Where is the Chinese alphabet?

In each month, more than 10,000 people try the "Chinese alphabet" on the internet.

Question is:

The Chinese language has an alphabet?

If yes, where is it?

Why can not I "see" this?

To answer these questions, let's look at how Chinese writing evolved over the centuries.

Initially, the company created symbols to refer to simple things.

Symbols are signs and images that refer to real objects.

The first symbols that represented things seemed.

For example, the symbol for "bird" like a bird.

Same goes for "mountain" and "tree", "Rain," "child", "knife", "boat".

Over time, the company grew and became increasingly complex.

Of course, the meanings of visual symbols changed.

Symbols not only synonymous with physical things, but for more abstract things as well.

As a "sunrise", "friend", "pray", "play", "safe" year ", etc.

Took shape as a culture, a written language, consisting of letters (ie the alphabet) was invented.

A sound was attached to each letter as a string of letters could be pronounced.

The symbols were replaced by words and phrases as the primary means of communication.

Usually, this is what happened with the written languages.

Not so with the Chinese language.

A Chinese alphabet has never been invented.

Rather, the evolution of the Chinese language took a special turn:

Instead of visual symbols being replaced by a written language of letters, symbols themselves became the written language.

That's why there is no Chinese alphabet.

One reason is that the Chinese language is tonal.

This means that there are several tones and each tone means a different thing.

For example, there are four tones in Mandarin.

Cantonese has six tones.

In addition, the words with the same tones often have different meanings.

And their meaning can not be that clear from the context of the sentence.

This unique feature of the Chinese language gives rise to "visual puns".

The interplay of phonetics (ie sounds) and puns often reveal the hidden meanings of symbols or Chinese characters.

Phonetics and puns give clues to the hidden meaning of images.

Here's a picture of a fish is an expression of "abundance" because the Chinese word for "fish" 鱼 yu2 has the same sound as "wealth" yu2 余.

This is an example of a "visual pun" and there are a lot of them in Chinese.

It 's easy to see why there is no such thing as a "full Chinese alphabet" or "Chinese alphabet".

Or why the Chinese alphabet is "missing".

An alphabet consists of a small number of letters (eg 26 in English) that make all the words in the spoken language.

There are no letters in Chinese writing.

only thousands of individual symbols or characters each with their specific sound (s) and meanings.

Since there are no letters in Chinese it naturally follows there is no Chinese alphabet.