homophones. Japanese. Main article: Chinese characters adapted to write words are known as. Opditracker update.
Chinese words borrowed into Japanese could be written with Chinese characters, while native Japanese words could also be written using the character(s) for a Chinese word of similar meaning. Most kanji have both the native (and often multi-syllabic) Japanese pronunciation, or the kun'yomi, and the (mono-syllabic) Chinese-based pronunciation, or the on'yomi. For example, the native Japanese word katana is written as 刀 in kanji, which uses the kanji's kun'yomi since the word is native to Japanese, while the Chinese loanword nihontō (meaning 'Japanese sword') is written as 日本刀, which uses the on'yomi of each character. While nowadays loanwords from non-Sinosphere languages are usually just written in, one of the two syllabary systems of Japanese, loanwords that were borrowed into Japanese before the Meiji Period were typically written with Chinese characters whose on'yomi had the same pronunciation as the loanword itself, words like Amerika (kanji: 亜米利加, katakana: アメリカ, meaning: America), karuta (kanji: 歌留多, 加留多, katakana: カルタ, meaning: card, letter), and tempura (kanji: 天婦羅, 天麩羅, katakana: テンプラ, meaning: tempura), although the meanings of the kanji used often had no relation to the words themselves. Kanji that are used to only represent the sounds of a word are called. While foreign loanwords in Japanese words are usually written only in kana, there are some words that normally use ateji to this day, like kurabu (ateji: 俱楽部, katakana: クラブ, meaning: club) and sushi (ateji: 寿司, katakana: スシ), which are done partially due to China's rapid economic growth and the increase of Chinese tourism in Japan.
Because there have been multiple layers of borrowing into Japanese, a single character may have several readings in Japanese. Written Japanese also includes a pair of known as, derived by simplifying Chinese characters selected to represent syllables of Japanese. The syllabaries differ because they sometimes selected different characters for a syllable, and because they used different strategies to reduce these characters for easy writing: the angular were obtained by selecting a part of each character, while were derived from the cursive forms of whole characters.
Modern Japanese writing uses a composite system, using kanji for, hiragana for inflexional endings and grammatical words, and katakana to transcribe non-Chinese loanwords as well as serve as a method to emphasize native words (similar to how italics are used in Romance languages). Main article: In times past, until the 15th century, in Korea, Literary Chinese was the dominant form of written communication prior to the creation of, the Korean alphabet. Metallica album zippy.
Much of the vocabulary, especially in the realms of science and sociology, comes directly from Chinese, comparable to Latin or Greek root words in European languages. However, due to the lack of tones in Modern Standard Korean, as the words were imported from Chinese, many dissimilar characters and syllables took on identical pronunciations, and subsequently identical spelling in hangul. Chinese characters are sometimes used to this day for either clarification in a practical manner, or to give a distinguished appearance, as knowledge of Chinese characters is considered by many Koreans a high class attribute and an indispensable part of a classical education. It is also observed that the preference for Chinese characters is treated as being conservative and Confucian. In Korea, have become a politically contentious issue, with some Koreans urging a 'purification' of the national language and culture by totally abandoning their use. These individuals encourage the exclusive use of the native hangul alphabet throughout Korean society and the end to character education in public schools.
In South Korea, educational policy on characters has swung back and forth, often swayed by education ministers' personal opinions. At present, middle and high school students (grades 7 to 12) are taught 1,800 characters, albeit with the principal focus on recognition, with the aim of achieving newspaper literacy. There is a clear trend toward the exclusive use of hangul in day-to-day South Korean society.
Hanja are still used to some extent, particularly in newspapers, weddings, place names and (although it is nowhere near the extent of kanji use in day-to-day Japanese society). Hanja is also extensively used in situations where ambiguity must be avoidedsuch as academic papers, high-level corporate reports, government documents, and newspapers; this is due to the large number of that have resulted from of Chinese words. The issue of ambiguity is the main hurdle in any effort to 'cleanse' the Korean language of Chinese characters.
Characters convey meaning visually, while alphabets convey guidance to pronunciation, which in turn hints at meaning. As an example, in Korean dictionaries, the phonetic entry for 기사 gisa yields more than 30 different entries. In the past, this ambiguity had been efficiently resolved by parenthetically displaying the associated hanja. While hanja is sometimes used for Sino-Korean vocabulary, native Korean words are rarely, if ever, written in hanja.
When learning how to write hanja, students are taught to memorize the native Korean pronunciation for the hanja's meaning and the Sino-Korean pronunciations (the pronunciation based on the Chinese pronunciation of the characters) for each hanja respectively so that students know what the syllable and meaning is for a particular hanja. For example, the name for the hanja 水 is 물 수 (mul-su) in which 물 (mul) is the native Korean pronunciation for 'water', while 수 (su) is the Sino-Korean pronunciation of the character.
The naming of hanja is similar to if 'water' were named 'water-aqua', 'horse-equus', or 'gold-aurum' based on a hybridization of both the English and the Latin names. Other examples include 사람 인 (saram-in) for 人 'person/people', 큰 대 (keun-dae) for 大 'big/large//great', 작을 소 (jakeul-so) for 小 'small/little', 아래 하 (arae-ha) for 下 'underneath/below/low', 아비 부 (abi-bu) for 父 'father', and 나라이름 한 (naraireum-han) for 韓 'Han/Korea'. In North Korea, the system was once completely banned since June 1949 due to fears of collapsed containment of the country; during the 1950s, had condemned all sorts of foreign languages (even the newly proposed ).
The ban continued into the 21st century. However, a textbook for university history departments containing 3,323 distinct characters was published in 1971. In the 1990s, school children were still expected to learn 2,000 characters (more than in South Korea or Japan). After, the second ruler of North Korea, died in December 2011, stepped up and began mandating the use of Hanja as a source of definition for the Korean language. Currently, it is said that North Korea teaches around 3,000 Hanja characters to North Korean students, and in some cases, the characters appear within advertisements and newspapers. However, it is also said that the authorities implore students not to use the characters in public.
Due to North Korea's strict isolationism, accurate reports about hanja use in North Korea are hard to obtain. Okinawan. Main article: Chinese characters are thought to have been first introduced to the in 1265 by a Japanese Buddhist monk. After the Okinawan kingdoms became tributaries of, especially the, was used in court documents, but was mostly used for popular writing and poetry. After Ryukyu became a vassal of Japan's, Chinese characters became more popular, as well as the use of. In modern Okinawan, which is labeled as a by the Japanese government, and hiragana are mostly used to write Okinawan, but Chinese characters are still used. Vietnamese.
Main articles:, and In the years after, the also instituted a series of orthographic reforms. Some characters were given simplified forms called ( 新字体, lit. 'new character forms'); the older forms were then labelled the ( 旧字体, lit. 'old character forms'). The number of characters in common use was restricted, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, first the 1850-character ( 当用漢字) list in 1945, the 1945-character ( 常用漢字) list in 1981, and a 2136-character reformed version of the jōyō kanji in 2010. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged. This was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals.
All Chinese Characters List
These are simply guidelines, hence many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, especially those used for personal and place names (for the latter, see )as well as for some common words such as 'dragon' ( 竜/龍, tatsu) in which both old and new forms of the kanji are both acceptable and widely known amongst native Japanese speakers. Southeast Asian Chinese communities. This section does not any. Unsourced material may be challenged and. (August 2012) underwent three successive rounds of character simplification. These resulted in some simplifications that differed from those used in.
It ultimately adopted the reforms of the People's Republic of China in their entirety as official, and has implemented them in the. However, unlike in China, personal names may still be registered in traditional characters. Started teaching a set of simplified characters at schools in 1981, which were also completely identical to the Mainland China simplifications.
Chinese newspapers in Malaysia are published in either set of characters, typically with the headlines in traditional Chinese while the body is in simplified Chinese. Although in both countries the use of simplified characters is universal among the younger Chinese generation, a large majority of the older Chinese literate generation still use the traditional characters. Chinese shop signs are also generally written in traditional characters.
In the, most Chinese schools and businesses still use the traditional characters and, owing from influence from the Republic of China (Taiwan) due to the shared heritage. Recently, however, more Chinese schools now use both simplified characters and. Peoplesoft report node definition page. Since most readers of Chinese newspapers in the Philippines belong to the older generation, they are still published largely using traditional characters. North America Public and private Chinese signage in the United States and Canada most often use Traditional Characters. There is some effort to get municipal governments to implement more simplified character signage due to recent immigration from Mainland China. Most community newspapers printed in North America are also printed in Traditional Characters. Comparisons of traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, and Japanese The following is a comparison of Chinese characters in the, a common standard used in Taiwan, the, the standard for Mainland Chinese characters, and the, the standard for Japanese.
Generally, the jōyō kanji are more similar to traditional Chinese characters than simplified Chinese characters are to traditional Chinese characters. 'Simplified' refers to having significant differences from the Taiwan standard, not necessarily being a newly created character or a newly performed substitution. The characters in the and the are also known as 'Traditional,' but are not shown. Chinese calligraphy of mixed styles written by (1051–1108 AD) poet.
For centuries, the Chinese literati were expected to master the art of calligraphy. The art of writing Chinese characters is called Chinese calligraphy. It is usually done with. In ancient China, Chinese calligraphy is one of the.
There is a minimalist set of rules of Chinese calligraphy. Every character from the Chinese scripts is built into a uniform shape by means of assigning it a geometric area in which the character must occur. Each character has a set number of brushstrokes; none must be added or taken away from the character to enhance it visually, lest the meaning be lost. Finally, strict regularity is not required, meaning the strokes may be accentuated for dramatic effect of individual style. Calligraphy was the means by which scholars could mark their thoughts and teachings for immortality, and as such, represent some of the more precious treasures that can be found from ancient China. Typography and design.
Main article: In Japanese there are 2,136 ( 常用漢字, lit. 'frequently used ') designated by the; these are taught during primary and secondary school. The list is a recommendation, not a restriction, and many characters missing from it are still in common use. One area where character usage is officially restricted is in names, which may contain only government-approved characters. Since the jōyō kanji list excludes many characters that have been used in personal and place names for generations, an additional list, referred to as the ( 人名用漢字, lit. 'kanji for use in personal names'), is published. It currently contains 983 characters.
Today, a well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3,500 kanji. The ( 日本漢字能力検定試験, Nihon Kanji Nōryoku Kentei Shiken or Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude) tests a speaker's ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the kanji kentei tests on approximately 6,000 kanji, though in practice few people attain (or need to attain) this level. Modern creation New characters can in principle be coined at any time, just as new words can be, but they may not be adopted. Significant historically recent coinages date to scientific terms of the 19th century. Specifically, Chinese coined new characters for chemical elements – see – which continue to be used and taught in schools in China and Taiwan.
In Japan, in the (specifically, late 19th century), new characters were coined for some (but not all) SI units, such as 粁 (米 'meter' + 千 'thousand, kilo-') for kilometer. These (Japanese-coinages) have found use in China as well – see for details.
While new characters can be easily coined by writing on paper, they are difficult to represent on a computer – they must generally be represented as a picture, rather than as text – which presents a significant barrier to their use or widespread adoption. Compare this with the use of symbols as names in 20th century musical albums such as (1971) and (1993); an album cover may potentially contain any graphics, but in writing and other computation these symbols are difficult to use.
Indexing Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for arranging Chinese characters in. The great majority of these schemes have appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly widespread use.
This is the system of (see for example, the 214 so-called ). Chinese character dictionaries often allow users to locate entries in several ways. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries of Chinese characters list characters in radical order: characters are grouped together by radical, and radicals containing fewer come before radicals containing more strokes. Under each radical, characters are listed by their total number of strokes. It is often also possible to search for characters by sound, using (in Chinese dictionaries), (in Taiwanese dictionaries), (in Japanese dictionaries) or (in Korean dictionaries). Most dictionaries also allow searches by total number of strokes, and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well.
For instance, to look up the character where the sound is not known, e.g., 松 (pine tree), the user first determines which part of the character is the radical (here 木), then counts the number of strokes in the radical (four), and turns to the radical index (usually located on the inside front or back cover of the dictionary). Under the number '4' for radical stroke count, the user locates 木, then turns to the page number listed, which is the start of the listing of all the characters containing this radical. This page will have a sub-index giving remainder stroke numbers (for the non-radical portions of characters) and page numbers. The right half of the character also contains four strokes, so the user locates the number 4, and turns to the page number given. From there, the user must scan the entries to locate the character he or she is seeking. Some dictionaries have a sub-index which lists every character containing each radical, and if the user knows the number of strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, he or she can locate the correct page directly. Another dictionary system is the, where characters are classified according to the shape of each of the four corners.
Most modern Chinese dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries sold to English speakers use the traditional radical-based character index in a section at the front, while the main body of the dictionary arranges the main character entries alphabetically according to their spelling. To find a character with unknown sound using one of these dictionaries, the reader finds the radical and stroke number of the character, as before, and locates the character in the radical index. The character's entry will have the character's pronunciation in pinyin written down; the reader then turns to the main dictionary section and looks up the pinyin spelling alphabetically. See also on on. Notes.
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Media/Culture. Regions. I was looking for list of characters to practice my writing and vocabulary. Most character practice books focus on beginners, and print only 4 or 5 characters per page. I wanted something to cover at least 2500 characters, use both simplified and traditional forms, and be in printed form (I try to minimize time looking at a screen).
I couldn't find a book that met this criteria. But, I looked at some frequency lists online, and found one I liked. His site seems to be down, but his original list is on a Harvard subpage. His original list has about 10 characters per page, and totals 156 pages. That's not ideal to print out.
So, I decided to create an. It's only 28 pages. I omitted the glosses for some characters that I felt I knew well. Some alternate meanings and pronunciations were also edited out. My goal was to have the most minimal gloss possible for each entry. I used KaiTi font for the characters (it looks more natural, as if handwritten), but SimSun and Times New Roman for glosses. Edit: For those on the mainland who don't have access to Google Docs, 's my abridged version mirrored on Baidu Cloud.
Feedback is welcome.
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