Getting over the Walls of Discourse: “Character Fetishization” in Chinese Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 1189-1213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Chinese Studies ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
The Way

Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called “ideographs,” continue to bedevil Chinese studies. This paper considers examples of what are referred to as “discourses of character fetishization,” whereby an inordinate status is discursively created for Chinese characters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought, and culture. The author endeavors to analyze and critique the presuppositions and implications of such discourses, with the aim of defusing the passions that have been aroused by this issue, and showing the way toward a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of the nature of Chinese characters, both as a writing system and in relation to Chinese culture and thought.

scholarly journals Arabic and Roman Numbers as Part of Chinese Semiotic System

2020 ◽  
Vol 162 (5) ◽  
pp. 249-260
Author(s):  
L.L. Bankova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Language ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
The Status ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
Mathematical Signs

The role of Roman and Arabic numbers in the Chinese semiotic system was analyzed. It was found that the use of Roman numbers in the Chinese language is extremely restricted: they only occur in official documents executed in accordance with the Western traditions and in some educational editions, which is due to the fact that the functions of Roman numerals are commonly carried out by the Chinese characters belonging to the traditional Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches sets. On the contrary, Arabic numbers are widespread. They originated in India and penetrated into China at the third attempt in the early 20th century. The failures of the first two attempts are explained by such fundamental differences of the Chinese writing system from the Western one as the direction of the text (down from the top and right to left) and the multiplicity of writing. With the Chinese language reforms, Arabic numbers were introduced in Mandarin. Having penetrated into the Chinese semiotic system, Arabic numbers became so widespread that a state standard was produced to regulate their co-existence with the traditional Chinese characters of numbers. Besides, Arabic numbers have acquired another important function in the Mandarin semiotic system over the last twenty years: they replace characters in the sphere of Internet and mobile-phone interaction. However, in contrast to other numbers in Mandarin, Arabic numbers, as mathematical signs, are devoid of the status of lexical units. Therefore, despite their extensive use, the functions of Arabic numbers in Mandarin are strictly limited.

A typology of readings of Chinese characters in traditional Zhuang manuscripts

2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
David HOLM ◽  
David HOLM
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Character ◽  
Southern China ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Standard Chinese ◽  
Chinese Writing

The Old Zhuang Script is an instance of a borrowed Chinese character script. Zhuang is the current designation for the northern and central Tai languages spoken in Guangxi in southern China. On the basis of a corpus of traditional texts, as recited by traditional owners, this article presents a typology of Zhuang readings of the standard Chinese characters in these texts. While some categories represent phonetic or semantic readings of Chinese characters, others correspond neither semantically nor phonetically to Chinese graphs, and often involve serial borrowing. The implications of this typology for the study of writing systems, and the Chinese writing system in particular, would seem to be considerable.

scholarly journals Chinese characters have increased in visual complexity over three millennia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Jerome Han ◽  
Piers Kelly ◽  
James Winters ◽  
Charles Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Communicative Efficiency ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
Over Time

Linguistic systems, be they spoken, written, or signed, are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that the characters of the Chinese writing system have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than a million images of Chinese characters spanning more than 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simplification through time, and contrary to popular belief we find that modern Chinese characters are higher in visual complexity than their earliest known counterparts. A plausible explanation for our findings is that simplicity trades off with distinctiveness, and that characters have become less simple because they have increased in distinctiveness over time. Our findings are therefore compatible with functional accounts of language but highlight the diverse and sometimes counterintuitive ways in which linguistic systems are shaped by pressures for communicative efficiency.

scholarly journals The Chinese Script in the Chinese Scriptworld

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Visual Language ◽  
Chinese Script ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

The exclusivist ideology characterizing the Chinese writing system as “ideographs” was constructed in the West, and later reimported into China where it influenced popular and nationalistic understandings of the characters. For the West, the Chinese script held out the promise, embraced particularly eagerly by the literary and artistic worlds, of a visual language not complicated by questions of sound, and thus by the arbitrary impositions of individual languages (Bush). For China, the Chinese script came to function as one of the key cultural characteristics marking the Chinese off from the rest of the world (Shen). This paper will attempt to provide some conceptual groundwork for understanding these complex and overlapping discourses, and set out the fundamental graphological basis through which the differing functions of Chinese characters in both the historical and the contemporary Chinese Scriptworld (Handel) can be understood.

Reconstructing Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu on the Taiwan-based Internet

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsi-Yao Su
Keyword(s):  
Positive Affect ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Interactional Functions ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing

This study investigates a type of online language play popularized on the Taiwan-based Internet, including the rendering in Chinese characters of the sounds of Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu (Taiwanese-accented Mandarin), which are defined as Stylized Taiwanese and Stylized Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, respectively. The playfulness inherent in these stylized practices has multiple sources. First, they manipulate the Chinese writing system and create an incongruity between sound and meaning. Second, they call attention simultaneously to a number of functions of language (Jakobson, 1960). Third, the two stylized practices bring into play the respective social meanings and stereotypes associated with their spoken counterparts. Thus the superficially similar forms of language play may be interpreted differently and further serve subtly different interactional functions in face-threatening situations. Two cases of stylized practices are examined in detail to illustrate how stylized language play is used to mitigate potential tension, to show positive affect, and to regulate appropriate group behaviors simultaneously.

“Head” Related Phrases In Chinese Language And Their Semantics

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (08) ◽  
pp. 621-630
Author(s):  
Tair Akimov
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Young People ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Semantic Structure ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Chinese Studies ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Practical Life

Everyone knows that phraseological units are the most popular genre of oral folk art, which was formed as a result of life observations of the ancestors. Learning and analyzing Chinese phraseology allow us to better understand the inner world of the Chinese nation. This article reveals and semantically analyzes aspects of the word “head” that are closely related to Chinese culture. The worldview, deep logical thoughts, feelings, superstitions, lifestyle and environment of the Chinese people are described in phraseological expressions in a concise and clear form. This article discusses the semantics and features of Chinese-language phraseological phrases associated with the word “head”. Chinese-language phrases associated with “head” express meanings such as wisdom and ignorance, process of thinking, cunning,sagacity, and planning. Phraseological units in Chinese linguistics are closely related to practical life and determine such features as philosophical and ideological thinking, logical observation. Taking into account the above, the article provides a comparative analysis of phraseological units related to “head” in Chinese and Uzbek languages. The figurative meanings of the word “head” are being revealed, semantic connections and semantic structure of phrases in the sentence are in the process of learning. Chinese phraseological expressions are poorly studied in Uzbek-Chinese studies. We hope that this work will provide practical assistance to our young people who are learning Chinese.

scholarly journals Neurocognitive Basis of Dyslexia in Different Writing Systems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Liu ◽  
James R. Booth
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Dyslexia ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
Alphabetic Writing

An important issue in dyslexia research is whether developmental dyslexia in different writing systems has a common neurocognitive basis across writing systems or whether there are specific neurocognitive alterations. In this chapter, we review studies that investigate the neurocognitive basis of dyslexia in Chinese, a logographic writing system, and compare the findings of these studies with dyslexia in alphabetic writing systems. We begin with a brief review of the characteristics of the Chinese writing system because to fully understand the commonality and specificity in the neural basis of Chinese dyslexia one must understand how logographic writing systems are structured differently than alphabetic systems.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture. Edited by Edward L. Davis. [London and New York: Routledge, 2005. xxiv+786 pp. $210.00. ISBN 0-415-24129-4.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 458-459
Author(s):  
Jeremy Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Falun Gong ◽  
Chinese Studies ◽  
Reform Period ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Important Shift

Readers seeking information about prominent urban Chinese artists, writers, composers, film-makers, public intellectuals, and socio-cultural trends in the reform period will find much of use in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, a collaborative transnational effort that is unfortunately marred by unevenness and sloppy editing. Browsers will also find lively and opinionated essays about cars and taxis, falun gong, democracy, dating and sex shops.Editor Edward L. Davis gave free reign to the contributors of the almost 1,200 entries in this fifth volume, encouraging them to pass judgment and editorialize. He also wisely involved mainland scholars like Yue Daiyun and Dai Jinhua when drawing up the lists of entries, and called upon Francesca Dal Lago to oversee the book's excellent sections on visual arts. While the Encyclopedia's list of contributors includes prominent, well-established scholars (Timothy Cheek on intellectuals and academics, Frank Dikötter on prisons, and Geremie Barme´ on seemingly anything he wanted to write about), its large number of young, Chineseborn scholars based in North America and Europe reflects an important shift in the field of Chinese studies.Entries, varying in length from a single paragraph to ten pages (see Lionel Jensen's piece on falun gong, for example), are organized alphabetically, include cross-references, and are often followed by suggestions for further reading. A helpful thematic classified entry list precedes the entries themselves. Unfortunately, problematic organization undermines the book's usefulness for both literate Chinese readers and those with no knowledge of the language. Pinyin renderings of names and phrases are not accompanied by Chinese characters, hampering the task of scholars hoping to conduct further primary-source research on a particular person.

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