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from the soylentils-are-characters-too dept.
It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!
For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:14AM
It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants.
I wasn't aware that there was an infinite number of substrokes to create words with
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gman003 on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:52AM
There's a finite number of digits, yet still an infinite number of numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:07AM
I have to take off my shoes to count to sixteen, you insensitive clod.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:24AM
well, stop using hexadecimal and use base ten like everybody else.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:14AM
Here's the story that I heard, some time ago. An attempt was made to compile a list of all characters in use, for their inclusion in unicode. A lot of the more obscure characters are only used to write the name of some place/person/thing. So the people compiling the list were running around and asking people to write their names. Naturally there were some ambiguities in the handwriting. As a result, unicode includes a few nonsense characters which don't have any known meaning or reading. Apparently some dictionaries now contain entries for these, with some curious "definitions."