Tondolese Hanzi
| Tondolese Hanzi | |
|---|---|
| Type |
Logographic
|
| Languages | Tondolese |
Parent systems |
Oracle bone script
|
Sister systems | Kanji, Hanja, Sierran Hanzi, Zhuyin, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Nom, Khitan script, Jurchen script |
 |
This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters. |
Tondolese Hanzi (漢字那来自通多; Hanzi na taga-Tondo) is the Tondolese term for logographic Chinese characters borrowed from China and to a lesser extent, Japan (Kanji) and Korea (Hanja). More specifically, it refers to Chinese characters assigned Tondolese pronunciations, and are incorporated into the written language, alongside Zhuyin, an auxiliary script that had developed alongside it. Since Tondolese Hanzi has never underwent any major reforms, it is almost identical to traditional Chinese. This is in contrast to other contemporary Sinitic scripts, which have been heavily simplified, and therefore use less strokes than their Tondolese Hanzi counterparts.
Initially developed as a vernacular script following the prohibition of Baybayin during the Late Imperial Era, the Instructions for the Adoption of the Tondolese Vernacular, and the accompanying Zhenmu Dictionary (which established the proper pronunciation, usage and stroke patterns of Chinese characters used within both Han Hokkien and Han itself), both documents promulgated by the Zhenmu Emperor, led to the both the orthographical, phonetic, and grammatical standardization and codification of the Tondolese language. While Tondolese Hanzi was used by the elite, middle-class literati preferred to use Bopomofo, especially within informal texts.
Like Chinese Hanzi, each character may have multiple readings and meaning, which could be determined through context or syntactic placement. Since each character is assigned a Tondolese reading (barring Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin loanwords), the utility of radicals found within many Chinese characters for their phonetic and semantic components has been lost. Therefore, the utility of radicals found in many Chinese characters for their phonetic and semantic components has been lost. Furthermore, Tondolese Hanzi has repurposed several characters (mainly obsolete ones) and reassigned them different readings, mainly morphemes, due to the agglutinative tendencies of Tondolese.