Chinese family of scripts
While written Chinese and many of its descendant scripts are logographic, others are phonetic, including the kana, Nüshu, and Lisu syllabaries, as well as the bopomofo semi-syllabary.
These inscriptions were carved into ox scapulae and tortoise plastrons, and recorded the results of official divinations conducted by the Shang royal house.
[4] Inscriptions on bronze vessels using a developed form of the Shang script dating to c. 1100 BC have also been discovered, and have provided a richer corpus.
[3] Characters are traditionally classified according to a system of six categories (六書; liùshū; 'six writings') according to the apparent strategy used to create them.
Three of these categories involved a representation of the meaning of the word: Characters directly descendant of these forms remain still among the most commonly used today.
[9] Phono-semantic compounds (形聲字; xíngshēngzì) were obtained by adding semantic indicators to disambiguate phonetic loans.
For example, the character 其 originally representing jī; 'winnowing basket' was also used to write the pronoun and modal particle qí.
Later the less common original word was written with the compound 箕, obtained by adding the symbol 竹; zhú; 'bamboo' to the character.
[10] Sometimes the original phonetic similarity has been obscured by millennia of sound change, as in 格; gé < *krak 'go to' and 路; lù < *graks 'road'.
[13] Development and simplification of the script continued during the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles.
After the western state of Qin unified China, its more conservative seal script became the standard across the entire country.
For many centuries, all writing in neighbouring countries was in Literary Chinese, albeit influenced by the writer's native language.
Such a Korean mixed script became the usual way of writing the language, with roots of Chinese origin denoted by Hanja and all other elements rendered in Hangul.
Such classic works as Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji were written in hiragana, the only system permitted to women of the time.
Vietnamese was first written from the 13th century using the chữ Nôm script based on Chinese characters, but the system developed in a quite different way than in Korea or Japan.
In particular the Khitan small script contained phonetic sub-elements arranged in a square block in a manner similar to the more sophisticated Hangul system devised later for Korean.
