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The story of Chinese

Most linguists agree (and this is their only way of explaining the phenomenon) that writing was invented in China in the second half of the second millennium BC. The first attested examples of written Chinese — oracular pronouncements used for divination purposes — date back to the period between 1500 and 950 BC (Shang Dynasty) and were written on bones, scapulae and tortoise shells.

 Chinese archaeologists have recently unearthed several fragments of neolithic pottery, the oldest of which dates back to 4800 BC. It contains symbols which can be compared to a form of writing. None of these symbols resembles Shang characters and the insufficient quantity of pieces found makes it difficult to decipher the script.

Chinese uses characters known as 'hanzi', which began as representations of humans or animals, but became more abstract down the centuries, and now no longer resemble the phenomena they represent.

 

Until the beginning of the 20th century, classical Chinese was the most widely used script in China. It was standardised at the end of the Han Dynasty (25-200 BC) and was also used in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, before these three countries developed their own scripts (although Japanese is still heavily influenced by Chinese — see article on Japanese script).

 In classical Chinese, most words were monosyllabic and written with a single character. The 1920s witnessed the emergence of a new form of writing based on spoken Mandarin and most Chinese publications since then have used this script. However, certain set phrases, such as proverbs, are still written in classical Chinese.

In spoken Chinese, words can contain one or several syllables,  each of which is written with a single character. Although many characters can be combined to form words, each has its own meaning.

Chinese script is an open system. While the most comprehensive Chinese dictionaries list 56,000 characters, most of these are archaic, rather vague or very little used. A knowledge of 3,000 characters is enough to read 99% of the characters used in Chinese newspapers or magazines. To read Chinese literature, technical works or classical Chinese, on the other hand, you need to know 6,000 characters.

 

There are around 1,700 possible syllables in Mandarin (English has 8,000), and so Chinese has a large number of homophones. To distinguish them, a different character is used for each syllable. The same character can therefore be pronounced in different ways depending on the context and the combination of surrounding syllables.

Simplified and traditional Chinese are two varieties of Chinese script. While they share a common grammatical structure, the two systems are not interchangeable, for cultural and historic reasons.

Traditional Chinese has around 13,000 characters, some of which are extremely complex. The complexity of this script was a major cause of the widespread illiteracy which beset China for many years; in order to improve literacy levels, the simplified script was therefore decreed official in 1949. This simplified system contains only 8,000 characters and is also used in Singapore.

Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Malaysia, on the other hand, continue to use traditional characters.

Depending on the target audience for your Chinese translation, you will therefore need to choose your target language carefully (traditional/simplified Chinese).

 

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