Bahasa Tionghoa tertulis
Bahasa Tionghoa Tertulis
Bahasa Tionghoa tertulis menggunakan aksara-aksara [Han]] (漢字/汉字 pinyin hànzì), yang dinamakan dari kebudayaan Han yang merupakan sumber dari bahasa ini. Huruf Tionghoa sepertinya berasal dari dinasti Shang sebagai piktogram yang menggambarkan benda nyata. Contoh-contoh pertama dari huruf Tionghoa adalah tulisan/gambaran pada tulang ramalan (oracle bones), yang kadang-kadang berupa domba scapula tetapi seringkali berupa kura-kura plastron yang digunakan untuk meramal. Dalam periode zaman dinasti Zhou dan Han, huruf-huruf ini berubah menjadi lebih bergaya. Selain itu, terdapat juga komponen-komponen tambahan yang ditambahkan sehingga banyak karakter huruf memiliki satu elemen yang memberikan tanda (atau dulunya memberikan tanda) untuk pengejaan, dan sebuah komponen lain (yang disebut "radikal") memberikan tanda untuk kategori artian umum yang menunjukkan arti dari kata tersebut. Di dalam bahasa Tionghoa modern, mayoritas huruf-huruf berbasis fonetik (bunyi) dan bukan berbasis logografik (gambaran). Sebagai sebuah contoh, karakter huruf 按 àn yang berarti "mendorong ke bawah", mengandung 安 an (damai), yang berfungsi sebagai komponen fonetik dari kata tersebut, dan 手 shǒu (tangan), yang menandakan bahwa itu merupakan suatu pekerjaan yang pada umumnya menggunakan tangan.
Many styles of Chinese calligraphic writing developed over the centuries, such as zhuanshu (篆書, seal-script), caoshu (草書, grass script), lishu (隸書, official script) and kaishu (楷書, standard script).
In Japan and Korea, Han characters were adopted and integrated into their languages and became Kanji and Hanja, respectively. Japan still uses Kanji as an integral part of its writing system; however, Korea's use of Hanja has diminished (it is not used at all in North Korea).
In the field of software and communications internationalization, CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and the rarer CJKV a collective term for the same plus Vietnamese, all of which are double-byte languages, as they have more than 256 characters in their "alphabet". The computerized processing of Chinese characters involves some special issues both in input and character encoding schemes, as the standard 100+ key keyboards of today's computers don't allow input of that many characters with a single key-press.
The Chinese writing system is mostly logographic, i.e., each character expresses a monosyllabic word part, also known as a morpheme. This is helped by the fact that 90%+ of Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic. The majority of modern words, however, are multisyllable and multigraphic. Multisyllabic words have a separate logogram for each syllable. Some, but not all, Han characters are ideographs, but most Han Chinese characters have forms that were based on their pronunciation rather than their meanings, so they do not directly express ideas.
Bentuk Aksara Tionghoa
There are currently two standards for printed Chinese characters. One is the Traditional system, used in Taiwan. Mainland China and Singapore use the Simplified system (developed by the PRC government in the 1950s), which uses simplified forms for many of the more complicated characters. For Hong Kong and Macau, they uses mainly the Traditional system, but for many characters, they have adopted the simplified form. Most simplified versions were derived from established, though obscure, historically-established simplifications. In Taiwan, many simplifications are used when characters are handwritten, but in printing traditional characters are the norm. In addition, most Chinese use some personal simplifications.
Simplification process is actually not restricted to Simplified system. In order to computerize Chinese, the authority in Taiwan has tried to "standardize" the glyph of characters being used, to eliminate unnecessary variations. As a result, several characters are combined into one, and some characters have their written form altered to ease the glyph generation process by computing technologies at that time. But these simplification process are rather minor as compared with the effort done by the Mainland government.