Authoritative classification and names of Chinese character strokes?

[Jackdk]

I've been searching for an "official" list of names or classification of the various character strokes and their names - heng, shu and so on, but also all their variants. I have located this document which seems to be a fairly comprehensive collection of stroke variants and names.

The document seems to classify (divide) 43 strokes into five main groups (横, 竖, 撇, 点 and 折), placing 提(挑) as a 横-variant/subordinate etc.

While is certainly the longest list of stroke names I've seen I don't know if the classification of names is "correct" and whether the stroke names are "official"?

Other sources such as CSU talks about eight basic strokes (not five), and uses the character for "eternally" as an example.

Any authoritative sources?

BTW: Is it just me or wouldn't it be nice if one could buy "da big Chinese book" with “all things” explained from A-Z... Instead of everyone trying to assemble info from many sources of various quality... perhaps an idea for some of the literate folks out there with too much free time...

[here2learn]

The site in the first link is great, thanks!

That CSU site looks quite... incomplete.

I've been recently looking for the basic strokes and also came up with differing lists.

The simple basic list I like best is from a 5kuai little copybook I have now.

(I'm not putting tones because they seem to be different than simply looking up that hanzi in the dictionary. If I say it "means" something, that's the dictionary definition of that actual hanzi, not necessarily shufa terms)

点 dian3 (dot, small mark)

横 heng (straight across; means horizontal)

竖 shu (straight down; means vertical)

撇 pie (down to the left; ooh I found it: "丿" means to cast aside, neglect)

捺 na (down to right; means press down with hand)

提 ti (upward, short; )

竖钩 shu gou (straight down, then little hook.. gou means a hook or to hook sth)

弯钩 wan gou (like shu but slightly curved, then hook)(as in 手shou; wan means bend, crooked, turn)

斜钩 xie gou (curved down to right, then hook, like 民 .. xie means oblique, slanted, inclined)

卧钩 wo gou (the big stroke in 心 ; wo means lie on your back)

竖弯 shu wan (the right inner stroke in 四 )

竖弯钩 shu wan gou (the right stroke of 儿 )

竖提 shu ti (the left bottom of 衣 )

横钩 heng gou ( horizontal top of 皮 )

横cun {hanzi not in my program! the unit of length} (cun just means short and helps make boxes, like the right side of 口 )

横cun钩 (top and right of 月 )

横撇 (left part of 水 )

撇cun (bottom of 去, but without the little part - ti? dian?)

捺点 na dian (the first of the 3 strokes in 女 )

横cun弯钩 ( 九 is mostly this except for the first stroke)

竖 cun (left-bottom of 山 )

竖cun cun 钩 (the 2nd of the 3 strokes in 马 )

横 cun 提 (话 's 2nd stroke; the part under the dian)

横撇弯钩 (the "3" looking bit all the way to the right of 那 )

oh god i had no idea this would be so long

横 cun cun cun 钩 ( the whole crooked mess on the right part of 乃 ; everything but that first plain stroke)

横cun 弯 ( 几 's 2nd of strokes)

竖 cun 撇 ( the straight-down & twist of 专 without the dian or whatever that little part is)

横 cun cun 撇 ( I can't find it now, and good golly it's the last one and it's late.... ZZzzzzzz)

But THEN when the book reviews it only shows 20 of the 28 above. Maybe the combinations are just really ... well, no one wants to bother?

Counting above, there are 11 separate actual strokes, and anything else is a combination.

So... where do the combinations stop, I think that's the issue. I'll go up and bold the 11 different strokes.

There.

SO.... experts out there... what do you think of my list? Please tell me it's wonderful because it took a long time, although I HAD to do it... you know how it is. How could I not? Plus it was a nice review for me to type that all in.

[Jackdk]

here2learn: many thanks .

I also noted the Character Description Language, and in particular this document from the ISO working group. It contains the names of 36 strokes and their variants, many of which are unicode characters.

It seems to be a fairly recent and somewhat "official" list...

[yonglin]

What are those characters in the last document marked Q圈, i.e., 加, 於 and 斗 with 〇 on the bottom? Are they Japanese or something? Never seen anything like them...

[atitarev]

Wenlin software has nice lists. 2 list of the lists included in the program have 1. radicals by stroke count and 2. radicals by number 1-214. I find them quite comprehensive and useful. The work one at a time (one click - one radical info), sorry can't make a complete list quickly.

[here2learn]

Jackdk - Thanks for the thanks... Ahh! Someone saw!

In your link called "this document from ISO..." there are 12 main strokes. VERY similar to the 11 in my kiddie handwriting book above.... I'm almost satisfied now to think that 11-12 is it.

The ISO document also has a circle, for which the examples included are a big O, which I only know as writing a year 二 〇〇八， and a few other characters I can't even copy & paste, like yonglin said... anyone know what they are? (see yonglin's post)

I figure there was no circle traditionally; the circle is a 'new' thing, coming from western numbers and now also needed in typing.

Remember, old circles were turned into squares, like 口 。

And his list has a couple different names for things compared to mine above:

bian = wo

zhe = cun ?

Now I don't know what to call them. Darnit.

I'm feeling better... maybe I'll go practice these 11-12 strokes for a while, and their names. I'm ok with that circle being optional or whatever. I'll take it in like a stray cat, heehee.

[Jackdk]

The ISO document now seems to be part of the official Unicode Standard, version 5.1. The strokes should therefore be 'official' now (when it comes to computers at least). Now we need some fonts to implement the new Unicode characters (strokes), so that we can type and read them as all other characters. That would be very nice .

There is another informative, although not completely updated page on Wikipedia about strokes.

About the O-stroke, which is Unicode character U+31E3 and entitled "CJK stroke Q" or quan1 / 圈 (which means 'circle'):

According to Wenlin, it is the sixth stroke of the 㔔-character. This character has it's own Wiktionary-page, which refers to this document, but this is where my detective skills ends... perhaps someone who can read Chinese would like to take over from here? It's radical should be 力, and there are Wubi-codes etc. here.

here2learn: The reason you are unable to copy&paste the O-stroke could be that it isn't implemented as a character in a unicode font on your PC yet. In the PDF-document it could just be graphics (or an embedded, but only draft unicode-character).

[Jackdk]

BabelMap is a nice character map application that can be used to browse installed fonts. It can be downloaded here.

It only shows a text reference to the O-stroke-character, but not the character itself (on my computer that is).

Alan Wood has more info about where to get the fonts and how to test usage in the browser here. I will look into this later today.

[889]

Code2000 includes both U+31E3 and U+3514. Install it and you'll see the characters U+31E3 ㇣ and U+3514 㔔.

It's a shareware font and can be downloaded here:

http://www.code2000.net/code2000_page.htm

[Jackdk]

889: Great many thanks. I'll have a look at the fonts suggested at Alan Wood's site.

I would really enjoy a font which has all the new characters (strokes) as well as full GB 18030 support for simplified characters - or perhaps two fonts, one with 'printed'-type characters and one with 'brush'-stroke characters.

[Jackdk]

I can confirm that the Code2000 font implements all the Unicode-characters U+31C0 - U+31E3. So with this font is is possible to view all the CJK-strokes in the Unicode-standard - and that is very good news indeed. See screen shot below.

It is IMHO however not an extremely beautiful implementation. It seems to be a 'printed-character'-style font, but the 'dot' at the end of 'heng' is smaller than it would normally be. Many of the strokes looks a little too... cheap ...inconsistent...and perhaps as mixture of the two main character types? 'dian' is longer, slimmer and less curved than I would normally see in 'printed'-type characters.

Another problem is that when rendering some characters at 9-10 CPI on my monitor, such as the aforementioned character with the O-stroke, parts of the characters are not visible. The same characters are clearly displayed using other "normal" Chinese fonts.

I'll continue searching for another implementation or two .

.

[Jackdk]

About to the 'O-stroke and the 㔔-character':

Various Chinese people I've spoken to seems to suggest two different possible explanations:

1. The O-stroke could be a placeholder indicating a place (space) to write another (normal) character component.

2. The 㔔-character is a character bordering Korean language, and this page seems to suggest that it could be the Korean name 'kang'.

I would put my money on the last explanation. But both suggestions could perhaps explain why it's difficult to locate the character in a Chinese dictionary.

[889]

No, Code2000 doesn't look very attractive on screen, does it.

As to the ISO document and Unicode classification, remember that these implement not Chinese but CJK coding, as in Chinese-Japanese-Korean. So of course they would code a stroke used only in Korean.

[Jackdk]

I haven't been able to locate any other fonts and according to this page Code2000 is currently the only implementation .