Chinese+Script

1. "__[|Nushu]__ is perhaps the most interesting writing system associated with Chinese. It is a secret script used by women in Hunan over hundred of years to communicate with each other as women were not given any education in feudal Chinese society. It is moribund and only known by a handful of women of advanced age. However recently there is considerable interest in it and some efforts are made in preserving it."

2. "**Vietnamese Chu Nom** means "Southern Writing" and it was a script to write Vietnamese using Chinese character construction principles. What this means is that traditional radicals were paired with characters serving as phonetic components to construct Chu Nom characters that represent Vietnamese words. Chu Nom never attained an official status such as that of Chinese in Vietnam and only remained in the domain of literary elites. During French colonization both Chinese and Chu Nom were suppressed and the Latin-based quoc ngu became the sole writing system for Vietnamese."

3. "**[|Khitan]**: The Khitan people were a powerful Mongolian tribe that dominated Northern China and established the Liao dynasty between the 10th and 12th centuries BCE and invented not one but two scripts both based on Chinese and augmented to their language. One form, the "Large Script", remained largely logographic, while the "Small Script" evolved into a mixed phonetic and logographic system. In both scripts, some signs were adopted from Chinese and heavily modified, while others are new creations. The Khitan script, as well as the Khitan language and people, faded into history after having been absorbed into the Mongolian empire."

4. "**[|Yi Scripts]**: The Yi people of China's Yunnan province have an indigenous writing system that on surface appears to resemble Chinese, so it is classified as a Sinitic script, but the resemblance might just a product of stimulus diffusion. This means that only the idea of writing and the visual style were adopted by the Yi, but the individual signs themselves are brand new inventions."

5. "[|**Korean**]: Writing in Korea also started as an adoption of the Chinese script to fit the Korean language, and as a result Chinese characters called //hanja// came to represent both words as well as sounds. This system persisted for more than a thousand until the creation and introduction of the alphabet //hangul// which is what is used in both North and South Korea."

6. "**[|Japanese]**: At first the Japanese wrote fully in Chinese, but over time the Chinese script was adopted to represent Japanese words, syntax, and grammar. The result is a set of three scripts serving as a single writing system. One of the scripts, //kanji// is essentially Chinese characters, whereas the other two systems, //hiragana// and //katakana// are simplified forms of certain Chinese characters and used exclusively to represent sounds. It is possible and fairly common that all three scripts are useds together in the same text."

8. "As the only indigenous and the oldest writing system in East Asia, the Chinese writing system became the inspiration and the basis for many other East Asian writing systems, some prominent and still in use, while other having faded into obscurity and disuse. Together they are loosely called the Sinitic family of scripts, which includes the following scripts."

7. "**Tangut**: The Xixia Dynasty or Tangut Empire was a powerful state in northwestern China, headed by an elite who spoke a Tibeto-Burman language. By edict of Emperor Jingzong, a writing system was created by his court scholars in 1036 and rapid disseminated via government schools. The Tangut script was a logographic writing system with over 5,000 characters made to resemble Chinese characters visually but were in fact new creations. The script quickly declined after the destruction of the Tangut Empire by Genghis Khan, the last inscription dating from the 16th century."

9. "[|**Jurchen**]: The Jurchens were the ancestors of the Manchus (who went on to conquer China and established the last dynasty, the Qing) and they adapted both the Khitan big and small scripts and modified them into a single script for their own language. It is still a poorly understood script. The Jurchen/Manchu people later adopted the Mongolian alphabet and modified it into the Manchu script, and abandoned the old logographic Jurchen script."

10. " //Jiaguwen//, or Oracle Bone Script . This is the earliest form of Chinese writing, used from the Middle to Late Shang dynasty (approximately 1500 BCE to 1000 BCE). This script was etched onto turtle shells and animals bones, which were then used for divination in the royal Shang court, hence the name "oracle bones". Consequently, scholars have been using oracle bones as historical documents to investigate the reigns of later Shang monarchs, and surprisingly confirming the veracity of the traditional list of Chinese emperors that was deemed mythological rather than historical. The shape of these characters are often described as "pictographic", in that they resemble stylized drawings of objects they represent."

11. "The common consensus is that writing in China evolved from earlier non-linguistic symbolic systems. During the Late Neolithic period, at the latter half of the 3rd millenum BCE, many symbols or "pictograms" started to be incised on pottery and jades. These symbols are thought to be family or clan emblems that identify the ownership or provenance of the pottery or jades."

All found on page 1