Foreign characters in Chinese

Factual Questions
1

I’m a beginning student of Chinese, and I have several questions relating to the use of foreign characters.

  1. Chinese texts seem, fairly frequently, to use Arabic numerals instead of Chinese characters (for instance, the year is commonly written using “our” numerals). In what circumstances is this done, and why are Chinese characters not used instead?

  2. When were Roman-style punctuation marks first used in Chinese? What punctuation was used in older Chinese texts to separate sentences, mark questions, etc.?

  3. In areas in which texts are still printed top-to-bottom instead of left-to-right (and how common is this in places like Taiwan where it’s still done? Is in done in every text? Or only for artistic purposes?) when Arabic numerals or foreign words are used, are they printed with one letter or number per “character box”, vertically?

  4. Certain characters seem to be commonly used for words/place names imported from English, seemingly with no regard for meaning (as in the Chinese word for Chicago, which translates roughly as “Sesame seed plus older brother”). Is there a specific set of characters used for this purpose? How were they selected?

2

  1. I think its b/c it is more difficult to do math in chinese characters. The number charatcers are more like our written out forms like “nine” then they are like “9”. Although they are much better then roman numerals ever were, chinese numbers arn’t really on a decimal level. Sure the chracters go from 1-9 like the arabic numbers, but instead of 10 being written yi ling (One Zero) it gets a complete new character (just like we have a word ten rather than one zero). Doing 24347/899 is a lot easier to do then two ten-thousands four thousands three hundreds four tens seven divided by eight hundreds nine tens nine.

  2. I beleive in Classical texts they did have marks ( i think lines or the numbers 1 if i remember correctly) that seperated each clause. I never quite understood it when I took classical chinese so I pretty much ignored them.

  3. I’ve only seen the character boxes vertically, but thats not to say the other way doesn’t exist.

  4. link Don’t think so but they do use a whole lot of the same simple ones like ke and ba for all the western movie star names on pirated movies.