![]() The first stroke is vertical to the left, followed by a type of upside-down L written without taking the pen off the page, and lastly the horizontal line that closes the square. To give a quick example, one of the characters you learn to write very early on when learning Chinese and that you can mess up quite easily is 口 (kǒu), “mouth”: seeing it as a square, instinctively we’d draw it with four lines, while in reality it’s formed by three strokes, as you can see in the image below. If the tool is not lifted from the medium on which it is written, it doesn’t matter how many curves the line has, it will always be just one stroke. The two phases are respectively called 落笔 (luòbǐ) “resting the pen” and 起笔 (qǐbǐ), “raising the pen”. When talking about a stroke, in Chinese 一笔 (yībǐ), 一画 (yīhuà) or 笔画 (bǐhuà, also written as 笔划 with the same pronunciation), it refers to what is written each time the pen (笔 bǐ) or brush (毛笔 máobǐ) touches the paper up to when it is lifted from the page. The strokes are simply the dots (点 diǎn) and lines (线 xiàn) that make up the characters. Lastly, the characters are written without spaces between words and intervals are only for punctuation, which has been introduced only in relatively recent times (at the beginning of last century). This did not happen in the early forms of Chinese writing where the more complex characters took up more space compared to those made up of fewer lines until regular writing (楷书 Kǎishū) regulated the proportions between characters. Historically, characters are conformed into a square structure: it’s worth saying that, regardless of the number of lines that make it up, they will always take up the same amount of space within the text. This order from left to right and top to bottom is generally also maintained (which we’ll see later on) for the lines within a character. The order of right to left vertically was used in the past (you can easily find books written in this way) and derived from the use of bamboo strips on which the first Chinese texts were written, and later by other “vertical” supports, but it is no longer used in everyday life. First of all, let’s disprove a common misconception: modern Chinese is written from left to right and from top to bottom, horizontally just like western languages.
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