Stroke (CJKV character)

CJKV strokes are the calligraphic strokes needed to write the Chinese characters in regular script used in East Asia. CJK strokes are the classified set of line patterns that may be arranged and combined to form Chinese characters (also known as Hanzi) in use in China, Japan, Korea, and to a lesser extent in Vietnam (see CJK characters).

Purpose

The study and classification of CJK strokes aid in:

Formation

When writing Han radicals, a single stroke includes all the motions necessary to produce a given part of a character before lifting the writing instrument from the writing surface; thus, a single stroke may have abrupt changes in direction within the line. For example:

Character

Character(s) may refer to:

Art and entertainment

Character (computing)

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language.

Examples of characters include letters, numerical digits, common punctuation marks (such as "." or "-"), and whitespace. The concept also includes control characters, which do not correspond to symbols in a particular natural language, but rather to other bits of information used to process text in one or more languages. Examples of control characters include carriage return or tab, as well as instructions to printers or other devices that display or otherwise process text.

Characters are typically combined into strings.

Character encoding

Computers and communication equipment represent characters using a character encoding that assigns each character to something — an integer quantity represented by a sequence of digits, typically — that can be stored or transmitted through a network. Two examples of usual encodings are ASCII and the UTF-8 encoding for Unicode. While most character encodings map characters to numbers and/or bit sequences, Morse code instead represents characters using a series of electrical impulses of varying length.

Persona

A persona (plural personae or personas), in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον (prosōpon). Its meaning in the latter Roman period changed to indicate a "character" of a theatrical performance or court of law, when it became apparent that different individuals could assume the same role, and legal attributes such as rights, powers, and duties followed the role. The same individuals as actors could play different roles, each with its own legal attributes, sometimes even in the same court appearance. According to other sources, which also admit that the origin of the term is not completely clear, persona could possibly be related to the Latin verb per-sonare, literally: sounding through, with an obvious link to the above-mentioned theatrical mask.

CJK characters

In internationalization, CJK is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, all of which use Chinese characters and derivatives (collectively, CJK characters) in their writing systems. Occasionally, Vietnamese is included, making the abbreviation CJKV, since Vietnamese historically used Chinese characters as well.

Collectively, the CJK characters often include, hànzì in Chinese, kanji, kana in Japanese, hanja, hangul in Korean, and Hán tự, Chữ Nôm in Vietnamese.

Character repertoire

Chinese is written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. It requires approximately 4,000 characters for general literacy, but up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters — general literacy in Japan can be expected with about 2,000 characters. The use of Chinese characters in Korea is becoming increasingly rare, although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters.