Mere China

The Chinese language is a non-alphabetic language. It is character-based and has no letters. Each character is one word and cannot be taken apart and spelled. The characters came into being when ancient Chinese first started writing, creating little pictorial symbols to refer to various objects and even abstract ideas to keep tract of life and to express themselves. In other parts of the world, these pictorial symbols were later replaced by phonetic symbols, which eventually evolved into letters. This, however, did not happen in China, partly because in the Chinese language there are many homonyms (words that pronounce the same and would therefore spell the same) and partly because the Chinese have a tendency to stick to their tradition - they were reluctant to abandon the characters their ancestors had created and used. Because the Chinese have no alphabet, when they render foreign names, they use their characters, which, of course, look very different from, say, Russian names presented in English. Basically, they use one character to stand for one syllable, so an English name may be consisted of a few characters, depending on how many syllables there are in the English name.