Chinese characters

Character, word and reading

Han characters are used to write Chinese and have also been adapted within Japanese, Korean and other historical writing practices. The same character can have different readings across languages. Unicode’s comparison table gives 山 as Mandarin shān, Japanese san or yama, and Korean san. That is a concrete reason a character’s shape cannot by itself specify one pronunciation. It also cannot supply an entire sentence’s meaning independently of grammar and language.

A character often writes a meaningful element, but a modern Chinese word can have two or more characters. Do not count characters as words. In a text, establish language, lexical context and word boundaries before translating. Modern punctuation and spacing may be editorial additions to an older witness.

Shape is evidence too

Unicode unifies many Han characters across regional print traditions; a font can choose different glyph shapes for the same encoded character. The standard discusses variation by locale and typeface. For a historical object, preserve a photograph or a careful drawing when stroke form matters. A searchable encoded character helps find other occurrences but does not document a particular brush form or damaged stroke.

Some characters have components that provide semantic or phonetic clues, but a present-day shape is not a transparent origin story. Consult a historical dictionary or palaeographic source before claiming that its parts “picture” a concept. This course uses 山 only for the sourced contrast in language-specific readings.

Worked comparison

Place 山 in three columns headed Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, then enter the readings listed by Unicode. The character string remains the same; the language tag changes the reading. Next place 山 beside a two-character Chinese word from a dictionary and check the whole-word meaning before translating either character separately. The answer is not a universal English gloss of 山; it is a language-specific lexical analysis.