3 replies to this topic

[Jaak]

There are, recently, about 49 000 Chinese hieroglyphs, not counting variant written forms.

Obviously every new word and every new hieroglyph to express a new meaning, thing or concept has to be invented somewhere by somebody, and be rare at first.

A number of Chinese hieroglyphs have been invented in Japan. There are called kokuji. Some of these are used only in Japan, but some have became used in China as well.

But it is not just Chinese and Japanese who use Chinese hieroglyphs. Chinese hieroglyphs are also used for Korean and Vietnamese language.

Are there any hieroglyphs invented in Korea or in Vietnam?

[qrasy]

There are plenty of Vietnamese-invented characters, and they are called Chu Nom.
Relatively big fraction of the native Vietnamese words have its own Chu Noms (often more than one).
One example is lửa "fire", written as 焒 (meaning "fire", sound like Chinese 呂).
Most of the Chu Noms are not yet in standard Unicode fonts.
http://en.wikipedia....nted_characters

For Korean, there are things like 畓乭, but it's a rather small number (I guess less than 30).
Some examples can be found here http://en.wikipedia....ja#Korean_hanja

Edited by qrasy, 17 June 2010 - 05:59 AM.

[Huseng]

Kind of related, but Tangut was loosely based on Chinese characters, though in principle not hanzi.

http://www.omniglot....ting/tangut.htm

[qrasy]

If one wants to mention non-Kanji but still Chinese-like logograms, one can add Khitan and Jurchen scripts.
In my opinion Khitan and Jurchen are both more similar to Han characters than Tangut.
http://www.omniglot....ting/khitan.htm
http://www.omniglot....ing/jurchen.htm
I wonder, though, how they would handle the grammatical particles.

Edited by qrasy, 20 June 2010 - 01:33 AM.