Chinese character

From CharacterDB

Chinese characters named Hanzi, Kanji and Hanja respectively are used in the writing of the Chinese languages, Japanese, infrequently for Korean and formerly for Vietnamese.

Compared to the Latin alphabet these characters are much more complex not only in appearance but also in terms of modeling due to their nature.

For many case it is important not to look at the abstract character as defined by Unicode, but to handle the particular visual form, the glyph.

The decomposition of a character into components, and the order of strokes are the most important structural data attributed to a glyph. The former often gives phono-semantic information, allows for look-up mechanisms and in general provides a structural view on the glyph. The stroke order is important when writing characters and is also used for look-up.

Usage of particular characters is hard to pin down to particular languages/writing systems. Character domains are a possibility to make assertions about special use cases. Character locales can indicate in which cultural circumstances a specific visual representation (glyph) of a character can be found.

In addition the nature of the characters makes it difficult if not mostly impossible to derive their reading (pronunciation).

For classification of characters, the character's radical and stroke count are often used. They allow for example for sorting of characters and provide a way for look-up to humans.