Fun fact: In Korean 田 means dry field and 畓 means rice paddy. In Japanese 田 means rice paddy and 畑 means dry field. Like 畓 being a Korean national character 畑 is made and widely used in Japan. Note 水 (water) and 火 (fire) in these letters.
畑 is more like describing the primitive way of making new farmland - slash and burn forest and use as farmland for 2 or 3 years while the nutrient from the ash support crops then move on to the next forest for slash and burn. Interesting. Now how they make characters for the smaller elements or phenomena which were not visible nor known previously.
"田field" uses "火fire" to burn straw to fertilize and turns it into a "dry field畑" "田" soaked in "water水", it becomes a paddy field"畓" You can even roughly understand through this that Korea has more dry fields, while Japan has more paddy fields, because "田" in the default state is the most commonly used field in the local area😂😂
in China we say水田 旱田to express畓 畑，旱meams drought，Characters are good but Chara will go to death if you keep creating new Chara to express some homopropertious items with neglecting the word-creating ability.
Some Chara summary the basic element in the word. eg电, in Traditional Chinese電 means the tail of rain(雨)，Simplified kept the tail means electricity, then We have created电视(Electronic visions, or Television) 电子(the essence of electricity, or Electron) by the basic element电。Their is hundruds of others and as Chinese we can create several words randomly in any life scene.
And Unicode thought they could squeeze every character into 16-bits (65536 codepoints). Clearly they didn't realize that Standard Chinese alone would fill the entire available space nearly twice over. It's a good thing that they reserved two entire planes of 65536 codepoints just for CJK characters, but even that wouldn't leave much room for everything other than Standard Chinese. Guess we can look forward to a Quternary Ideographic Plane and Quinary Ideographic Plane, one of which would be reserved exclusively for Yi. The official proposal from China for Yi characters asked for 88613 characters, just barely shy of the 90 000 given in the video.
Actually quite a few Unicode developers thought that 65,536 code points wouldn't be enough, but there was a big argument about it around 1990 and the folks wanting a smaller size won. And then kinda lost later when they had to expand past that anyway.
They knew they couldn't squeeze every character into 16 bits. The original proposal states that Unicode was to be used for the characters used in modern texts, and obsolete or rare characters shouldn't be conjesting the list of useful characters. They were aware of the problem, but decided to focus on the future, not the past. You have to remember that at the time the development of unicode started 32-bit computers were still rather new.
I mean to be fair. Unicode was supposed to replace the old ISO-2022 based national standards which had a hard limit of 8836 characters. Though Joe Becker's original estimate of extant characters was "far below 16,384". Which turned out to be way off.
@@osoiii The thing is that several platforms, including Java and Windows, were confident enough in only needing 65536 codepoints that they standardized to UCS-2 and haven't been able to change beyond adopting the hack that is UTF-16, which was an attempt at supporting the full range of UCS-4 on platforms otherwise designed for UCS-2. UTF-8 is technically in a similar situation, ultimately being a hack to support UCS-4 on systems originally designed for ASCII, but the smaller code units make the fact that the whole thing is variable width more obvious. (There is also just more software that depends on certain properties of ASCII than than there are that depend on properties of UCS-2.)
This is a pretty incredibly-researched video! And unlike a lot of videos that ask questions and never truly answer them, there is an actual specific answer at the end, even if we can never know exactly how many Chinese-style characters there were. Great stuff!
I'm not sure that Tangut or Yi scripts can be counted. They are wildly different. In fact, I could only see the Zhuang's Sawndip a part of the Chinese character family. Jurchen and Khitan scripts are clearly influenced but, wouldn't be called within the zone of the Chinese characters.
After a year of reflection on this video I have to agree with you. While this isn't a scholarly look at character based writing systems, I think I would do it differently if I redid the video today. My assertion that all character writing systems of that area of the world are "漢字" is almost like saying every language using latin letters is latin based, influenced no doubt, but not a necessarily a direct descendent. But I still think this provides an interesting look at the different characters of the orient. Thanks for the comment.
@@InkboxSoftware yeah, definitely. Greek, Latin and Cyrillic are all based on the Phoenician script and they even overlap to some extent. Meanwhile Georgian and Armenian are not. But there is some influence. The situation is kinda similar here.
@@yanyanz3011 well the Mandarin name of it. Japanese name is “Kanji”, Korean name is “Hanja”. I used more of the neutral English naming. Not that wrong; 漢 is “Chinese” and 字 is “letter, writing character”. It’s literally the translation of “Hanzi”.
I also made the mistake of believing that the Chinese character 之 make hiragana arise え, When it actually arose し, but I still doubt that because it doesn't look similar.
와... 대단하네요. 한자에 대해서 알고 싶은 사람에게 좋은 참고가 될 것 같아요. What a great video! I think this video will be a good reference for those who want to know about Chinese Characters.
@@yanyanz3011 that is just for chinese people bro chinese characters are not chinese thing like alphabet in EU japanese characters are kanji and korean characters are hanja
This is the most comprehensive presentation about 漢字 and their derived scripts I've found on the English side of UA-cam. I learned some new interesting information from this video.As a Mandarin learner, I'm quite familiar with 漢字，but didn't know much about the 國字s from Korea and Japan.
It’s funny, just yesterday I was looking for a good video on this topic but couldn’t find anything, and then this video got recommended to me today! I guess that means the algorithm is doing it’s job. It satisfies my itch for this topic so I’m glad I came across it! I’ll check out this other video too
It's worth noting that a lot of Han Chinese languages cannot be written using the most standard characters due to a lack of standardisation process, and if newly adopted characters to write Cantonese and Taiwanese Hokkien is included, then the numbers could be higher.
That's not necessarily true. For example in Hokkien/Min Nan/Taiwanese, many of the spoken words do have corresponding characters in kai style written characters. The only thing is that many of them were ancient and archaic characters that modern Chinese don't use as much. So many people ended up created or using other characters to informally represent that spoken word.
i think dialectal and regional characters are already accounted for in the Chinese count of 106,000 characters. tho wouldnt be surprised if some slipped thru the cracks
A question below was about why Chu Nom was not popular in Vietnam. Chu Nom was used to write pure Vietnamese words (what are pure Vietnamese words is another problem to be discussed), however, these characters were perhaps too complicated to learn, hence in fact, it has never been officially used in the courts. In some periods, Chu Nom was promoted and encouraged, just to be discouraged later. However, some greatest works of Vietnamese literature were written in Chu Nom, for example The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du, of poems of Ho Xuan Huong.
people always get blown away with myriads of Chinese character, but most of them never realize that we only use abt a tenth of them in daily life, even so many of them was surprisingly simple by combining some basic, typical hanzi into one. Hanzi is much simple and making sense than most of the western peoplr thought
Fantastic video. Thoroughly structured. Loved your academic approach to the topic. And kudos to always reminding the viewer that estimations are not facts. Subscribed in an instant.
not sure if i would count the Yi characters. they are aesthetically very different, or at least their modern reflexes are. also 㔔 is just the old koreans trolling us through time, isn't it?
I think that character would be pronounced Kang? I think it was an experiment to use chinese characters combine with hangul to increase number of sounds? Or an intermediate script before current Hangul was finalised?
@@KuraSourTakanHourThat "experiment to use hangul with hanja" can't be the case, as the only character that would qualify as hangul is the ㅇ in the bottom. The ㅁ in the top right may seem like one, but no. Since ㅁ is a consonant character, it cannot be there -- it must be a hanja character. There being only 1 character that just barely looks like a hangul character doesn't give much credence to that theory imo.
@@noonehere6994 There is noㅇ in 㔔; it's actually Old Ieung (ㆁ). It is not a modern Hangul character. This character is a Hunminjeongeum(訓民正音) character. 㔔 is basically old Korean combining 加 (a Chinese character) with ㆁ (a Hunminjeongeum character). 加 is pronounced 가(Ka/Ga), while ㆁ has ㅇ sound. So, that gets us 강 (Kang/Gang) sound. However, 加 also had a native sound called 더(Deo). Put ㆁ in 더, and you get 덩 (Dung). This character was obviously created after King Sejong created the Korean alphabet, but it was still more of an experimental character that was used when Koreans tried to write native Korean words in Chinese characters.
Would you count those variations as different characters? I think I would, but I guess that would open a bigger debate on whether different styles count as different characters, as they have different ammounts of strokes
There are a lot of linguists trying to come up with typological classifications for the Chinese writing system. Logography is good enough for most people not interested in the fine details and who are not academics or linguists. Joyce (2016) classifies the Chinese writing system as "morphologic" since it is a writing system that uses morphemes to convey meaning. It isn't accurate to say that the Chinese writing system uses characters to represent words since there are actually very few single characters that function as words. Most words in Chinese are made up of two morphemes (bimorphemic or disyllabic). Some Chinese characters cannot be used alone (bound morpheme), which means that they have no meaning without another character or more. For example, 珊瑚 means "coral," but 珊 and 瑚 cannot be used by themselves and are inherently meaningless without each other. This would undermine the idea that Chinese characters represent words, among other counterexamples. Reference: Joyce, T. (2016). Writing systems and scripts. In A. Rocci & L. de Saussure (Eds.), Verbal communication (Handbooks of Communication Science 3) (pp. 287-308). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
That’s so stupid. You picked out a rare example of a multi-character word where the morphemes are bound and not words in of themselves. THAT’S INCREDIBLY RARE. 99%+ of morphemes can and do function as independent words as well as morphemes to construct words. 😂
@@PeebeesPet 99% is a big claim, but it's still true that the majority of words in Chinese are disyllabic, not monosyllabic. Chinese was more monosyllabic in the past, especially true for Classical Chinese, but that has since changed. Also, I was arguing against the claim that Chinese characters represent words. Yes, there are monosyllabic words, but you would then have to explain exceptions of bound morphemes if your claim is that characters represent words. If you can't deal with exceptions, then you have to change your claim being made to account for exceptions to the claim. The fact that there are bound morphemes undermines the idea that characters represent words.
Hello, Inkbox. I feel this video is interesting and educational. But, I wanna add the largest numbers of Chinese characters recorded in some dictionaries. So, according to Wikipedia (Sadly, It was edited recently with no numbering of characters in dictionaries, but you can find previous article in "Last edited"), Greater China (Well, I include Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) has 異體字字典 (Yitizi Zidian/Dictionary of Chinese character Variants) published in Taiwan which contains 106,330 Chinese characters. Japan has Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (大漢和辞典/The Great Chinese-Japanese Dictionary) contains 50,305 Chinese characters. And also, Korea published Han Han Dae Sajeon (漢韓大辭典/한한대사전/The Great Dictionary of Hanja-Hangeul) which contains 53,667 Chinese characters.
it's hard because each character has its tone and pronunciation, completely different from English and other languages that use an alphabet, missing either one completely changes the character, but many characters just have a different radical to differentiate them, so you have to remember all of them
Beautiful? Lol. Tonal languages, and just East Asian languages in general sound horrible. 9 times out of 10 and especially if it’s a woman talking it sounds like an animal is dying. And a lot of their women are pretty, so I’m not just saying this out of racism sake lol
@@danielzhang1916alphabet indicate sound so any sound in Chinese can use alphabet instead use signs to indicate meaning mean you must remember over 20k signs are overwhelmed for people to learn Chinese writing that's why Chinese language is most unpopular hate writing make Chinese so shy scare stiff silent sissy slow square sick shameful sad small with small slantt eye so you folk can focus reading.
Excellent presentation and good luck with people who are still stuck with the writing system which one has to memorize few thousands symbols/characters/ideograms. I am lucky to read/write/understand the greatest writing system Hangul plus English alphabet.
@@neo.4662source for this claim? it's only falling more and more into obscurity and just a "kids these days don't know this" kind of thing from boomers
The Chinese characters are actually comparable to that of Latin and Germanic languages. Even though both use letters, the people from China, Korea, and Japan can understand each other's languages to a certain extent. Whereas the languages used by the Khitans, Jurchens, and Western Xia are incomprehensible with the languages of the south. Just like how Germanic languages and Latin languages are not easily comprehensible and have very little lexical similarities.
你忘了越南。越南从古代也用汉字（Hán tự or chữ Hán）。虽然越南的地欧是东南亚，但是我们国家和中国，韩国，朝鲜，台湾，日本 有相同的文化，甚至越南的文化是最像中国的。希望以后你们记得把越南放在东亚文化。越南语有许多汉越词，这些词以古代或者中代的汉语，发音像广东话：结婚（ kết hôn)，中国 (Trung Quốc)，美国( Mĩ quốc,Hoan Kỳ or Mĩ)，身(thân)，同( đồng)，速度(tốc độ)，准备(chuẩn bị)，离婚( li hôn),常(thường)，古代(cổ đại)，车(xe or xa)，公共汽车( xe công cộng)，卫生间( nhà vện sinh)，电话(điện thoại)，脑 (não)，(tim or tâm)心, 房间(phòng)，头(đầu),查(tra), 大使馆(đại sứ quán) 历史(lịch sử)，物理学(vật lí)，化学(hoá học)，数学(toán học)，体育学(thể dục)，大学(đại học)，银行(ngân hàng) 校长(hiệu trưởng),学生(học sinh)，学(học)，雪(tuyết)，密(mật)什么的。另外，字喃 不是越南正式的字，大数的时间我们用汉字。越南人也可读懂汉字的韩国，中国，和日本。我希望这些可以让你们对越南的理解越来越深
My Korean in-laws just laughed when I asked about Hanja. They said "Oh, they pretend to teach those old things to us in school, and we pretend to learn them - then the moment we graduate we never see them again". One of them, a teenager, said if anyone ever actually uses Hanja characters when writing, it's considering a total affectation & silly. "It's like if an English speaker writes poetry with a quill pen, it's just somebody being weird". I know in North Korea all Hanja are banned.
wow, that's so true! I was born in Korea and lived until univ. and now living in Canada, and I don't think I can read most of hanja. lol maybe I remember some numbers and elements words such as fire, water, and tree things. maybe around 20-30 characters? fyi, I learned hanja only in middle school for 3years.
yap more than younger people but still not like a few thousand or hundred words. My parents would know maybe around 100 characters, and for sure forgot about them a lot by now cuz never use them @@sharpasacueball
So if we try to guesstimate, there are probably around 500,000 characters, if we include ones that were lost to history and guess their approximate quantity.
Despite my admittedly limited knowledge of Japanese and Chinese, I was pleased to recognise the constituent parts of the Korean character for "rice paddy" as water and field
It's called Hiragana. Ok fine I know what you're talking about. But it's strange that Hiragana became the main writing script in Japan, while the female script in China just fell out of fashion.
I love this scripture system no matter how hard it is, I love how Japanese mix Kanji and two different syllabaries Imagine that hieroglyphs and cuneiform scripture never lost Do Chinese have something like the Jōyō Kanji list? It would be usefol to reduce the number of characters, and also unify the simplifications from China and Japan
The Simplified Chinese Script is called 簡体字. I heard it's around 2200 new ones but the overall Kanji of 簡体字 are considered around 8000. Because there were probably already a lot of Kanji that were considered simple/easy.
@@danielantony1882 the japanese kanji was simplified after the world war II and they created a list of the most common used, originally were around 1800 but today they are like 2200, not because people today use more kanji but when they made the list they forgot the include some important ones
@@carltomacruz9138 Same thing, bro. Just different pronunciation. I mean, if we're just going with the orignal ownership idea then might as well just call it Kanji. You don't need to get butthurt simply because I'm not calling it Hanzi. It's literally the same thing.
hey the "seal" at 13:34 is incredibly aesthetically pleasing, do you have any links or info on how to read more about that? it sorta connects with my obsession about space-filling curves (mathematical stuff).
I don’t know about that seal in particular, but there was a system of writing Mongolian used by one of the mongol dynasties in China called Phags Pa script and it often was used in seals in a way that looks very similar!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script here's the wikipedia page on the script used. It's used heavily in official state documents/seals (like passports and government stamps, kind of like a signature). If you load the article in japanese there's much more information so you'll just have to use google translate and look at the pictures. Ultimately it's mainly just a way of making logos look fancy
Why do you use the Japanese simiplification of 漢 even when talking about Chinese and Korean use? The traditional character has an extra line the Japanese one removed.
If you are counting all variations, derivations and even characters that are no longer used to add up the total, then it is not correct to say that the phonetic alphabet used in English only has 26 characters. You should use the same logic and count historical and current variations (for example, the characters for uppercase are different from lowercase), and even derivations created in other countries, such as ñ, ç, etc.
I like the depth of this video. Thanks for making this! But actually counting all the convoluted historic variants of characters is quite nonsensical to say the least. It's like, when faced with a question how many Greek characters are there, replying "well, certainly over a hundred, let's think about all the lost characters, historic glyph forms and maybe even about the Minoan script". Obviously, the common sense answer should be 24. And, on that matter, I don't understand why you even count Khitan, Sui and Yi. It's like counting Cherokee and Inuit scripts into Latin because they were 'influenced'
There are not just one Chữ Nôm. Some minority people in Vietnam created their own version which very similar to Chữ Nôm but with their language (sorry bad english)
There are at least 10000 Traditional Chinese characters, but most of those characters are not used in everyday language. Some were used in old poetry and writings. The PRC use Simplified Chinese that use shortened characters for the less literate.
Trần Nhân Tông didn't bring Chữ Nôm into official writing. This part is wrong. The picture you showed is Hồ Quý Li, who did try to bring Chữ Nôm into official writing.
Fun fact: The thumbnail is not 漢字, instead to be 𡨸喃 (chữ Nôm) and some other script that he covered. But as a Vietnamese, I don't classify 𡨸喃 as 漢字, since it made to make our writing system differs from 漢字.
Too outdated too old fashioned too hard to learn n use so why use character writing for instead use spelling system lot easy n faster. That's why nobody use character writing but dumbb Chinese.
In Taiwan there is the Standard Form of National Characters released by the Ministry of Education. It does look like they have some of their own unique forms of Characters as well, although not like the National Characters from Japan or Korea. Taiwan has only recently (since 1949) been a separate political entity from the mainland and the majority of the educated officials in those early days came from the mainland itself, meaning that they didn't have the same reasons to create National Characters as other nations did because they were, are still are, Chinese. The best way to put it might be that The Standard Form of National Characters is the standard that was set by the Ministry of Education of The Republic of China for the writing of Chinese Characters, which does hold some differences in particular with how the standards are set for the People's Republic of China (mainland China), but does not result in the creation of new Characters unique to that island.
Taiwanese as a dialect of Sino language group indeed has many unique vocabularies, and so on the characters for them. And besides the dialect part, on a level of formal occasions, Taiwan is actually the one that keeps the very 'fundamental' version of Chinese writings; And on the contrary, we (the PR. China) have actually made many reforms on those characters, and in some cases even borrowed pieces of your Japanese simplified Kanji back. That's why sometimes the Taiwanese mention our simplified Chinese characters are broken (残体字）
Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters but some simplified characters are used informally, there is also new characters for written vernacular Hokkien like 𪜶, but the majority of them can't be displayed on computers.
Would you have any sources you recommend for further research in this topic? I'm looking into doing my dissertation on the history and influence of the Chinese language.
It is interesting that because Japan is an island country, it can see many other types of fish than China, so it has created many characters related to fish.
The clerical script is the euphemism for slave script . Because at that time period, there were two types of slaves, the field slaves and the house hold slaves. The so-called clerical script was performed by the household slaves. They were the slaves that performed household chores , including bookkeeping and record keeping.
Also in Han language group, there are a lot of languags that is not Mandarin, like Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu, etc. Although most of their languages can be written in current Characters, some of them can't, so they design more Characters. For example, in Hokkien, we design "𤆬 (tshuā)", which means take people with you. "𠢕 (gâu)", which means good. "𪜶 (in)", which means they.
I've been interested in learning Taiwanese Hokkien for a while and wasn't sure about how many characters were innovated for the Min language family, and thought those would be mentioned in this video too!
Yes, all those characters exist, but I think it would be misleading to call them all 漢字, as clearly, there were sets of characters that were invented by other peoples, such as mentioned here, the Vietnamese, Yi etc. I guess it depends on what the question is. Do we want to know a more or less exhaustive list of every character that ever stemmed from the 漢字 beast? Yes. It's "at least 235,647." But when counting 漢字 characters, why must we necessarily include all those character sets NOT invented or used by 漢 Chinese? Can those be called "漢字?" I don't think so. That's taking credit from all those people who devised their own writing styles. Strictly speaking, only those characters created and used by the 漢 people are 漢字. So rather than make the task of counting 漢字 needlessly complicated, I think it's better to keep things simple. How many characters were devised by the 漢 people? In my mind, that is the true number. Also, how many of them are being used today? That would make the task even simpler. When counting Roman characters, do we count all those characters that have fallen out of disuse? Þ/þ for example? We use 26 characters in English, _but_ Þ/þ was replaced with Th/th. So do we count that or leave it out? So we can simplify the task of counting 漢字 characters by limiting ourselves to only the characters that the 漢 people created, and we can further simplify it by limiting ourselves to only those characters used today. How many characters must someone learn to read any Chinese newspaper? That's the number I want to know. In Japan, there are 2,332 characters officially designated as essential for every day use. (常用漢字) Though my sources say that realistically most Japanese know about 3,000. Is this number the same in China?
你忘了越南。越南从古代也用汉字（Hán tự or chữ Hán）。虽然越南的地欧是东南亚，但是我们国家和中国，韩国，朝鲜，台湾，日本 有相同的文化，甚至越南的文化是最像中国的。希望以后你们记得把越南放在东亚文化。越南语有许多汉越词，这些词以古代或者中代的汉语，发音像广东话：结婚（ kết hôn)，中国 (Trung Quốc)，美国( Mĩ quốc,Hoan Kỳ or Mĩ)，身(thân)，同( đồng)，速度(tốc độ)，准备(chuẩn bị)，离婚( li hôn),常(thường)，古代(cổ đại)，车(xe or xa)，公共汽车( xe công cộng)，卫生间( nhà vện sinh)，电话(điện thoại)，脑 (não)，(tim or tâm)心, 房间(phòng)，头(đầu),查(tra), 大使馆(đại sứ quán) 历史(lịch sử)，物理学(vật lí)，化学(hoá học)，数学(toán học)，体育学(thể dục)，大学(đại học)，银行(ngân hàng) 校长(hiệu trưởng),学生(học sinh)，学(học)，雪(tuyết)，密(mật)什么的。另外，字喃 不是越南正式的字，大数的时间我们用汉字。我希望这些可以让你们对越南的理解越来越深
For people who live in traditional characters environment, the simpified characters are unaesthetic. The strcture and balance of the characters are wrecked.
Sorry, wall of text below. tldr: (1) what about characters in topolects/ dialects in East Asia, and (2) what about characters in the Ryukyus. (1) It would have also been cool to include characters used in writing down topolects/ dialects in East Asia, so called dialect characters 方言字 (which I like to imagine as the opposite of national characters 國字). (See the Chinese or Japanese wiki articles for 方言字 .) A notable example is Cantonese gaat6 zaat6 曱甴. Naturally much like the characters for ethnic minorities or historical ethnicities, these would be difficult to count barring a few exceptions... The exceptions would be the few languages that are official in some sense in contemporary political entities, namely Cantonese (in Hong Kong and Macao) and Taiwanese (in Taiwan) (and possibly languages that are widely-ish written, like maybe Wu). For the purpose of getting a sense of numbers and counting (in a broad sense not sure how many characters in the sets I mention are going to be double counted), there is the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (5033 characters), the Macao Supplementary Character (425 characters, small number because built from the former) Set, and the Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters (700 characters) to the numbers you mentioned. No idea about other topolects, but it'd be cool to get a feel for other varieties, like Wu or Hakka or some widely-spoken Japanese one. (2) You effectively talked about most of the Chinese character sphere, with possibly the only large omission being the Ryukyus (Okinawan: Ruuchyuu). In my understanding, writing was introduced there by Zen Buddhist monks from Japan and become more widespread under the Ryukyu kingdom (1429-1879) (especially after it was vassalized by Satsuma). Due to the long tradition of character writing there, I imagine national characters might have been developed there too. I haven't found anything about them (yet?), but there is a short Chinese wiki article on Ryukyuan Characters 琉球漢字 (on how characters were used there). The article claims most characters were traditional, except for the preference of some variant characters.
Thank you for this great comment. I had skipped over dialect characters because I had assumed it would all be the same, that's certainly one group I missed. As for Ryukyuan Characters, I had looked at them but for some reason they didn't make the final cut. But it really is comments like these that bring new things to my attention new topics and open up a whole new world of connections, so thank you. Eventually I will publish an extension to this video and will try to gather even more characters, including all those you mentioned.
i noticed this too!!! its a shame how little people know about dialectical writing, its dying out really fast. im hokkien but i could never dream of learning to write it, even hokkien speakers dont really even know about it anymore - 我問我婆時候她講福建話“不能”寫的
As an asian who try to learn japanese, this video help me to better understand the kanji origin in a more comprehensive point of view. Kanji with furigana such as Hiragana and Katakana maybe not as hard as I used to think, compare to learning only chinese character and their numerous variation. 🥲
@@yanyanz3011 And I didn't want to spesifically say hanzi here, but chinese character as a broader term and its influence to kanji hanja etc like in the video.
Fun fact:
In Korean 田 means dry field and 畓 means rice paddy.
In Japanese 田 means rice paddy and 畑 means dry field.
Like 畓 being a Korean national character 畑 is made and widely used in Japan. Note 水 (water) and 火 (fire) in these letters.
畑 is more like describing the primitive way of making new farmland - slash and burn forest and use as farmland for 2 or 3 years while the nutrient from the ash support crops then move on to the next forest for slash and burn. Interesting. Now how they make characters for the smaller elements or phenomena which were not visible nor known previously.
"田field" uses "火fire" to burn straw to fertilize and turns it into a "dry field畑"
"田" soaked in "water水", it becomes a paddy field"畓"
You can even roughly understand through this that Korea has more dry fields, while Japan has more paddy fields, because "田" in the default state is the most commonly used field in the local area😂😂
in China we say水田 旱田to express畓 畑，旱meams drought，Characters are good but Chara will go to death if you keep creating new Chara to express some homopropertious items with neglecting the word-creating ability.
Some Chara summary the basic element in the word. eg电, in Traditional Chinese電 means the tail of rain(雨)，Simplified kept the tail means electricity, then We have created电视(Electronic visions, or Television) 电子(the essence of electricity, or Electron) by the basic element电。Their is hundruds of others and as Chinese we can create several words randomly in any life scene.
Actually we Japanese often use 水田 for rice paddy.😂
And Unicode thought they could squeeze every character into 16-bits (65536 codepoints). Clearly they didn't realize that Standard Chinese alone would fill the entire available space nearly twice over. It's a good thing that they reserved two entire planes of 65536 codepoints just for CJK characters, but even that wouldn't leave much room for everything other than Standard Chinese. Guess we can look forward to a Quternary Ideographic Plane and Quinary Ideographic Plane, one of which would be reserved exclusively for Yi. The official proposal from China for Yi characters asked for 88613 characters, just barely shy of the 90 000 given in the video.
Actually quite a few Unicode developers thought that 65,536 code points wouldn't be enough, but there was a big argument about it around 1990 and the folks wanting a smaller size won. And then kinda lost later when they had to expand past that anyway.
They knew they couldn't squeeze every character into 16 bits. The original proposal states that Unicode was to be used for the characters used in modern texts, and obsolete or rare characters shouldn't be conjesting the list of useful characters. They were aware of the problem, but decided to focus on the future, not the past. You have to remember that at the time the development of unicode started 32-bit computers were still rather new.
You probably could if you decompose it.
I mean to be fair. Unicode was supposed to replace the old ISO-2022 based national standards which had a hard limit of 8836 characters.
Though Joe Becker's original estimate of extant characters was "far below 16,384". Which turned out to be way off.
@@osoiii The thing is that several platforms, including Java and Windows, were confident enough in only needing 65536 codepoints that they standardized to UCS-2 and haven't been able to change beyond adopting the hack that is UTF-16, which was an attempt at supporting the full range of UCS-4 on platforms otherwise designed for UCS-2. UTF-8 is technically in a similar situation, ultimately being a hack to support UCS-4 on systems originally designed for ASCII, but the smaller code units make the fact that the whole thing is variable width more obvious. (There is also just more software that depends on certain properties of ASCII than than there are that depend on properties of UCS-2.)
This is so far the best and most comprehensive video about Hanzi / Hanja / Kanji / Chu Nom. Very informative! Well done!👍👍👍
Chữ nôm ? Hán tự nhé bro
No kanji and Hanja and Chu Nom in history. Only Hanzi 漢字 in history.
Hanji(Chinese characters in Japanese) = wrong Chinese characters
Hanja kanji hanzi hantu
实际上，我们的国家正常使用汉字（），喃字不是越南正式的字
@@tungmeiali1036 喃字看起來比漢字復雜。
You should be more popular than you currently are. So much interesting videos!
This is a pretty incredibly-researched video! And unlike a lot of videos that ask questions and never truly answer them, there is an actual specific answer at the end, even if we can never know exactly how many Chinese-style characters there were. Great stuff!
I'm not sure that Tangut or Yi scripts can be counted. They are wildly different. In fact, I could only see the Zhuang's Sawndip a part of the Chinese character family. Jurchen and Khitan scripts are clearly influenced but, wouldn't be called within the zone of the Chinese characters.
After a year of reflection on this video I have to agree with you. While this isn't a scholarly look at character based writing systems, I think I would do it differently if I redid the video today. My assertion that all character writing systems of that area of the world are "漢字" is almost like saying every language using latin letters is latin based, influenced no doubt, but not a necessarily a direct descendent. But I still think this provides an interesting look at the different characters of the orient. Thanks for the comment.
@@InkboxSoftware yeah, definitely. Greek, Latin and Cyrillic are all based on the Phoenician script and they even overlap to some extent. Meanwhile Georgian and Armenian are not. But there is some influence. The situation is kinda similar here.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
@@yanyanz3011 well the Mandarin name of it. Japanese name is “Kanji”, Korean name is “Hanja”. I used more of the neutral English naming. Not that wrong; 漢 is “Chinese” and 字 is “letter, writing character”. It’s literally the translation of “Hanzi”.
@@yorgunsamuray I'm sorry, Koreans like to steal the history of other countries and need to be vigilant at all times
4:42 The character え comes from the cursive script of 衣 and not 之 which is the origin of し
how did 之 becomes し ??? it doesnt even make sense
@@DaniSC_l1 Google Japanese cursive script
I also made the mistake of believing that the Chinese character 之 make hiragana arise え, When it actually arose し, but I still doubt that because it doesn't look similar.
@@slushfilm dude doesnt know what a comment is. Also stop going to reddit my guy
@@erosnunez6238 し is from 之's cursive writing style
와... 대단하네요. 한자에 대해서 알고 싶은 사람에게 좋은 참고가 될 것 같아요.
What a great video! I think this video will be a good reference for those who want to know about Chinese Characters.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
@@yanyanz3011 that is just for chinese people bro
chinese characters are not chinese thing like alphabet in EU
japanese characters are kanji and korean characters are hanja
@@kimurahundoshi4485 Chinese Hanzi are not Chinese. Whose are they? Please read more books
@@yanyanz3011 Hanzi - 漢(Han *Chinese* ) 字(character). They are literally the same thing
This is the most comprehensive presentation about 漢字 and their derived scripts I've found on the English side of UA-cam. I learned some new interesting information from this video.As a Mandarin learner, I'm quite familiar with 漢字，but didn't know much about the 國字s from Korea and Japan.
Chinese was brought to Japan in the 5th-6th century C.E.
It’s funny, just yesterday I was looking for a good video on this topic but couldn’t find anything, and then this video got recommended to me today! I guess that means the algorithm is doing it’s job. It satisfies my itch for this topic so I’m glad I came across it! I’ll check out this other video too
It's worth noting that a lot of Han Chinese languages cannot be written using the most standard characters due to a lack of standardisation process, and if newly adopted characters to write Cantonese and Taiwanese Hokkien is included, then the numbers could be higher.
That's not necessarily true. For example in Hokkien/Min Nan/Taiwanese, many of the spoken words do have corresponding characters in kai style written characters. The only thing is that many of them were ancient and archaic characters that modern Chinese don't use as much. So many people ended up created or using other characters to informally represent that spoken word.
i think dialectal and regional characters are already accounted for in the Chinese count of 106,000 characters. tho wouldnt be surprised if some slipped thru the cracks
A question below was about why Chu Nom was not popular in Vietnam. Chu Nom was used to write pure Vietnamese words (what are pure Vietnamese words is another problem to be discussed), however, these characters were perhaps too complicated to learn, hence in fact, it has never been officially used in the courts. In some periods, Chu Nom was promoted and encouraged, just to be discouraged later.
However, some greatest works of Vietnamese literature were written in Chu Nom, for example The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du, of poems of Ho Xuan Huong.
Dude I can’t remember how to write one to ten in Chu Nom
people always get blown away with myriads of Chinese character, but most of them never realize that we only use abt a tenth of them in daily life, even so many of them was surprisingly simple by combining some basic, typical hanzi into one. Hanzi is much simple and making sense than most of the western peoplr thought
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
Fantastic video. Thoroughly structured. Loved your academic approach to the topic. And kudos to always reminding the viewer that estimations are not facts.
Subscribed in an instant.
not sure if i would count the Yi characters. they are aesthetically very different, or at least their modern reflexes are.
also 㔔 is just the old koreans trolling us through time, isn't it?
I think that character would be pronounced Kang?
I think it was an experiment to use chinese characters combine with hangul to increase number of sounds? Or an intermediate script before current Hangul was finalised?
@@KuraSourTakanHourThat "experiment to use hangul with hanja" can't be the case, as the only character that would qualify as hangul is the ㅇ in the bottom. The ㅁ in the top right may seem like one, but no. Since ㅁ is a consonant character, it cannot be there -- it must be a hanja character.
There being only 1 character that just barely looks like a hangul character doesn't give much credence to that theory imo.
@@KuraSourTakanHour It is pronounced 'Kang/Gang' or 'Dung' in Korea.
@@noonehere6994
There is noㅇ in 㔔; it's actually Old Ieung (ㆁ). It is not a modern Hangul character. This character is a Hunminjeongeum(訓民正音) character. 㔔 is basically old Korean combining 加 (a Chinese character) with ㆁ (a Hunminjeongeum character).
加 is pronounced 가(Ka/Ga), while ㆁ has ㅇ sound. So, that gets us 강 (Kang/Gang) sound.
However, 加 also had a native sound called 더(Deo). Put ㆁ in 더, and you get 덩 (Dung).
This character was obviously created after King Sejong created the Korean alphabet, but it was still more of an experimental character that was used when Koreans tried to write native Korean words in Chinese characters.
The "漢字" shown in the video is actually in Japanese version of simplified characters. I think it's due to the font being used though.
Would you count those variations as different characters? I think I would, but I guess that would open a bigger debate on whether different styles count as different characters, as they have different ammounts of strokes
And in the part showing Japanese simplification, Chinese fonts are used, as is clear from 寿 and 箪.
There are a lot of linguists trying to come up with typological classifications for the Chinese writing system. Logography is good enough for most people not interested in the fine details and who are not academics or linguists.
Joyce (2016) classifies the Chinese writing system as "morphologic" since it is a writing system that uses morphemes to convey meaning. It isn't accurate to say that the Chinese writing system uses characters to represent words since there are actually very few single characters that function as words. Most words in Chinese are made up of two morphemes (bimorphemic or disyllabic). Some Chinese characters cannot be used alone (bound morpheme), which means that they have no meaning without another character or more.
For example, 珊瑚 means "coral," but 珊 and 瑚 cannot be used by themselves and are inherently meaningless without each other.
This would undermine the idea that Chinese characters represent words, among other counterexamples.
Reference:
Joyce, T. (2016). Writing systems and scripts. In A. Rocci & L. de Saussure (Eds.), Verbal communication (Handbooks of Communication Science 3) (pp. 287-308). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
That’s so stupid.
You picked out a rare example of a multi-character word where the morphemes are bound and not words in of themselves.
THAT’S INCREDIBLY RARE.
99%+ of morphemes can and do function as independent words as well as morphemes to construct words. 😂
@@PeebeesPet 99% is a big claim, but it's still true that the majority of words in Chinese are disyllabic, not monosyllabic. Chinese was more monosyllabic in the past, especially true for Classical Chinese, but that has since changed.
Also, I was arguing against the claim that Chinese characters represent words. Yes, there are monosyllabic words, but you would then have to explain exceptions of bound morphemes if your claim is that characters represent words. If you can't deal with exceptions, then you have to change your claim being made to account for exceptions to the claim. The fact that there are bound morphemes undermines the idea that characters represent words.
Amazing video! As a learner of Japanese and Korean, this scratched an itch I didn’t think could be scratched
Hello, Inkbox. I feel this video is interesting and educational.
But, I wanna add the largest numbers of Chinese characters recorded in some dictionaries. So, according to Wikipedia (Sadly, It was edited recently with no numbering of characters in dictionaries, but you can find previous article in "Last edited"), Greater China (Well, I include Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) has 異體字字典 (Yitizi Zidian/Dictionary of Chinese character Variants) published in Taiwan which contains 106,330 Chinese characters. Japan has Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (大漢和辞典/The Great Chinese-Japanese Dictionary) contains 50,305 Chinese characters. And also, Korea published Han Han Dae Sajeon (漢韓大辭典/한한대사전/The Great Dictionary of Hanja-Hangeul) which contains 53,667 Chinese characters.
Asian countries otw to have the hardest, most confusing yet beautiful languages known to humanity for no reason:
it's hard because each character has its tone and pronunciation, completely different from English and other languages that use an alphabet, missing either one completely changes the character, but many characters just have a different radical to differentiate them, so you have to remember all of them
Beautiful? Lol. Tonal languages, and just East Asian languages in general sound horrible. 9 times out of 10 and especially if it’s a woman talking it sounds like an animal is dying. And a lot of their women are pretty, so I’m not just saying this out of racism sake lol
@@sneedfeed3179still better than ebonic lol
@@ZETA14.88based
@@danielzhang1916alphabet indicate sound so any sound in Chinese can use alphabet instead use signs to indicate meaning mean you must remember over 20k signs are overwhelmed for people to learn Chinese writing that's why Chinese language is most unpopular hate writing make Chinese so shy scare stiff silent sissy slow square sick shameful sad small with small slantt eye so you folk can focus reading.
Excellent presentation and good luck with people who are still stuck with the writing system which one has to memorize few thousands symbols/characters/ideograms. I am lucky to read/write/understand the greatest writing system Hangul plus English alphabet.
There's a trend to bring back Chinese characters in Korean though
Too many homophones
@@neo.4662source for this claim? it's only falling more and more into obscurity and just a "kids these days don't know this" kind of thing from boomers
The Chinese characters are actually comparable to that of Latin and Germanic languages. Even though both use letters, the people from China, Korea, and Japan can understand each other's languages to a certain extent. Whereas the languages used by the Khitans, Jurchens, and Western Xia are incomprehensible with the languages of the south. Just like how Germanic languages and Latin languages are not easily comprehensible and have very little lexical similarities.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
and Vietnam
get an education
你忘了越南。越南从古代也用汉字（Hán tự or chữ Hán）。虽然越南的地欧是东南亚，但是我们国家和中国，韩国，朝鲜，台湾，日本 有相同的文化，甚至越南的文化是最像中国的。希望以后你们记得把越南放在东亚文化。越南语有许多汉越词，这些词以古代或者中代的汉语，发音像广东话：结婚（ kết hôn)，中国 (Trung Quốc)，美国( Mĩ quốc,Hoan Kỳ or Mĩ)，身(thân)，同( đồng)，速度(tốc độ)，准备(chuẩn bị)，离婚( li hôn),常(thường)，古代(cổ đại)，车(xe or xa)，公共汽车( xe công cộng)，卫生间( nhà vện sinh)，电话(điện thoại)，脑 (não)，(tim or tâm)心, 房间(phòng)，头(đầu),查(tra), 大使馆(đại sứ quán) 历史(lịch sử)，物理学(vật lí)，化学(hoá học)，数学(toán học)，体育学(thể dục)，大学(đại học)，银行(ngân hàng) 校长(hiệu trưởng),学生(học sinh)，学(học)，雪(tuyết)，密(mật)什么的。另外，字喃 不是越南正式的字，大数的时间我们用汉字。越南人也可读懂汉字的韩国，中国，和日本。我希望这些可以让你们对越南的理解越来越深
You have a great, varied and interesting channel! I’m very glad to find it.
I love your videos, these are so interesting!
My Korean in-laws just laughed when I asked about Hanja. They said "Oh, they pretend to teach those old things to us in school, and we pretend to learn them - then the moment we graduate we never see them again". One of them, a teenager, said if anyone ever actually uses Hanja characters when writing, it's considering a total affectation & silly. "It's like if an English speaker writes poetry with a quill pen, it's just somebody being weird". I know in North Korea all Hanja are banned.
wow, that's so true! I was born in Korea and lived until univ. and now living in Canada, and I don't think I can read most of hanja. lol maybe I remember some numbers and elements words such as fire, water, and tree things. maybe around 20-30 characters? fyi, I learned hanja only in middle school for 3years.
@@pluto1526 Older people can read and write a lot more because it used to be taught and used more widely.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters or Hanja.
Koreans don't care if they can't read historical documents or even news papers 30 years ago.
yap more than younger people but still not like a few thousand or hundred words. My parents would know maybe around 100 characters, and for sure forgot about them a lot by now cuz never use them @@sharpasacueball
So if we try to guesstimate, there are probably around 500,000 characters, if we include ones that were lost to history and guess their approximate quantity.
Excellently well researched and respectfully presented.
I envy your ability to perfectly pronounce Chinese characters properly
Tbh not really, but I also appreciate the effort
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
Despite my admittedly limited knowledge of Japanese and Chinese, I was pleased to recognise the constituent parts of the Korean character for "rice paddy" as water and field
I was expecting to see the mention of 女書(female script) and is surprised that it wasn't even mentioned.
It's called nüshu, not female script
@@yanyanz3011 That's pinyin, what I did is translated them into English.
It's called Hiragana. Ok fine I know what you're talking about. But it's strange that Hiragana became the main writing script in Japan, while the female script in China just fell out of fashion.
Excellent introduction of 漢字 🀄🀄🀄👍👍👍More people should know your video!👁👁👁💪💪💪❤❤❤❤❤
You forgot to add the characters used by American and European hipsters incorrectly in tattoos
We should call them caricatures.
I love this scripture system no matter how hard it is, I love how Japanese mix Kanji and two different syllabaries
Imagine that hieroglyphs and cuneiform scripture never lost
Do Chinese have something like the Jōyō Kanji list? It would be usefol to reduce the number of characters, and also unify the simplifications from China and Japan
The Simplified Chinese Script is called 簡体字. I heard it's around 2200 new ones but the overall Kanji of 簡体字 are considered around 8000. Because there were probably already a lot of Kanji that were considered simple/easy.
@@danielantony1882 the japanese kanji was simplified after the world war II and they created a list of the most common used, originally were around 1800 but today they are like 2200, not because people today use more kanji but when they made the list they forgot the include some important ones
@@floptaxie68 I'm talking about Chinese Kanji. That's literally what Kanji means.
@@danielantony1882: HANZI, not "Chinese Kanji".
@@carltomacruz9138 Same thing, bro. Just different pronunciation. I mean, if we're just going with the orignal ownership idea then might as well just call it Kanji. You don't need to get butthurt simply because I'm not calling it Hanzi. It's literally the same thing.
hey the "seal" at 13:34 is incredibly aesthetically pleasing, do you have any links or info on how to read more about that? it sorta connects with my obsession about space-filling curves (mathematical stuff).
Google 篆書印章 篆書印鑑 or 篆書体
I don’t know about that seal in particular, but there was a system of writing Mongolian used by one of the mongol dynasties in China called Phags Pa script and it often was used in seals in a way that looks very similar!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script here's the wikipedia page on the script used. It's used heavily in official state documents/seals (like passports and government stamps, kind of like a signature). If you load the article in japanese there's much more information so you'll just have to use google translate and look at the pictures. Ultimately it's mainly just a way of making logos look fancy
這基本上是漢字的一種特殊的書寫方式，稱之為“篆書”，常用於政府的印章，是非常嚴肅莊重的
BUT IMAGINE ACTUALLY READING IT!!!!!!
so much work in this video
Why do you use the Japanese simiplification of 漢 even when talking about Chinese and Korean use? The traditional character has an extra line the Japanese one removed.
漢 vs 漢
almost identical... its easy to mistake one for the other
Exactly what I wanted to see, I love the history of chinese writing
If you are counting all variations, derivations and even characters that are no longer used to add up the total, then it is not correct to say that the phonetic alphabet used in English only has 26 characters. You should use the same logic and count historical and current variations (for example, the characters for uppercase are different from lowercase), and even derivations created in other countries, such as ñ, ç, etc.
All I knew about Yi writing was the syllabary. When you announced how many characters were in the Yi dictionary, my jaw dropped!
I like the depth of this video. Thanks for making this!
But actually counting all the convoluted historic variants of characters is quite nonsensical to say the least. It's like, when faced with a question how many Greek characters are there, replying "well, certainly over a hundred, let's think about all the lost characters, historic glyph forms and maybe even about the Minoan script". Obviously, the common sense answer should be 24.
And, on that matter, I don't understand why you even count Khitan, Sui and Yi. It's like counting Cherokee and Inuit scripts into Latin because they were 'influenced'
There are not just one Chữ Nôm. Some minority people in Vietnam created their own version which very similar to Chữ Nôm but with their language (sorry bad english)
Okay, I haven't heard of that, do you know which minorities?
@@InkboxSoftware Tày & Dao (in Vietnamese)
There are at least 10000 Traditional Chinese characters, but most of those characters are not used in everyday language. Some were used in old poetry and writings. The PRC use Simplified Chinese that use shortened characters for the less literate.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
Please give links of your sources so people can do their own research
as a taiwanese person that thumbail looks soooo cursed out of context
That red character in thumbnail looks sus
Trần Nhân Tông didn't bring Chữ Nôm into official writing. This part is wrong. The picture you showed is Hồ Quý Li, who did try to bring Chữ Nôm into official writing.
Fun fact: The thumbnail is not 漢字, instead to be 𡨸喃 (chữ Nôm) and some other script that he covered. But as a Vietnamese, I don't classify 𡨸喃 as 漢字, since it made to make our writing system differs from 漢字.
There are many chinese characters, but there would always be some useles characters that can't be pronounced like: ，，，， and others.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
Chu nom characters are really interesting also, why is this not popular?
Even mostly Vietnamese people don't give a sh!t to that script. This is a sad reality as Vietnam has given up on Han Nom
@@nomnaday thanks for explaining!
Colonization
Fake nationalism fueled by colonialism
Too outdated too old fashioned too hard to learn n use so why use character writing for instead use spelling system lot easy n faster. That's why nobody use character writing but dumbb Chinese.
6:15 Yes, the Asahi Newspaper Newspaper.
The chai tea
Fun fact how Japanese Hiragana was influenced by Cursive Chinese script.
Fascinating. One thing that came to mind was Taiwan. They don’t have their own variants or national characters?
In Taiwan there is the Standard Form of National Characters released by the Ministry of Education. It does look like they have some of their own unique forms of Characters as well, although not like the National Characters from Japan or Korea. Taiwan has only recently (since 1949) been a separate political entity from the mainland and the majority of the educated officials in those early days came from the mainland itself, meaning that they didn't have the same reasons to create National Characters as other nations did because they were, are still are, Chinese. The best way to put it might be that The Standard Form of National Characters is the standard that was set by the Ministry of Education of The Republic of China for the writing of Chinese Characters, which does hold some differences in particular with how the standards are set for the People's Republic of China (mainland China), but does not result in the creation of new Characters unique to that island.
In Taiwan we use traditional Chinese characters instead of simplified Chinese characters,which is the original writing system in Chinese history
Taiwanese as a dialect of Sino language group indeed has many unique vocabularies, and so on the characters for them.
And besides the dialect part, on a level of formal occasions, Taiwan is actually the one that keeps the very 'fundamental' version of Chinese writings; And on the contrary, we (the PR. China) have actually made many reforms on those characters, and in some cases even borrowed pieces of your Japanese simplified Kanji back.
That's why sometimes the Taiwanese mention our simplified Chinese characters are broken (残体字）
Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters but some simplified characters are used informally, there is also new characters for written vernacular Hokkien like 𪜶, but the majority of them can't be displayed on computers.
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use standard Chinese (i.e. traditional Chinese, the non-simplified ver.)
You make Super Mario Bros hacks, you talk about Typography history, how am I not following your channel already?
5:14 Probably the most syllable-packed kanji. 5 SYLLABLES IN ONE KANJI!
汉字is not character, it literally means Han character. Han is the majority ethnic group of China. so hanzi, kanji all mean Chinese character
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
was wondering if you ganna mention Western Xia（西夏）, Great job mate !
What about naxi dongba? Its not in unicode yet, but it is still sorta in use.
btw 福建与 and 广东与 also exist which also has its own character derived from written mandarin
How many characters are there? As many as you want. I can just make new ones whenever.
As a Chinese, I can't understand all the words in the video, it's very hard to us.
I can't really read chinese, but seal form characters look impossible to read.
That thumbnail is a crime against my eyes
Would you have any sources you recommend for further research in this topic? I'm looking into doing my dissertation on the history and influence of the Chinese language.
甲骨文
Why is the 骨 character, written in Japanese? Should the little square be on the left side? Since it’s Chinese?
The little square is also on the right in Taiwan and Hong Kong, So I see no problem here.
長い漢字の歴史の中で、大陸で骨の字がそのように書かれるようになったのはつい最近です。
Disappointed by lack of mentionment of the 則天文字
Could you make a video about the radical system in Chinese and Japanese?
Q:How Many Characters are there?
A:How many characters do you want?
By the way, "Chu Nom" in Khmer (Cambodian) means "to have to pee" lol
Haha, how funny (baby boring)
@@Jacob.D. ok
It is interesting that because Japan is an island country, it can see many other types of fish than China, so it has created many characters related to fish.
Should I invent a word, can I then just invent a character if it is translated in languages like chinese? (Hypotheticaly)
The clerical script is the euphemism for slave script . Because at that time period, there were two types of slaves, the field slaves and the house hold slaves. The so-called clerical script was performed by the household slaves. They were the slaves that performed household chores , including bookkeeping and record keeping.
Why Japan map shown in the video still has Southern Sakhalin as its territory?
Mistake
4:20 I see what you did there with the map of Japan. Very good, very good. Haha
日本は樺太を取り戻す。絶対に。
🙄
Thanks for sharing
10:13 that man is Hồ Quý Ly Emperor
Adding Chu Nom would just double the numbers, no?
It’s gonna be 80000 more
Pretty interesting
4:22 Why does Japanese map contain Sakhalin area? It's shocking.
Also in Han language group, there are a lot of languags that is not Mandarin, like Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu, etc. Although most of their languages can be written in current Characters, some of them can't, so they design more Characters.
For example, in Hokkien, we design "𤆬 (tshuā)", which means take people with you. "𠢕 (gâu)", which means good. "𪜶 (in)", which means they.
I've been interested in learning Taiwanese Hokkien for a while and wasn't sure about how many characters were innovated for the Min language family, and thought those would be mentioned in this video too!
@@danteuribe2179 yeah, it's sad they are not mentioned. Han languages other than Mandarin need more recognition
Im just seeing ? In a box, i guess my windows os cant support the characters
@@dalee2419 Yes, they are fairly new Unicode charactors, some fonts don't support them. You can install update fonts to see them
@@skps2010
Is it possible to understand written vernacular Hokkein with only the knowledge of standard mandarin?
Overall very informative, but it's a shame that this has so many mistakes, like Japan having the Sakhalin and Vietnam being a Han vessal state
crazy how ðe number shown is 90 away from 234,567 (just digits 2 to 7 as a number)
The letter on the middle of the thumbnail looks kinda cursed 💀
Yes, all those characters exist, but I think it would be misleading to call them all 漢字, as clearly, there were sets of characters that were invented by other peoples, such as mentioned here, the Vietnamese, Yi etc.
I guess it depends on what the question is. Do we want to know a more or less exhaustive list of every character that ever stemmed from the 漢字 beast? Yes. It's "at least 235,647."
But when counting 漢字 characters, why must we necessarily include all those character sets NOT invented or used by 漢 Chinese? Can those be called "漢字?" I don't think so. That's taking credit from all those people who devised their own writing styles.
Strictly speaking, only those characters created and used by the 漢 people are 漢字. So rather than make the task of counting 漢字 needlessly complicated, I think it's better to keep things simple. How many characters were devised by the 漢 people?
In my mind, that is the true number.
Also, how many of them are being used today? That would make the task even simpler.
When counting Roman characters, do we count all those characters that have fallen out of disuse? Þ/þ for example? We use 26 characters in English, _but_ Þ/þ was replaced with Th/th. So do we count that or leave it out?
So we can simplify the task of counting 漢字 characters by limiting ourselves to only the characters that the 漢 people created, and we can further simplify it by limiting ourselves to only those characters used today.
How many characters must someone learn to read any Chinese newspaper?
That's the number I want to know.
In Japan, there are 2,332 characters officially designated as essential for every day use. (常用漢字) Though my sources say that realistically most Japanese know about 3,000.
Is this number the same in China?
Katsumotonese letters look like the Burmese script but cursed lol
13:28 what is this script?
I like "小纂"so much!
你忘了越南。越南从古代也用汉字（Hán tự or chữ Hán）。虽然越南的地欧是东南亚，但是我们国家和中国，韩国，朝鲜，台湾，日本 有相同的文化，甚至越南的文化是最像中国的。希望以后你们记得把越南放在东亚文化。越南语有许多汉越词，这些词以古代或者中代的汉语，发音像广东话：结婚（ kết hôn)，中国 (Trung Quốc)，美国( Mĩ quốc,Hoan Kỳ or Mĩ)，身(thân)，同( đồng)，速度(tốc độ)，准备(chuẩn bị)，离婚( li hôn),常(thường)，古代(cổ đại)，车(xe or xa)，公共汽车( xe công cộng)，卫生间( nhà vện sinh)，电话(điện thoại)，脑 (não)，(tim or tâm)心, 房间(phòng)，头(đầu),查(tra), 大使馆(đại sứ quán) 历史(lịch sử)，物理学(vật lí)，化学(hoá học)，数学(toán học)，体育学(thể dục)，大学(đại học)，银行(ngân hàng) 校长(hiệu trưởng),学生(học sinh)，学(học)，雪(tuyết)，密(mật)什么的。另外，字喃 不是越南正式的字，大数的时间我们用汉字。我希望这些可以让你们对越南的理解越来越深
8:56
原来如此，感觉东亚文化圈很少把越南包括在内，大部分时候指的都是中日韩
Hanja was first created in ancient Korea. .
to be honest lot of these characters seems over exaggerated
For people who live in traditional characters environment, the simpified characters are unaesthetic. The strcture and balance of the characters are wrecked.
Only 15k views ??? How ?
Sorry, wall of text below. tldr: (1) what about characters in topolects/ dialects in East Asia, and (2) what about characters in the Ryukyus.
(1) It would have also been cool to include characters used in writing down topolects/ dialects in East Asia, so called dialect characters 方言字 (which I like to imagine as the opposite of national characters 國字). (See the Chinese or Japanese wiki articles for 方言字 .) A notable example is Cantonese gaat6 zaat6 曱甴. Naturally much like the characters for ethnic minorities or historical ethnicities, these would be difficult to count barring a few exceptions... The exceptions would be the few languages that are official in some sense in contemporary political entities, namely Cantonese (in Hong Kong and Macao) and Taiwanese (in Taiwan) (and possibly languages that are widely-ish written, like maybe Wu). For the purpose of getting a sense of numbers and counting (in a broad sense not sure how many characters in the sets I mention are going to be double counted), there is the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (5033 characters), the Macao Supplementary Character (425 characters, small number because built from the former) Set, and the Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters (700 characters) to the numbers you mentioned. No idea about other topolects, but it'd be cool to get a feel for other varieties, like Wu or Hakka or some widely-spoken Japanese one.
(2) You effectively talked about most of the Chinese character sphere, with possibly the only large omission being the Ryukyus (Okinawan: Ruuchyuu). In my understanding, writing was introduced there by Zen Buddhist monks from Japan and become more widespread under the Ryukyu kingdom (1429-1879) (especially after it was vassalized by Satsuma). Due to the long tradition of character writing there, I imagine national characters might have been developed there too. I haven't found anything about them (yet?), but there is a short Chinese wiki article on Ryukyuan Characters 琉球漢字 (on how characters were used there). The article claims most characters were traditional, except for the preference of some variant characters.
Thank you for this great comment. I had skipped over dialect characters because I had assumed it would all be the same, that's certainly one group I missed. As for Ryukyuan Characters, I had looked at them but for some reason they didn't make the final cut. But it really is comments like these that bring new things to my attention new topics and open up a whole new world of connections, so thank you. Eventually I will publish an extension to this video and will try to gather even more characters, including all those you mentioned.
i noticed this too!!! its a shame how little people know about dialectical writing, its dying out really fast. im hokkien but i could never dream of learning to write it, even hokkien speakers dont really even know about it anymore - 我問我婆時候她講福建話“不能”寫的
ayyy singapore!!!
サムネの漢字、これらだけなら出た峠、歩、雫、嵒、斈、辻、榊
*logosyllabic (except in Japanese)
Over 100,000
in current Japan alone
i havent seen anything yet but the thumbnail made me immensely uncomfortable
？
他国の文字を尊重してください
you forgot the Nv script. 女書。
It's called nüshu.
Why do not Vietnam?
Jurchen....the pronunciation of letter J is Y😑 if you know how to pronounce 女(汝)真
As an asian who try to learn japanese, this video help me to better understand the kanji origin in a more comprehensive point of view. Kanji with furigana such as Hiragana and Katakana maybe not as hard as I used to think, compare to learning only chinese character and their numerous variation. 🥲
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
@@yanyanz3011 And I didn't want to spesifically say hanzi here, but chinese character as a broader term and its influence to kanji hanja etc like in the video.