X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Chinese characters


Battle of the Chinese Farm

The farm featured specialised, Japanese-made machinery; Israeli soldiers mistook Japanese characters on this equipment for Chinese, leading to the area being labeled 'Chinese Farm' on Israeli military maps.

Flamecrest

The Flamecrest or Taiwan Firecrest (Regulus goodfellowi) (火冠戴菊鳥 or 台湾戴菊 in Chinese characters), is a species of bird in the kinglet family, Regulidae, that is endemic to the mountains of the island of Taiwan.

Pangram

The Thousand Character Classic is a 1000-character poem in which each character is used exactly once, but it does not include all Chinese characters.

Tetragram

a sinogram, i.e. a complex grapheme fit into the square area characteristic to East-Asian scripts

Yuan Xuefen

Yuan Xuefen (Chinese characters: 袁雪芬; Hanyu Pinyin: Yuán Xuěfēn; 26 March 1922 – 19 February 2011) was a noted performer in the Yueju opera genre of Chinese opera.

Zuo Si

Zuo Si (Chinese characters: 左思; Hanyu Pinyin: Zuǒ Sī) (250–305), courtesy name Taichong (太沖), was a writer and poet of the Western Jin.


Chinese classics

Generally, children first memorized the Chinese characters of the Three Character Classic and Hundred Family Surnames, and then went on to memorize the other classics.

Neolithic signs in China

A pottery inscription of the Longshan culture discovered in Dinggong Village, Zouping County, Shandong contains eleven symbols that do not look like the direct ancestor of Chinese characters.

The Hundred-word Eulogy

The Hundred-word Eulogy (百字讃 bǎizìzàn) is a 100-character praise of Islam, Allah, and the prophet Muhammad written by the Hongwu Emperor of China (r. 1368-1398).


see also

Anarchism in China

Japan, especially Tokyo, was the most popular destination because of its geographic proximity to China, its relatively affordable cost, and certain natural affinities between the two cultures (for example, the Japanese language uses Chinese characters extensively, facilitating communication and livability).

CDNC

Chinese Domain Name Consortium, a Chinese collaboration to come up with a method for allowing Chinese characters in domain names

Character encoding

Early binary repertoires include Bacon's cipher, Braille, International maritime signal flags, and the 4-digit encoding of Chinese characters for a Chinese telegraph code (Hans Schjellerup, 1869).

Cross-strait language database

A Cross-strait language database is an online Chinese word database launched by the General Association of Chinese Culture (GACC) in 2012 to store information about different Chinese characters and words usage exchanges.

ETen Chinese System

DOS did not support Chinese characters, which are not in Extended ASCII.

Fuzhou dialect

Most of the characters of Fuzhou dialect stem from Ancient Chinese and can therefore be written in Chinese characters.

Han unification

During the 8th Northeast Asia Trilateral Forum (held by Xinhua News Agency, Nikkei News Group, JoongAng Ilbo) in 2013-07-08, a draft bill (Draft Chart of Most Commonly-Used 800 Chinese Characters among the three countries) edited by former Renmin University of China president Ji Baocheng containing a list 800 unified CJK ideographs was announced.

IETF language tag

When the difference is one of script or script variety, as for simplified versus traditional Chinese characters, it should be expressed with a script subtag instead of a region subtag; in this example, zh-Hans and zh-Hant should be used instead of zh-CN and zh-HK.

Kim Ho-shang

Tibetan King Khri srong lde btsan (742–797) invited the Ch’an master Mo-ho-yen (whose name consists of the same Chinese characters used to transliterate "Mahayana") to transmit the Dharma at Samye Monastery.

Marquis Daniels

The tattoos range from a detailed map of Florida that covers his entire back, a caricature of a man blowing his head off with a shotgun on his lower right arm, and Chinese characters on his other arm which were intended to represent his initials, but translate to English as "healthy woman roof".

Moment in Peking

Her father has always encouraged her interests, among them her intense interest in "oracle bones" (the study of ancient Chinese characters craved on bones) and the singing of Chinese opera.

Ruo'ao

Like other early Chu rulers, Ruo'ao held the hereditary noble rank of viscount that was first granted to his ancestor, also named Xiong Yi (熊繹, different in Chinese characters), by King Cheng of Zhou.

Russell Leong

"Chinese Characters in the Diaspora: Russell Charles Leong," by Stella Dong, in South China Morning Post, May 30, 2004 (Hong Kong)

Square peg in a round hole

Sejong the Great of Korea commented, in 1443, that using Chinese characters for Korean was “like trying to fit a square handle into a round hole”.

Telegraph code

(Demand for accented vowels led to the 8-bit ISO 8859-1. Demand for Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and other letters led to many variations of ISO 8859. Demand for using more than one of these sets of letters at the same time led to the 16 bit Unicode. Demand for Chinese characters led to 20-bit Unicode, which clearly is impossible for any typewriter like formed character mechanical teleprinter, although dot-matrix printers can print Chinese characters.)

Thomas Franklin Carter

Pelliot took an immediate interest in the subject, bringing from his desk drawer a box full of movable type in Chinese characters, hundreds of years older than Gutenberg's, which he had found on a cave floor.

漢字

Kanji, the Chinese characters that are used in the modern written Japanese

Hanja, the Chinese characters sometimes used in modern written Korean