Sinitic Language and Script in East Asia: Past and Present
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Background I. Names
Background I. Names 1. China It used to be thought that the name ‘China’ derived from the name of China’s early Qin dynasty (Chin or Ch’in in older transcriptions), whose rulers conquered all rivals and initiated the dynasty in 221 BC. But, as Wilkinson notes (Chinese History: A Manual: 753, and fn 7), the original pronunciation of the name ‘Qin’ was rather different, and would make it an unlikely source for the name China. Instead, China is thought to derive from a Persian root, and was, apparently, first used for porcelain, and only later applied to the country from which the finest examples of that material came. Another name, Cathay, now rather poetic in English, but surviving as the regular name for the country in languages such as Russian (Kitai), is said to derive from the name of the Khitan Tarters, who formed the Liao dynasty in north China in the 10th century. The Khitan dynasty was the first to make a capital on the site of Beijing. The Chinese now call their country Zhōngguó, often translated as ‘Middle Kingdom’. Originally, this name meant the central – or royal – state of the many that occupied the region prior to the unification of Qin. Other names were used before Zhōngguó became current. One of the earliest was Huá (or Huáxià, combining Huá with the name of the earliest dynasty, the Xià). Xià, in fact, combined with the Zhōng of Zhōngguó, appears in the modern official names of the country, as we see below. 2. Chinese places a) The People’s Republic of China (PRC) [Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó] This is the political entity proclaimed by Máo Zédōng when he gave his speech (‘China has risen again’) at the Gate of Heavenly Peace [Tiān’ān Mén] in Beijing on October 1, 1949. -
Propaganda and Memory in Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié's a Chinese Life
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42.1 March 2016: 99-118 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2016.42.1.05 Propaganda and Memory in Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié’s A Chinese Life Jeffrey Mather Department of English City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, S.A.R. Abstract A Chinese Life is a graphic autobiography first published in France as Une vie chinoise in three separate volumes between 2009 and 2011. With a single volume English translation appearing in 2012, the work has reached a global audience and speaks to a growing interest in the graphic narrative form as a mode through which comics artists are able to explore questions of identity, politics, and memory. Documenting the life of a Communist Party member who faces severe personal adversity and struggles to maintain his faith in Party ideals, A Chinese Life is a work that addresses issues of history and memory on both personal and political levels. The result is a provocative, sometimes unsatisfying, account that speaks to larger underlying problems of cultural memory and narrating Chinese history, particularly as this history is translated and negotiated across national and political borders. Keywords graphic autobiography; propaganda and memory; memory studies; collaborative autobiography; A Chinese Life Images are printed by courtesy of Mediatoon Foreign Rights. 100 Concentric March 2016 History is the raw material of nationalistic or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material of heroin addiction. —Eric Hobsbawm On History In a discussion of Asia’s troubled history, and in the context of the “textbook wars” that have emerged in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, historian Tessa Morris- Suzuki suggests that contestations around historical memory need to be considered beyond the textbook and in relation to a wide range of cultural forms. -
Localizing Into Chinese: the Two Most Common Questions White Paper Answered
Localizing into Chinese: the two most common questions White Paper answered Different writing systems, a variety of languages and dialects, political and cultural sensitivities and, of course, the ever-evolving nature of language itself. ALPHA CRC LTD It’s no wonder that localizing in Chinese can seem complicated to the uninitiated. St Andrew’s House For a start, there is no single “Chinese” language to localize into. St Andrew’s Road Cambridge CB4 1DL United Kingdom Most Westerners referring to the Chinese language probably mean Mandarin; but @alpha_crc you should definitely not assume this as the de facto language for all audiences both within and outside mainland China. alphacrc.com To clear up any confusion, we talked to our regional language experts to find out the most definitive and useful answers to two of the most commonly asked questions when localizing into Chinese. 1. What’s the difference between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese? 2. Does localizing into “Chinese” mean localizing into Mandarin, Cantonese or both? Actually, these are really pertinent questions because they get to the heart of some of the linguistic, political and cultural complexities that need to be taken into account when localizing for this region. Because of the important nature of these issues, we’ve gone a little more in depth than some of the articles on related themes elsewhere on the internet. We think you’ll find the answers a useful starting point for any considerations about localizing for the Chinese-language market. And, taking in linguistic nuances and cultural history, we hope you’ll find them an interesting read too. -
Neural Substrates of Hanja (Logogram) and Hangul (Phonogram) Character Readings by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
ORIGINAL ARTICLE Neuroscience http://dx.doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2014.29.10.1416 • J Korean Med Sci 2014; 29: 1416-1424 Neural Substrates of Hanja (Logogram) and Hangul (Phonogram) Character Readings by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Zang-Hee Cho,1 Nambeom Kim,1 The two basic scripts of the Korean writing system, Hanja (the logography of the traditional Sungbong Bae,2 Je-Geun Chi,1 Korean character) and Hangul (the more newer Korean alphabet), have been used together Chan-Woong Park,1 Seiji Ogawa,1,3 since the 14th century. While Hanja character has its own morphemic base, Hangul being and Young-Bo Kim1 purely phonemic without morphemic base. These two, therefore, have substantially different outcomes as a language as well as different neural responses. Based on these 1Neuroscience Research Institute, Gachon University, Incheon, Korea; 2Department of linguistic differences between Hanja and Hangul, we have launched two studies; first was Psychology, Yeungnam University, Kyongsan, Korea; to find differences in cortical activation when it is stimulated by Hanja and Hangul reading 3Kansei Fukushi Research Institute, Tohoku Fukushi to support the much discussed dual-route hypothesis of logographic and phonological University, Sendai, Japan routes in the brain by fMRI (Experiment 1). The second objective was to evaluate how Received: 14 February 2014 Hanja and Hangul affect comprehension, therefore, recognition memory, specifically the Accepted: 5 July 2014 effects of semantic transparency and morphemic clarity on memory consolidation and then related cortical activations, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Address for Correspondence: (Experiment 2). The first fMRI experiment indicated relatively large areas of the brain are Young-Bo Kim, MD Department of Neuroscience and Neurosurgery, Gachon activated by Hanja reading compared to Hangul reading. -
Assessment of Options for Handling Full Unicode Character Encodings in MARC21 a Study for the Library of Congress
1 Assessment of Options for Handling Full Unicode Character Encodings in MARC21 A Study for the Library of Congress Part 1: New Scripts Jack Cain Senior Consultant Trylus Computing, Toronto 1 Purpose This assessment intends to study the issues and make recommendations on the possible expansion of the character set repertoire for bibliographic records in MARC21 format. 1.1 “Encoding Scheme” vs. “Repertoire” An encoding scheme contains codes by which characters are represented in computer memory. These codes are organized according to a certain methodology called an encoding scheme. The list of all characters so encoded is referred to as the “repertoire” of characters in the given encoding schemes. For example, ASCII is one encoding scheme, perhaps the one best known to the average non-technical person in North America. “A”, “B”, & “C” are three characters in the repertoire of this encoding scheme. These three characters are assigned encodings 41, 42 & 43 in ASCII (expressed here in hexadecimal). 1.2 MARC8 "MARC8" is the term commonly used to refer both to the encoding scheme and its repertoire as used in MARC records up to 1998. The ‘8’ refers to the fact that, unlike Unicode which is a multi-byte per character code set, the MARC8 encoding scheme is principally made up of multiple one byte tables in which each character is encoded using a single 8 bit byte. (It also includes the EACC set which actually uses fixed length 3 bytes per character.) (For details on MARC8 and its specifications see: http://www.loc.gov/marc/.) MARC8 was introduced around 1968 and was initially limited to essentially Latin script only. -
The PARI Journal Vol. XIV, No. 2
ThePARIJournal A quarterly publication of the Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute Volume XIV, No. 2, Fall 2013 Mesoamerican Lexical Calques in Ancient Maya Writing and Imagery In This Issue: CHRISTOPHE HELMKE University of Copenhagen Mesoamerican Lexical Calques Introduction ancient cultural interactions which might otherwise go undetected. in Ancient Maya The process of calquing is a fascinating What follows is a preliminary treat- Writing and Imagery aspect of linguistics since it attests to ment of a small sample of Mesoamerican contacts between differing languages by lexical calques as attested in the glyphic and manifests itself in a variety of guises. Christophe Helmke corpus of the ancient Maya. The present Calquing involves loaning or transferring PAGES 1-15 treatment is not intended to be exhaus- items of vocabulary and even phonetic tive; instead it provides an insight into • and syntactic traits from one language 1 the types, antiquity, and longevity of to another. Here I would like to explore The Further Mesoamerican calques in the hopes that lexical calques, which is to say the loaning Adventures of Merle this foray may stimulate additional and of vocabulary items, not as loanwords, (continued) more in-depth treatment in the future. but by means of translating their mean- by ing from one language to another. In this Merle Greene sense calques can be thought of as “loan Calques in Mesoamerica Robertson translations,” in which only the semantic Lexical calques have occupied a privileged PAGES 16-20 dimension is borrowed. Calques, unlike place in the definition of Mesoamerica as a loanwords, are not liable to direct phono- linguistic area (Campbell et al. -
Old Cyrillic in Unicode*
Old Cyrillic in Unicode* Ivan A Derzhanski Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences [email protected] The current version of the Unicode Standard acknowledges the existence of a pre- modern version of the Cyrillic script, but its support thereof is limited to assigning code points to several obsolete letters. Meanwhile mediæval Cyrillic manuscripts and some early printed books feature a plethora of letter shapes, ligatures, diacritic and punctuation marks that want proper representation. (In addition, contemporary editions of mediæval texts employ a variety of annotation signs.) As generally with scripts that predate printing, an obvious problem is the abundance of functional, chronological, regional and decorative variant shapes, the precise details of whose distribution are often unknown. The present contents of the block will need to be interpreted with Old Cyrillic in mind, and decisions to be made as to which remaining characters should be implemented via Unicode’s mechanism of variation selection, as ligatures in the typeface, or as code points in the Private space or the standard Cyrillic block. I discuss the initial stage of this work. The Unicode Standard (Unicode 4.0.1) makes a controversial statement: The historical form of the Cyrillic alphabet is treated as a font style variation of modern Cyrillic because the historical forms are relatively close to the modern appearance, and because some of them are still in modern use in languages other than Russian (for example, U+0406 “I” CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER I is used in modern Ukrainian and Byelorussian). Some of the letters in this range were used in modern typefaces in Russian and Bulgarian. -
Chinese Script Generation Panel Document
Chinese Script Generation Panel Document Proposal for the Generation Panel for the Chinese Script Label Generation Ruleset for the Root Zone 1. General Information Chinese script is the logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages. They are called Hanzi in Chinese, Kanji in Japanese and Hanja in Korean. Since the Hanzi unification in the Qin dynasty (221-207 B.C.), the most important change in the Chinese Hanzi occurred in the middle of the 20th century when more than two thousand Simplified characters were introduced as official forms in Mainland China. As a result, the Chinese language has two writing systems: Simplified Chinese (SC) and Traditional Chinese (TC). Both systems are expressed using different subsets under the Unicode definition of the same Han script. The two writing systems use SC and TC respectively while sharing a large common “unchanged” Hanzi subset that occupies around 60% in contemporary use. The common “unchanged” Hanzi subset enables a simplified Chinese user to understand texts written in traditional Chinese with little difficulty and vice versa. The Hanzi in SC and TC have the same meaning and the same pronunciation and are typical variants. The Japanese kanji were adopted for recording the Japanese language from the 5th century AD. Chinese words borrowed into Japanese could be written with Chinese characters, while Japanese words could be written using the character for a Chinese word of similar meaning. Finally, in Japanese, all three scripts (kanji, and the hiragana and katakana syllabaries) are used as main scripts. The Chinese script spread to Korea together with Buddhism from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD. -
The Establishment of State Buddhism in Japan
九州大学学術情報リポジトリ Kyushu University Institutional Repository The Establishment of State Buddhism in Japan Tamura, Encho https://doi.org/10.15017/2244129 出版情報:史淵. 100, pp.1-29, 1968-03-01. Faculty of Literature, Kyushu University バージョン: 権利関係: - 1 - THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STATE BUDDHISM IN JAPAN Encho Tamura In ancient times, during the Yamato period, it was the custom for each succeeding emperor at the beginning of his reign to seek some site on which to build a new imperial palace and relocate himself. In other words, successive emperors neither inherited their palaces from the previous emperor nor handed them down to the following emperor. Hardly any example is to be found of the same palace being used by more than two emperors successively. The fact that the emperor in ancient times was called by the name of the place where his palace was located* is based on this custom of seeking new sites and founding new palaces. < 1 > This custom was strictly adhered to until the 40th Emperor, Temmu (672-686 A. D.).** The palaces, though at times relocated at Naniwa (the present Osaka Prefecture), or at Cmi (Shiga Prefecture), in most cases were built in different locations within the boundary of the Yamato area (Nara Prefecture). It is true that there is a theory denying the existence of emperors previous to the 14th Emperor, Chuai, but it is clearly stated in both the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki that all of the emperors including Jimmu, the 1st Emperor, strictly adhered to this custom of relocating the palace. This reflects the fact *For example, Emperor Kimmei was called "Shikishima no Kanazashi no Miya ni Arne ga shita Shiroshimesu Sumeramikoto" (The Emperor who rules the whole area under heaven at his Kanazashi Palace in Shikishima). -
Learning Cyrillic
LEARNING CYRILLIC Question: If there is no equivalent letter in the Cyrillic alphabet for the Roman "J" or "H" how do you transcribe good German names like Johannes, Heinrich, Wilhelm, etc. I heard one suggestion that Johann was written as Ivan and that the "h" was replaced with a "g". Can you give me a little insight into what you have found? In researching would I be looking for the name Ivan rather than Johann? One must always think phonetic, that is, think how a name is pronounced in German, and how does the Russian Cyrillic script produce that sound? JOHANNES. The Cyrillic spelling begins with the letter “I – eye”, but pronounced “eee”, so we have phonetically “eee-o-hann” which sounds like “Yo-hann”. You can see it better in typeface – Иоганн , which letter for letter reads as “I-o-h-a-n-n”. The modern Typeface script is radically different than the old hand-written Cyrillic script. Use the guide which I sent to you. Ivan is the Russian equivalent of Johann, and it pops up occasionally in Church records. JOSEPH / JOSEF. Listen to the way the name is pronounced in German – “yo-sef”, also “yo-sif”. That “yo” sound is produced by the Cyrillic script letters “I” and “o”. Again you can see it in the typeface. Иосеф and also Иосиф. And sometimes Joseph appears as , transliterated as O-s-i-p. Similar to all languages and scripts, Cyrillic spellings are not consistent. The “a” ending indicates a male name. JAKOB. There is no “Jay” sound in the German language. -
Freedom on the Net 2016
FREEDOM ON THE NET 2016 China 2015 2016 Population: 1.371 billion Not Not Internet Freedom Status Internet Penetration 2015 (ITU): 50 percent Free Free Social Media/ICT Apps Blocked: Yes Obstacles to Access (0-25) 18 18 Political/Social Content Blocked: Yes Limits on Content (0-35) 30 30 Bloggers/ICT Users Arrested: Yes Violations of User Rights (0-40) 40 40 TOTAL* (0-100) 88 88 Press Freedom 2016 Status: Not Free * 0=most free, 100=least free Key Developments: June 2015 – May 2016 • A draft cybersecurity law could step up requirements for internet companies to store data in China, censor information, and shut down services for security reasons, under the aus- pices of the Cyberspace Administration of China (see Legal Environment). • An antiterrorism law passed in December 2015 requires technology companies to cooperate with authorities to decrypt data, and introduced content restrictions that could suppress legitimate speech (see Content Removal and Surveillance, Privacy, and Anonymity). • A criminal law amendment effective since November 2015 introduced penalties of up to seven years in prison for posting misinformation on social media (see Legal Environment). • Real-name registration requirements were tightened for internet users, with unregistered mobile phone accounts closed in September 2015, and app providers instructed to regis- ter and store user data in 2016 (see Surveillance, Privacy, and Anonymity). • Websites operated by the South China Morning Post, The Economist and Time magazine were among those newly blocked for reporting perceived as critical of President Xi Jin- ping (see Blocking and Filtering). www.freedomonthenet.org FREEDOM CHINA ON THE NET 2016 Introduction China was the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom in the 2016 Freedom on the Net survey for the second consecutive year. -
The Bungku-Tolaki Languages of South-Eastern Sulawesi, Indonesia
The Bungku-Tolaki languages of South-Eastern Sulawesi, Indonesia Mead, D.E. The Bungku-Tolaki languages of south-eastern Sulawesi, Indonesia. D-91, xi + 188 pages. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 1999. DOI:10.15144/PL-D91.cover ©1999 Pacific Linguistics and/or the author(s). Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. PACIFIC LINGUISTICS FOUNDING EDITOR: Stephen A. Wurm EDITORIAL BOARD: Malcolm D. Ross and Darrell T. Tryon (Managing Editors), John Bowden, Thomas E. Dutton, Andrew K. Pawley Pacific Linguistics is a publisher specialising in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, atlases and other material on languages of the Pacific, the Philippines, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. The authors and editors of Pacific Linguistics publications are drawn from a wide range of institutions around the world. Pacific Linguistics is associated with the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. Pacific Linguistics was established in 1963 through an initial grant from the Hunter Douglas Fund. It is a non-profit-making body financed largely from the sales of its books to libraries and individuals throughout the world, with some assistance from the School. The Editorial Board of Pacific Linguistics is made up of the academic staff of the School's Department of Linguistics. The Board also appoints a body of editorial advisors drawn from the international community of linguists. Publications in Series A, B and C and textbooks in Series D are refereed by scholars with relevant expertise who are normally not members of the editorial board.