In Written Chinese, components (Chinese: 部件; pinyin: bùjiàn) are building blocks of characters, composed of strokes. [1] In most cases, a component consists of more than one stroke, and is smaller than the whole of the character. For example, the character 件 consists of two components: 亻 and 牛. These can be further decomposed: 亻 can be analyzed as the sequence of strokes ㇓㇑, and 牛 as the sequence ㇓㇐㇐㇑. [2]
There are two methods for Chinese character component analysis, hierarchical dividing and plane dividing. Hierarchical dividing separates layer by layer from larger to smaller components, and finally gets the primitive components. Plane dividing separates out the primitive components at one time. [3]
The structure of a Chinese character is the pattern or rule in which the character is formed by its (first level) components. [4] Chinese character structures include single-component structure, left-right structure, up-down structure and surrounding structure. [5]
- ^ National Language Commission 2009, p. 1.
- ^ Su 2014, pp. 84–85.
- ^ Su 2014, p. 86.
- ^ National Language Commission 2009, p. 2.
- ^ Fu 1999, p. 2.