Talk:Stroke order

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fr:Discuter:Composition d'un sinogramme

i think there need to be an article explaining what constitute a stroke. Someone who have not taken chinese classes would probably think 口 is a 4-stroke character. (口 has only 3 strokes)--空向 22:28, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

I don't think there needs to be a seperate article. I've added a line that should help. Exploding Boy 23:18, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Mention of Oracle Bones and multiple other changes

The previous version mentioned the oracle bones; the mention was not centrally relevant to stroke order, or at least its relevance was not made clear. More importantly, it contained a major misunderstanding about the oracle bones; Chin. char. were incorrectly referred to as originally having been carved, and only later written on bamboo, etc. This confuses the notions of what existed at that time vs. what survived archaeologically (extant). The description of the contents of oracle bone inscriptions was also slightly off. See the Keightley reference which I've added. Dragonbones March 16, 2005

Changes made in the March 16th 2005 revision: 1. Apparent typo; orig. "Stroke power", changed to "stroke order"

2. Error:

"Chinese characters were originally carved",

changed to

"Chinese characters are believed to have originally been brush-written on perishable materials such as bamboo or wood slats, which could then be bound together like Venetian blinds, and rolled for storage. Examples of such books have been found dating to the late Zhou dynasty. It is a common misconception that Chinese characters were originally carved; this stems from the fact that the earliest extant examples are in carved form".

Any reputable authority on sinopaleography can verify this (that it is not believed that carving characters preceded writing them); I've cited Keightley as the most prominent Western authority on this. Note that my change lengthens the explanation, on a point which is not central to stroke order. The information probably more properly belongs in the pages on Chinese characters and/or oracle bones. Perhaps it should be moved or deleted.

3. Inaccurate or misleading description:

"the so-called oracle bones, scapulomancy fortune-telling devices on which the diviner inscribed his name, the date, and two possible outcomes (see image)" changed to
"The oracle bones were animal bones, generally turtle shells and the scapulae of oxen and other animals, into which pits were dug. These pits were heated to produce cracks which were read by diviners, and the date, diviner's name, topics divined, and sometimes answers were then written on and carved into the bones (see image)."

Perhaps I've added too much information, but the key change here is that "two possible outcomes" is not necessarily correct. The topic divined was inscribed, and it might or might not be done in both positive and negative wordings of the question; alternately, more than two possible outcomes might be recorded. See the cited Keightley, as well as his still in-print ppbk version, 1985, ISBN 0520054555; and his (2000) The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200 – 1045 B.C.). China Research Monograph 53, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California – Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-070-9.

4. Inaccuracy:

"Although it would take thousands of years for uniform, defined forms for each character to appear, now, as then, characters comprise a number of strokes which must be written in a prescribed order",

changed to

"Although it would take over a thousand years for uniform, defined forms for each character to appear,..."

. The time span from the oracle bones to the standardization at the time of Qin Shihuang was roughly ONE thousand (ca. 1300 BC to 3rd century BC). Even factoring in a handful of slightly earlier bronze forms, 'thousands' is misleading.

5. Personally, I think the whole bit on history of Chinese characters is out of place here, not directly relevant to stroke order. I'm considering deleting everything from

"Chinese characters are believed to have originally been brush-written ..."

to

"Although it would take over a thousand years for uniform, defined forms for each character to appear, now, as then, ".

This would leave the focus on the topic, stroke order.

6. Added:

"Taiwan continues to use the unsimplified forms, often called traditional or regular forms."

Again, I don't think the info on who uses which form is relevant to stroke order, but if Japan and China are mentioned here, Taiwan is certainly relevant.

7. The examples for stroke order as in the article's #4 are a bit confusing. "There are some circumstances where the vertical stroke is written first, usually when the bottom-most stroke is horizontal, such as in 田 or 王." This is confusing because there are three vertical strokes. If the vertical stroke the rule is trying to refer to is the center one, it is actually written fourth, not first, in this character 田, i.e., leftmost vertical, then top horiz. and right vertical jointly, then center horiz., then center vertical, and finally lower horizontal. In which case it is first ***only in relation to*** the final stroke of the character. The same is true with 王; the vertical is only "first" in relation to the final, bottom horiz. stroke. In fact, it is the third stroke, in the order taught here in Taiwan. I refer to the Chinese orders; M4RC0 clearly felt there was a problem with these examples too. I've changed it to the following: "4. There are some circumstances where the vertical stroke is written before a horizontal, such as when the character ends in a horizontal stroke at the bottom. E.g., 上 is written 一 then | then _. " Note the careful use of the word "before" rather than "first", and the simpler example.

8. A similar problem occurred in the next rule, orig. "Vertical strokes that "cut" through a character are written last, as in 書 and 筆. " But in the first of these examples, the vertical stroke is not in fact the last stroke in the character; after it come a horizontal, followed by all of 日 at the bottom. My rewording as "Vertical strokes that "cut" through a character are written after the horizontal strokes they cut through, as in 書 and 筆. " clarifies this.

Dragonbones

Regarding oracle bones and how Chinese characters were first produced, I'd like to see the claim in the article (that characters were first written with brushes and later encarved) very well referenced. According to all sources I've seen, the reverse is true. Exploding Boy 17:42, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
Should the referencing occur in detail here on this talk page as below, and just the source (book author, name etc.) be added in the Stroke Order page in the References section at the bottom? Or should specific citations be placed within the Stroke Order page in the "(Norman, p.71)" style? Sorry, I'm new at this and don't want to screw up. Thanks in advance for your feedback! Dragonbones 08:24, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
“Chinese scholars believe that the writing brush (máobĭ) was already used at this [oracle bone] period; unfortunately, the materials on which the writing brush was employed were mostly perishable, and very few examples of actual brush writing have come down to us. The bronze inscriptional script, however, preserves a style of script closely modeled on brush-writing techniques.” Norman (1988), p. 64.
The early W. Zhou figure, the Duke of Zhou, is known to have said to the Shang survivors "The fact is you are aware that [your] ancestors of the Yin had bamboo books and codices..." (Qiu 2000, p.43). Note that bamboo books were traditionally written on with a brush and ink, which is faster and easier than carving them.
Characters are also found in the oracle bone inscriptions which depict such bamboo books as well as writing brushes -- see for example, the OB 聿 yu4 (forerunner to 筆 bi3, writing brush, and central component of 書 shu1, book) (cf. Wu, T.L., 1990, p266, or Liu (1997) p.168-9, or Zhao Cheng, p.122); another example, 冊 ce4, which depicts the bound bamboo (or wood) slat book (see Liu p.112, or Zhao Cheng, p.218). The logical conclusion is therefore that brush writing was at least contemporary with the engraved OB.
Even some of the oracle bone inscriptions themselves may have been been written with a brush onto the bone surface before being carved. Carvers would often cut all the strokes going one direction before turning the piece 90 degrees to cut the remainder. This is clearest in examples in which all the strokes going one way have been carved, and some strokes going the other way missed; I doubt carvers would have done this kind of unidirectional cutting without following an existing visual reference on the bone. Furthermore, there are some bones which still bear their ink characters, without carving: "in a small number of cases they were written with a brush dipped in ink or cinnabar" (Qiu 2000, p.60).
Dr. 裘錫圭 Qiú Xīguī (2000) mentions on p. 30 that the Neolithic-period symbols which may have a bearing on primitive Chinese writing are found in both drawn (using pigmented substances) and engraved forms. I note that it is not clear whether these are in fact forerunners of the Chinese script; the citation is relevant because these symbols, as well as painted pottery during the Neolithic period, show evidence that brushes were already being used. This, plus the relative ease of both making and employing a brush, compared to engraving on a hard surface like bone, helps to support the assumption by many scholars that brush writing was at least as early as and may well have predated the engraving of characters on the oracle bones.
The Dawenkou inscriptions of around 4500 to 2300BC, which are thought by some scholars to be ancestral to the Shang writing system, are in both incised and red pigment (presumably brush written) forms. See e.g. Woon (1987), p. 27.
I'd also like to point out that it's a bit misleading to say that the OB are *the* earliest Chin. writing; there is writing on bronzes and on pottery at least as early. “From the same period [as oracle bones] there also exist a number of inscriptions on bronze vessels of various sorts.” Norman (1988), p.58. I will make a minor edit in the article soon to reflect this; I'll add these references too, although I'm considering trimming the amount of info on OB from the Stroke Order page, as it's not centrally relevant. I'm planning on overhauling the info on the Oracle Bones page itself, as it's woefully incomplete and inaccurate.
Note that there is no hard evidence of brush-written writing which predates carving; into the Neolithic period (the symbols which are debated as to whether they constitute writing) as well as in the Shang period (with symbols mirroring the contents of the OB), both are found, and it's not unreasonable to assume the brush, being easier, predates engraving. In other words, from the earliest times, the hard evidence is that the two were contemporary. There is an additional reason to believe that the brush-written form is the more basic of the two: the Shang writing on bronzes is more complex and pictographic than that scratched into the OB. It seems that the difficulty of engraving into the hard bone resulted in simplification and stylistic change, and it is easy to conclude by comparing the two in detail that the bronze version more closely reflects the normal script in everyday use. On the bronzes, these graphs could be created with a stylus in the wet clay, mirroring the ease with which they could be brush-written. In other words, the inference is that the ease of carving the wet clay allowed the complexity of the daily, (assumedly) brush-written script to be preserved, while the hard bones were not so easily carved, resulting in graphical changes. I will try to find some more references on this specific point shortly, but see for example Woon p.87-8, "The reasons why Shang and Zhou bronze preserve these primitive picture characters...is chiefly because the method of casting characters on bronze permits the drawing of the (relatively complex) picture characters." And "The employment of thick strokes in [first period] writing obviously developed from primitive drawings. From the pictures on both Banpo and Jingzhai pottery..., it can be seen that a sort of flexible painting or writing brush was presumably already in use at that time (Guo 1972:2). It can be assumed that the striking pictorial nature of characters of this first period originally had a close connection with the use of a flexible writing brush." (Woon, p.90, citing one of the most prominent Chinese scholars, Guo Moruo, from Gudai wenzi zhi biangzheng de fazhan. Kaogu 3.2-13.
Here below in double asterisks is what the new paragraph would look like if we A) trim some of the excess material, as this is all irrelevant to stroke order anyway, B) word more carefully to avoid the perception that OB are the earliest writing (earliest *extant and *significant is correct), and C) very concisely incorporate mentions of bronze, pottery, and Shang-period bamboo/wood book forms. I am proposing using this to replace the current section. Feedback pls? Thanks.
    • The earliest significant extant corpus of Chinese characters are in carved (and a few in brush-written) form on the so-called oracle bones, scapulomancy fortune-telling devices engraved or written dating to the Shang dynasty. Some writing on pottery shards and bronze vessels also exists from this period. However, these are thought to have been merely some of the media to which characters were applied, and it is generally only the carved or cast, harder materials which survived. There is evidence of Shang-period writing on bamboo- or wood-slat books, preserved in both early Western Zhou textual citations, as well as in Shang-period graphs which depict such books as well as the brushes used to write in them. By the late Zhou dynasty, surviving examples of writing on bamboo, silk and finally paper appear.**
References supporting today's arguments:
劉興隆Liú Xīnglóng (1997). 新編甲骨文字典 (new oracle bone dictionary), 文史者出版社, 台北. Wénshĭzhĕ (Wen-shih-che) Publishing, Taipei. ISBN 957-549-062-2.
Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press, UK. ISBN 0521228093; 0521296536. Dr. Norman is at the Dept. of Asian Languages and Literature, Univ. of Washington.
裘錫圭 Qiú Xīguī (2000). Chinese Writing. Translation of 文字學概論 by the late Gilbert L. Mattos (Chairman, Dept. of Asian Studies, Seton Hall University) and Jerry Norman (Professor Emeritus, Asian Languages & Literature Dept., Univ. of Washington). Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.
Woon, Wee Lee (1987). Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution. Originally publ. by the Univ. of East Asia, Macau (no ISBN); now available through Joint Publishing. No ISBN. Fax: 852-28104201; email: jpchk@jointpublishing.com (attn: Edith Ho kit-sheung). Note: the Joint Publishing staff can’t seem to handle English titles well; be sure to send the author and title in Chinese by fax to get the right book: 作者: 雲惟利， 書名: 漢字的原始和演變.
Wú, Teresa L. (1990). The Origin and Dissemination of Chinese Characters (中國文字只起源與繁衍). Caves Books, Taipei ISBN 957-606-002-8, OOP.
趙誠 Zhào Chéng (Chao Ch’eng; 1988) 甲骨文簡明詞典 – 卜辭分類讀本 jiǎgǔwén jiǎnmíng cídiǎn – bǔcí fēnlèi dúbĕn. 中華書局 Zhōnghúa Shūjú, ISBN 7-101-00254-4/H•22. Note: Zhao Cheng was a student of 胡小石 Hú Xiǎoshí at 中央大學 Central University, and studied oracle bone writing under 于省吾 Yú Xĭngwú (ed. of Gǔlín, q.v.). He is one of the top figures in philology in the PRC, and as editor at 中華書局has made great contributions to the field, including his co-editing (under the pen name of 肖丁Xiào Dīng) of Lèizuǎn (殷墟甲骨刻辭類纂) and Móshì (殷墟甲骨刻辭摩釋總集).
Dragonbones 08:24, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Simplified Chinese Input Device

For other Wikipedia contributors who input Chinese, or need to create Pinyin romanizations of Chinese, I have started working with the PenPower Chinese Handwriting Recognition System.

My initial experience with this device can be found on my user page.

If anyone has any questions about the PenPower device, please feel free to post either on this talk page, or over on my user talk page. So far, the out-of-the-box experience for this device has been excellent, but I'll post again later, after I see how it holds up to everyday use, to let you know if I highly recommend it or not. --DV 10:12, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Calligraphic Stroke Order

I don't know enough about this yet in order to write about this, but calligraphic stroke order rules actually differs from the "standard" stroke order rules taught in Chinese schools today. In addition, I believe the Japanese have their own stroke order rules that more or less follow the calligraphic stroke order rather than the current "standard" stroke order. For instance I don't think the "Cutting strokes last" rule is in the calligraphic stroke order. Someone more knowledgeable about this should probably write something up concerning this. --Umofomia 05:03, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry to don't have a perfect English, but I wrote this Stroke_order#Read_the_Stroke_order_from_the_graph & Stroke_order#Three_National_stroke_order_schools which may answer to you Yug (talk) 17:08, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removed

I removed the image link from the article as 1) it wasn't working properly, and 2) the stroke order in the image appeared to deviate from the rules. Exploding Boy 23:36, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Needs more contents

I agree with the discussion on the featured article discussion page that this needs more contents. For example, there is no explanation of how to write something like 門 - from this article I would not be able to understand that the right outside part is one stroke, but the left side is two strokes, in the normal order. At the moment the article is vague, also there was a mistake about where the stroke order originated from - it comes from the so-called "grass style". There is a great need for more examples and more explanations using real characters in the second half of the article, where the rules are. --DannyWilde 01:02, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Both the left and right sides of this character (門) contain the same number of strokes: 4. Each half is actually a sort of 日 with one stroke elongated, the left-most stroke on the left, and the right-most stroke on the right -- or you could think of it as a 月 with one stroke foreshortened.
The stroke order for this character is explained in rules 8 and 9 in the article:
"Left vertical strokes are written before enclosing strokes . . . the leftmost vertical stroke (|) is written first, followed by the uppermost and rightmost lines (┐) (which are written as one stroke)"
and
"Outside enclosing strokes are written before inside strokes; bottom strokes are written last."
I'm quite happy to add more examples, as long as they don't clutter up the article. We don't need to explain every character, but those that are tricky, or complicated, or deviate from the expected sequence can certainly be highlighted.
Exploding Boy 07:05, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion of reverts

[Remove personal comments to my user page -- Exploding Boy] I just this morning corrected a major mistake in this article, he has just reverted out the correction again, claiming for some reason he is 'restoring a lost paragraph'. Look again, Exploding Boy. The lost paragraph was WRONG. Grass style is the BASIS of stroke order. Geez. --DannyWilde 03:23, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

The sentence I wrote that you characterise as "badly written English" is -- I think -- much better written and easier to understand than the one you propose.
Your paragraph: "Stroke order . . . refers to the way in which Chinese characters are written. The stroke order of a character gives the order and direction in which the brush strokes, or simply "strokes", are written."
This makes little sense to me. The stroke order does not "give" anything, it "is" something, specifically a set of rules that determine the order and direction in which the strokes that make up Chinese characters are written.
My sentence: "Stroke order . . . refers to the way in which Chinese characters are written, that is, the order and direction in which the marks ("strokes") that form a given character are drawn."
This is not only simpler and more descriptive, but more accurate. Strokes are not only made by brushes, strokes are not always "brush strokes," and so on.
On the topic of the paragraph you characterise as "erroneous," I think you are misreading it. Here it is:
"The normalisation of stroke order in Chinese characters allows readers to recognize characters that are written in cursive styles, in particular the highly stylized Grass script style, by recreating in their imagination the sequence of movements used to write a given character."
What this paragraph is saying is that since there is a standard stroke order for writing Chinese characters, readers can decipher characters that differ in appearance from the standard, ie: those that are written cursively, such as grass script. This is possible because, since there are standard rules, readers can recreate in their imagination the motions used to write a character.
I'm not sure how you interpreted it, but judging from your remarks above you seem to have misunderstood it.
In addition, I'm not certain where you're getting the idea that grass script is the "basis" for stroke order. Given that grass style -- essentially a highly cursive style of writing -- developed some time after the origins of Chinese characters and their standardization, by necessity after oracle script and bronzware script, and, as far as I can tell, seal script, clerical script, and various others, I don't see how this can be the case, especially since grass script is characterised by a marked economy of individual strokes (言, for example, often being abbreviated from seven strokes to a single stroke). Could you clarify this?
As to the comments I removed from above, please discuss them on my talk page.
Exploding Boy 06:19, 16 September 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Chinese Stroke order

If you need picture of strokes order please have a look here

and on my user page on wikicommons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:M4RC0, You will find the 1st and 2nd grade of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoiku_kanji and JPLT1

I don't understand if this article speak about Chinese stroke order or Japanese stroke order ..

for exemple the rule 3 is wrong if you write in japanese 田 , you draw : (|) (┐) then for write the 十, has two strokes written as follows: | → 十. but it's true in chinese stroke order..

you have the same probleme with 王 in japanese in chinese

sometime it's funny ..in japanese : for exemple 左 and 右 , the two first stroke are not the same, so when i write 有 or 友 which order I use ?

I like this article. But there is about 3000-5000 kanji, I think you will always find an "exception", So it's difficult a global rule (personnaly, I draw for the wikicommons about 800 hundred kanji/hanzi , I always have to check in my dictionnary, most of these rules doesn't work so fine..)

it's would be nice also to speak about the stroke direction.

sorry for the english .. --M4RC0 09:15, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

The stroke order thingie is just for elementary kids to learn how to write characters properly; if you ever have seen how native writers writing with their pens, you will understand in the instant that the information provided in this article is totally "theoretical" lol... -- G.S.K.Lee 14:43, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
Of course it is. Who ever writes even English in the exact way you were taught at school? ShizuokaSensei 02:59, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Misleading Image

The character 永 only has five strokes, not eight, and is indexed that way in dictionaries. The middle vertical stroke is performed with one motion. The leading dot occurs by the landing of the brush on the medium, and the final "tick" is performed by flicking up and to the left. It's misleading to explain this as three separate, overlapping strokes without additional explanation. It's one stroke with three features. Similarly, the left stroke is just one motion also. A stroke isn't a necessarily a straight line. It is a congtiguous motion performed without lifting the pen or brush.

I get what you're saying, but the caption doesn't say it has 8 strokes, it says it has 8 'different kinds' of strokes, meaning a few of the strokes include 2 or 3 different styles in one. The wording might be done a little better ... maybe
this character displays 8 different stroke styles, used over 5 strokes?
  freshgavin TALK    15:07, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
yeap, it's that : 5 stroke, but containing the 8 "traditional main stroke" Yug
Seeing as this is pretty fundamental to the whole article I also thing this image is confusing. It should either be scrapped or redone. You can't have 8 different kinds of stroke in something that everyone is taught has 5 strokes. Akihabara 07:56, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A lovely article

This arctle is really lovely. Everyone should be proud. ShizuokaSensei 06:33, 2 May 2006 (UTC)


[edit] So what? Why does it matter?

incorrectly ordered or written strokes can produce a visually unappealing or, occasionally, incorrect character Well, yes. And it's also true that knowledge is essential in order to read particular kinds of handwriting. But I think this article gives a rather false impression of two extremes: printing (or handwriting that resembles it), and a very cursive script. In my (Japanese) experience, most real-world handwriting falls somewhere between the two extremes, and if you don't know about stroke order, you won't be able to read a large percentage of handwriting. So the answer to my rhetorical question is: "More than the article seems to suggest."

Also, how about near-minimal-pairs? In Japan, at least, 左 and 右 (which of course have opposite meanings and appear in the same contexts) have different orders for the first pair of strokes (as excellently illustrated above). One has to know this.

But I hesitate to edit this article because I'm far from being an expert. -- Hoary 12:03, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Stroke order isn't really that important. -- G.S.K.Lee 14:42, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
Depends just what you mean. It's common knowledge that people don't always follow the correct order to the number, but to say stroke order as a whole is not important is incorrect. For starters, without a standadised method for writing, it it'd be imposible to teach writing at all. The odd stroke here and there out of order makes no difference, but if you try writing Chinese or Japanese in the opposite order to the 'correct' order, then the chances are it will look at lot worse. By the same token, if you didn't stress the importance of the correct order, local variations and alterations would become a lot more common. For a writng system that is pretty intricate, if you lost the standadised, 'correct' method of sriting it, it would soon degenerate into chaos. ShizuokaSensei 04:32, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Failed GA

This is an interesting subject, but I do have a couple of concerns:

  1. Per WP:LEAD, the lead is too long; it should be two to three paragraphs for an article of this length. Some material should be moved to appropriate sections.
  2. The "Rules" section is not entirely clear about how the rules interact and which ones supersede others in various circumstances. For example, the dot in the symbol for "fire" is shown as written second, but rule 11 states that those dots are usually written last.

In short, it's a decent article, but some clarification and reorganization would be helpful. — TKD::Talk 17:21, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I was planning on reviewing this article, and I'd like to point out that the table of simple strokes does not show all of the strokes. n/a is not a helpful visual representation. Also, there are no inline citations. --Cryptic C62 20:00, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
it's still easily a GA. What's with the near-FA requirements for GA, recently? We don't need two grades if they mean practically the same thing. dab (ᛏ) 19:49, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unicode

The Unicode table should be merged with the "basic strokes" table. I have no idea how the cryptic Unicode character names map to the strokes' actual names, but if anyone does, please merge them. dab (ᛏ) 19:49, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 2 more section to add

  1. Section "Old calligraphic style and current Stroke order" : there is a Origine => consequence link. Done - Yug
  2. Section "Variation function of the country" : there are 3 differents rules function of China, Traditionnal Chinese, and Japanese-Korean. Done - Yug

--Yug (talk) 15:00, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Clean up Improvement (start on january 2007)

I think it's now need to

  • clean up the Main-China_stroke_order_rules section. We have a table, and then a list of explanation. Can you help to merge the both ?
  • Rename this article into : CJK strokes and Stroke order, an half of this article being about CJK strokes.

Yug (talk) 15:18, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Introductive section is it misleading ?

The introductive section talk a lot about Jiaguwen, scapulomancy, and such origines of chinese characters. I like this, it's really interesting, but this article is the "Stroke order article". Most of the introduction should be remove (where ? should this be absolutely keep in this article ? May we remove text about Jiaguwen & scapulomancy here, on the talk page ?). The Introduction should also be expand by some summaries of each section. Yug (talk) 09:17, 26 March 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Removed from article

This entire section seems to make no sense, smacks of original research, and I'm not convinced it really has much to do with the article Exploding Boy 05:25, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article may require a spell check.
Please correct the typos and other spelling mistakes in this article.

Ancient China —
Jiǎgǔwén
Jīnwén
Dàzhuàn
Xiǎozhuàn
Lìshū
Kǎishū (t)
Kǎishū (s)

In archaic China, the Jiǎgǔwén characters (Oracle script), carved on ox scapula and tortoise plastrons (see Oracle bones) showed no indication of stroke order. The graph of each semantic meaning such as "Man" or "Horse" show huge variations depending of which oracle bones one looks at, and the "stroke order" was probably the stroke order of the local pyromantic divin.

With the development of Jīnwén and Dàzhuàn (Bronzeware script and Large Seal Script) we continue to see "cursive" signs which also do not indicate a clear a stroke order. Moreover, it is evident that even as late as the development of Large seal (Dàzhuàn) style, each archaic kingdom of current China had its own set of characters.

Imperial China —

In Imperial China, the graphs on the old steles —some being as far as 2,200 years old (200 BC) and in Xiaozhuan style— start to reveal tiny indications of the stroke order of the time.

About 220 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first to conquer all China, impose several reforms, in which the Li Si's Characters uniformisation, imposing a set of 3.000 standardized "Xiǎozhuàn" characters. But the style is still not enough "geometrical" to read a stroke order from graphs on steles, and every paper's calligraphies of the time were lost.

The true starting point of the possibility to determine the stroke order of old style is the Lìshū style (Clerical script) which is more geometric and more similar to the current regular style. In theory, by looking the Lìshū style steles' graphs and the exact place of each stroke, we can see an "hierarchisation" of priority between the strokes, which indicate us the stroke order use by the calligrapher or stele sculptors.

The first apparition of Kǎishū style (regular script) —still in use nowadays— more regular and geometric, allows us to read more clearly the hierachisation and so the stroke order use to write on the steles. It is to notice that this analyze show that the stroke order 1,000 years before was close but was not the same that in the end of Imperial China. An other thing is that some graphs in the stele show clearly the stroke order, while current Kǎishū graphs, still using the same stroke order, doesn't show clearly the stroke order. By example, the stroke order of 广 is really clear if we read the Kangxi dictionary of 1716; but if we read a book print in 2007, the official stroke order (the same) will not appear clearly (see here). The Kangxi and current shapes have tiny differences, while current stroke order is still exactly the same, according to old style.

The official shape of every radical and characters continue to move along history. It is also important to note that "graph" and "stroke order" are closely linked.


In addition, I've removed some incorrect claims. For example, someone had included in the article the claim that the character ㇀ is a "stroke." This is emphatically not the case. ㇀ is a radical; a stroke, however, it is not. Exploding Boy 05:25, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


Thanks for your work and clean up of the introduction and some other sections. But, I don't agree with several modifications. In example : 廴，戈，方，母，瓦，癶，禸，舟，辶，阝，骨，and 鬼 aren't all characters as you changed it, in bold are the 偏旁 pianpang, which are radicals only and can't be use alone (see 康熙字典，Zhonghua shuju, Hong Kong, 1958, 1979). Then, the sentence just after that you deleted had all its sense. This is the only "true" mistake that I seen in my overview.
Other point is that the section that you remove in the talk page answer to question such as "what is the stroke order of Jinwen's characters", images are there to show an example, people can go to by calligraphic books if they want to see hundred of Jinwen characters to match with this statement that everybody can find out.
The unreadability of the stroke order in old style is a well know statement, or please show me where a serious scholar wrote the opposite. While the stroke order readability of Lishu and Kaishu is also a fact. Article about stroke order have to talk of stroke order, and talk of the possible stroke order of each style such Jiaguwen, Jinwen, Zhuanshu, Lishu, Kaishu, Xinshu, Zaoshu, is a part of this work, exactly like the need to talk that the stroke order change in Taiwan, PRC, and Japan-Korea.
Yug (talk) 20:43, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
I think the Ti may be look as a radical if look in the Kangxi list, or as a stroke if look in a stroke list. All is depending of the context. Yug (talk) 20:43, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
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