Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script

Human Research in Rehabilitation, 2019

This paper introduces the nature of the Chinese script, with the focus on its origin and development, the main four kinds of creation methods, the basic strokes of Chinese characters and the significance of its radical structure. The author believes that Chinese characters are the carriers of the script, phoneme and meaning as well as of the grammatical structure of the Chinese language. Hence, the Latin alphabet for the Chinese phonetic system cannot replace Chinese character, and learning Chinese character is very important for foreign learners. Finally, the author gives a mnemonic of the basic rules for stroke order that facilitates learners' memory and helps them write characters correctly and quickly

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2010

Transilvania, 2018

The present article is a section from a larger study entitled The History and Culture of Chinese Characters and serves as a continuation of my first article named The History and Origin of Chinese Characters (I). The purpose of this article is to exemplify the changes Chinese characters have underwent during its history of evolution. Each of the 7 stages of development led to the final Simplified Characters that Chinese speaking people use nowadays. Chinese characters evolved from pictographic characters, created on the foundation of a picture, to pictophonetic characters, based on the meaning of strokes; from the Traditional complex characters to the Simplified easy to write characters; from different writing tools and materials to ink and paper; thus so far one of the most widely used language created its own unique method of writing. Throughout the paper I will retell stories that contribute to the discovery of the Chinese characters, sustain my paper with either self-drawn characters or with pictures exemplifying the calligraphy of the specific script. Keywords: Wang Yi Rong, Bronze ware, Qin Shi Huang, Scribe, Ancient characters, Modern characters, Zhong Yao, Zhang Xu, The Chinese Reform Committee, Simplified Characters

Pathways into Korean Language and Culture: Essays in Honor of Young-Key Kim-Renaud, 2001

A comparison of the Khitan Small Script and Korean han'gŭl shows a striking structural similarity of two essentially phonetic scripts that combine 'letters' into large blocks. These blocks in han'gŭl correspond to the syllable, whereas in Khitan they correspond to the word-level. I shall compare these two systems structurally with both the linear alphasyllabic principle of Brahmi-derived scripts and the principle of an 'ideal square' (or 'ideal oblong') that characterizes Chinese, Egyptian or Mayan logographic scripts in order to establish why the Khitan and Korean scripts share a rare structural principle.

The early development of the Chinese script from the oracle bone inscriptions to standardization under the Qin is a seemingly ad-hoc mixture of invention and abandonment. The current literature which addresses the various media (i.e. bones, bronze, bamboo slips, etc.) used for recording the Chinese script in Early China has yet to examine trends in the usage of media to meet the needs of institutional pressures set alongside the influence of the shifting media on the development of the Chinese script. This paper explores institutional changes in the Chinese script with special attention given to the emergence of new institutional needs and the development of new media. This study builds on such works as the groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the oracle bones by David N. Keightley, The Ancestral Landscape, and Li Feng’s insightful exploration of bronzes in Landscape and Power in Early China. I argue that conscious developmental changes in the script in Early China occur in the wake of institutional needs even in the early stages of the Chinese script with direct evidence in such instances as the standardization of the script under the Qin and indirect evidence through differences in media. Through reexamination of the Chinese script in Early China, patterns in governmental needs emerge in their power to consciously influence tendencies in the development of the script.

November 3-4, 2018, 9 am - 6 pm Penn Museum, Nevil Classroom ORGANIZERS: Adam D. Smith Maddalena Poli SPEAKERS: William Baxter Wolfgang Behr Chen Lin Constance Cook Paul R. Goldin Guo Jue 郭珏 Philip Jones Lai Guolong 來國龍 Simon Martin Maddalena Poli Adam D. Smith Sun Yan 孫岩 Stephen J. Tinney Crispin Williams

Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 2021

The article raises the question of the role and significance of ancient Chinese writing for the preservation and development of the Chinese language, the study of which is impossible without analyzing the monuments of writing and culture of China-Jiaguwen (writing on turtle shells and animal bones, XIV-XI centuries BC). The article raises the question of the need to search for new auxiliary research methods for such valuable and significant written monuments. The authors proposed and considered a statistical method for studying signs (keys / hieroglyphs) on turtle shells, thanks to which the possibility of a sufficiently accurate determination of the surface of the shell by digital photometry data was demonstrated. Thanks to this method, the number of characters (ancient keys / hieroglyphs) was determined in a number of complex areas. This method could be additional, primarily for visual research by specialists in various fields of science. The research of the ancient written language plays a vital role in understanding human history and enriching human civilization.

2021

The Chinese language uses the ideographic writing. The outer form of Chinese characters in 3rd century ВС and later underwent strong changes, which were caused mainly by change in the technique of writing. In the first century AD the writing style that has survived to the present time. We recall some of main results of the spread and change of linguistic information in certain Chinese community obtained with the help of a dynamic nonlinear model. Undoubtedly, Oracle script writings Jiaguwen (甲骨文) played an important role in this process. We consider it quite legitimate to discuss rather about the written language of the Chinese language, as main link between ancient Chinese, Middle Chinese, and modern Chinese languages Putonghua. In the study of the oldest examples of art, culture and science, for example, such as Jiaguwen, there is a need to study ancient hieroglyphs depicted on the surface of a tortoise shell, copper vessel or stone. New method for correct solving of an inverse pr...

Scripta 6, 2014

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.

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?