English: Chinese characters, 3,000 years of analysis and rationalizations.

Abstract:
Since their early creation, each Chinese characters -which is basically a visual non-phonetic representation of a concept- have both evolve and been duplicated in multiple variants. Across history, governments have continuously try to standardize their shapes and forbidden variants in order to keep the Chinese plain united by those thousands characters. On their side, individuals have done their best to analyses those characters, and create database such as etymological ones, semantic (dictionaries), phonetics (zhuyin, pinyin, hiragana, hangeul), graphics, which are now join by digital encodage table, geometric descriptions, and foreign languages fields. It’s actually the full set of meta-data relate to Chinese characters which is now expand, and link together by computing possibilities.

This article exposes quickly the most noticeable of those changes and achievements made the last 3.000 years in Chinese characters description, with a special focus on recent developments (20th century).