The Chinese Language

China is the only country in the world with a literature written in one script for more than 3,000 consecutive years. This continuity results largely from the nature of the written language itself. It is the use of characters, not letters as in Western languages, that is most important in the Chinese language. The characters stand for things or ideas and so, unlike groups of letters, they cannot, and need never be, sounded. Thus Chinese could be read by people in all parts of the country in spite of gradual changes in pronunciation, the emergence of regional dialects, and modification of the characters. The dominance of the written language has had significant effects on the development of the literature. In handwriting or in print, a piece of literature has visual appeal. This has given rise to the great respect that calligraphy enjoys in China, where it has been regarded for at least sixteen centuries as a fine art comparable to painting. The main disadvantage of written Chinese, however, is the great number of characters it contains: Even basic reading and writing require a knowledge of more than 1,000 characters.