Introduction

Why characters?

Why Chinese writing has not been replaced by some kind of alphabetic system yet, limiting the use of characters to the art of calligraphy? The reason why Chinese-speakers still use a writing system where one is forced to memorize thousands of symbols is not merely a tribute to their history and traditions, nor to artistic beauty; it's rather the unique nature of Chinese language itself that makes alternative systems unfit.


First of all, Chinese is not alphabetic but syllabic. Hindi is an example of a syllabic language that uses a few tens of symbols - only twice Western alphabets - but while it's still possible to understand an Indian word in Latin letters, one can only try to guess the meaning of a transcribed Chinese word, in spite of the fact that so-called Mandarin Chinese has more than 400 different syllables. The problem is, words are often composed of only one syllable. While classical Chinese was almost completely monosyllabic, polisyllables are becoming more and more common in modern Chinese. The average number of syllables in a word, however, is two; still too low to allow a precise individuation of a word's meaning by its transcription.

In spoken Chinese the problem is overcome by the context and by the use of five different tones, but an isolated syllable can be actually misunderstood in spoken language, too. Characters, on the contrary, are impossible to misunderstood, and that is why they have always been a unifying factor among speakers of different dialects or languages, such as Cantonese, Korean and Japanese.

By now, the difference between writing the character ("middle") and the correspondent transcription zhong should be clear, because while the former is immediately recognizable among 50.000 some symbols, the latter could well be meaning, for instance, "clock" () or "loyal" (), each of them pronounced exactly the same.