Keys of Chinese characters by groups. Hieroglyph recognition program

The largest hieroglyph: “view of a dragon in flight”
Hieroglyph

(moon.
かんじ
; Korean 한자; Chinese 漢字; Egyptian) - a random set of straight and crooked sticks, dancing men and other squiggles, meaning anything depending on the context. According to legend, in the fairy-tale countries of China and Japan, natives speak and draw anime with the help of these sticks, but since no one has ever been there, it is impossible to verify this.

[edit] Introduction

Seriously, hieroglyphs arose much earlier than these letters of yours. The very first type of recording of information was the rock paintings of primitive people. Then, with the advent of civilizations, they were improved to pictograms and ideograms, i.e. conventional drawings, the meaning of which is agreed upon in advance and is clear to everyone. Pictograms are still used today, for example in road signs and other symbols (lightning is a sign of electricity, etc.)

The ancient Chinese went further and simplified pictograms into hieroglyphs, i.e. even more conventional icons, having even less external resemblance to the designated phenomenon, which could be combined into more complex icons to denote more complex and abstract concepts. They do not convey phonetics or do so in a limited way (we smoke “phonetic keys”), which leads to butthurt and a break in the pattern of gaijin students. Some of them contain a lot of small parts and tend to merge into one big blob (especially the traditional version).

But hieroglyphs don’t care at all about phonetic differences. If Slavic languages ​​had hieroglyphs, a Russian would understand what a Pole wrote a little more than completely. After World War II, East Asia even began to think about abandoning hieroglyphs and switching to this Latin alphabet, but the Chinese and Japanese found reasons not to do this, but the Vietnamese abandoned hieroglyphs and switched to the Latin alphabet. True, to convey tones and additional sounds, it was necessary to introduce a three-story diacritic (some of the characters indicate tones, some modify the letter like these umlauts of yours, both can be combined in one letter), so Vietnamese texts look cumbersome and are not so easy to type on the keyboard ( although from a mobile phone it’s ok).

It is important to note that the word “hieroglyph” refers to Asian squiggles only in this country. In the rest of the world, the word “hieroglyph” is used exclusively in the context of the writings of ancient civilizations, in particular Ancient Egypt. Therefore, if there is a need to translate something into English, never, anon, write “Chinese hieroglyphs” or the like - no one will understand. In the language of Shakespeare you need to speak “Chinese characters”.

[edit] Some numbers

Racially Chinese keyboard.
In fact, there are not hieroglyphs on it, but keys according to the Tsang Jie system. In the Chinese language, things couldn’t be more fun. Thousands of hieroglyphs, having different meanings, are homonyms, which is generally a scourge for analytical languages. If there are not so many of them in colloquial speech, then books are simply full of them, which is why not every Chinese can clearly verbally tell the contents of a book, especially written in ancient Chinese, which, firstly, was especially prone to one-syllable words, and secondly, in general was a written language most of the time. True, they save the tones by making the number of homonyms a little less, but there are still a lot of them. Writing text on a computer and cell phone is a different story. Since no keyboard can fit so many hieroglyphs, the Chinese write a word or phrase in Latin and then select the appropriate hieroglyphs from the drop-down menu. This forces the Chinese to make attempts to switch to the Latin alphabet, which are not so unsuccessful (children at school learn to write in the Latin alphabet (the so-called pinyin

拼音) parallel to the hieroglyphic). However, until all Chinese speak the Beijing dialect, the transition will not be complete[1].

In Japanese, there are about 150,000 hieroglyphs, but given such a crazy number of little and unused characters, you can simply ignore this number. At one time, the Ministry of Education of Japan approved a list of 1850 most frequently used characters, which was then revised several times, bringing it to 2136 characters by 2010. Knowledge of these hieroglyphs is quite enough for reading simple books and various publications, but for specialized literature and any fanciful art this number will still be several hundred more. Also, the original list caused a lot of fun, because a number of hieroglyphs included in the names were not included in it, which is why some parents were simply refused to register their children. Realizing that the matter smelled of kerosene, the Ministry of Education quickly added 92 more characters to this list, characteristic of proper names, and everything seemed to calm down. In the best traditions of the way of the samurai, these 92 signs gradually grew into 843 over time and became a separate list, no less official than the previous one.

Of the mentioned 2136 hieroglyphs, 1006 are intended for study in elementary school (grades 1-6), 1130 - in high school (grades 7-12), and schoolchildren certainly learn what is not included in the general list themselves, because they so want to finish teaching the hundreds of nine to ten who are bored squiggles to the point of nausea even in elementary school. In China, they teach it haphazardly, just like someone your mother kicked in childhood, but you still have to remember about three thousand hieroglyphs so as not to be branded a moron.

However, this list does not exhaust all the hieroglyphs needed in everyday life. To write and read words such as “happy”, “perfect”, “for”, “fang” - knowledge of the mentioned 2136 hieroglyphs will not be enough. However, there is a kana for this; many popular words like “konnichiga” and “arigato-o” are written with it. Theoretically, you can write everything in kana, but then you will be overtaken by homonymy, which in Japanese is no less strong than in Chinese. There is even such a wonderful phrase as “kischa no kischa hga kischa de kischa shield.”

一 (yī)

Translation : one

Just a horizontal line. Easy to remember, isn't it? The most interesting thing is that two in Chinese are two horizontal lines:

二(èr) - two.

And three... guess what! Three features!

三(sān) - three.

Then it’s more complicated, so for now we’ll focus on the first three numbers.

Examples of use:

我一个人来。 (wǒ yī gè rén lái) - I came here alone.

我要一个。 (wǒ yào yī gè) - I would like one (when buying or ordering something).

[edit] Connections of hieroglyphs

Itoshiki Nozomu is also worried about the incorrect spelling of kanji.
Actually, problems begin when a person has already learned all the hieroglyphs, and is surprised to realize that he still cannot make out anything written. And all because, depending on the order of writing and connecting hieroglyphs, their total meaning may change. So, the hieroglyphs “flower” and “fire” will give you “fireworks”, which is all right, but “man” and “mouth” can suddenly also give you “population”. Approximately the same problems arise if you write hieroglyphs not in a column, but in a line.

In general, such a formulation of the question only makes truth philologists laugh. It is quite obvious that writing is secondary to speech, and therefore complex words, that is, those that consist of several roots, must be taught as full words, and not as a sum of roots. Often the meaning of the roots only conveys a certain idea (compare with the Russian “to guide”: if you take the roots literally, it will be more reminiscent of hand passes, rather than “to direct”). In modern Chinese there are many two-syllable words, which are respectively represented by two characters, and it is better to memorize their spelling in its entirety.

十 (shi)

Translation : ten

Another numeral that is easy to remember.

十诫 (shí jiè)一 10 commandments.

Examples of forming numbers with 十:

十一 (shí yī) - eleven;

十二 (shí èr) - twelve,二十 (èr shí) - twenty (two tens);

十三 (shí sān) - thirteen,三十 (sān shí) - thirty (three tens).

In other combinations, the word can be translated differently:

十分 (shí fēn) - very much;

十成 (shí chéng) - completely.

[edit] Varieties

[edit] Katakana and hiragana

Katakana (カタカナ) and Hiragana (ひらがな) are Japanese racial syllabaries, each containing 46 characters, and in general they duplicate each other, but with different spellings of the characters.

Every hieroglyph has more than one (as a rule, not even two or three) readings and meanings, therefore, in cases where this is not clear from the context, a furigana can be assigned to the hieroglyph, which determines its pronunciation in a given situation. Some proper names, various grammatical connectives and all borrowed words are also written in Kanoi. Actually, katakana is exclusively used to write borrowed words, and the borrowed words (“Gairai-go”, Japanese

. 外来語) in Japanese - a carriage and a small cart. For example, the Japanese language never had the concept of “table,” just as there were no tables there for a long time, and this word was borrowed from the English table and is written in katakana. Plus, we must remember that in Japanese a syllable must look like “consonant + vowel (+ n)”, so “table” turns into TEBURU (they don’t have the “L” sound either). Kanu is also used by Nippon shkolota instead of those hieroglyphs that they do not yet know. The Gaijin school is often limited to learning; in fact, only the Kan continues to amuse his self-esteem by the fact that he “knows Japanese.” As a rule, anime people do this in order to rise above their peers and avoid accusations of being a moron.

[edit] Hanja and Hangeul

Korean combo
In ancient times, the main literary language of Korea was Wenyan - also known as Hanmun - literary Chinese, the characters in which were read adjusted to Korean phonetics - without any tones and sounds of nature. Accordingly, to this day in the Korean language, 70% of words are of Chinese origin and can be written in Hanja - that is, in hieroglyphs. Since the language of the Joseon state essentially remained Chinese, there were initially enough hieroglyphs. However, over time, due to the combination of Hanmun with local colloquial speech and the formation of a language close to modern Korean, with an agglutinative system, it became necessary to somehow reflect the phonetically inflected part of the word. Since the hieroglyph in an agglutinative language could not cope with the reflection of inflections, Emperor Sejong the Great cut down an alternative writing system, Hongmin Chongum, which was later renamed Hangul. At first, all texts were written using a hellish combo method: Chinese characters are the roots of hanmun origin, and Hangeul is the variable part of the word (almost like in Japanese kanji-kanamajiribun, that is, “mixed writing”), so it was necessary to spend quite a lot of time and effort on studying the characters, given the fact that Koreans never purposefully simplified the characters. Hangul itself is a racial phonetic alphabet, which is written in a “group” manner: letters (the so-called “chom”s) forming one syllable are combined into a kind of visual resemblance to a hieroglyph. Therefore, remember, anonymous: Korean writing is not hieroglyphs

, and the real alphabet is truth, inclined to be combined into syllables. For those who do not understand: in Kana one character is one syllable, in Hangul one character is one letter, it’s just that in each syllable the letters are located one above the other, and not separately, as in other alphabetic writings.

Later, after the division of Korea into two, changes occurred in the principles of writing. The North Koreans, without any hesitation, decided to make their life easier and threw out all these hieroglyphs altogether (they continue to study them, but only those who specialize in Chinese literature). In South Korea, in principle, most texts are also written in Hangeul, but Chinese characters continue to be used: in scientific texts, articles, publications of medieval Korean and Chinese classics, as well as to clarify the meaning in places where discrepancies may arise (a typical example: the words “ makeup" and "cremation" in Hangul are written exactly the same: 화장, and with hieroglyphs differently: 化妝 and 火葬, respectively): newspaper headlines and the like (in North Korea, along with hieroglyphs, they also got rid of many Chinese words, replacing them with Korean ones, Therefore, such a problem does not exist there). Currently, in South Korea there is a gradual shift away from hanja: few young people can sanely read the written hanja hanmun word. Abroad, hanja is studied either as an elective in separate Korean language courses, and even then not everywhere, or by professional linguists-Korean historians, for whom the analysis of hanmun vocabulary without knowledge of the hieroglyphic base is a difficult task.

[edit] Ancient Egyptian

From the Chamber of Weights and Measures
Racial ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are among the oldest in the world, they are under 5000 years old. Only Sumerian writing has a longer pussy. In Pharaonic this letter is called “medew netcher”, that is, “the words of God.” Like most analogues, it has several types of writing:

1. Hieroglyphics.

Classic hieroglyphs, “pictures” with dancing people, birds, snakes, etc. Everyone has seen them. After kanji, probably the first thing that comes to mind for 99% of the population when they hear the word “hieroglyph”. It can be written from left to right, from right to left, from top to bottom. The GOST method was from right to left. In this case, all living beings must always be turned “facing” the beginning of the line. In total there were about 6,000 hieroglyphs. There were no punctuation marks, but they knew how to typesetting - the letter had to be positioned exactly symmetrically, forming visual rectangles. This whole thing was divided into two categories:

• Phonograms
  - a hieroglyph means a specific sound.
• Ideograms
  - a hieroglyph represents a whole word.

2. Hieratic.

Over the years, it has branched off from hieroglyphics and is a type of cursive writing. The scribes realized that it was too expensive to write neat hieroglyphs every time the pharaoh planned all sorts of crap and began to write in a more simplified manner. And then italics appeared, a home version for the people. They wrote everything in hieratic - documents, scientific and literary texts, complaints, letters to friends, etc. Visually, it vaguely resembles Hebrew, although it is derived directly from classical hieroglyphs. It is always written in hieratic only from right to left.

3. Demotics.

At the very end of Ancient Egypt, when the language was no longer the same, hieratic simplified even more, becoming demotic. There were only 270 characters, a semblance of a clear alphabet appeared, and ligatures developed.

A little later, when the empire descended into fucking shit, the ancient Egyptian language turned into Coptic

. This one already used the Greek alphabet as its basis. Well, then the Arabs, having captured the lands of the proud pharaohs, ousted him too, replacing him with the language of some prophet. Although racial Copts still live on Egyptian soil and speak this language to this day.

[edit] Mayan hieroglyphics

An example of spelling options for the sound “U”

The same word written in the same hieroglyphs with one superimposed on the other, for kawaiiness

Perhaps the most beautiful-looking and incredibly original writing, cut down by the Spanish Inquisition (because fuck heretics) and completely deciphered only recently, at the end of the twentieth century. Not without the help, by the way, Comrade Knorozov is from this country. On the surface, Mayan writing is a standard logogrammatic system, but what sets it apart is its truly creative approach to business, in every sense of the word. The first thing that catches your eye is the artistic style, so to speak, consisting of sometimes the cutest “pictures” packed into neat squares. Until this

No other civilization has achieved kawaiiness, confirming the superiority of the Mayans. The key feature of writing is simply a general love for substitution: in a language with 800 hieroglyphs, the same sound could sometimes be arbitrarily represented by as many as fifteen characters - I don’t want to choose. This can be vaguely compared to the F/PH or O/AU situation in English. Each time he wrote a new document or stele, the scribe could pick up, whatever he wanted, any acceptable variant of the hieroglyph he liked and even combine them into new images. At the same time, the same hieroglyph could be depicted both abstractly and in the form, for example, of the head of a person, animal or god.

But the Maya’s resourcefulness did not stop there: one hieroglyph, completely arbitrarily, could be inserted inside another or partially overlap it; two signs could generally be combined into one common one. All this, without a doubt, added a lot of happiness to epigraphists who were trying to decipher the written language. The signs were most often arranged in columns of two hieroglyphs and were read from left to right, top to bottom, that is, quite familiar to us. Due to the fact that the oral version of the language in one form or another was not lost until the 20th century, at the moment the language is almost completely academically resurrected and the proud descendants of the Mayans teach it to their children.

人 (rén)

Translation : man

Looks like a cartoon man, doesn't it? More precisely, on his feet, confidently walking somewhere. Stick, stick...

The funny thing is that if you add one more person, the meaning will change to “everyone”, “everyone”:

人人都爱喝可乐。 (rén rén dōu ài hē kě lè) - Everyone loves soda.

Moreover, “man” in Chinese is 男人(nánrén) , and woman is 女人(nǚrén) .

Other usage examples:

人丛(rén cóng) - crowd of people;

人体(rén tǐ) - human body;

He is a very popular guy (person) .

女人一般比男人长寿。 (Nǚrén yībān bǐ nánrén chángshòu.) - Women usually live longer than men.

[edit] Uninteresting facts

• The subject allows Asian trolls to freely push T-shirts with racially accurate slogans like “I’m a stupid white monkey” onto unsuspecting laoai, vagugin and gaijin.
• After a reassessment of values, which usually occurs at puberty, by the phrase “some hieroglyphs” individuals mean what they previously called “squiggles (squiggles).” In some cases, the habit of using the verbal noun “kalyaki-malyaki” with the same meaning, which arises at an early stage of development of the communicative function of the brain, remains. This spontaneous terminology irrefutably proves the fact of the same origin of hieroglyphs and avant-garde painting.
• In fact, most of the characters indicate reading (in Chinese). For example, in the character 恕 (shu - apologize
  ), the upper part indicates that its pronunciation is close to the pronunciation of the character 如 (zhu -
  similar; such as
  ). The only problem is that these pronunciations are a couple thousand years out of date.
• In Hong Kong, having decided that many new things and concepts had appeared over the century, they decided to supplement the Chinese characters with new ones, creating several thousand new characters that were not recognized in the PRC (in the PRC they did not invent a new character for the word “Internet”, but made do with a combination of the usual ones, they do the same with other new things and concepts).
• Few people know, but the Chinese also have two syllabic alphabet. One of them (zhuyin fuhao) was invented by Chinese linguists at the beginning of the 20th century, but not to replace or supplement hieroglyphs, but just to record their pronunciation - so that when you see an unfamiliar hieroglyph, you don’t have to rack your brains over its pronunciation and rebus in the dictionary , where they tried to approximately (and inaccurately) convey the pronunciation of the hieroglyph using other hieroglyphs. The idea received the support of the Kuomintang, but since the Kuomintang was released to Taiwan, it did not gain popularity in Greater China, and the Latin alphabet, Pinyin, was used to record pronunciation. But another syllabary alphabet - Nui Shu - is traditional and has a long history. ICHSH, like Japanese Hiragana and Korean Hangeul, Nyu Shu was a purely feminine writing, which was owned only by women, and for a noble husband it was considered not true. And if the Japanese onnade
  女手 (literally “women’s writing”) was renamed into hiragana, and the Korean
  amgeul
  (also literally “women’s writing”) into Hangul, and the writing became suitable for men to use, then in China syllabic writing remained purely feminine, and after the turbulent events of the 20th century (civil war, revolution, again civil war, war with Japan, again civil war, cultural revolution), in the entire billion-strong China there were only six people left who mastered this alphabet, such things. Also, the novel “Snow Flower and the Treasured Fan” by Lisa See was written about this writing.
• At one time, the Vietnamese, when creating their own written language, did not create alphabets like the Japanese and Koreans, but in addition to the Chinese characters they used, they added several thousand new characters of their own, overcomplicating the already difficult Chinese literacy. As a result, when it was necessary to teach millions of illiterate people to read and write, it was decided to abandon such an overcomplicated writing system in favor of the Latin alphabet.
• The Kindani, Jurchen and Zhuang, taking Chinese characters, remade them to suit their needs, obtaining characters that look like Chinese, but are often unpredictably different in meaning.
• The Chukchi also came up with their own hieroglyphs! True, they were very late in this matter, having invented hieroglyphs already in the 20th century (!), and therefore they were easily replaced with the Cyrillic alphabet.

上 (shang)

Translation : up, above, at the top; on

The symbol seems to be moving upward - this is a hint that makes it easier to remember.

水果在桌子上。 - The apple (is) on the table.

请上楼。—Please go up the stairs.

他上电台了。 (Tā shàng diàntáile.) - He is on the radio.

晚上 (wǎn shàng) - in the evening.

早上 (zǎo shàng) - in the morning.

上车 (shàng chē) - to get into the car.

It is also often used when we talk about “visiting something” or “going somewhere”:

上课 (shàng kè) - to go to classes;

上班 (shàng bān) - to go to work.

[edit] Gallery