User:Arilang1234/Sandbox/Chinese/English
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Historical civilizations of the Near East, China, and Central America used some form of logographic writing systems.
Since a purely logographic script would be impractical, a subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is then used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In both Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of fusing such phonetic elements with determinatives; such "radical and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script, and both languages relegated simple transliterations to the spelling of foreign loan words and words from non-standard dialects.
Written Chinese (Chinese: 中文) comprises the symbols commonly known as Chinese characters or sinograph (漢字), and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. The Chinese writing system is logosyllabic; that is, each character generally represents either a complete one-syllable word or a single-syllable part of a word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation.
English, an alphabet-based language, is a West Germanic language that developed in England and south-eastern Scotland during the Anglo-Saxon era. English has become the lingua franca in many parts of the world, and the most prominent language in international business and science.[1][2] It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language in the European Union and many Commonwealth countries, as well as many international organisations.