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 The Lowest Protocol

The Han Stock

Chinese characters ("", read hanzi in Chinese and kanji in Japanese) are called ideograms or, more properly logograms, as each character ("-gram") represents a word ("logo-").

Tradition says that the Chinese script had been invented around 2700 b.C. by Cang Jie, a minister of king Huang Di, but archaeologist found written documents dating back to 6000 years ago: some pieces of inscribed pottery discovered in 1954 at Banpo (near Xi'an, Shaanxi, China).

Hanzi are perfectly suited for the Chinese language, as (over-simplifying) each character equals a syllable, which equals a word. This perfect equation among writing, sound and meaning, however, did not hold when the Chinese characters started to be used for different languages, such as Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese.

These new users of hanzi soon felt the need to supplement the script with phonetical signs to represent grammatical particles, non-Chinese words or, simply, to mark the pronounciations of all those imported Chinese words. The Japanese kana and the Korean hangul arised from this need.


The Chinese Script

  • KANJIDIC is a plain text database containing most of the Chinese characters (kanji, in Japanese) in the JIS character set. Each character lists a lot of useful information such as: Japanese and Chinese pronunciation(s), JIS and Unicode code, traditional radical, usage frequency, Japanese "grade" (i.e. at what age Japanese kids learn it).
    The work of putting this database together has been initiated by Stephen Chung and Mike Erickson, but the project soon became a collective Linux-style work to which a lot of people on the Net, under the coordination of Jim Breen, contributed for free.
  • Statistical information about Chinese characters: frequency of usage and average number of strokes.
  • Characters Tables by Koichi Yasuoka: cross reference tables of various national CJK characters sets and Unicode.
  • A Survey of Chinese Input Methods: an introduction to some popular Chinese keyboard codes.
  • Chinese fonts from Yamada (PC).
  • Documentation for using the Chinese script on Macintosh.
  • Documentation and software for using the Chinese script with various operating systems and applications.
  • JavaScript utility to get the Chinese pronunciation of Han characters (Mandarin or Cantonese dialects; Guobiao and Big5 characters sets are accepted).
  • Notes on CJK Character Codes and Encodings, by the Chinese Community Information Center. An informative introduction the main Far Eastern character sets:
    Big5 and CNS (the traditional Chinese characters, used in Taiwan and Hong-Kong);
    Guobiao (the simplified Chinese characters, used in the People's Republic of China);
    JIS (the Japanese national standard);
    KSC (the Korean national standard);
    CCCII/ANSI Z39.64-1989 and the Unicode/ISO-10646 "CJK" section (international encodings).
    Encodings of 94x94-Character Sets is another interesting article; it covers the popular "shifted" or "multibyte" schemes, that allow embedding the 14-bit Far Eastern characters in normal 8-bit "ASCII" text.

    The Kana Script (Japanese Syllabary)

  • Introduction to the katakana syllabary (by The Japanese Tutor).
  • Introduction to the hiragana syllabary (by The Japanese Tutor).
  • Japanese fonts from Yamada (Mac).

    The Hangul Script (Korean Alphabet)

  • Korean fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).


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    Page by Marco Cimarosti. Last updated: March 10, 1997.