Read the following materials carefully and talk about your understanding of Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are the most basic unit of Chinese writing. Its use began in the Shang Dynasty at the latest and has gone through various changes in calligraphy styles such as oracle bone inscriptions, large seal script, small seal script, official script, and regular script (cursive script and running script). Qin Shihuang unified China, Li Si compiled the small seal script, and the history of "scripts with the same text" began. Although the pronunciation of Chinese dialects varies greatly, the unification of the writing system reduces the communication barriers caused by dialect differences.

Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty summarized the structure rules of Chinese characters into "six books" in "Shuowen Jiezi": pictogram, referring to things, understanding, pictophonetic, transliteration, and borrowing. Among them, the four items of pictography, reference, meaning, and pictophonetic sound are the principles of character creation, which are the "methods of creating characters"; while transfers and borrowings are the rules of word usage, which are the "methods of using characters."

For more than three thousand years, the way of writing Chinese characters has not changed much, allowing future generations to read ancient texts without any hindrance. However, after modern Western civilization entered East Asia, various countries in the entire Chinese character cultural circle have set off a trend of learning from the West. Among them, giving up the use of Chinese characters is an important aspect of this movement. The rationale for these movements was that Chinese characters were cumbersome and clumsy compared to Western pinyin characters. Many countries that use Chinese characters have made varying degrees of simplification of Chinese characters, and there are even attempts to completely pinyinize them. The emergence of the Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese kana and the various pinyin schemes of Chinese are all based on this idea. Mainland China simplified the strokes of Chinese characters with reference to cursive script, and approved the "Simplified Character List" on January 28, 1956, which is still in use in China and Singapore. Taiwan has always used Traditional Chinese.

Currently, in most areas where Chinese is spoken, two standardized Chinese characters are used, namely Traditional Chinese (traditional Chinese characters) and Simplified Chinese (simplified Chinese characters).

Hanzi is a writing system for recording Chinese, and is still or was used in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest writing systems in the world, with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is a Chinese character; in a broad sense, it is a unique character in the Chinese cultural circle.

Chinese characters are an important tool for carrying culture, and there are currently a large number of classics written in Chinese characters. Different dialects use Chinese characters as their own writing systems. Therefore, Chinese characters have played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization in history and have become an intrinsic link in the formation of Southeast Asian cultural circles. In the process of the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures were left behind, and a unique art of Chinese calligraphy was formed.

A Chinese character generally has multiple meanings and has a strong ability to form words, and many Chinese characters can independently form words. This has resulted in extremely high "usage efficiency" of Chinese characters, with about 2,000 commonly used characters covering more than 98% of written expressions. Coupled with the ideographic characteristics of Chinese characters, the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high. Chinese characters have a higher information density than alphabetic characters. Therefore, on average, Chinese expressions of the same content are shorter than characters in any other alphabetic language.

The current Chinese character system is divided into traditional Chinese characters and simplified characters. The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and North America, and the latter is used in Chinese communities in mainland China, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two Chinese character writing systems, the individual differences in commonly used Chinese characters are less than 25%.

Due to the complexity of writing Chinese characters, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" has existed for a long time. It is believed that Chinese characters are a bottleneck in education and informatization, and there is a push to "Latinize Chinese characters" or even abolish them. Nowadays, it is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although the initial learning is difficult, after mastering common characters, there is no problem of continuing to learn similar to the massive English words, and its ideographic characteristics can also fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the computer input problem has been basically solved, the "theory of backwardness of Chinese characters" and the "Latinization of Chinese characters" have actually been gradually abandoned by most people.

At present, the Chinese character system has been basically stable, but the standardization of Chinese characters and the natural demise of rare characters are still going on.

About Chinese character encoding

In order to exchange information, each region where Chinese characters are used has formulated a series of Chinese character set standards.

① GB2313 character set, including 6763 Chinese characters and 715 symbols, totaling 7478 characters. This is the simplified character set commonly used in mainland China.

Most fonts on the market, such as regular script-GB2313, imitation Song Dynasty-GB2313, and Chinese regular script, support the display of this character set, and it is also the character set used by most input methods. The vast majority of so-called traditional fonts on the market actually use the encoding of simplified characters in the GB-2313 character set. The fonts are displayed as traditional Chinese characters instead of directly encoding traditional characters in the GBK character set, which is full of errors.

② The BIG-5 character set contains 13,060 traditional Chinese characters and 808 symbols, totaling 13,868 characters. It is currently commonly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and other regions. Most fonts in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including Taiwan's Ministry of Education's standard Song Ti and Kai Ti, support the display of this character set.

③ GBK character set, also known as the large character set (GB=GuóBiāo national standard, K=extended), includes Chinese characters from the above two character sets, with an income of 21003 Chinese characters, 882 symbols, and a total of 21885 characters, including 20,902 unified Chinese characters in China, Japan and Korea (CJK) and 52 Chinese characters in Extended Set A (CJK Ext-A). The Simplified Chinese version of Windows 95\98 comes with this GBK.txt file. Fonts such as Song, Lishu, Hei, Youyuan, Chinese Song, Chinese Fine Black, Chinese Kai, Standard Kai (DFKai-SB), Arial Unicode MS, MingLiU, PMingLiU and other fonts support the display of this character set. Microsoft Pinyin Input Method 2003, Quanpin, Ziguang Pinyin and other input methods can input GBK simplified and traditional Chinese characters such as 镕镕炁夬喆嚞姤韟韟?龑昳郃慜靕蹹.

BIG-5 (Traditional Chinese) and GB-2313 (Simplified Chinese) encodings are incompatible, and characters will be garbled in different operating systems. The conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese text (text and encoding) can be solved by transcoding software such as BabelPad, TextPro or Convertz. If it is a program, you can use Microsoft AppLocale Utility 1.0 for the Windows .

④ GB18030 character set, including all 6582 Chinese characters in the GBK character set and CJK Ext-A, with a total of 27533 Chinese characters. Song-18030, Founder Kai-Z03 (FZKai-Z03), MS Song (ht_cjk), Hong Kong Standard Song (DFSongStd), Hong Kong Standard Kai, CERG Chinese Font, Korean New Gulim, and Microsoft Windows Fonts such as Song Hei Kai Fake Song and other fonts provided by the Vista operating system also support the display of this character set. Windows 98 supports this character set, but the following character sets are not supported. The handwriting input method Xiaoyao Pen version 4.0 supports the input of Chinese characters in the GB18030 character set and Founder's super large character set.

⑤ Founder's large character set includes 36862 Chinese characters in the GB18030 character set and CJK Ext-B, totaling 64395 Chinese characters. The Song-Founder large character set supports the display of this character set. Microsoft Office XP or 2003 Simplified Chinese version comes with this font. The Windows 2000 operating system requires the installation of the very large character set support package "Surrogate Update".

⑥ ISO/IEC 10646/Unicode character set, this is the world's most shared coded character set. The two are compatible with each other and cover the characters of the world's major languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese characters. , totaling: 20,902 CJK unified Chinese characters, 6,582 CJK Ext-A, 42,711 Ext-B, and a total of 70,195 Chinese characters.

SimSun-ExtB (Song style) and MingLiU-ExtB (Xingming style) can display all Ext-B Chinese characters. So far, there is no single font that can display all 70,195 Chinese characters, but it can be entered using input methods such as Haifeng Wubi, New Concept Wubi, Cangjie Input Method Century Edition, the new version of Microsoft's new phonetic notation, and Cangjie Input Method version 6.0 (single code function). Ext-C also has more than 20,000 Chinese characters. For details, please visit the website of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the website of Friends of Cangjie, Malaysia, and the personal website of Fujian Chen Qingyu.

⑦ Version 2.3 of the Chinese character configuration database contains 60,082 regular script glyphs, 11,100 small seal characters, 2,627 Chu-style bamboo and silk characters, 3,459 bronze inscriptions, 177 oracle bone inscriptions, and 12,768 groups of variant characters. You can install this program, or you can unzip it and use the font files in it, which is very useful for sorting out some ancient documents.

If it exceeds the character set supported by the input method, it cannot be entered into the computer. If there is no support for the corresponding font, it will appear as a black box, square box or blank. If the operating system or application software does not support the character set, it will be displayed as a question mark (one or two). The same situation exists on the web.

About Unicode

Due to differences in the number of Chinese characters and commonly used characters included in the national standard character sets of various countries, although the commonly used characters in the GB/BIG5 character sets on both sides of China are basically similar, reading after conversion It is not a problem, but this confusing relationship of code conversion is always an obstacle to text communication. Therefore, through joint efforts, standardization organizations and text workers in relevant countries finally completed the Unicode Chinese character standard ISO 10646.1 including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) Chinese characters in 1993. Unicode is a multi-national character encoding system with complete double-byte representation, and the encoding space is 0x0000-0xFFFF. The ISO 10646.1 Chinese character standard uses encoding 0x4E00-9FA5, which contains 20902 Chinese characters. Among them: 17,124 Chinese characters proposed by Mainland China (S), 17,258 Chinese characters proposed by Taiwan (T); the union of S and T, that is, 20,158 Chinese characters proposed by China (C). Japan (J) proposed 12,157 Chinese characters, and China did not propose 690 (Ja); South Korea (K) proposed 7,477 Chinese characters, of which China did not propose 90 (Ka); Ja and Ka are combined** *744 words. Relevant computer system software that supports Unicode encoding, such as Unix and Win95, has been launched. However, because the ASCII code of Unicode is double-byte encoding (that is, the single-byte ASCII code in general computer systems is preceded by 0x00), and its Chinese character encoding It is also incompatible with existing codes in various countries, causing existing software and data to not be directly used. Therefore, there are not many users who fully use the Unicode software system. Most of them only use it as an international language coding standard.