Chinese Characters

Xu Bing's installations are renowned for their production of "nonsense writing," that is, for extracting operations from Chinese characters in a manner that defies conventions for what is sensible and intelligible in writing. Xu Bing, apparently in all seriousness, glosses such "nonsense" with the Chan Buddhist notion of shengyu 生语 or "living word." If the characters in Xu Bing's installations can be said to be living words, it is because they afford an experience of what is nonsensuous in the everyday experience of characters-while we are used to characters being visible and audible, we do not normally experience what happens between seeing and saying the character. In this paper, I look at various installations in which Xu Bing uses techniques of abstract resemblance, such as pictographs (characters that resemble things) and psuedographs (fake characters that resemble actually used characters) in order to provide an experience of nonsensuous similarity or semblance prior to and beyond resemblance. The challenge of his recent installation, Background Story, is that it explores nonsensuous similarity in a new register: calligraphic paintings in which there is brushwork without brushwork, in which actual things appear self-abstracting. Thus his art delivers a profound challenge to received hierarchies for organizing experience, suggesting that things are no less abstract than images or signs, only differently so.

Using a thematic analysis methodology, this paper attempts to critically review published articles on Chinese character teaching and learning in and outside China between 2005–2019, highlighting contributions scholars made to the current literature as well as identifying gaps in the research. The analysis reveals that there is a rather large gap in the use of research methodologies between the two sets of articles, with publications in China predominantly adopting non-empirical approaches while most articles published outside China are empirical. Besides, the use of Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) in character teaching and learning seems to be a key research topic outside China, while exploring new pedagogical ideas and strategies attracts more interests among scholars in China. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research directions and a call for more diverse research paradigms and mixed-method perspectives.

The 『Zhuanjuege(篆訣歌)』, quatrain with seven Chinese characters in each line, has the Gugyeols, a system for rendering texts written in the Zhuanshu(篆書) writing system into another understandable form of the Lishu(隸書) writing system and is the textbook for the learning of the Zhuanshu(篆書) writing system. The book was written in Kaishu(楷書) writing system by Ying Zai(應在) in Won Dynasty and the Zhuanshu(篆書) writing system was added and edited by Zhu, Zhi-fan(朱之蕃) in Ming Dynasty. Due to the addition of Zhuanshu(篆書) writing system by Zhu, Zhi-fan(朱之蕃), the book has undergone some radical changes in the seven texts such as 『Zhuanfabianjue(篆法辨訣)』 written in Kaishu(楷書) writing system by Ying, Zai(應在), Zhong Guoshibanben(中國石版本), Lindemingben(林得明本), Weichangduben(韙倡讀本), Weichangchaoben(韙倡鈔本) written in Kaishu(楷書) writing system and Zhuanshu(篆書) writing system by Zhu, Zhi-fan(朱之蕃), 『Zhuanfatanyuan(篆法探源)』 written in Zhuanshu(篆書) writing system by Yang, Jia-xiang(仰嘉祥), and 『Zhuanjuege(篆訣歌)』written in Zhuanshu(篆書) writing system by Han, Tian-heng(韓天衡). This article aims at analysing the relationship between Zhuanshu(篆書) and Kaishu(楷書) of『Zhuanjuege(篆訣歌)』.

The construction of environmental communication with Chinese characteristics is a special requirement of China's new era, and it is also the result of the era of China's journalism and communication from practice to theory. In the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China's environmental communication practice activities and systems have become more and more perfect, and the promotion of environmental communication theory innovation has entered an important stage. Many conditions for the development of China's environmental communication innovation are relatively mature, which provides the possibility of constructing environmental communication with Chinese characteristics:" The construction of ecological civilization has become a national development strategy. It provides macroeconomic guarantee for the construction of environmental communication with Chinese characteristics. The accumulation of environmental communication research in China during the 40 years of reform and opening up has provided academic accumulation for the construction of environmental communication with Chinese characteristics; The establishment of academic system and discourse system has laid a theoretical foundation for the construction of environmental communication with Chinese characteristics. Strengthening academic self-confidence, taking root in China's environmental research soil, basing on the experience of China's environmental undertaking development, and criticizing the achievements of foreign environmental communication are the top priorities for the construction of environmental communication with Chinese characteristics.

Với việc lựa chọn tư liệu nghiên cứu là 5 văn bản khắc in chữ Nôm hậu kì (1884-1945), mỗi văn bản chọn phân tích 1000 lượt chữ Nôm, bài viết đã nghiên cứu một số vấn đề về cấu trúc văn tự học chữ Nôm hậu kì trong lượng tư liệu trên ở hai cấp độ: cấp độ hệ thống văn tự và cấp độ đơn vị văn tự. Sau đây là một số kết luận quan trọng rút ra dựa trên các số liệu thống kê chi tiết và hệ thống.

Xét từ cấp độ hệ thống văn tự:

- Không có sự thống nhất tỉ lệ các loại cấu trúc chữ Nôm ở các văn bản khác nhau. Có một điểm thống nhất đáng chú ý là sự vắng bóng chữ Nôm tiểu loại hội âm chính phụ (thuộc loại E1) để tạo thành dạng âm tiết có mô hình CCVC.

- Nếu tính tỉ lệ trung bình của mỗi loại cấu trúc chữ Nôm trong 5 văn bản thì 10 loại cấu trúc chữ Nôm được chia thành 3 nhóm với sự sai biệt khá lớn về số đơn vị thống kê: nhóm thứ nhất là loại cấu trúc A1, với số lượng đơn vị thống kê rất lớn, khoảng 40-45%, tức gần bằng tổng số lượng của 9 loại còn lại; nhóm thứ hai gồm các loại C2, F1, F2, C1, A2, mỗi loại chiếm khoảng 10-15% số lượng đơn vị thống kê; nhóm thứ ba là các loại D, E2, B, E1, mỗi loại chiếm trên dưới 1% đơn vị thống kê.

- Tỉ lệ nhóm chữ Nôm “Tự Tạo” chỉ bằng khoảng ¼ nhóm “Mượn Hán”, bất kể là về số chữ hay số lượt chữ. Sự vay mượn văn tự này cũng thể hiện phần nào sự vay mượn về ngôn ngữ và văn hóa từ Trung Quốc sang Việt Nam.

- Với một số lượt chữ bằng nhau, thì các văn bản có tính văn chương và theo thể văn vần sử dụng nhiều chữ hơn, thậm chí có thể nhiều gấp đôi số chữ dùng trong các văn bản có tính hành chính nghi thức và theo thể văn xuôi.

Xét từ cấp độ đơn vị văn tự (nghiên cứu các biệt thể tự hình):

- Góc nhìn đơn văn bản: trong phạm vi khảo sát của bài viết, mỗi văn bản có từ 261 đến 574 ngữ tố, số ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình dao động trong khoảng 3 – 11. Nếu tính tỉ lệ trung bình, ta có con số 1,03%, nghĩa là cứ 100 ngữ tố thì mới có khoảng 1 ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình. Thêm nữa, mỗi ngữ tố thuộc loại có biệt thể tự hình thì cũng chỉ có 2 biệt thể, tức là con số ít nhất để có thể coi là có biệt thể.

- Góc nhìn đa văn bản: 5000 lượt chữ có 1468 ngữ tố, trong đó 114 ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình, tổng số biệt thể tự hình này xuất hiện 970 lần, nghĩa là 7,8% tổng số ngữ tố có biệt thể tự hình, số biệt thể tự hình này xuất hiện trong 19,4% tổng độ dài 5 văn bản. Tuyệt đại đa số (104/114) các ngữ tố này chỉ có 2 biệt thể tự hình, điều này cho thấy “độ tụ” của biệt thể tự hình rất cao, ít ngữ tố có quá nhiều biệt thể tự hình. Ở cả hai cấp độ đơn văn bản và đa văn bản thì các biệt thể tự hình chủ yếu khác nhau về loại cấu trúc (10/24, 62/124), hoặc là thay đổi vị trí tương đối giữa các bộ phận trong mỗi chữ Nôm ý-âm tự tạo (5/24, 15/124).

- Xét từ cả hai góc nhìn đơn văn bản và đa văn bản, chúng ta cần phải xem xét lại một cách nghiêm túc về quan niệm “Nôm na là cha mách qué”, bởi những nghiên cứu về biệt thể tự hình như trên cho thấy cách viết chữ Nôm hậu kì khá chặt chẽ và nhất quán. Để làm rõ hơn vấn đề này thì vẫn cần những khảo cứu cụ thể và chi tiết hơn từ các góc nhìn văn tự, ngôn ngữ, lịch sử, xã hội.

Chers Amis, Chers Collègues, J'ai le plaisir et l'honneur de vous inviter à la soutenance publique de ma thèse de Doctorat en Sciences du Langage, spécialité didactique des sinogrammes dans le chinois langue étrangère, intitulée : L'intersinographie : une étude de l'acquisition de l'écriture des caractères chinois par des apprenants francophones Vous êtes chaleureusement conviés au pot qui suivra. Merci de me confirmer votre présence avant le 30 septembre pour la réservation de salle.

如同華語習得過程有中介語(INTERLANGUAGE)現象，漢字的習得過程也存在著
中介狀態。本研究試總結“非漢字語圈”學生普遍的中介漢字規律及特點，探討如何
根據習得者的個人認知傾向，結合不同文化背景的教師及不同教學法的教材，高效地
培養其漢字能力。

      本研究主要參考鄧守信2和白樂桑3的研究成果。首先蒐集了2013 年度法國艾克
斯馬賽大學中文系所有學生 (102 人) 的筆記、聽寫、考試等漢字書寫資料，再重點
使用100 個最高頻漢字編撰了《漢字集中視覺測試》，實際獲得可分析試卷46 份。
最後補充中學生、職員、退休人員等其他學習者的試卷，一共62 份作為實際語料，
進行了漢字偏誤分析，歸納偏誤類型。並試從以下三方面進行探討：
1. 中介漢字對於印歐語系學生學習漢字的影響卻不僅僅由其母語文字直接影響，並
且受到了其個人認知傾向，其生活環境中所見的圖像、商標、書法等影響而產生正
遷移或(及) 負遷移。
2. 不同年齡、不同水平、不同背景的學習者會產生共同的漢字偏誤類型，甚至針對
相同的若干漢字產生共同的漢字偏誤。比如語料中發現的“鏡像” 偏誤可細分為
四小類：筆劃鏡像、單個部件鏡像、部件之間鏡像、整字鏡像。
3. 不同認知傾向的學生的漢字書寫表現出的不同的中介文字現象，分別是：視覺傾
向更容易有漢字字形上的問題；聽覺傾向則表現為同音字或同音部件的誤用；動覺
傾向的筆劃筆順問題最明顯。

      教師如能了解學習者的中介漢字類型，再配合適當的教學策略，就能對CSL(CHINESE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE)學習者的漢字學習起到正作用甚至強化其學習效能。

In the Anglophone sphere, according to popular and most academic understandings, the term “ideograph” is regarded as an unproblematic synonym of 漢字 hànzì ‘Chinese character’. On graphological grounds, it can easily be shown that the concept of “ideograph” is both theoretically incoherent and practically unfeasible [reference omitted]; while historically it is clear that the notion was founded on an imperfect understanding of Chinese characters as a writing system, and grew out of a European obsession with the notion of a “universal character” at a particular historical moment (Mungello 1985; Saussy 2001). Nevertheless the concept has become deeply embedded in European understandings of Chinese language and culture, to the extent that it is, in effect, a valuable conceptual possession of Western modernity (Bush 2010), and promoted alike by those with a detailed knowledge of the Chinese writing system, such as H.G. Creel (1936), as by those in blissful ignorance of it, like Jacques Derrida (1967/1976). In the Sinophone sphere, while for most practical purposes, as well as in a large proportion of scholarly work, more grounded understandings of Chinese characters as a writing system operate either implicitly or explicitly, the traditional emphasis on characters as a link between civilization and the cosmos (O’Neill 2013), as well as a long tradition of pedagogical “just so stories” about the construction of individual characters (Zuo 2006), provide a key point of contact with Western notions of the “ideograph” as symbolizing not a word, but an idea or an object. The situation may thus be described involving a type of inversion of the phenomenon of faux amis or “false friends”, where two different words are understood as being more or less synonymous; or alternatively as an example of Lydia Liu’s (2004) notion of a cross-lingual “supersign” where two comparable terms exercise an influence on each other across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This paper will attempt to trace the genealogy of these complex and overlapping notions, and see what differing understandings of Chinese characters have to tell us about notions of cultural specificity, cultural production, and cross-cultural (mis-)communication in the contemporary globalized world.

In the late seventeenth century, Dutch Delftware manufacturers developed refined ceramics with an entirely new decoration of pseudo-Chinese characters. The application of this extraordinary design did not replicate Chinese porcelain examples and today it is usually dismissed as made up and meaningless. However, illegible script—be it foreign or ‘pseudo’—in any form of art has, if not a specific semantic meaning, a certain agency to evoke particular spheres of authenticity and remoteness and therefore deserves further investigation. Moreover, closer examination of these decorations and their sources of inspiration—both Dutch and Chinese, ceramic and print—reveals that there is a wide spectrum of authenticity and intentionality that ranges between script that appears to have been invented and symbols that show resemblance to actual Chinese characters. This article focusses on the transfer and reinterpretation of script as a decorative design, and how the presence of characters negotiates the relationship between Delftware and Chinese porcelain. By comparing the pseudo-characters on Delftware to pseudo-scripts on other materials, the function of pseudo-script as a design and its relationship to materiality is explored. As characters were appropriated and applied in different contexts, their connotations swayed between Chineseness and foreignness, script and ornament.

Department of Linguistics
The University of Adelaide
2012

An investigation into the challenge of writing Chinese characters and kanji for native speakers of languages using logographic scripts.

Comment and constructive criticism most welcome. Neurolinguistics is not part of the undergraduate linguistics curriculum, but it is something I would like to study at post-graduate level. Please bring any blatant errors of understanding to my attention.

As soon as we visualise language in a written form we make use of typographic methods, wittingly or unwittingly. It starts by selecting a typeface, setting the font size, putting a text block on a page and arranging it in a layout.
In a bilingual city, like Hong Kong, the typographic landscape consists of a colourful mashup of two writing systems, which are regarded as “world-historical opponents” as the linguist Stetter phrases it: Chinese characters and Latin letters.
Thanks to globalisation, international visual designers, typeface designers as well as laymen nowadays need to deal with the two writing systems. Observing this development, being a  graphic designer, researcher and assistant professor, I have started a research project in 2011 to bridge the two “contrary” writing systems by typographic means. This project concentrates on micro-typography and on applying English typographic terms on Chinese characters.

The project starts with a description of the writing system itself and the derivation of Hanzi and Alphabet. One aspect is the demystification by visual explanation of Chinese characters, as they are often simplified as pictograms and pictures of existing objects. The detailed description and naming of body parts of the characters and letters is another major topic. It becomes rather specific when it come to the area of micro-typography. In this sense, the outer shape, the fitting (vertical and horizontal expansion), the structure of typeface families are thematised. Another comprehensive topic is an approach to summarise Chinese (or even Japanese) and Latin typefaces in one classification system. Last but not least the demonstration of the differences in shape between traditional Chinese characters (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan), simplified Chinese characters (common in China and Singapore) and the Sino-Japanese Kanji is one important topic, while dealing with Hanzi.

In this study, I extended input methods for the Japanese language to Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are several systems that capable of inputting Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. However, they do not allow us to directly input hieroglyphs, for instance, into MS Word. The new Egyptian hieroglyphic input system being reported here, developed using technology used for inputting Japanese writing, is quite unique and allows the direct input of hieroglyphs, for example, into MS Word. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Japanese writing system (with its mixture of hiragana, katakana and kanji) share basic graphemic characteristics. For instance, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic logograms are functionally similar to Japanese kanji logograms (Chinese characters), whereas Egyptian hieroglyphic phonograms are functionally similar to Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabic phonograms. The input technology for Japanese makes it possible to input a mixture of logograms and phonograms, and phonetic complements. This technology is a well-organized and handy tool to input Japanese writing into computers, having been used by over 100 million people. I applied this technology to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inputting and created a new intuitive hieroglyphic inputting system using Google Japanese Input. Using this method, anyone can directly write Egyptian hieroglyphic writing into software like MS Word. If the transcription of an ancient Egyptian word is entered, the correct hieroglyphs are generated by this system. If there are multiple options for any phonemic combinations that use other combinations of phonetic complements or determinatives, a dropdown window with a list of several combinations of glyphs appears and the user can choose the desired combination.

In response to Unger (2014), I argue that Chinese does not merely lie along one end of an undifferentiated continuum of writing systems plotted according to the degree of phonological representation found in its graphs. Rather, two features of Chinese writing make it categorically distinct from even orthographically “deep” alphabetic writing systems like English: (1) the high prevalence of graphs that represent distinct meaningful linguistic units (i.e. morphemes) and (2) the use of graphic components (variously termed significs, determinatives, taxograms, classifiers, radicals) to represent the general semantic domains of those represented morphemes. These features have implications for how Chinese writing is processed in the brain, how it changes over time, and how it has been adapted for the written representation of other languages. For these reasons we should recognize that Chinese writing is distinct from phonographic systems of writing. Any dispute over which term is most appropriate for characterizing Chinese and the other writing systems of its type—logographic, morphographic, morphosyllabic, etc.—is secondary in importance to the recognition of the validity of this categorical distinction.

The main aim of the following article is to provide the analysis of the masculine and feminine words used in both spoken and written Chinese language. At first, the author will focus on describing the specificity of the Chinese characters from the perspective of their construction and some historical background which has a significant influence on their meaning. Following, a set of words introducing both types of gender will be thoughtfully examined, implementing a rule on how to differentiate the two types of gender and what kind of attributes the elements in question obtain in terms of Chinese written system. Moreover, the author will analyze the personal pronouns and occupation words in terms of gender distinction, which is problematic in terms of telling apart the masculine and feminine form of such words as opposed to English and Polish equivalents.

In the more than 3,000 years since its invention, the Chinese script has been adapted many times to write languages other than Chinese, including Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Zhuang. "Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script" provides a comprehensive analysis of how the structural features of these languages constrained and motivated methods of script adaptation. This comparative study reveals the universal principles at work in the borrowing of logographic scripts. By analyzing and explaining these principles, the study advances our understanding of how early writing systems have functioned and spread, providing a new framework that can be applied to the history of scripts beyond East Asia, such as Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform.

Does a special and unique typographic culture exists in Hong Kong? And if yes, how is the Hong Kong typographic culture distinguishable from other Asian cultures as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.? Who are the leading typographers and what are their missions? How to promote and develop the “typographic culture of Hong Kong” in future not only within the local context, but internationally? This research on “typographic culture in Hong Kong” does not only aim to analyse the current situation but shows ways of creating awareness of the Hong Kong typographic identity and culture in the future. The long-term significance of this project is to promote the international acceptance of Hong Kong (designer/artist) in the field of graphic design and typography in particular.

對外華語教學研究發展至今,無論語言本體、教學理論或教學策略皆已取得相 當豐富的成果;又結合學術研究與教學實際,現今教學主流強調以學生為中心,將 語言之結構、功能與文化結合起來,目標為培養學生跨文化之溝通能力。反映在教 材編寫之中,卻出現了「重語輕文」的現象,不但漢 教學與詞彙、語法、練習設 計相較之下比例嚴重失衡,更忽略識、寫漢 為以華語為外語/第二語言學習者的首 要重點與難點。另外,根據筆者教學之經驗與很多相關的研究指出,漢 因其音節、 形象表意等特殊性,同時也是吸引學習者選擇學習華語的理由之一。
如何立足於對外華語教學之上,正視漢 教學的重要性,在教材中凸顯漢 形 象負載之意義訊息與 為單位之構詞功能,充分利用漢 蘊含的文化意義結合教學, 真正促成漢 結構、語法結構、語言溝通功能與跨文化交際能力合一的教學實踐, 為現今對外華語教學研究應細緻思考的方向。
因此,本研究旨在分析兩岸對外華語綜合性教材漢 教學內容,考量編寫單位 與流通度,以《當代中文課程》與《新實用漢語課本》第一冊為研究對象,目的在 探討教材識 、寫 教學之內容,針對漢 、漢 知識與練習的呈現與安排進行分 析。通過對比研究結果,評述其特點與需要改進的地方,發現教材應增加 理分析、 辨識漢 的策略,重視形聲 在漢 教學中的主體與學習資源,拓展形、義符的教 學設計。最後,發揮漢 蘊含之文化與邏輯,貫徹已有文化單元,將漢 教學綿密 融入語言教學之中。
希望在描繪現今初級華語教材漢 教學概貌之上,為教材後續修訂或編寫提供 實際、具體的建議。

This paper first assesses the achievements and limitations of square scripts research in Vietnam, and then progresses to sketch out necessary steps that should be undertaken in the near future. The paper argues that researchers in Vietnam need to face the reality that the field of grammatology (or graphology), specifically regarding the research of square scripts, on the whole remains weak in many areas, despite some achievements, such as in the aspect of Nom script. Within the present academic circumstances, a key issue will be entering into the international arena and cooperating on multiple levels with international academia in order to absorb the knowledge and experience of the international community, thereby creating a stable foundation on which this field can be developed in Vietnam.

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This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.

This paper compares variant characters in large-scale dictionaries from the pre-modern period with actual writing habits using a special subset of variants known as 'semantic compounds' (huiyi 會意) as a case study. The results show that despite their prominent presence in traditional dictionaries, only a fraction of such variants were in everyday use. Most of the forms recorded in dictionaries were preserved and handed down as part of the lexicographic tradition, to some extent irrespective of genuine writing habits. Going one step beyond recognising that only some of the documented forms were at any given time in common use, the analysis presented here measures the discrepancy between dictionaries and manuscripts as a percentage.

The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji to stickers and custom images. This article is grounded on ethnographic research and approaches biaoqing in terms of their circulation across Chinese digital media platforms. By formulating a comprehensive typology of biaoqing genres, I foreground the situated socio-technical specificities of their circulation: the creative play with typographical compositions, the affective repurposing of graphical emoticons, the platformed monetization of proprietary stickers, and the user-driven proliferation of custom images. Drawing on this typology, I argue for the need to recognize the circulation of biaoqing as an emergent and malleable category of semiotic resources profoundly shaped by two decades of development of the Internet in China.

The oracle bone characters do not represent words of the language but thoughts or concepts. The bone text did not record an oral language. Perhaps we can say that it recorded an artificial language. The French scholar, Léon Vandermeersch says that the oracle bone inscriptions are a formula. A better analogy is to say that it is like a computer language. Is it English? The answer is yes, but it is not like English at all. Similar to Sumerian protocuneiform writing, the nature of Chinese writing is fundamentally ideographic, in which concepts or thoughts are represented rather than speech. This paper will present hundreds of examples of the oracle bone scripts that demonstrate these qualities. Excavated deer antlers Г-shaped axe and hoe and Г-shaped spear are figurative in the Oracle script jin 斤 (axe) and bing 兵 (weapon). A number of ideograms are derived from the Г-axe character. The ideograms of Sumer, Mo-so, English and Oracle script, are created from thoughts and by recording these thoughts, they are similar to narrative arts that express emotions. So an ideograph, which records ideas, not words or sounds, sometime also creates language. In addition, other kinds of small and light antler Г-shaped spear can be tied to the front end of a long slender and flexible pole, waved in a swinging motion instead of thrust. This weapon has a much longer killing distance than a spear for thrust. Bing-Г (兵) perhaps is the key technology of Shandong Longshan Culture from the Central Plains, and the predecessor of Ge-Г (戈).

Carrolova Alenka byla do čínštiny přeložena několikrát. Jednou z nejobtížnějších částí je nonsensová báseň Jabberwocky, která napříč jazyky ukazuje na možnosti a limity překladu či převodu do daného jazyka. Překladu do čínštiny se jako první zhostil lingvista Zhao Yuanren, jehož práce zůstává dodnes nepřekonanou.

This paper examines the emerging phenomenon of creating new Chinese characters on the internet with a case study of the artist Li Xiaoguai's work. First, it analyzes the aesthetics and sociopolitical significance of Li's new characters and neologisms. It explores how the new characters, as an alternative translation, achieve their Austinian performative force through an iteration of the original official language, which is thus displaced and subverted; how the puns become double-voiced and double-signified utterances in the Bakhtinian sense of folk humor; and how the vulgarities are pervasively used as interjections and intensifiers to vent strong emotions in the struggle against the state's anti-vulgarity and internet censorship campaigns. Second, it studies how Li's characters are integrated into his artistic creations via comic blogging. It explores how his comic strips evoke carnivalesque laughter by satirizing social ills, officialdom, and the increasing gap between the Communist Party (CCP) and the people, the state and the family, and the privileged and the underprivileged.

Le standard d’usage couramment appelé Unicode, basé sur la norme ISO/CEI 10646 permet de traiter de façon unifiée les écritures codées sur deux octets, notamment les écritures idéographiques, un temps méprisées, Unihan, base d’idéogrammes, et le code de conversion UTF permettent l’échange d’information entre pays du monde sinisé mais aussi
avec les autres zones culturelles. Le japonais représente un cas particulier, par la conjonction d’une histoire complexe de l’écriture et d’un savoir-faire technologique de pointe. L’intégration d’Unicode permet l’accès à des ressources documentaires de toute origine, indépendamment du codage, ainsi que leur traitement et stockage informatique. Une aubaine pour le Japon, qui cultive l’ouverture au monde.

Characters for dialects: from vernacular Baihua to the Internet
O.I. Zavyalova
Abstract.  Dew to the possibilities of computer typesetting new forms of word representation with various scripts are known to appear even in Standard Mandarin texts written by the Internet users. Meanwhile a new life of Chinese dialects has started on the web, both dew to the efforts of the linguists and of the Internet users from various regions of the Chinese world. In particular, speakers of regional varieties often prefer to use phonetically borrowed characters even for the words from the all-China dialect lexicon and thus invent a kind of local “character-based alphabets”. A systematic analysis from the point of view of language geography of the phonetically written dialect words, which have already penetrated into the all-China Internet language, has not been conducted so far. However, one can already identify the distribution on the map of some phonetic features reflected in the recent all-China dialect borrowings. 
Keywords: Chinese, Baihua, Standard Mandarin, Chinese dialects, dialect characters, Internet-language, computer-mediated communication, “character alphabets”.

Over the last 20 years, stimulated by William G. Boltz’s influential monograph The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System, a number of scholars in the West have engaged in a debate over the historical status of the traditional huìyì 會意 (‘conjoined meaning’) category of Chinese characters. While the existence of such characters within the Chinese writing system at various points in its history is not in dispute, the role of huìyì characters in the formative stages of the script remains a matter of controversy. 

In this paper I draw on some recent significant publications on Chinese writing in order to advance a theoretical argument in defense of the existence of huìyì graphs during the formative stages of the script. I argue that iconic combinations of graphs are well motivated and meaningful to script users, and therefore could well have played a role in the formation of the Chinese script. Comparative evidence from other early logographic writing systems as well as evidence from later stages of Chinese both support this argument, and provide an explanation for some early Chinese characters that would seem to defy any interpretation that assigns a phonetic role to one of the components.

In the modern Chinese writing system, the vast majority of Chinese characters are logograms with semantic-phonetic compound structure. These characters consist in origin of a semantic element and a phonetic element, each of which bears a non-arbitrary relationship to the spoken morpheme that the character represents. These functional elements are closed sets of graphic elements and comprise meaningful structural subsystems within the writing system, with striking parallels to subsystems in other early logosyllabic writing systems, such as Egyptian and Sumerian.

In this paper I focus on an analysis of the closed set of elements which can fill the semantic slot in a semantic-phonetic compound. Even though many of these elements are formally identical to logograms that represent spoken morphemes, they play a functional role that is independent of speech units. They can therefore be considered a system of classificatory signs (“semantic classifiers”) that is embedded in and interfaces with the glottographic functions of the graphic units of which they form a part.

Because of the unbroken history of use of the Chinese script from its creation down to the present day, the cognitive and functional role of these elements can be investigated in ways that are not available to researchers interested in the similar systems that are embedded in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Mayan writing. Recent psycholinguistic studies provide insights into the role that these classifiers play in learning, remembering, and recognizing graphs, as well as into how they interface with cognitive categories in the minds of script users. We can also examine the role that these classifiers play in the ongoing creation of new characters. By focusing on character creation in the last few centuries, we can ascertain with a reasonable degree of certainty which classifiers are cognitively “active” and how they relate to the mental categorization of modern words and morphemes.

As Buddhism travelled to the East, so did its languages. Sanskrit, and even some texts in Prakrits like Gāndhārī gradually found their way into China. But these sacred texts did not contain mere narratives—they also had mantras—potent formulae with soteriological, ritualistic and even magical significance. There was a problem, however. The argument for the necessity of a mantra’s exactitude had been inherited from the ritual environment of South Asia where Buddhism had grown up. But how to render the sacred sounds of mantras into Chinese? When, a few centuries later, it was brough to Japan, the same problem arose, but this time with Chinese as an intermediary, creating a perfect storm of systems nested within other systems—phonetic, semantic and scriptural. By a roll of the phonetic dice, Japanese is acoustically much better suited to the rendition of Sanskrit than its mainland counterparts. However, this did not prevent Japanese Buddhist schools from developing their own ideas about mantras and their usage, mixing and matching phrases, pronunciations and meanings as they went along. In this talk I will attempt to lay out the fascinating problematics of this dynamic using the example of a Japanese Siddham manual from the year 1695. I will explore the interplay of historic pronunciations and their written renditions and look at examples of how Japanese Buddhist traditions took mantras and over the centuries made them their own. This process is still ongoing, as mantras continue to be made, live and evolve even in present-day Japan.

Chinese character Learning has been identified as one of the most challenging issues for English-speaking learners of Chinese due to the distinctions between the Chinese writing system and alphabetic languages in terms of orthography, phonology and semantics. In order to support Western students in overcoming the challenges associated with Chinese character learning a contextualized, socio-cultural approach to character learning was designed. Aimed at novice learners of Chinese, this design draws on social constructivism and Universal Design for Learning--contextualizing the learning experience and affording students to work on acquiring characters via several distinct avenues. The project-based inquiry design supports the exploration of Chinese character learning through six research-based learning tools and strategies. These tools include: educational technologies designed specifically for learning Chinese characters, pinyin & typing, making connections between different levels of linguistic components, stroke animation, handwriting, radical positioning, and character gamification. This learning experience design integrates multiple technology tools, awareness of culture, hands-on activities, and interactive multimodal web technologies that draw on constructivist theories and approaches to language acquisition.

The recent study by Trần Trọng Dương (2018) of graphemic borrowing in the transcription to chữ Nôm of Sinitic loanwords attracted our attention because of the importance of this work for research on broader questions. These are questions of language contact, in history and in the modern day, informed by linguistic theory and cognitive science approaches to the study of writing and literacy.

Un particolare estetico spesso ci colpisce in Cina perché è presente quasi in ogni costruzione cinese, moderna o antica: la scrittura. La scrittura in caratteri è simbolo della continuità e della nobiltà della tradizione culturale cinese. Il segno scritto, elemento fondante della cultura cinese da secoli, rappresenta anche un simbolo dell'identità collettiva dei cinesi, tant'è vero che il carattere wen 6 5 8 7 è presente in parole come cultura 6 5 8 7 5 3 1 6 wenhua e civiltà 6 5 8 7 6 6 0 E wenming). Quanto detto finora non deve però portarci a pensare che la lingua cinese sia vincolata al mondo materiale o resti statica nel tempo. Non si tratta di un sistema di simboli ma di una lingua vera e propria in continua evoluzione. Nella cornice del recente ma imponente sviluppo economico, della globalizzazione, della velocità dei mezzi di trasporto, della ricchezza del flusso mondiale delle informazioni, della frequenza delle occasioni di incontro tra culture diverse, si colloca l'importanza crescente della Cina e parallelamente l'aumento progressivo delle scuole che vantano la lingua cinese tra i corsi curricolari. In Italia negli ultimi anni oltre all'istituzione di cattedre di lingue orientali in alcune università, è stato introdotto l'insegnamento del cinese in alcune scuole superiori come terza lingua straniera curricolare, finanziati in parte dal Governo Cinese tramite gli Istituti Confucio. Ma la scrittura in caratteri che continua ad essere riconosciuta come un simbolo culturale, è adatta a rappresentare la Cina di oggi? La scrittura cinese ha alle spalle un percorso di evoluzione e perfezionamento molto particolare in confronto alle altre scritture dell'umanità. La semplificazione della scrittura cinese è sempre andata di pari passo con la sua evoluzione. In particolare, negli anni '20 e '30, molti intellettuali cinesi videro nel sistema logografico cinese un serio ostacolo al tentativo della Cina di entrare a far parte del mondo moderno. Molti invocarono l'abbandono della scrittura tradizionale in favore di un sistema alfabetico1. Ma si trattava di un'idea troppo radicale oltreché realisticamente inapplicabile. Nei tempi moderni tutte le idee di romanizzazione della lingua cinese sono state abbandonate, focalizzando l'attenzione sulla semplificazione della scrittura tradizionale, per renderla più facile da imparare. Con la messa a punto nei primi anni novanta del sistema di codifica Unicode e la possibilità di utilizzare i caratteri cinesi su computer, l'informatica è divenuta un formidabile alleato al servizio della scrittura logografica. Con qualunque computer opportunamente configurato è oggi possibile scrivere testi in carattere con grande rapidità, semplicemente digitando sulla tastiera la trascrizione in lettere latine delle frasi e selezionando i caratteri voluti tra quelli che compaiono a video. Da un lato questo rappresenta una soluzione più che soddisfacente a dimostrazione di come il sistema di scrittura cinese abbia in sé la capacità di reagire e far fronte con successo alle sfide,

In the process of learning Chinese, characters are one of the biggest challenges for students from outside the Chinese culture sphere. The strategy of teaching characters undertaken by the teacher has a huge impact on the development of learners’ language skills as well as on their motivation and approach to learning. This article discusses strategies for teaching Chinese characters. The authors focus on the benefits and problems resulting from two main didactic concepts: first, spoken language, then, writing and language-character integration. The authors presents the factors that should be taken into account when deciding whether to adopt the appropriate strategy for teaching characters.

"同意"是《说文解字》所揭示的一种汉字构形现象,或指几个字的某个构件之构意相同,或指整字的构形意图相同。段玉裁不仅继承了许慎的"同意"说,而且有所发展,主要表现为在明确区分"意"与"义"的基础上,重视"意"这一概念;对"同意"做了理论阐释;增加了"同意"字组;丰富了同意字的结构类型。段玉裁的理论发明对于当今文字学的研究具有重要启示意义:"意"是古今汉字皆有的科学概念,是建构完善的汉字学理论体系必不可少的概念;形—构—意—义的交互关系不仅体现在"同意"字方面,而且是理解"造字过程"和"识字过程"的理论指导;以此为基点离析文字学上的相关概念亦具有十分重要的意义。

Abstract
This introductory article to Chinese characters aims at shedding light on some of the peculiarities of this unique millenary writing system. What are sinograms and why are they so relevant to the people whose native language has adopted this writing system and to those who are passionate enough about their history? We shall first look at what these Chinese characters are all about and how they can be studied for scientific and practical purposes. Particular attention is given to the formation, development and usage of Chinese characters across the centuries. Among the particularities discussed in this article are elements that connect these sinograms with the culture, history, geography, beliefs and mythology the people who first coined them and then adopted them as a long-lasting base of a complex writing system.
The result will be a discovery of a new world that is worth analysing for its historical and geographical relevance. In fact, a close study of Chinese characters reveal that these sinograms not only represent ideas that express concepts but also tell intricate stories that uncover much of the knowledge of the world shared by a number of cultures across the centuries. It is possible to see the characters as small frozen entities that have immortalised concepts and notions construed by people in different periods of time.
One final element discussed in this article centres around the unifying power that Chinese characters have exerted over different periods of time for its users. Sinograms have been used as a unifying tool for a culture and its people as well as a medium for national identity and pride.

This study brings together current research on cross-language literacy learning and a report from the implementation of a Chinese as second language (L2) immersion teaching program. The challenges of early L2 literacy learning, concurrent with L1 literacy learning, by child learners (K-6 biliteracy) are the guiding theme of the discussion. Chapters 1 and 2 present a panorama of the recent expansion of Chinese language immersion programs in North America. The research on these new programs now forms an important part of the applied linguistics literature spanning many years from its groundbreaking origin in the Canadian immersion programs of the 1960s. Chapter 4 describes the curriculum of the program (one-way immersion, 50-50 model), context of the study in a major metropolitan center in California, and its evaluation procedures for the target language: a set of informal teacher-designed assessments for estimating students' progress in Chinese literacy learning. Chapters 6-8 report findings from an on-site study that applied key concepts from emerging international research, discussed in the chapters devoted to the conceptual framework. The purpose of Chapters 3 and 5 is to provide programs with an introduction to recent advances in work on L2 and bilingual literacy and the morpho-syl-labic writing system in particular. Especially useful to teachers is this part of the book for its clear and up-to-date summary of the growing scientific consensus on the interdisciplinary research problems currently in play. Here, a particularly important result from the Canadian immersion studies that comes forward is the pivotal assessment of expressive language proficiency in students' L2 (pp. 31 and 196-199). In passing, it should be mentioned that these studies, now classic, were unique in their ability to directly compare ultimate attainment of the immersion learners with that of native-speaker peers in French, utilizing standardized measures. Precisely, it was in the domain of expressive (oral and written) proficiencies where immersion learners were revealed as non-native L2 learners, this in contrast to their, by all measure, impressive attainments in academic language in the two receptive domains, demonstrating equivalent (native-like) levels of mastery. The finding that child L2 learners' mastery levels, under adequate language-rich input conditions, pattern similarly to those of adult L2 learners presents the field of language learning with profound implications, no less, regarding the discussion on competing theories of the nature of the Faculty of Language. At the center of the conceptual framework for understanding bilingual literacy in Chapters 3 and 5 is the centrality of metalinguistic awareness (MA). Within all the categories (phonological, morphological, syntactic awareness, ß The Author(s) (

Bu çalışmada Japon yazı sistemlerinden ikisi olan hiragana ve katakananın sembollerinin nasıl ortaya çıktığı incelenmiş ve tablolaştırılmış ve tablo bir terim sözlüğü ile zenginleştirilmiştir.

In this study, how the symbols of hiragana and katakana, two of the Japanese writing systems, emerged, was examined and tabulated, and the table was enriched with a glossary of terms.

Ce cahier fonctionne comme un outil pour comprendre et mémoriser 775 caractères chinois, issus de 100 éléments graphiques. Il vous permettra de parfaire vos tracés et mieux maîtriser l'écriture des caractères, grâce à :

    Des grilles d'écritures en trois temps pour apprendre à bien reproduire et positionner les caractères ;
    Une présentation originale des caractères, qui sont regroupés par ensembles de familles graphiques ;
    De nombreux exemples de niveau B1 et B2.

Ce cahier richement illustré sera très utile pour améliorer son écriture et sa compréhension du chinois.

ISBN :  9782340029132

rén-person, human being • adult • each. This is a pictogram of a person standing, with legs separated. Person > kind of person > every > other. It is one of the more frequently used characters. When it forms part of other characters it is simplified as 亻, a radical found in about 500 characters. 人民 rénmín-the people (person + people) 人才 réncái-a person of talent (person + talent)