The Writing of ChinaBy Nathaniel Maddalene and Ethan Scher

IntroductionDo you know about the Chinese Writing

system? About simplified Chinese? The Chinese oracle bone? Chinese symbols? Chinese language? Chinese alphabet and reading in Chinese? About how many Chinese symbols? Well if you don’t, too bad but it might not be too bad any more because you have this slide show about Chinese writing to see!

Oracle boneOracle bone is a type of

Chinese writing. An oracle bone is made of turtle shell or bone. The emperor wrote a question on the oracle bone and an oracle looked at the cracks for the answer. The oracle bone had characters on it. Oracle bone was also called “dragon bone”. An oracle is someone who determines your fate.

The Chinese Language

The Chinese language is a member of the Sino – Tibetan family of languages. Chinese is a native language. Chinese language is one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six languages in the United nations. There are several variations of the Chinese language. The languages are: Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Jin, Xiang, Hakka, Ganshu, and Pinguha Chinese. China has a lot of languages. About one – fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese.

Chinese Alphabet

The Chinese alphabet has 29 symbols. There are 3 more symbols in their alphabet than ours. Many of the symbols looked like today’s English letters. One symbol looked like “k”. Another symbol looked like “z”. In the Chinese dictionary, there are 60,000 symbols.

Chinese Writing System The Chinese writing system is what all Chinese writing is based on. The Chinese writing system goes back 4,000 years ago maybe even more. That’s before Christ (B.C.). The Chinese writing system is based on logographics (a character that represents one word). The Chinese writing system brought all the Chinese languages into one. The Chinese writing system is the oldest writing system in the world. The Chinese writing system has over 60,000 characters. The Chinese writing system was invented in 2,000 B.C. The Chinese didn’t actually have letters. They had characters.

Chinese Translation The people who translate Chinese have to be fluent in Chinese and the other language. Chinese can be translated in: Movies, Speeches, Videos, Video tapes, and just plain talking. Some places Chinese translators can be found are: The U.N., Offices, Factory’s, and Consulats. Different people and factory’s have different needs for Chinese translators.

Simplified Chinese

Simplified Chinese is really just Chinese characters but more simple. For example, instead of n being person, this is person. Here are some simplified Chinese characters: Mountain= , sun= , mouth= , soil= , and tree= . All simplified Chinese are logograms. The characters have names like sun or is ri, rain or is yu. You can sometimes find simplified Chinese characters on oracle bone.