Chinese characters, also known as Han characters, Chinese script or Hanzi, are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and other Far Eastern languages from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture such as Japanese, Korean and (pre-colonial) Vietnamese. Unlike letters in the alphabets of most languages, which only transcribe the phonetics (phonemes) of speech (i.e. are phonegraphs), Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the basic units of meaning in a language, thus making them the linguistic equivalent of words rather than letters, while the majority of "words" in the Chinese lexicon are in fact compounds and phrasemes (short phrases). The pronunciation of Chinese characters is transcribed phonetically via separate (usually romanized) transliteration systems such as the Pinyin, Zhuyin, Jyutping, Wade–Giles or Yale system.
At the most basic level, Chinese characters are composed of strokes (the actual linguistic equivalent of letters), which are written in a fixed stroke order for each character. The strokes are then organized into radicals, which are the fundamental root components that represent either a semantic feature or a homophone (often based on the Middle Chinese pronunciations) of the character. Historically, methods of writing characters have included carving inscriptions on stone, animal bones (usually turtle shells) or bronze; drawing ink onto bamboo slips, fabric (typically silk) or paper; and printing with woodblocks or moveable type. Technologies invented since the 19th century to facilitate the use of characters include telegraph codes and typewriters, as well as input methods and text encodings on computers.
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