Interesting Facts about Chinese Writing

Mandarin is predicted to become the next lingua franca within 50 years or so. For some people doing business with China, learning the language is essential to success. China is the world’s most populous nation today with 1.3 billion people and counting. It has the world’s largest foreign currency reserves at about US$1.9 trillion aided in large part by huge merchandise trade surpluses and massive foreign direct investments to the country after its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Its growing clout in international financial affairs is highlighted by the first ever BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) meeting in Russia last week.

Chinese civilization is also the world’s longest continuously existing civilization. Its civilization is evidenced through its culture, religion, herbal medicine, acupuncture, feng shui (geomancy) and many other unique practices. The two unifying factors about China is its sense of destiny through its long history and its unique system of writing. The Chinese people do not think in terms of the Western Westphalian idea of a nation-state but of a wider concept of belonging to a civilized nation (Middle Kingdom) even today.

Writing is a true unifying factor because the different ethnic tribes can understand each other through a unified written language of which spoken Mandarin is the most dominant although there are some fourteen major language groups. Mandarin itself is composed of 50 sub-dialects but the single writing system allows people to communicate quite easily. The earliest Chinese writing was traced to around 1500 BC during the time of the Shang Dynasty and found inscribed on turtle shells called as oracle bones by the historians. Chinese is written as individual characters which were originally the representations or pictures of people, animals, events and things.

Classical Chinese writing was monosyllabic and written with a single character. This form is known as wenyan and prevailed until the early 20th century but this later on became stylized and no longer closely resembled things they were supposed to represent. The new form known as baihua is closely modeled on spoken Mandarin and is the form used by most publications such as books and newspapers. A vocabulary of about 3,000 characters is enough to get by in everyday life such as reading newspapers and magazines while mastery of some 6,000 characters is needed to truly appreciate Chinese literature and technical writings. However, Chinese writing is open-ended because new characters can be invented for new things and it is estimated a good dictionary contains 56,000 characters including the archaic, obscure or rarely used variants.

There are only twelve basic strokes to write Chinese characters but these can be combined to produce characters ranging up to 64 strokes for a single character alone. It is also important to write the characters on the same amount of square space which requires skill in calligraphy. Reading Chinese characters requires decoding what characters mean when taken together and also which characters belong together when placed side by side. The writing system allows for one character per verb or adjective but nouns often require two, three or more characters because the Chinese way of naming them is by description. Example, a computer has two characters instead, each representing electricity and brain.

Due to the complexity of learning and memorizing all the Chinese characters, it was decided to simplify about 2,000 words which is being used today in Singapore and parts of Southeast Asia where there are significant minorities of Chinese populations. The influence of Chinese writing can be found in Japanese and Korean writing even today. It was also once used to write Vietnamese in earlier periods of history.