Scripts
Han Script
HAHN, as in the Han dynasty
Also Known As Hanzi
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Origin from 1250 BCE
Han script, Chinese characters, is a logographic writing system in which most characters represent a morpheme rather than a single sound, developed in China over more than three thousand years from the pictographic and divinatory oracle bone script of the late Shang dynasty. Because the characters encode meaning more directly than pronunciation, the same script historically served, and in the case of Japanese kanji and Korean hanja still partly serves, multiple mutually unintelligible languages, and unifies the many varieties of spoken Chinese in writing even where they cannot be understood between speakers. Modern usage divides between Traditional characters, still standard in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Simplified characters, introduced in mainland China from the 1950s onward to increase literacy.
Facts
DirectionalityLeft to right in modern usage; historically top to bottom in vertical columns read right to left 1 In Use Since (Year)Approximate date of the earliest oracle bone inscriptions, the script's earliest confirmed ancestor; the exact point at which the system counts as a mature writing system rather than a proto-writing notation is itself debated among specialists. Cross-Tradition Connections
Ancestor Of
Hiragana, Scripts Developed by cursive simplification of man'yogana, Chinese characters used purely for their sound values; katakana derives from the same man'yogana practice by a different process, taking a fragment of each source character rather than simplifying the whole shape.
Katakana, Scripts Formed by taking abbreviated fragments of man'yogana kanji rather than simplifying the whole character in cursive, the method that produced hiragana instead.
Associated With
This source names Korean directly: "and in the case of Japanese kanji and Korean hanja still partly serves, multiple mutually unintelligible languages, and unifies the many varieties of spoken Chinese in writing even where they cannot..."
Script Of
Japanese, Languages Japanese is written with kanji (Han-derived characters) alongside two native syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, neither of which is yet modeled as its own script entity in this atlas.
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Arts and Music Atlas: Calligraphy, influenced this subject there.
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