Downloaded from https://www.everyspec.com FM 34-54 NOTE: North Korean text seldom has any Chinese characters as a matter of official policy. CHINESE: Chinese is written with several thousand symbols called characters. International numerals are widely used and scientific and technical Chinese will contain quoted European words in Roman letters. The characters are constructed according to a complex system based on the use of only a few different stroke types (less than 10) and a large set of elements called "radicals" (about 200). Radicals are made up of one or more elements associated with them. These radicals and strokes are used to construct the characters.
The characters are thought of as occupying a rectangular space and good calligraphy allots about the same area to each character, regardless of complexity. Figure G-15 shows the 50 most common radicals in Chinese. Some will occur by themselves as characters. Most will more frequently occur as constituents of more complex characters. The People's Republic of China has recently changed the form of some of these elements, but most are unchanged and the traditional forms still occur even there. Except for numerical zeroes and the small circles that are used as punctuation marks to indicate the end of a sentence, printed Chinese does not have any circles.
If the text has a lot of circles and curves, suspect some language other than Chinese. G-22