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There was a common preoccupation during the Classical period with names ; from the Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100 CE) onward, there was also a clear notion of characters. The first clear indication of Chinese authors articulating a concept of "words" is in the translation of and commentary on Sanskrit Buddhist texts during the 5th century. While written characters were always discretized and always correspond one-to-one with monosyllabic morphemes, abstract segments of language like,  , and   are not consistently defined from text to text, as they are for modern Chinese writers.