Chinese writing

The basic unit of Chinese writing is the character. The latter is also called a sinogram, but it is not very correct to say "sign." Currently, Chinese dictionaries list 214 basic characters called "keys." By combining these keys, one can form a multitude of sinograms. The first Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi by Xu Shen, written around +100, contained 9,353 characters classified under 540 keys. Now, there are more than 60,000. But this includes variants of the same sinogram. The total number of different characters must be around 20,000. To read contemporary Chinese fluently, one must master between 2,000 and 3,000. To read classical Chinese, one needs to know 10,000.

Classical Chinese was the written language used since antiquity. The practice of writing the spoken language only truly spread in the last century with the fall of the empire.

More than an image, the Chinese character is a sequence of strokes. The order of writing the strokes is very important, as is the direction of each stroke. It is essential to follow this order. Just as if a Chinese person learned to write our letters backward, their writing would soon become illegible, the person writing Chinese cannot neglect this rule. Otherwise, what they write is not Chinese. This is even more important in calligraphy, with increasingly cursive styles such as the Running style and the Grass style.

Sinograms can be classified into four main families:

Pictograms: they represent a reality in a stylized or symbolic way. For example, the character for "tree" with its trunk and branches: 木

Ideograms: these are associations of ideas from simple elements. For example, the sign for "forest" is composed of two trees. 林

Ideophonograms: they are composed of one element carrying the meaning and the other carrying the pronunciation.

For example, the character for "mom": 妈 is composed of the character for woman: 女 on the left and the character for horse: 马 on the right.

The character for woman obviously carries the meaning. The character for horse, pronounced "ma," carries the phoneme. "Mom" is also pronounced "ma," only the intonation changes.

Borrowings: for words that do not have a character, characters with the same pronunciation were borrowed and modified to distinguish them.

One more very important thing for the apprentice calligrapher: in the 1950s, the Chinese in mainland China undertook a simplification of the characters, while the Chinese in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and those in the diaspora kept the classical characters. Therefore, we now speak of simplified characters and non-simplified characters (or classical characters). In calligraphy, classical characters are more commonly used as they are much more aesthetically pleasing.