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53-554: The Peach Blossom Spring ( Chinese : 桃花源記 ; pinyin : Táohuā Yuán Jì ; lit. 'Source of the Peach Blossoms ', also translated as “( The Record of ) the Peach Blossom ”), or Peach Blossom Spring Story or The Peach Blossom Land was a fable written by Tao Yuanming in 421 CE about a chance discovery of an ethereal utopia where the people lead an ideal existence in harmony with nature, unaware of

106-661: A Korean mixed script became the usual way of writing the language, with roots of Chinese origin denoted by Hanja and all other elements rendered in Hangul. Hanja is still used (but not very commonly like the Japanese) and is required in both North and South Korea. Historically, a few characters known as gukja were coined in Korea; one example is 畓 'rice paddy'. Chinese characters adapted to write Japanese words are known as kanji . Chinese words borrowed into Japanese could be written with

159-503: A certain extent in South Korea , remain virtually identical to traditional characters, with variations between the two forms largely stylistic. There has historically been a debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters . Because the simplifications are fairly systematic, it is possible to convert computer-encoded characters between the two sets, with the main issue being ambiguities in simplified representations resulting from

212-468: A few hundred new characters and used traditional character forms until the mid-20th century, to the extensive adaptations of Zhuang and Vietnamese, each coining over 10,000 new characters by Chinese formation principles, to the highly divergent Tangut script , which formed over 5,000 new characters by its own principles. The earliest known examples of Chinese writing are oracle bone inscriptions made c.  1200 BC at Yin (near modern Anyang ),

265-534: A fisherman haphazardly sailed into a river in a forest made up entirely of blossoming peach trees, where even the ground was covered by peach petals. When he reached the end of the river (or spring in some translations), the source turned out to be a grotto . Though narrow at first, he was able to squeeze through and the passage eventually reached a village with animals and people of all ages. The villagers were surprised to see him, but were kind and friendly. They explained that their ancestors escaped to this place during

318-758: A part of each character, while hiragana were derived from the cursive forms of whole characters. Such classic works as Lady Murasaki 's The Tale of Genji were written in hiragana, the only system permitted to women of the time. Modern Japanese writing uses a composite system, using kanji for word stems , hiragana for inflexional endings and grammatical words, and katakana to transcribe non-Chinese loanwords. A few hundred characters have been coined in Japan; these are known as kokuji , and include natural phenomena, particularly fish, such as 鰯 ; 'sardine', together with everyday terms such as 働 ; 'work' and technical terms such as 腺 ; 'gland'. Vietnamese

371-481: A popular four-character idiom ( chengyu ), meaning an unexpectedly fantastic place off the beaten path, usually an unspoiled wilderness of great beauty. The text inspired many later poems, some music compositions, art and a modern Taiwanese play-turned-movie, Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring . In some of the poems, the inhabitants of the villages were xian (immortals). Taohuayuan Scenic Area

424-461: A representation of the meaning of the word: Characters directly descendant of these forms remain still among the most commonly used today. Words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles, were denoted using the rebus strategy, selecting characters for similar-sounding words. Thus, these phonetic loans ( 假借字 ; jiǎjièzì ) are new uses of existing characters rather than new graphic forms. An example

477-460: A similar sound and native words with a similar meaning. In the Vietnamese case, the latter category consisted mainly of early loans from Chinese that had come to be accepted as native. The Vietnamese system also involved creation of new characters using Chinese principles, but on a far greater scale than in Korea or Japan. The resulting system was highly complex and was never mastered by more than 5% of

530-421: Is 來 ; lái ; 'come', written with the character for a similar-sounding word meaning 'wheat'. The borrowed character was sometimes modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with 毋 ; wú ; 'do not', a borrowing of 母 ; mǔ ; 'mother'. Phono-semantic compounds ( 形聲字 ; xíngshēngzì ) were obtained by adding semantic indicators to disambiguate phonetic loans. This type

583-749: Is 産 (also the accepted form in Japan and Korea), while in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan the accepted form is 產 (also the accepted form in Vietnamese chữ Nôm ). The PRC tends to print material intended for people in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and overseas Chinese in traditional characters. For example, versions of the People's Daily are printed in traditional characters, and both People's Daily and Xinhua have traditional character versions of their website available, using Big5 encoding. Mainland companies selling products in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan use traditional characters in order to communicate with consumers;

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636-587: Is a retronym applied to non-simplified character sets in the wake of widespread use of simplified characters. Traditional characters are commonly used in Taiwan , Hong Kong , and Macau , as well as in most overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia. As for non-Chinese languages written using Chinese characters, Japanese kanji include many simplified characters known as shinjitai standardized after World War II, sometimes distinct from their simplified Chinese counterparts . Korean hanja , still used to

689-611: Is a national park based on The Peach Blossom Spring located in Taoyuan County , Hunan , China. The Mu Lung Gardens in MapleStory are named after the land in the text ( Chinese : 武陵桃源 ; Korean pronunciation : Mureung Doweon ). Mu Lung Garden is one of the Asian-themed areas in the game, even with several pandas training to become monks. The modern sculpture by Yuanxing Liang called "Chunmang Peach Blossom Island"

742-465: Is similar in scale to the chữ Nôm of Vietnam. Even though an official alphabet-based writing system for Zhuang was introduced in 1957, Sawndip is still more often used in less formal situations. Several peoples in southwest China recorded laws, songs and other religious and cultural texts by representing words of their languages using a mix of Chinese characters with a similar sound or meaning, or pairs of Chinese characters indicating pronunciation using

795-518: Is uncertain. Development and simplification of the script continued during the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods , with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles. Writing became more widespread during the Warring States period , as well as further simplified and more varied, particularly in the eastern states. After

848-483: The Chinese Commercial News , World News , and United Daily News all use traditional characters, as do some Hong Kong–based magazines such as Yazhou Zhoukan . The Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified characters. DVDs are usually subtitled using traditional characters, influenced by media from Taiwan as well as by the two countries sharing the same DVD region , 3. With most having immigrated to

901-599: The Standard Form of National Characters . These forms were predominant in written Chinese until the middle of the 20th century, when various countries that use Chinese characters began standardizing simplified sets of characters, often with characters that existed before as well-known variants of the predominant forms. Simplified characters as codified by the People's Republic of China are predominantly used in mainland China , Malaysia, and Singapore. "Traditional" as such

954-597: The fanqie method. The languages so recorded included Miao , Yao , Bouyei , Kam , Bai and Hani . All these languages are now written using Latin-based scripts. Chinese characters were also used to transcribe the Mongolian text of The Secret History of the Mongols . Between the 10th and 13th centuries, northern China was ruled by foreign dynasties that created scripts for their own languages. The Khitan large script and Khitan small script , which in turn influenced

1007-509: The Kensiu language . Chinese family of scripts These scripts are written in various styles , principally seal script , clerical script , regular script , semi-cursive script , and cursive script . Adaptations range from the conservative, as in Korean, which used Chinese characters in their standard form with only a few local coinages, and relatively conservative Japanese, which has coined

1060-466: The Mongolic and Tungusic languages. Chinese characters adapted to write Korean are known as Hanja . From the 9th century, Korean was written using a number of systems collectively known as Idu , in which Hanja were used to write both Sino-Korean and native Korean roots, and a smaller number of Hanja were used to write Korean grammatical morphemes with similar sounds. The overlapping uses of Hanja made

1113-622: The Shanghainese -language character U+20C8E 𠲎 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-20C8E —a composition of 伐 with the ⼝   'MOUTH' radical—used instead of the Standard Chinese 嗎 ; 吗 . Typefaces often use the initialism TC to signify the use of traditional Chinese characters, as well as SC for simplified Chinese characters . In addition, the Noto, Italy family of typefaces, for example, also provides separate fonts for

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1166-695: The Tangut script and Jurchen script , used characters that superficially resemble Chinese characters, but with the exception of a few loans were constructed using quite different principles. In particular the Khitan small script contained phonetic sub-elements arranged in a square block in a manner similar to the more sophisticated Hangul system devised later for Korean. Other scripts in China that borrowed or adapted some Chinese characters but are otherwise distinct include Ba–Shu scripts Geba script , Sui script , Yi script and

1219-587: The simplified Chinese variant. Until the early 20th century, formal writing employed Literary Chinese , based on the vocabulary and syntax of the Chinese classics . The script was also used less formally to record local varieties, which had over time diverged from the classical language and each other. The logographic script easily accommodated differences in pronunciation, meaning and word order, but often new characters were required for words that could not be related to older forms. Many such characters were created using

1272-443: The 8th-century anthology Man'yōshū . This system was not quite a syllabary , because each Japanese syllable could be represented by one of several characters, but from it were derived two syllabaries still in use today. They differ because they sometimes selected different characters for a syllable, and because they used different strategies to reduce these characters for easy writing: the angular katakana were obtained by selecting

1325-522: The Chinese character, while Japanese words could be written using the character for a Chinese word of similar meaning. Because there have been multiple layers of borrowing into Japanese, a single kanji may have several readings in Japanese. Other systems, known as kana , used Chinese characters phonetically to transcribe the sounds of Japanese syllables. An early system of this type was man'yōgana , as used in

1378-547: The People's Republic of China, traditional Chinese characters are standardised according to the Table of Comparison between Standard, Traditional and Variant Chinese Characters . Dictionaries published in mainland China generally show both simplified and their traditional counterparts. There are differences between the accepted traditional forms in mainland China and elsewhere, for example the accepted traditional form of 产 in mainland China

1431-521: The United States during the second half of the 19th century, Chinese Americans have long used traditional characters. When not providing both, US public notices and signs in Chinese are generally written in traditional characters, more often than in simplified characters. In the past, traditional Chinese was most often encoded on computers using the Big5 standard, which favored traditional characters. However,

1484-463: The civil unrest of the Qin dynasty , and that they themselves had not left since or had contact with anyone from the outside. As a result, they had heard nothing of subsequent changes in political regimes, but remained happy and self-sufficient. The fisherman was warmly received by the hospitable villagers and stayed for over a week. Upon leaving, he was informed that it was worthless to reveal this experience to

1537-466: The early script represents an Old Chinese word, which were uniformly monosyllabic at that time. Characters are traditionally classified according to a system of six categories ( 六書 ; liùshū ; 'six writings') according to the apparent strategy used to create them. This system was first made popular by the Shuowen Jiezi dictionary ( c.  100 AD ). Three of these categories involved

1590-493: The inverse is equally true as well. In digital media, many cultural phenomena imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan into mainland China, such as music videos, karaoke videos, subtitled movies, and subtitled dramas, use traditional Chinese characters. In Hong Kong and Macau , traditional characters were retained during the colonial period, while the mainland adopted simplified characters. Simplified characters are contemporaneously used to accommodate immigrants and tourists, often from

1643-725: The mainland. The increasing use of simplified characters has led to concern among residents regarding protecting what they see as their local heritage. Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters. The use of simplified characters in government documents and educational settings is discouraged by the government of Taiwan. Nevertheless, with sufficient context simplified characters are likely to be successfully read by those used to traditional characters, especially given some previous exposure. Many simplified characters were previously variants that had long been in some use, with systematic stroke simplifications used in folk handwriting since antiquity. Traditional characters were recognized as

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1696-682: The majority of Chinese text in mainland China are simplified characters , there is no legislation prohibiting the use of traditional Chinese characters, and often traditional Chinese characters remain in use for stylistic and commercial purposes, such as in shopfront displays and advertising. Traditional Chinese characters remain ubiquitous on buildings that predate the promulgation of the current simplification scheme, such as former government buildings, religious buildings, educational institutions, and historical monuments. Traditional Chinese characters continue to be used for ceremonial, cultural, scholarly/academic research, and artistic/decorative purposes. In

1749-975: The merging of previously distinct character forms. Many Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between these character sets. Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as 正體字 ; 正体字 ; zhèngtǐzì ; 'orthodox characters'. This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and traditional, from other variants and idiomatic characters . Users of traditional characters elsewhere, as well as those using simplified characters, call traditional characters 繁體字 ; 繁体字 ; fántǐzì ; 'complex characters', 老字 ; lǎozì ; 'old characters', or 全體字 ; 全体字 ; quántǐzì ; 'full characters' to distinguish them from simplified characters. Some argue that since traditional characters are often

1802-665: The official script in Singapore until 1969, when the government officially adopted Simplified characters. Traditional characters still are widely used in contexts such as in baby and corporation names, advertisements, decorations, official documents and in newspapers. The Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative in Southeast Asia regarding simplification. Although major public universities teach in simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications such as

1855-456: The oldest samples. While various symbols inscribed on pieces of pottery, jade, and bone have been found at Neolithic sites across China, there is no clear evidence of any relation to Shang oracle bone script. Inscriptions on bronze vessels using a developed form of the Shang script dating to c.  1100 BC have also been discovered, and have provided a richer corpus. Each character of

1908-472: The original phonetic similarity has been obscured by millennia of sound change , as in 格 ; gé < *krak 'go to' and 路 ; lù < *graks 'road'. Many characters often explained as semantic compounds were originally phono-semantic compounds that have been obscured in this way. Some authors even dispute the validity of the semantic compound category. The sixth traditional category ( 轉注字 ; zhuǎnzhùzì ) contains very few characters; its meaning

1961-700: The original standard forms, they should not be called 'complex'. Conversely, there is a common objection to the description of traditional characters as 'standard', due to them not being used by a large population of Chinese speakers. Additionally, as the process of Chinese character creation often made many characters more elaborate over time, there is sometimes a hesitation to characterize them as 'traditional'. Some people refer to traditional characters as 'proper characters' ( 正字 ; zhèngzì or 正寫 ; zhèngxiě ) and to simplified characters as 簡筆字 ; 简笔字 ; jiǎnbǐzì ; 'simplified-stroke characters' or 減筆字 ; 减笔字 ; jiǎnbǐzì ; 'reduced-stroke characters', as

2014-503: The outside world for centuries. The phrase can be used to describe an idealistic place of beauty and repose, although it is sometimes used to refer to an unrealistic dream. "The Peach Blossom Spring" was written during a time of political instability and national disunity; and, according to the story, set in the same (the Taiyuan era of the Jin dynasty (266–420) . "Peach Blossom Spring" describes how

2067-497: The population. It was completely replaced in the 20th century by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . Zhuang has been written using Sawndip for over a thousand years. The script uses both Chinese characters and new characters formed using the traditional methods, as well as some formed by combining pairs of characters to indicate the pronunciation of a word by the fanqie method. The number of new created characters

2120-463: The site of the final capital of the Shang dynasty ( c.  1600  – c.  1046 BC ). These inscriptions were carved into ox scapulae and tortoise plastrons , and recorded the results of official divinations conducted by the Shang royal house. The script shows extensive simplification and linearization, believed by most researchers to indicate an extensive development of the script prior to

2173-567: The system complex and difficult to use, even when reduced forms for grammatical morphemes were introduced with the Gugyeol system in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Hangul alphabet introduced in the 15th century was much simpler, and specifically designed for the sounds of Korean. The alphabet makes systematic use of modifiers corresponding to features of Korean sounds. Although Hangul is unrelated to Chinese characters, its letters are written in syllabic blocks that can be interspersed with Hanja. Such

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2226-627: The traditional character set used in Taiwan ( TC ) and the set used in Hong Kong ( HK ). Most Chinese-language webpages now use Unicode for their text. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends the use of the language tag zh-Hant to specify webpage content written with traditional characters. In the Japanese writing system , kyujitai are traditional forms, which were simplified to create shinjitai for standardized Japanese use following World War II. Kyūjitai are mostly congruent with

2279-970: The traditional characters in Chinese, save for minor stylistic variation. Characters that are not included in the jōyō kanji list are generally recommended to be printed in their traditional forms, with a few exceptions. Additionally, there are kokuji , which are kanji wholly created in Japan, rather than originally being borrowed from China. In the Korean writing system , hanja —replaced almost entirely by hangul in South Korea and totally replaced in North Korea —are mostly identical with their traditional counterparts, save minor stylistic variations. As with Japanese, there are autochthonous hanja, known as gukja . Traditional Chinese characters are also used by non-Chinese ethnic groups. The Maniq people living in Thailand and Malaysia use Chinese characters to write

2332-513: The traditional methods, particularly phono-semantic compounds. For many centuries, the Chinese script was the only writing system in East Asia, and had a huge influence as the vehicle for the dominance of Chinese culture. Korea, Japan and Vietnam adopted Chinese literary culture as a whole. For many centuries, all writing in neighbouring countries was in Literary Chinese , albeit influenced by

2385-509: The ubiquitous Unicode standard gives equal weight to simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and has become by far the most popular encoding for Chinese-language text. There are various input method editors (IMEs) available for the input of Chinese characters . Many characters, often dialectical variants, are encoded in Unicode but cannot be inputted using certain IMEs, with one example being

2438-510: The western state of Qin unified China, its more conservative seal script became the standard across the entire country. A simplified form known as clerical script became the standard during the Han dynasty , and later evolved into regular script , which remains in use. At the same time, semi-cursive and cursive scripts developed. The traditional Chinese script is currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Mainland China and Singapore use

2491-526: The words for simplified and reduced are homophonous in Standard Chinese , both pronounced as jiǎn . The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han dynasty c.  200 BCE , with the sets of forms and norms more or less stable since the Southern and Northern dynasties period c.  the 5th century . Although

2544-409: The words of other languages using a range of strategies, including The principle of representing one monosyllabic word with one character was readily applied to neighbouring languages to the south with a similar analytic structure to Chinese, such as Vietnamese and Zhuang . The script was a poorer fit for the polysyllabic agglutinative languages of the north-east, such as Korean , Japanese and

2597-489: The world. However, he marked his route on his way out with signs and later divulged the existence of this idyllic haven to others, who attempted repeatedly – but in vain – to locate it. The Tang dynasty poet Li Bai referenced the Peach Blossom Spring in his poem "A Gift to Wang Lun" ( 贈汪倫 , Zèng Wāng Lún , c. 750 CE). The expression shìwaì taóyuán ( 世外桃源 ), lit. "the Peach Spring beyond this world") has become

2650-399: The writer's native language. Although they wrote in Chinese, writing about local subjects required characters to represent names of local people and places; leading to the creation of Han characters specific to other languages, some of which were later re-imported as Chinese characters. Later they sought to use the script to write their own languages. Chinese characters were adapted to represent

2703-421: Was already used extensively on the oracle bones, and has been the main source of new characters since then. For example, the character 其 originally representing jī ; 'winnowing basket' was also used to write the pronoun and modal particle qí . Later the less common original word was written with the compound 箕 , obtained by adding the symbol 竹 ; zhú ; 'bamboo' to the character. Sometimes

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2756-454: Was first written from the 13th century using the chữ Nôm script based on Chinese characters, but the system developed in a quite different way than in Korea or Japan. Vietnamese was and is a strongly analytic language with many distinct syllables (roughly 4,800 in the modern standard language), so there was little motivation to develop a syllabary. As with Korean and Japanese, characters were used to write borrowed Chinese words, native words with

2809-460: Was inspired by the tale; it presents a woman with her hair forming into nature imitating the utopian world which is presented in the fable. Traditional Chinese characters Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to write Chinese languages . In Taiwan , the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in

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