Division of Humanities Tentative Course Syllabus

Course Code: HUMA Course Title: Chinese Writing and Culture Course Offered in: Fall 2019 Course Instructor: SUN Jingtao

Course Description: This introductory course to the Chinese writing system covers the origin, classification and development. The cultural and historical implications of and the script reform will also be discussed. The course will be conducted through lectures combined with discussions of assigned readings/problems, take-home assignment and team work on research project. This course has a CANVAS website in which students can access the instructor’s lecture notes and other study materials.

Course Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs):

Course ILOs

Get a systematic understanding of how the Chinese writing originated and 1 developed; Clearly understand how phonetic and semantic components function in forming 2 Chinese characters; Be able to analyze Chinese characters and to classify them into different categories 3 in accordance with the newly-developed theory – the three-principles theory of Chinese script; Identify the historical and cultural components implied in the Chinese writing 4 system; Be able to identify about 200 Chinese characters in archaeological texts, and about 5 100 characters created for dialectal words including those in Cantonese; Be able to apply the three-principles theory of Chinese script in creating their own 6 characters.

Course Outline:

Week

Introduction 課程介紹; The development of writing 文字的發展

1

The development of writing 文字的發展

2 Division of Humanities Tentative Course Syllabus

Nature, origin and development of Chinese Script 漢字的性質、形成、發展 3

Classification of Chinese characters 漢字基本類型的劃分 4

Semantographs 表意字 5

Semantographs 表意字 6

Phonograms 形聲字; 7

Loangraphs 假借字; Midterm 8

Oracle bone inscriptions 甲骨文 and Bronze inscriptions 金文; 9

Graphs created for Cantonese words 粵語字; Exercise of creating characters 造字 10 練習; Assignment

Simplification of Chinese characters 漢字簡化 11

Phonetization and Romanization of Chinese (characters) 漢字的注音與拼音化問 12 題

Characters tell stories 漢字故事; Review 複習 13

Planned Assessment Tasks:

Midterm: 30%

Assignment: 6%

Final: 58% Division of Humanities Tentative Course Syllabus

Participation in class and worksheets: 6%

Readings: 1. Qiu Xigui. Chinese Writing, translated by Gilbert Louis Matto, Jerry Norman, Early Special Monograph Series, No. 4. Berkeley: Publications, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2000. 2. Norman, Jerry. Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3. Taylor, Insup and M Martin Taylor. Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. 1995. 4. 裘錫圭.《文字學概要》，北京：商務印書館，1988。又重印於臺北：萬卷樓圖 書公司，1994。(You need to buy this book) 5. 何九盈、胡雙寳、張猛主編《中國漢字文化大觀》，北京：北京大學出版社， 1995。