Chinese Characters

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Research in second language acquisition suggests that objective performance-based assessments may provide more reliable and valid measures of second language proficiency than subjective self-ratings. To measure proficiency in English as a second language, a quick, vocabulary-based test called LexTALE (Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English) was developed and shown to be able to differentiate between various levels of English proficiency. Following in the line of adaptations of this test for other languages, we created a character-based adaptation for Mandarin Chinese: LEXTALE_CH. In this paper, we discuss the development and validation of LEXTALE_CH in detail. In short, LEXTALE_CH can discriminate between high and low levels of Mandarin proficiency and is sensitive to the significant differences in vocabulary size between native speakers and second language learners of Mandarin; further, it takes only a few minutes to administer and is simple to score, making it a practical tool for low-stakes estimation of Mandarin proficiency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technology has been a staple in the language classroom for more than fifty years. From audio cassettes, to video tapes, to multimedia CD-ROMs, to static and interactive web technologies, language teachers have taken the time to learn these tools and integrate them into the classroom experience. Each new technology, each new app, creates an opportunity to alter the experience of teaching and learning—often supporting increased authentic interactions with the Chinese language. This potential however can go unrealized when the ways the technologies are used align with more traditional grammar and vocabulary-focused teaching methodologies and promote efficiency over communication. In this article we explore the way traditional methodologies (i.e. Structural/Cognitive approaches) influence the implementation of web technologies. We unpack the complex relationship between language teaching Methodologies/Approaches, Methods, and Techniques. We examine several popular Chinese as a foreign language [CFL] web technologies, along with descriptions of their use, as a way to consider the influence of teachers’ educational values on technology integration decisions. We highlight the way design decisions made during the technology design and development process can constrain fit across methodologies. Next, as a way to outline what is possible when new technologies are informed by recent pedagogical developments, we briefly describe DaZiBao—a multimodal web application for learning characters via writing. Finally, we unpack findings and challenges from a pilot study of DaZiBao’s integration in a somewhat traditional classroom setting and offer suggestions for teachers, researchers, and technology designers.

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.

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.

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.

This study aims to investigate how native speakers of Chinese perceive the semantic transparency of radicals in Chinese characters and how their perception is related to the ontological representation of characters. More specifically, we use semantic transparency as a measurement to compare the perception of native Chinese speakers of various dialects from different regions, including Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan. We explore several factors that may potentially cause convergence or divergence of native speakers’ perception. Our results show that the performances of participants from various regions converge with each other. From this, we conclude that Chinese speakers of various dialects share an ontological representation of characters and have an agreement concerning which ontological relation is more closely related to basic concepts, which provides evidence for the psychological reality of Chinese orthography. We also prove that the crowdsourcing method is a powerful and effective tool for empirical linguistic research.

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”.

Most psycholinguistic models of speech production agree on an earlier semantic processing stage and a later word-form encoding stage. Using a logographic language, Mandarin Chinese, Zhang and Weekes [2009. Orthographic facilitation effects on spoken word production: Evidence from Chinese. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(7-8), 1082-1096. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01690960802042133] reported an early effect of orthography in a picture-word-interference study and suggested orthography affects speech production via a lexical-semantic pathway at an early stage. This early orthographic effect without co-occurrence of phonological effect, however, was not replicated [Zhao, La Heij, & Schiller, 2012. Orthographic and phonological facilitation in speech production: New evidence from picture naming in Chinese. Acta Psychologica, 139(2), 272-280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.12.001]. The present study aimed to dissociate further the semantic and phonological representations from orthography by using simplex Chinese characters. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 revealed an orthographic effect but only at a similar point in time as the phonological effect, both of which followed the semantic effect. Our results thus raise further doubts about the role of orthography at the conceptual level of speech planning and lend new evidence to a two-step model of speech production.

The recent study by Trần Trọng Dương (2018) of graphemic borrowing in the transcription to chữ Nôm of Sinitic loanwords called 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. Taking its sample from the Quốc Âm Thi Tập [Poetry Collection in the National Language], the framework of the study is centered on the Sinitic lexicon, divided between loanwords read in Sino-Vietnamese (SV) pronunciation and loanwords read in Non-Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation (NSV). The overarching purpose is to analyze the functional structure of the Nôm characters that transcribed them, emerging over many years. Within the corpus of Sinitic loanwords from the source text, the analysis centers on the design features, the “functional structure,” of the self-generated Nôm characters and how they compare to the larger set that borrows Sinitic graphic forms exactly. As researchers from outside of the field of Nôm Studies we are calling attention to this type of work in the hope that qualified scholars might give these works a proper review, the reason being the unique opportunity for cross-discipline discussion that all of this represent.

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.

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).

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.

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)