Italics In Chinese

[beso]

Can Chinese be written in italics or would that change the meaning of the word?

[boxtops]

I've never heard of it - perhaps there are special symbols to give emphasise to certain phrases.

[heathfield]

"For emphasis, Chinese uses emphasis marks instead of italic type. Each emphasis mark is a single dot placed under each character to be emphasized (for vertical text, the dot is placed to the right hand side of each character). Although frequent in printed matter, emphasis marks are rare online, as they cannot be represented as plain text, are not supported by HTML and most word processors, and otherwise inconvenient to input." (Wikipedia, Chinese Punctuation).

[mikey4444]

I don't want to cause an offence here but doesn't most Chinese look like italics anyway ?

[boxtops]

I wouldn't say so, mikey - Chinese characters are draw in upright position, not leaning forward as in italics

[maxtown]

As a Chinese, I would say traditionally we don't have italics, but now there are italics in Chinese, and it commonly appears in the Chinese version word documents, but we seldom use it. It only changes the word shape from a square to a parallelogram. And it does not change the meaning of the word.:-)