Chinese

Although the Chinese writing system is commonly referred to as logographic, implying a one-to-one correspondence between a character and its meaning, the story is somewhat more complicated (Mair 1996). Some characters, indeed, can convey their meaning directly or in a form of semantic compounding (e.g., ^ is a tree, and # wood). However, the vast majority of Chinese characters (around 80%) involve additional character components or radicals that are used to give clues either to the meaning or pronunciation of the character (Mair 1996). For example, the Mandarin for “pour” is lin, which is a homonym for “wood”. So by combining the glyph for the radical signifying water (? ) with that for wood we get the character for “pour” (№). In this example, the wood glyph serves a purely phonetic purpose. Another form of productive compounding occurs with borrowed words. For example, take the Mandarin for “coffee”, kafei. This is represented as ЙП#, comprising two characters Ш (jia) and # (fei) each compounded with the glyph Д (kou) for mouth, which is a semantic clue to the meaning of the word and indeed to its pronunciation. The characters alone, without the P, mean, among other things, plus and non- respectively, which are meaningless in the context of the overall word. Mair (1996) concludes that the Chinese writing system can best be described as a large and phonetically imprecise syllabary with significant visual and semantic elements.

Another feature of the writing system relevant to our focus on landing sites is that the mean word length for Chinese texts is just over two characters. The characters are written in equally sized square blocks, irrespective of the number of strokes involved. The number of strokes in modern Chinese ranges from 1 to 36 for the 7,000 most frequently used characters, with a mean of 10.8. The character with most strokes in contemporary, though infrequent, use is the word В (da), which is a traditional Chinese character meaning “dragon in flight”. Traditional, as opposed to modern (simplified), characters are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but not in mainland China. Indeed, there are more complex archaic characters such as Ш meaning, ironically, "verbose” or “redundant” and comprising a repeated block of four “dragon” components (

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Crucially for our purposes and similarly to Thai, spaces are not normally used to delineate words in Chinese and word segmentation can be a source of ambiguity for the reader.