Chinese Writing

Pendant toute sa vie, G. W. Leibniz chercha à créer une langue universelle pour éradiquer l'ambiguïté des langages naturels et permettre de résoudre toute sorte de controverses. Contemporain de l'arrivée des premières informations sur la Chine en Europe, le philosophe séduit par le symbolisme et le formalisme de l'écriture chinoise. Il s'est alors demandé si elle pouvait participer à l'établissement des signes nécessaires à sa « Caractéristique », composante de son dessein de langue universelle. Cet article propose une analyse, des explications provisoires et des questionnements sur ce potentiel rôle que pourrait jouer l'écriture chinoise dans le projet leibnizien de langue universelle. Explorant les écrits et correspondances de Leibniz par une lecture critique et analytique, au stade où en sont nos recherches, l'article affirme que l'écriture chinoise fut pressentie par Leibniz pour jouer un rôle dans sa langue universelle parce qu'à ses yeux et selon les connaissances qu'il en avait, ses caractères étaient des combinaisons de caractères simples. L'écriture chinoise lui semblait artificielle, idéographique, c'est-à-dire indépendante de la langue parlée puisqu'il croyait qu'un caractère renvoyait à une chose ou une idée. L'écriture chinoise lui apparaissait comme un système de classification des choses. Mais finalement, après 1672 et son intérêt croissant pour les mathématiques, l'écriture chinoise, langue particulière, fut rapidement écartée pour jouer ce rôle. Leibniz lui préféra un schéma mathématique et une arithmétique pour découvrir la vérité dans un cadre rigoureux et universel que la connotation et la plurivocité des caractères chinois contemporains ne permettaient pas. L'enjeu de ces questionnements est à resituer dans une image large de la langue chinoise en Europe, imaginée encore aujourd'hui comme essentiellement idéographique, un caractère chinois étant supposé renvoyer à une idée.

The property of Chinese writing is interrelated to the property of its basic unit. The basic unit of Chinese writing system is not "character", but rather "grapheme". There are two types of graphemes in Chinese writing, semantic grapheme and phonetic grapheme. For a better understanding of Chinese writing system, it's important to compare the forms and functions between Chinese graphemes and other writing systems' graphemes, particularly the graphemes of  other semantic-phonetic writing systems (Egyptian, Sumerian, and Mayan, etc.).

Chinese language has almost one character per every word, therefore the memorization and the active use of the language for a speaker with a native Indo-European language background must be harder than for a Chinese person. Nonetheless, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary to China, was able to teach Chinese thanks to an ancient mnemonic method, which he transformed and applied to Chinese. I will search in history for the connection of this method with the field of languages, and apply this old method in teaching English words to a modern secondary school classroom. By doing this, I will try to prove whether this ancient mnemonic method, used in the 16th century by Matteo Ricci in China, is still applicable in today’s secondary school teaching environment, where I will focus on acquiring words in English as a foreign language.

The invention of the Ancient Chinese Writing System (henceforth ACWS) is a significant event in world history. In this paper I put forward a hypothesis on the co-evolution of the Old Chinese language and its writing system (ACWS). I argue that the invention of ACWS bears a strong correlation with the linguistic evolution, more specifically, the monosyllabicization, of Old Chinese. In other words, ACWS might never be invented if monosyllabicization had not occurred in Chinese. The paper is organized in the following way. First, we discuss the reason why a subsyllabic writing system was not invented for Old Chinese (section 2). Next, we discuss the nature of the rebus principle in ACWS (section 3), and its correlation with morphological alternations (section 4). Then I argue that monosyllabicization of Old Chinese is a precondition for the rebus principle, which is crucial for the birth of ACWS (section 5). Lastly, I discuss the implication of the hypothesis for the study of Old Chinese (section 6).

This paper firstly discusses the graph 【耳人又】appearing in Shi, Bin and Wu groups of oracle bone inscriptions; considering contextual evidence and graphic form, the author seeks to establish that the graph in question represents the word qǔ “to take”, otherwise written as 取. It is further argued that the component 【耳人】 , deriving from a depiction of a person with an ear substituting the head, itself should be understood as representing the word cōng “acute of hearing” (in later textual corpora written as 聰), thus serving as an indication of the phonetic value of qǔ. This, along with the later paleographic
evidence, provides the basis to challenge the long-standing ideographic interpretation of the graph 取 as motivated solely by the association with the ancient custom of taking the left ear of hunted-down game and slain enemies; instead, the 耳 “ear” component in 取, as well as the 【耳人】 component in 【耳人又】, should be seen as motivated both semantically (“an object/person being grasped”), and phonetically, by virtue of them representing the word 聰 cōng or simultaneously representing a family of cognates (or semantically related lexemes) 聰 cōng, 聽 tīng and 聖 shèng.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the government of the People’s Republic of China undertook, in two stages, a carefully planned “simplification” of the logographic Chinese script. Drawing on a variety of historical precedents, over 2,000 individual graphs were modified in an attempt to make the script easier to learn and use. This was the first significant change in the official form of the Chinese script in nearly two millennia, and resulted in the script variety that is widely used today in mainland China, commonly termed “simplified Chinese characters”. Because the traditional script has remained in use in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the reform offers an opportunity to compare the scripts and draw conclusions about the efficacy of logographic simplification. Such a comparison offers the possibility of broader theoretical insight into the nature of logographic writing.

This study has several goals: (1) To describe and analyze the script-internal results of the simplification; (2) to evaluate the practical effects of the simplification; (3) to explore the theoretical implications raised by the simplification. A central question is whether the available evidence—including recent studies on script learning and reading strategies of Chinese speakers—supports the idea that a logographic script structured like Chinese can be meaningfully simplified without being changed to a phonographic script. The conclusion is that a meaningful logographic simplification is possible, but that today’s simplified character script cannot be characterized as an effective reform by any reasonable metric—it is only “simpler” in the crudest of senses. Based on the results of recent studies on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters, I propose a scheme for genuine logographic reform of the Chinese script, and further suggest that there would be advantages to such a simplification in comparison not only to the two existing Chinese scripts, but even to replacement by a phonographic (alphabetic or syllabic) writing system.

This conclusion is intended to be of purely theoretical interest. For a number of practical reasons, further simplification of the script is almost certainly not advisable from a policy standpoint.

This volume provides a broad introduction to Chinese linguistics, offering an accessible synthesis of the most relevant topics in the field. Despite the steady growth in interest in Chinese linguistics in recent years, this is one of very few books at introductory level written for a Western audience. The authors begin by outlining the history and typology of the Sinitic languages and the writing system of Chinese before moving on to discuss key topics in phonology, morphology and the lexicon, and syntax. Throughout the book, they incorporate and discuss examples from standard and non-standard varieties of Sinitic, and include new research on topics such as dialect writing, subjecthood, and word formation. The book will be a valuable reference both for researchers and scholars in the field of China studies and for linguists, including those with little or no previous knowledge of Chinese.

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.

An examination of the reality of the Qin unification of writing. Judging from contemporary material, the whole idea of unifying writing and making it an orthographically consistent system was most likely not a Qin invention but a retrospective view from the Eastern Han dynasty nearly three centuries later.

A look at foreign elements in Dunhuang manuscripts from the 9th-10th centuries, including bookbinding format, paper, orthography and other issues. Dunhuang was a cosmopolitcan city on the Silk Road and a closer analysis of the manuscripts reveals that many of even the Chinese manuscripts were likely to have been written by non-Chinese people. This attests to the multilingual nature of contemporary communities and, from our modern point of view, to the fluidity of concepts such as literacy, ethnicity, language.

En el horizonte de una investigación acerca de las solidaridades entre las artes del lenguaje (lengua, poética, escritura) y maneras de concebir lo real o habitar un mundo, el seminario interrogará el legado filosófico-literario de China clásica, una poética sostenida y radical de la imagen que ha tenido un impacto contemporáneo que va desde la poesía al cine.
En un primer bloque, tras introducir el rendimiento metafísico-epistemológico de la imaginación lingüística (formas poéticas y gramatológicas como síntesis de lo real que conforman una visión de mundo determinada), se hará un examen comparativo entre la economía de la ‘metáfora’ en la poética/retórica occidental y la economía de la ‘imagen dinámica’ en la poética china, discerniendo las solidaridades básicas entre sus actuaciones estéticas y las cosmovisiones respectivas. Partiendo de la sentencia heideggeriana –“lo metafórico no existe más que en el interior de las fronteras de la metafísica [occidental]”– y asistidos, entre otros, por los trabajos de F. Nietzsche, J. Derrida, P. Ricoeur y F. Jullien, se indagarán al menos dos series de relaciones que permiten delimitar la concepción china del arte como ‘correlación’ y ‘proceso’, desmarcándola de la poiesis y mimesis que se impone en Occidente desde Aristóteles. Estas son: (i) las relaciones entre espacialidad y figura, con énfasis en las solidaridades entre la correlación de la imagen dinámica y una metafísica horizontal e inmanente, frente a las solidaridades entre la sustitución metafórica y el dualismo jerárquico de la ontología; (ii) las relaciones entre temporalidad y figura, con énfasis en las solidaridades entre la vibración dinámica de la imagen y una concepción de la temporalidad como proceso o flujo, frente a las solidaridades entre la traslación estructural en la metáfora y una concepción del tiempo como movimiento.
En un segundo bloque se interrogarán las grandes concepciones clásicas del pensamiento poético, con atención a las maneras en que promueven el estatuto de la imagen como respuesta subjetiva y entelequia de lo real. La atención a la poética expresiva de tendencia confuciana estará centrada en la doctrina de la ‘corrección de los nombres’ y en la concepción de la imagen como respuesta subjetivo-emocional ante la objetividad-natural. El examen de la poética metafísica de tendencia taoísta pondrá atención a la imagen como búsqueda de ‘representación más allá de la representación’ y entelequia de las correlaciones cósmicas (actualización de las virtualidades de la inmanencia).
En un tercer bloque se examinarán las diversas formas de la imagen en la poesía china, con atención a su síntesis de lo real como correlación y proceso. Tras discernir los elementos de lengua/escritura que contribuyen a la promoción e impacto de la imagen dinámica, el énfasis estará en ciertos arreglos mayores (paralelismo, cuartetos, octetos, etc.) que forjan una tensión característica entre lo subjetivo-proposicional y lo objetivo-imagístico, así como en otras formas de significación por fragmentación y yuxtaposición (montaje) que han tenido un impacto decisivo en las artes contemporáneas.
En un bloque final, dedicado precisamente a los ecos contemporáneos de esta poética de la imagen, se interrogará el método ideogramático en la poesía moderna (del imagismo de Ezra Pound a la poesía concreta brasilera), así como el impacto del ideograma y la imagen dinámica en el montaje cinematográfico.
El desarrollo de este programa general se hará en contrapunto con cuatro sesiones intercaladas, a cargo del Dr. Fernando Pérez, quien nos introducirá a los elementos esenciales de la poética y escritura chinas, así como a al legado respectivo de Wang Wei, Li Po y Du Fu, las tres cumbres indiscutibles de la Edad de Oro.
Los ecos de las formas de la poética china en las estrategias contemporáneas del cine serán abordadas por el cineasta Raúl Ruiz.

This study examines the variability of the Chinese script during the Warring States period. I take issue with the traditional linear model of the evolution of writing in China. According to this model, characters developed along a single line from the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions to Zhou bronze inscriptions, all the way to the Qin small seal and Han clerical scripts. My contention is that this view is not only an oversimplification but in many cases incorrect. This model mirrors the ideologically motivated unilateral genealogy of traditional historiography which traced the mandate of Heaven from mythical emperors to the ruling house.
A full copy of the book can also be found at my website at http://shahon.org

This paper is the first scholarly attempt to examine the history of Chinese cryptography and the role it played in building the intelligence network of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) from 1927 to 1949. Rather than investigating the institutional structure of intelligence, I focus on Chinese characters, the primary medium that made cryptology and intelligence possible. Given that the Chinese writing system is by nature nonalphabetic and thus noncipherable, how did cryptography work in Chinese? How did the state and its scientists reengineer Chinese characters for the purposes of secret communication? This paper argues that due to the Chinese writing system itself, Chinese cryptography was bound to the use of codebooks rather than ciphers; thus, “codebook management” was central to building intelligence networks in China.

Dr. Catherine Farris is the author of this paper, originally in English, now presented in both English and Chinese. Maggie Li is the translator. Jennifer Ball is the person who facilitated the translation as well created this document (with Dr. Catherine Farris' permission).

This is a landmark paper, written in 1988, exploring not only the role of "the female" in Chinese written language, but also the role of the female in Western culture and language, and positing that the similarity of roles for women in both cultures and languages represents a linguistic universal. Women in both cultures play the role of "other," the exception, or the specially noted: "woman doctor" (as opposed to simply "doctor"); however certain roles (those of lesser societal significance) are assumed to be female, i.e., nurse. The ubiquity of the female character 女 representing something negative, lesser, or bartered ("a respectful term to refer to another’s daughter is qianjin 'a thousand pieces of money'") is no doubt related to a young women's procreative value, which is alternatively attractive and disturbing to men. Viewing written language with this awareness of bias allows us to recognize that bias creates a pattern. Once we see this pattern, we can use it to understand language faster, as well as human nature.

Na gruncie logograficznego systemu, jaki stanowi pismo chińskie, struktura znaku może wiązać się zarówno z fonetycznym, jak i semantycznym aspektem zapisywanego wyrazu. Niniejsza praca poświęcona jest historycznemu spojrzeniu na tego rodzaju związek, przybliżeniu motywacji grafii wybranych znaków, i zarysowaniu mechanizmów rządzących funkcjonowaniem pisma chińskiego w diachronicznie rozumianym, chińskim środowisku językowym.

Although the Shang dynasty sometimes seems archaic and alien from the point of view of later periods, there are important elements of Shang culture that persevered in recognizable forms, even after allowing for adaptation to new historical realities, beyond the Zhou conquest in 1045 B.C. These points of continuity being generally underappreciated, five of the most salient are sketched below, in the hope of spurring renewed interest in China’s first historical dynasty: the ritual use of writing, particularly as a mode of communication with the spirit world; the status of Chinese as the sole written language; the notion that some days are auspicious and others inauspicious; a patrilocal and patrilineal family structure that nevertheless accommodated mothers within its ritual order; and “the Deity’s command” (di ling). In keeping with the genre of “brief communication,” the examples adduced are illustrative rather than exhaustive; a full study of these themes would require an entire monograph.

From the perspective of prototype theory in cognitive science this article conducts a comparative study between prototypical determinatives in Egyptian and Chinese writing. A prototypical determinative stands for a prototypical member (or subcategory) of a category, and is hence used to mark words labelling other members. Through comparable examples of prototypical determinatives in Chinese and Egyptian writing, this article analyses the working mechanisms of prototypical determinatives and the cultural factors that influence their usage.

Reading Warring States manuscripts we are confronted with a number of graphs that are not only structurally different from modern characters and the small seal forms of the Shuowen jiezi but show variation even among themselves. While some of these graphs may be characters that have since disappeared, the majority of them are variants of known ones and represent words in much the same way as seen in transmitted sources. In early manuscripts we often see character structure varying within the same corpus or, at times, even within the same document. In most cases, the context provides enough information for deciphering the meaning of graphs, yet it is always a question whether we can link structural discrepancies with grammatical differences or shades of meaning. In other words, do graphic differences have any relevance to how the word is to be interpreted? Or are they inconsequential errors committed by scribes working in a hurry or perhaps possessing lower literacy skills?

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.

A modern paradigm of Oriental-Occidental translatio is presented by ... Andrés Claro ... in his comprehensive study “Montage as East-West Poetic Configuration. Ezra Pound’s Translation of Chinese Images”. The critic demonstrates that Ezra Pound’s principle of montage, developed at first in his early collection of translated Chinese poems called Cathay (1915) that contributed  to revolutionize English and Western poetry, is not only a re-orientation of euro-centred literature and of global translatio studii, but a reconfiguration of poetic form and representation as such. As a result, montage ‘formally’ emerged as “a hybrid figure of mixed origins”.
In order to illustrate the complexity of cultural transfer or translatio studii in the field of translation between Eastern and Western languages and literatures, Claro starts with the presentation of Pound’s iconical notice on the front cover of Cathay. This notice synoptically displays in the shape of an inverted cone the creative translation process leading to East-Western Cathay: it goes from the Chinese poems, many of them by Li Po (jap. Rihaku), to Ernest Fenollosa’s English translation and notes, via a Japanese sinologue – Pound’s professor, ignoring English – and via an auxiliary Japanese-English interpreter – up to Ezra Pound himself who, besides retranslating in Cathay Fenollosa’s cribs and paraphrases of Chinese poetry, was to edit Fenollosa’s essay The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry (1918) whose ideas had inspired his own translational poetry and poetics since he was handed over the manuscript in 1913, after the author’s death (1908).
In the first chapter on “East-West Poetic Figurations” Claro analyses the principles of Pound’s creative transpositions of the Chinese images into the English language, with constant reference to Fenollosa’s notes and with close comparisons between Fenollosa’s more prosaic and Pound’s more poetic translations. The basic principle is the English re-creation of Chinese imagery, rooted in the partly pictographic writing system and in the syntactic isolation, the asyndetic juxtaposition of discrete images stimulating a vivid dynamic between the imagistic figures in the reader’s mind. While Pound’s translations aim mainly, in accordance with the principle of phanopoeia, at an adequate, yet creative, verbovisual figuration, the ‘equivalence’ of Chinese and English melopoeia, i.e. phonic and rhythmic figuration, and of logopoeia, i.e. cultural and allusive figuration, is either reduced or completely left apart, due to historic and linguistic resistance or to the poet’s personal ignorance, as he declares himself.
Another principle of Chinese writing is the cosmic correspondence between nature and literature, firstly the word considered as a natural and moving thing, and secondly the verbovisual configuration of invisible cosmic correlations between things. Its symbolic matrix is the figure of Yin Yang that constitutes the dynamic parallelism of corresponding and complementary pairs of all kinds. In a series of lucid interpretations, Andrés Claro, so to speak, ‘carves the dragon’ by working out some subtle stylistic couplings or “dynamic imagistic arrangements” in classical Chinese poetry, namely in Li Po’s couplets, quatrains and octets, heteroglossically transfigured in Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Claro’s interpretation includes the philosophical value of imagistic figuration, where he notes, with reference to contemporary sinologues, the significant linkage between the Taoist principle of cosmic correspondence and the Chinese word wen that designates literature through the meaning of ‘pattern’, especially the stirring figure of parallelism. This goes along with a comparative analysis of Oriental and Occidental conceptions of cosmic and literary figures, of parallelism and metaphor.
In his second chapter “East-West Metaphysical Configurations: from ideological criticism to the transcendental revolution of montage”, the scholar looks at the more or less ‘discrete’ and ‘discreet’ modes of montage within the context of the work of Ezra Pound: the more ‘discreet’ and a bit less ‘discrete’ Cathay versus the more ‘discrete’ and less ‘discreet’ The Cantos. At the same time, he considers the modes of montage in the larger context of Western Modernism in the fields of literature, the arts and the media, with a focus on T.S. Eliot, on Picasso and on Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram”. Since montage is substantially linked to the aspect of history, the scholar investigates the double connexions between the context of World War I in which Cathay is embedded and the topic of ancient history in Cathay, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the connexions between ancient and contemporary world history, including World War II, in and around The Cantos.
Against the background of Chinese ‘ideogrammaticality’, The Cantos induced a new form of representation in epic poetry where ideogrammic and idiomatic fragmentation and semantic polyvalence become overwhelming and eliminate intentional meaning and anticipatory historical sense, while staging it in an kaleidoscopic way. The performative and imagistic impact is predominant, very much like Walter Benjamin has stated in his Passagen-Werk regarding the phenomenon of Modernity. Both world views, the traditional Occidental dualism of two separate worlds with its static mode of metaphorical figuration and the dynamic ideogrammic figuration of correlated immanent worlds in Oriental poetry and Taoism are finally disconnected from Modernity. They are replaced by the poetic and ideogrammic figure of the interruptive and instantaneous event that generates flashes of impersonal meanings and multiple perspectives on a possible past and future, lacking both origo and telos.
Still, in the broken figures of montage there is also a partial re-membring of disiecta membra: the figure of interlingual and intermedial couplings of Chinese and European characters, of translational parallelisms in The Cantos. They are conceived as a multiple écart, semantic, phonic and graphic, operating erratically in praesentia and in absentia: a complex convergence and divergence of Eastern and Western idioms and ideas. 

A. Knauth (from "Configuration of the Book" - Introduction).

In questo breve elaborato ho cercato di dimostrare il ruolo ambivalente della scrittura cinese nella costruzione dell’unità nazionale. Essa infatti è stata sia il mezzo unificatore delle molte etnie presenti in Cina ma allo stesso tempo è stata anche motivo di divisione. Nel primo paragrafo ho esposto le aree geografiche della Cina e le varie differenze culturali. Nel secondo e terzo paragrafo invece ho descritto le diverse fasi che si sono succedute per il raggiungimento di una lingua comune; e successivamente quelle che secondo me hanno reso la lingua scritta mezzo di scissione sociale.

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.

Traditional Chinese scholarship understood the principles of character formation according to the six scripts (liu shu 六書) model initially set forth in Eastern Han sources towards the end of the first century CE. Although initially these categories were not intended as etymological principles, in later times they were also used to explain the origin and early development of the script. Even some modern models of the origin of Chinese writing, which generally stem from the critique of traditional views, rely on the concept of liu shu as they try to determine the actual number of principles at play during the formative stages of the script. All of these models, however, seem to carry the assumption that writing had been created in the distant past and then creation essentially stopped. This paper is an attempt to demonstrate that character creation, that is, the development of orthographic structure, was an ongoing process that involved a number of principles beyond the traditional liu shu categories. Along the same line of thought, I am trying to draw attention to the value of interpreting character forms in terms of their medieval structure, rather than disregarding what we see in an effort to find out what an archaic structure might have been at the time the character first came into being.

Since Andrew West’s inaugural proposal of soon to be 10 years ago,
there has been a journey towards encoding second stage simplifications in Unicode, for uses such as correctly representing the texts published during the short implementation, as well as rendering correctly the ancient texts which used the forms sometimes taken as inspiration. However, since then some of the characters were successfully encoded, and the original proposal did not include explicit generalizations of schemes offered as generic simplifications, and contained a small number of unfortunate misprints. Hence, I believe there is now time to review the charts against the current information and remake the list with as much data as possible.

This is Version 2.2, synchronized with the changes in the BabelStone Erjian fonts.

The current version is now available under link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NYAWfzGFBBLXRs-1BZXZBJzd2XN57Azd

""In the 1950s and 1960s, the government of the People’s Republic of China undertook, in two stages, a carefully planned “simplification” of the logographic Chinese script. Drawing on a variety of historical precedents, over 2,000 individual graphs were modified in an attempt to make the script easier to learn and use. This was the first significant change in the official form of the Chinese script in nearly two millennia, and resulted in the script variety that is widely used today in mainland China, commonly termed “simplified Chinese characters.” Drawing on recent psycholinguistic experiments that attempt to characterize the cognitive functions involved in Chinese script processing, this study revisits long-standing questions about the efficacy of character simplification and provides some additional theoretical insights into the nature of logographic writing.
The central conclusion of this study is that meaningful simplification of a logographic script is possible, but that today’s simplified character script cannot be characterized as an effective reform by any reasonable metric—it is only “simpler” in the crudest of senses. After evaluating the results of recent studies on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters, I introduce the concept of semantic orthographic depth and argue that a true simplification of a logographic script should be based on regularization of semantic and phonetic components, rather than on reduction of the number of graphs or the reduction of the number of strokes per graph. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that a well functioning logographic script has cognitive advantages over purely phonographic scripts. As a thought experiment, I apply these conclusions to sketch out a scheme for what genuinely effective logographic reform of the Chinese script might have looked like.""

In this paper it is argued that the theories of writing introduced during the last fifty years are based on " ideological " definitions and typologies of writing systems. Indeed, both linguists and more recently neuroscientists showed a theoretical bias for Latin alphabet, almost completely disregarding technical and social constraints in the use of writing (thus the cultural significance of writing practices). However, adopting an anthropologically informed approach, four general semiotic thesis are articulated which are intended as the basis for any viable assessment of textual products in visual and graphic domains, going beyond any formal and abstract approach to the study of writing.

FROGBEAR SEMINAR (“From the Ground Up”)
“Graphic Variation, Modification and Replacement in Medieval Chinese Writing: Case Studies and Resources”
August 17, 2021

This part of the seminar aims at providing various materials concerning the topic of “variation”, drawing mainly from Dunhuang manuscripts and sometimes - for reasons of comparison – medieval epigraphical material (mainly 墓誌)
The term variation is used here in a very general sense, referring to phenomena related to the use of non-standard / variant Chinese characters, phonetic (and other) substitutions, non-standardized representations of colloquial / dialect words in the script, as well as various scribal “mistakes”
Naturally, this comprises a huge array of complex phenomena, and in the framework of this seminar only a few aspects can be covered, in order to trigger / stimulate further interest / research in this field
In the first part (introduction), several phenomena related to variation will be randomly presented, whereas the second part comprises of a small case study (a section of a manuscript)
During the limited time frame of the seminar, we will be only able to select and discuss a few aspects, based on the interest of the students

The augmentation of consumers and the development of the sports industry directly depends on the correct and successful coinage and translation of the sports products brands from foreign languages into Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) and vice versa. This paper suggests a brief look at foreign and Chinese domestic sportswear brand names from a linguistic and cultural viewpoint.
Foreign trademarks’ adaptation process in MSM is formed by several different categories, phonemic loans being the most numerous one. Adaptations of this type can be faithful or deviant, and often convey not only phonemic similarities, but also semantic associations.
Semantic and graphic analysis of Chinese domestic top brand names shows that the principle of the auspicious strokes numbers is accurately followed. When introduce their names written in Latin letters on international arena, Chinese brands usually employ phonological transcription of their original names, which is either faithful or deviant mapping of pīnyīn.
In order to make successful naming decisions, it is important to understand how the recipient language interprets explicit and implicit linguistic information encoded in the different donor writing system. To avoid any possible gaffes in adaptation of names, acronyms or slogans, one must be familiar with cultural traditions, superstitions, symbolism, and frequent ambiguity of Chinese characters.

Article is consecrated to bicentennial of Institute of
Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in the same
time to the 80th anniversary of so called “big terror” — the worst time in
the history of Russian oriental studies. Objective is to track a story of relationships of two great sinologists — Vasiliy Alekseev and Aleksandr Dragunov which were formed on the background of the most tough period of Russian history.

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.

【摘要】 本文介紹了萊布尼茲對於中文字與《易經》卦象的表述。我認為萊布尼茲之所以選 擇中文作為通用表意文字的符碼，但因為它既不是組合詞也不是允許計算的腳本，所 以放棄了它。他與白晋往來的書信中對於二元算術與耶穌會建立的《易經》八卦的談 論使他恢復了對中文字的興趣。這些八卦以組合形式出現，因此有資格作為萊布尼茲 的通用表意文字的符碼。對於透過八卦建立通用表意文字，萊布尼茲既充滿希望卻也 同時躊躇不前。白晋改變了萊布尼茲對漢字的看法。萊布尼茲認為中文字其實具有更 多的哲學性，但卻較少的象形圖像性。因為他與白晋認為《易經》卦相與中文字具有 家族關係。
【關鍵詞】 萊布尼茲，中文字，通用表意文字，白晋，《易經》，八卦。
【Abstract】 This article introduces the Leibnizian representations of Chinese writing and the Yijing hexagrams. I argue that Leibniz chose Chinese writing for his Universal Characteristic and then abandoned it because it was neither a combinatory nor a script that allowed calculation. His epistolary exchange with Bouvet revived his interest in Chinese writing with the analogy between binary arithmetic and the hexagrams of the Yijing established by the Jesuit. The hexagrams appear as combinatorial and therefore eligible to participate in Leibniz's project as signs. However, he is plagued by ambivalence, led by both the hope of building a Universal Characteristic from the hexagrams, and a caution against using them. Bouvet changed Leibniz's view of Chinese characters which he considered less pictographic and more philosophical because of their genealogical link with the Yijing hexagrams assumed by the two men.
【Keywords】Leibniz, Chinese writing, Universal Characteristic, Bouvet, Yijing, Hexagrams.