甲骨文 (Oracle bone script)Ī common misconception about the origin of Chinese writing is that 甲骨文 (literally translates to Oracle bone script) was the earliest form of Chinese characters. Until I researched this topic, I didn’t realise that Chinese is the only logographic writing system left that is widely used in the modern world. Chinese is a logographic writing system, whereby each character itself holds meaning, whether alone or as part of a phrase. Instead, let’s talk a bit about Chinese characters. It warrants an encyclopaedic series of tomes. To be fair, Chinese history is too vast a subject for a blog post. The W3C Internationalization (i18n) Activity serves this purpose, to make it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts and cultures. The purpose of the internet is to connect people around the world, and to do that, the Web needs to cater for the various writing systems out there. Not every writing system utilises a left-to-right, downward block flow direction that is commonly seen in Latin-based systems.įor example, Arabic-based scripts and the Hebrew alphabet are written from right-to-left with a downward block flow direction, while Han-based scripts can be written from left-to-right with a downward block flow OR from top-to-bottom with a leftward block flow direction. There are more than 6000 languages in the world today and hence many different writing systems. Some background and history (skip to next section) Writing systems
#CHINESE FONTS ALPHABET FULL#
And this got me thinking about Chinese typography on the web.Īgain, this is one of those posts that grew from a cute little cub into a full fledged Giant Panda, sooo here’s a content list. There was also an article by Ahmad Shadeed on CSS Writing Mode that was making its rounds on the interwebs.
#CHINESE FONTS ALPHABET PLUS#
Like many others with similar backgrounds, we speak both English and Chinese with native fluency, plus a smattering of other languages and dialects here and there.Ī couple of months back, I went down a rabbit hole while researching my article on CSS display and discovered the HTML ruby element. I was born in Malaysia, then studied and now work in Singapore. If you hadn’t realised by now, I am Chinese.