Why are there no 'circles' in Chinese characters?
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- čas přidán 14. 02. 2021
- For more:
news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-16...
Many people wonder why there are no "circles" in Chinese characters. In fact, it did exist in ancient Chinese characters, but disappeared over time. Uncle Hanzi will unveil the mystery of the disappearance of the circle.
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Me: "Allright Imma gonna do some reviewing my flashcards right now!"
CZcams: "Why are there no circles in Chinese characters?"
Me: "Excellent question! This takes top priority now!"
There were circles. They got squared away over time.
@B J How many Yuan per month do Uyghurs get for welfare payments?
@@aks4331 So I take it there's no welfare payment?
@@Released0 disgusting
@@elnorton7113 What's disgusting, exactly?
@@Released0 Yeah, I don’t like most of the chinese government actions either, but what does the Xinjiang uigur problem have to do with the video topic? did you even watch it or have any interest in the chinese language?
Our "full stop" is still a circle, haha.
Good point. 😄
@@edwardyang8254 you steal my line, I'm about to say that... 😃
Dot, not circle
@@n0n1utube in Chinese it's a circle.
It is called a "dot", and it represented a "droplet of water," and was shaped like a cone.
And here goes simplified zero (líng): 〇
口
零
wait so |ing-|ing just means zero-zero???
@@vaiirecti7873 why TwoSet?
@@vaiirecti7873 no it's prob 玲玲 but that's a girl's name
Not everybody can draw a nice circle, so it had to go overtime
Haha count me in , never been able to draw a round circle.
spongebob can show how to create a perfect circle :v
I'm Chinese, I also learn a lot from this short clip. The whole story of evolution of Chinese characters must be very interesting!
Do you remember Tienanmen?
@@bucherregaldomi9084 yes. a nice plaza. Do you remember Brandenburg Tor?
@@bucherregaldomi9084 Are you german? you know also Gutenberg's contribution to the world?
@@bucherregaldomi9084 Yes. Part of forbiddencity. Longer than brandenburg tor. right?
@@bucherregaldomi9084 Bist du deutsche?
I think 50 years ago we had this kind of story too in western TV, but since News is business now.... so such informative little stories anymore. Thanks CGTN!
I so agree :-)
Asia has shows that talk about different cultures and worldly things. I don't think these shows would make it in America or the West, they don't care
@@supahsmashbro I think nowadays the westerners put these in national geographic channel?
@@supahsmashbro what makes you think these things don't make it in america or the west? Brother I think you're just out of touch.
CGTN is not news, it's state sponsored propaganda of a foreign government, they are funded by the CCP and broadcast in english precisely because they are aimed at pushing chinese cultural propaganda on foreigners. If the USA had a "Freedom Channel" or any other broadcaster specifically in Russian aimed at Russian audiences out in Russia or something (as if that would ever be allowed) they'd also talk about apple pie and picket fences, funny quirks and US history all the time lol it's part of the propaganda, they mix in funny things, pandas and things to pull you in and then mix it up with defending fascism in hong kong or genocide in Xinjiang to brainwash you once they have you watching.
circles are difficult and time consuming to carve on hard surfaces in the olden times compared to straight lines. maybe this is the reason why circles are gradually done away with. just my two cents.
Good point
Makes perfect sense
This is most probably the main reason.
nah, there was bamboo writing in shang dynasty, and they were circles and curves
Actually the circle exited when Chinese carved words and lost when they wrote words according to this clip.
Each character has its own history over thousands of years. Amazing !!!
This woman speaks such clear Chinese, it's perfect for us learners to practice some listening! Also thanks for the super interesting history lesson!
What I was also thinking
Wow, learn something new everyday. Love this channel.
Excellent! I look forward to future episodes.
WOW. This is very informative and interesting. Please release more of this type of videos.
I commented to that dude one time, no more.
What an amazing video. I love learning new things everyday!
Fascinating. Thanks for this!
Excellent documentary! Watched it twice to grasp the meaning.
Happy New Year
KC Koay
Val T
Just Awesome
Love you all
I don't see KC Koay anymore? I enjoy reading his comments.
In fact the Chinese characters are easy to recognize, but the Chinese spoken language is difficult to learn as because there are many characters' pronunciations are the same. The Chinese characters can be learn systematically according to "bushou" 部首classifications. Then from there the characters can be recognized as noun, verb, adjective...and so on...now, with the "Hanyu pinyin"汉语拼音one can learn the pronunciation very much easier, faster, and more effectively.
In terms of speaking, I guess the only difficulty is tones, grammar is even easier than English
Iirc, ancient Chinese dialects (languages) didn't have tones. They also had consonant endings as in Cantonese, but more. I heard a reconstructed sampling and it sounded klingon (from star trek): doQ Jaak miN gnyop'
@@spencerhu5473 That’s because present standard Chinese grammer has been simplified.The literacy Chinese （文言文）which was official in ancient China ‘s grammer was much harder .Even native Chinese speakers must spend much time to master it.There’s a subject in college entrance examination choosing a literacy Chinese article and almost no one could get full scores.
Great story and fantastic video, I love the animations.
This is zero "0"
This is also zero(in hanzi simplified)
〇/零 Ling. Though I prefer using the one with more strokes just to flex my knowledge lol.
Indonesian
Yes, it's the only circle charactor in Chinese.
That's technically a Suzhou numeral instead of a character.
@@ADeeSHUPA whats wrong if he was indonesian?
@@veenibik336 nothin Just saYin
好久不見 漢字叔叔！Have known him way back when he started his hanzi website. Good to see him telling hanzi stories on CZcams now.
There are no circles if you're typing with a default font, but natives usually relax their hands more and round the edges of the squares. If you write a bit faster, like my brother, your squares are basically circles.
Interesting and worthwhile video.
We got “圆” means round, “圈” means circle, “零” means zero, while the circle-like "口" means mouth and "回" means back around, also 一 二 三 for 1 2 3.
This is nice! And it's educational about the evolution of the Chinese characters👌👍😄
“〇” is a circular character today
。
I've always wondered about that one since it looks so weird in the sea of angular Chinese characters
And it means what?
That is an import of Arabic numbers.
The full-stop, or 'period' as our American friends would have it, is still a small circle (。) as is one character for 'zero' (〇) but what struck me the most is the absolute perfection in the clarity of speech of the docent in the museum.
Where did all those symbols (like the small circle) come from? I know its used in both Chinese and Japanese but I don't think they were used historically right?
Yes. We once did have circles in characters. It's called Kedou. You can write circles in Cursive or some Semi-cursive script. As long as someone else could read it, you CAN write it.
I like this woman . She is extraordinary beautiful and intelligent. Her body language is also very beautiful. She embodies the Chinese female beauty!
are you simping or just admiring her like everyone else is, because you're kinda suspicious man
Where do you hail from, sir?
I like your attitude.
czcams.com/video/Lykgg5phVJE/video.html
Thanks for the insights
Wonderful story of overcoming difficulty and of personal achievement. Thanks.
Thank you so much for this. Great, great museum! The most beautiful script in the world! 汉字forever！
The Chinese character for "zero" may be written with a symbol of O (Circle).
Some people believe that doesn’t count as a Chinese character
零
〇
@@Brybao Does it though? I never thought of it as an "official" character but the people commenting they seem to count it as one.
@@danshakuimo I’m not sure, it depends on your person belief on what makes a Chinese character/汉字. Are korean/Vietnamese/Japanese/zhuang, etc made hanzi character still considered Chinese despite not being made in China? I personally don’t believe 〇 is chinese hanzi since it doesn’t follow the six principles and is just a fat 0
Everyone should just ignore this troll called Jef Chen. He paste the same msg everyday, fishing for response which he then gets paid. Ignore him so he won't get paid.
I have noticed this troll commenting on a lot of Chinese related videos, what a moron.
Is he 1450 from Taiwan?🤣🤣🤣
@@Chelsea12118 Either Taiwan 1450 or HK rioter, haha.
Every time I saw it I gave no reply but report it.
said by another fishy account with weird name
i will ignore you both. both that Chen and this account with weird name.
Imagine if you had to carve a whole text in a huge stone slab. What is easier, to carve and chisel straight lines, or to attempt to do perfectly round shapes? Just look at what we did when we tried to represent our numbers in calculators. We used a minimum number of straight lines that could form the shapes of all numbers in a way that we could still recognize them without showing a single curve. And it worked fine. Now, for us writing, it is easier and faster to draw curves by pencil than to be sharply stopping to give our numbers their squared shapes like in the calculator display. But if you were chiseling numbers in stone, you would prefer to do the straight lines. And people would still recognize them.
Perfect.
Few hundred years ago chinese, there are round character which is “zero”
〇 this is zero
But end up they just copied from the west
they shouldve keep their tradition
Learning is good for the human civilization.
umm.. actually no. the modern numbers is from arabic. 0123456789. and arabic itself got the 0 number from somewhere else. i forgot where. from india region maybe? or china? idk. i forgot..
@@DBT1007 India developed the Arabic Numerals (they're called arabic numerals because the west learned them from arab traders). China most likely adopted the 〇 due to contact with western cultures.
That isn't a character. It's a symbol.
Very good video, thank you
非常有趣，谢谢
I love those 篆 word, they are the most beautiful Chinese characters, thanks uncle Hanzi.
AMAZINGLY OF EDUCATIONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE EVOLUTION OF TODAY'S CHINESE CHARACTERS......THANKS TO THE EUROPEAN UNCLE FINDINGS.....WELL DONE
Not only the characters have changed over time, but the writing format is also simplified in ancient times. For example, in morden days we say like this:
I saw the flowers, I'm surprised by them and praised, "How pretty is that!"
But in ancient times in China, the sentence will become this:
Me see them, surprise said, "pretty!"
🌻
Yea it's confusing non the less lol😂
This is because in ancient times paper are expensive, so the tried to fit in as much content in a area.
@@ylimexyz you've got a point
Ah yes i absolutely love and hate it when they got poetic by removing all the unnecessary words. Love because goddamn it, it sounds and looks so poetic and elegant. Hate it cause also goddamn it, it takes 10x the effort to understand what it means 😂😂
Good video Sears!
4:20 for those that didn't notice, the top character means book, and bottom character has hands holding the book which means document. So it's literally pictures, originally at least.
Do you think, perhaps what people were attempting to write on, or with influenced the changes as well? For example, Cuneiform is as it is in part because scribes learned that attempting to traces characters into the clay created all kinds of "loose bits" of clay and other issues. Simply pressing into the clay, on the other hand, leaves a flat, smooth and clean surface, much like pushing your finger into clay versus attempting to draw lines across it with a stick.
If they were writing on bamboo, I imagine that the grain of the wood (really a grass) might attempt to coax a given line one way versus another if you were attempting to carve. If you were attempting to write, the issue with the grain is then that it will absorb the ink and cause it to form lines (both desirable and otherwise) because of the porous nature of the xylem and phloem.
The ancient 'writings' were inscriptions with knife to bone. Inscribing a line is just a push,
inscribing a circle requires a continuous [x,y] = [cos (A), sin(A)] for A from 0 degree to 360 degrees.
Not a popular style.
X² + Y² = C²
Very interesting!
Thank you. I thought this was going to be a short pleasant fluff piece, but in fact, it was quite interesting with a lot of depth and history.
Also, it helps explain why new learners of Chinese characters have so many problems. The characters of today have evolved and
are stylized versions of the originals. It looks like it would be much easier for people to learn Chinese characters today if they were still
using the original characters, as those look much more like the things that they were trying to describe.
The problem is, as the culture evolves, more concepts that doesn’t have a physical form needs to be defined, and thus the fundamental rule of the written language needs to adapt to transform those concepts into characters. This is achieved by borrowing the sound and shape of another character (e.g. north 北, it used to mean human back, just look at the shape, and the word for back was mortified into 背, with an additional 月 at the bottom to represent flesh) or using several bushou to represent a new idea (e.g. family/home 家, with a roof at the top and a swine underneath to represent a stereotypical farmer house) with some exceptions. Rules like these allow Chinese characters to evolve into a matured writing system for both casual and scientific applications, without having to borrow words from other languages (yes I’m looking at you English😛)
@@gywghhb Thank you for your response. It was a very educational and well nuanced explanation of the evolution of the "easy to decipher" original characters into the
more developed and mature characters that we see today. I was wondering, does anyone teach Chinese characters today by demonstrating what the parts initially attempted to indicate? (Sorry, I am only a super-beginner on my first lesson.) So far, in my own mind, I can see and understand the Chinese character for "man",
as it looks like a person walking. And then I decided that the word for "fire" made sense to me, because it looked like a person who is very excited, and worried because he sees a fire, so he is throwing his arms up into the air. I, of course, don't know if that is really true, but as for myself.....I now always instantly recognize the Chinese characters for "man" and "fire"....without even thinking anymore.
I like traditional chinese characters. It is more beautiful.
As someone who has studied a little bit of Japanese but no Chinese, I can recognize the occasional Chinese characters (which are some of the kanji in Japanese). One of the things that has always struck me is how easy it is to tell when something is written in Korean (which many Westerners would not be able to distinguish from Chinese writing) because of the fact that the Korean writing system does have circles in its characters.
I find it interesting and odd that Korean has circles in its characters but Japanese and Chinese don't (except for the exceptions like zero).
the frequent す, む have circles.
and then there's おなのねぬはほまよる, each with a certain circular form.
@@xolang Also, ぱ ぴ ぷ ぺ ぽ have circle diacritics, although I believe those only became common in the Meiji era (late 1800s).
ㅇ only this
"〇"(ling) same as “零”, means zero. is a circle
But that's not chinese tho
@@qweqwe-tu4rt it is chinese. it 〇, not 0
@@rickr9435 My bad I never seen it before
老实说..... : 〇 = 0
就承认直接使用古印度（阿拉伯）数字吧
@@emhgarlyyeung 没说是原创啊。问题是〇是汉字，0不是。〇在武则天时期就有了。你可以在汉字古书上看到〇
Thank you very much for the presentation!
Chinese characters are so beautiful!
Great design!
Ancient Greeks also avoided circles because it was easier to write greek letters on stones or other hard material. Curvy letters need soft material and soft material was not easily available in antiquity.
Fourteen people disliked this video because they are squares.
Very clever joke ! Hahaha.
hahaha
Cinema culture and history is so wonderful!👍✌❤🌟
Excellent.
The docent Ms. Yang is great!
There is halfly wrong and halfly right to say Chinese is the most difficult language as you can't compare orange and apple. Do you know that one only needs to master about two thousand characters you can read 97%of all the subjects written in Chinese. No way one can have this for languages derived from phonetic. This is the speciality and the beauty and uniqueness about Chinese language.
Thank you, I was feeling discouraged because it seems so difficult.
What lovely museum dedicated to the language itself
from its earlier forms to the presently evolved method of writings and its usages
But the title may be should be
'Were there ever any circles in the Chinese language characters' ,
any such similar titles
so interesting! the big changes happened because of the government requirements at the time! (of course!) It was so cool she pointed out in the Tang dynasty they started to use brush strokes that varied in thickness and it gave it a painting feeling. Now I know!
Nowadays, 〇 (líng) is sometimes written like a circle too..
Love from Brazil 😄✊🇧🇷🇨🇳.
6:50 that stroke orders are unique...
Excruciating watch if you do not understand chinese :( It's simple, circles are messy to paint with a brush, lines and curves are more efficient to paint fast
What a world of knowledge. Fascinating.
well explained !
Happy new year and spring festival China.😁👍An amazing video. Language is key to how we all interact one way of another from the written form to how we talk to each other. It identifies us for who we are, gives us identity. If you grew from a baby learning the language of your people it is NOT a difficult language to know. All of our languages have good, bad and or indifferent aspects to them. YET across the centuries it has not stopped us from communicating with each other ! 👀👍
Hmmmmm Interesting.
Now that you bought up this topic.
You got me wondering and thinking about it too. I have been learning and studying Chinese for more than a year and why didn't I notice this.No O in Hanzi ( Characters).
Its not something you think about until you look at Korean Hangul and can't help but to notice the massive number of circles in their writing.
Chinese characters are quite difficult to learn and understand~
So this is probably why Chinese is viewed as the most difficult language in the world
Better to dump the old and adopt pinying, more compatible with the keyboard.
@@geoffcrumblin7505 Pinyin is ugly and a lot of Chinese words have the same pronunciation which would make it hard to read. Characters are much easier to read - Pinyin is like reading English
@@crzer07 I've never read so much cringe in my life
@@crzer07 One street one toilet, be Proud... Jai Hind.
@@crzer07 how long is india's history? just curious
In the longer past they had the circular scripts. But later on they cut the writing on stones or wood, it was difficult to craft circular lines, so they were dropped, straight lines and combination of straight lines were easy to draw and they're common. Later on they used paint and brush to write, circular lines come back, however the angular scripts have already been formalized, circular ones become the variants. In contrast, the Burmese scripts are circular, because they wrote on tree leaves, straight lines would cut through the leaf, so the Burmese scripts would avoid drawing straight lines.
漢字叔叔，謝謝你！
What a beautiful museum.
Fascinating contents indeed
Circle is informally used to represent zero in time format.
Wow, the Museum's docent is not only knowledgeable, but can even explain it in a way that's easy to understand, and doesn't bored me out.
Also, she uses a very easy language, as a beginner chinese learner, I can grasp a lot of the words she uses.
How to make video and make those words on the wall shines? Damn I need to learn more
It is not just a question of asking about rounded figures, but about a whole circle. Greek letters O and Theta are full circles. From their originals, which is not Greek, we can tell that O, be it Omega or Omicron, and Theta depict the eye and the sun, respectively. I came here specifically to see how the sun is represented in Chinese pictography and whether it preserves the circle shape.
Of cause, in ancient Chinese characters sun is a circle with a point in the center. It is became 日 now.
Very interesting to me, as i m in middle of self educating myself in 汉字。。。。
Are these videos also available on platforms chinese people have access to?
The character for circle should've stayed a circle though. Good video!
The way we Teochew (Chaozhou) people write our numerals, we still use circle as zero for digits from 10 and greater
I love Chinese characters but they oversimplified it in modern times
I think the reason is simple, Chinese started to use printing blocks and circles are harder to cut quickly.
Babylonians wrote by making indentations on clays with a sharp stick, their writings have no circle too.
Harder to write to begin with.
Circle rolls away, square stays put.
Still wonder how Un.Hanzi can read n studies thousand of characters?👌Thanks for circles..
This video answers the “were” part of the question but doesn’t really tackle the “why.”
Yes, they did answer the question why, "to standardize and beautify the Chinese characters to make it easy for all Chinese people to communicate."
@@jianxinc Chinese Calligraphy as a "beautiful art" is consider a late idea, which came into prominence post-Song dynasty. Also, you claim that standardizing is the answer, yet Qin Shihuang standardized characters to small seal script, which vastly contains circles. It's clerical script that contains angular strokes, yet that wasn't standardized. I've studied Chinese calligraphy all my life- this question on "why" still has no convincing answers-including this video.
@@ambervale6172 isn't the "why" so obvious? it's preference! clerical script is easier to write comparing to the small seal script, especially on bamboo sticks.
@@rickr9435 That's a good theory, but just because it's obvious doesnt mean that it's the reason. You need to back it up with plausible evidence. Just like during the Qing dynasty when writing seal script came back in a roar, it didn't happen because it was more "convenient." A work in seal script can take twice as long compared to clerical.
@@ambervale6172 there wouldn't be any "plausible evidence" to prove a "preference". and seal script didn't come back in a roar in qing dynasty when most people still did not write in seal script. you may be talking about a temperory trend which only reached certain groups of people for a certain period of time.
I never knew Freddie Roach was so knowledgeable about China.
Still doesn't explain WHY the circles went away. For aesthetic purpose? My theory is that circles are hard to carve, so they have to go.
as the presentation brought up, it was a Tang Dynasty government requirement for characters to be written in neat boxes, with squarish strokes, as a purely aesthetic peculiarity (and associations between squarish, well-formed characters and being a person of upright character)
the square words were not written in carvings, if anything the carving scripts are the ones that made heavier use of circles and fluid strokes. I think you are thinking of impression-based scriptions like hieroglyps and cuneiform. those truly have a hard time with circles, and hieroglyphics had circles because the whole idea of hieroglyphics was that they were holy (hiero-) scripts (glyphs) meant mostly to be used by the royals and priest classes for artistic value rather than practical usage, thus they could afford the time to impress circles into rock
Exactly. She never explained WHY.
it is easier to carve straight lines compared to curves
Simple and logical.
i deadass thought it was adam savage in the thumbnail
The Volkswagen Beetle. Best shape there is for a car. It's much harder to make a round car than a square car.
Oh look. It's Mr. KFC
How dare you say that about the Colonel
Little circles are used in Korean. There are no little circles in Japanese either.
@VAIBHAV LOHITASHV those curves in Japanese were adopted from Chinese 草书 calligraphy.
ぱぴぷぺぽ (then again, these are the only little circles)
Ancient to modern.
Will there be a futuristic form of font in the future?
No triangles also, I think. ☂️傘 (or 伞 simplify Chinese) umbrella is closed to triangle.
Some triangles, not a lot. 么，垒，公, you get the idea.
Because it is easier to draw a squared
than a circle.
Simple logic, that the stupid Chinese lack.
When KFC granny meet good looking Chinese lady learning Chinese history, things get interesting.
"granny" = "grandmother", not "grandfather".
Try "gramps", "grandpa" (or even "pop-pop" or "pawpaw" in some versions of American English).
Btw, how American does his accent sound when he is speaking Chinese? My European ears are not sure. I think his Chinese sounds pretty good, despite his American accent. How does it sound to you?
解说员准备充分，表达得行云流水
确实 这个解说的非常好
Against oppression and dictatorship, people must always take to the streets and demand their rights to freedom. Be it here, in China or Russia. Be brave and fight for your freedom!
freedom is when western billionaires own your life . ok I got it
Russia got their freedom from the Czars by busting a cap in their ass.
The French revolution chop off Kings' head with a guillotine.
That's how you get your freedom.
Very interesting question
I thought I was the only one wondering about this lol
Fantastic lesson on Chinese characters!