scholarly journals Emergence of a New Written Culture: The use of Hebrew script among the Krimchaks and the Karaim

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Zsuzsanna Olach

Conversion to a religion usually has a positive impact on the written culture of a given community. The conversion may or may not result in the adoption of a new writing system. In the Turkic world, we find examples for both cases. The Karaims, by their conversion into Karaitism, adopted the Hebrew script. They used the Hebrew alphabet up till the beginning of the 20th century in their everyday life for writing; for example, private letters and secular and religious texts in Karaim.Another Turkic speaking group, the heterogeneous Rabbanite community of Krimchaks (whose majority is of Sephardic origin) also used the Hebrew script to write their vernacular.Some characteristics of the writing systems of the Karaim and of the Krimchaks have been described, but no comparative research has thus far been carried out. In this study, the peculiarities of the Hebrew alphabet used by both Turkic speaking peoples will be discussed and illustrated. For instance, the new characters, which were introduced in order to indicate specific Turkic phonetic values, and the ways the same Hebrew vowel sign or letter is used in the different Krimchak and Karaim manuscripts.

Author(s):  
Uģis Nastevičs

The article analyses a writing system of the Latvian language that has been scarcely researched before. The evidence of the usage of the knot script and song clews is present in the Latvian folklore, although it has been commonly considered as a metaphor. At the beginning of the 20th century there were individuals still using it prior to the conventional literacy increase due to the general education. Similar knot scripts can be found in several cultures around the globe. The article encompasses a study of previous researches and evidence in periodicals, Latvian community in Lithuania, education of commoners in Latvia, reciprocal comparison of the Latvian knot script writing systems, interview with a contemporary witness and experiment on reconstruction of the Latvian knot script.


1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
M Slamet Yahya

Islam is a religion that has prophetic mission, namely rahmatan lil ‘alamin, blessing to universe. To realize this mission, Islamic education must able to produce outputs that have inclusive character, pluralist, and appreciative to pluralism. Pluralism in Islam not only normatively supported by religious texts, but also on praxis-empiric level. Islam also has practiced life orientation that reflected religious plurality. Therefore, on global scale, acknowledgment to religious plurality became essential and significant matter. To realize this, it’s urgently needed wisdom to suppress emotional and radical attitude on everyday life. 


Author(s):  
Norhazlina Husin ◽  
Nuranisah Tan Abdullah ◽  
Aini Aziz

Abstract The teaching of Japanese language as third language to foreign students has its own issues and challenges. It does not merely involve only teaching the four language skills. Japanese language has its own unique values. These unique values also tend to differentiate the teaching of Japanese language as a third language from other third language acquisitions. The teaching of Japanese language as third language to foreign students also involves the teaching of its writing system. This makes the teaching of Japanese language rather complicated because Japanese language has three forms of writings, namely: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Students are required to fully understand the Hiragana system of writing first before proceeding to learn the other two forms of writings. The main challenge in the teaching of Japanese writing systems is the time allocated that can be considered as very limited as other language aspects need to be taught too. This, which relates directly to students’ factor very much contribute to the challenges foreseen. Students are likely to face problems in understanding and using the writings as they simultaneously need to adhere to the findings teaching and learning schedules. This article discusses on the analysis conducted in terms of the learning of the Hiragana and Katagana systems of writing among foreign students. The discussion in this article is based on the teaching of Japanese language to students of Universiti Teknologi MARA(UiTM), Shah Alam. Keywords: Third language, Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji


2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Venezky

Philologists, linguists, and educators have insisted for several centuries that the ideal orthography has a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme. Others, however, have suggested deviations for such functions as distinguishing homophones, displaying popular alternative spellings, and retaining morpheme identity. If, indeed, the one-to-one ideal were accepted, the International Phonetic Alphabet should become the orthographic standard for all enlightened nations, yet the failure of even a single country to adopt it for practical writing suggests that other factors besides phonology are considered important for a writing system. Whatever the ideal orthography might be, the practical writing systems adopted upon this earth reflect linguistic, psychological, and cultural considerations. Knowingly or unknowingly, countries have adopted orthographies that favour either the early stages of learning to read or the advanced stages, that is, the experienced reader. The more a system tends towards a one-to-one relationship between graphemes and phonemes, the more it assists the new reader and the non-speaker of the language while the more it marks etymology and morphology, the more it favours the experienced reader. The study of psychological processing in reading demonstrates that human capacities for processing print are so powerful that complex patterns and irregularities pose only a small challenge. Orthographic regularity is extracted from lexical input and used to recognise words during reading. To understand how such a system develops, researchers should draw on the general mechanisms of perceptual learning.


2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-234
Author(s):  
Martin Neef

Assuming that a writing system is inevitably dependent on a language system, the main function of written representations is to give access to the basic representations of the language system. In this paper, I want to deal with graphematic phenomena, i.e. the relations of written representations to corresponding phonological representations. In particular, I will delve into the relation of written representations to the phonological factor of the number of syllables, based on data from English and German. Though in these languages, there is neither a specific written element relating to the syllable number nor an isomorphic relation between vowel letters and the number of syllables, two questions are worth examining: Can a word have more syllables than vowel letters? Can a word have less syllables than uninterrupted sequences of vowel letters? The first question will be answered positively for both languages although there are some severe differences to be stated; the second question will be answered positively only for English. I will show that these results are side-effects of more basic regularities of the writing systems under consideration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Duncan Poupard

A script can be a window into a language and all the culture contained within it. China’s minority peoples have a multitude of scripts, but many are in danger of falling out of use, a decline spurred by the adoption and promotion of standard Chinese across the country. Nevertheless, efforts are being made to preserve minority writing systems. This article reveals how the primarily logographic Naxi dongba script (often labelled the world’s ‘last living pictographs’), used in China’s southwestern Yunnan province to record the Naxi language, can be practically used as a modern writing system alongside its more widely known traditional role as a means of recording religious rites, and what exactly separates these two styles of writing. The efforts that have been made to achieve the goal of modernisation over the past decades are reviewed, including the longstanding attempts at Unicode encoding. I make some suggestions for the future development of the script, and employ plenty of examples from recent publications, alongside phonetic renderings and English translations. It is hoped that overall awareness of this unique script can be raised, and that it can develop into a vernacular script with everyday applications.


Xihmai ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Fournier Garcí­a ◽  
Bridget M. Zavala Moynahan

Resumen A lo largo del Camino Real los habitantes usaron la cultura material - incluyendo objetos de uso cotidiano destinados a la preparación, almacenamiento y servicio de alimentos- para construir y reafirmar aspectos identitarios. En este ensayo, derivado de nuestras investigaciones concluidas en 2013, consideramos patrones de consumo de estos objetos desde el siglo XVIII hasta inicios del XX reflejados en inventarios de bienes de la época y contextos arqueológicos de la Nueva Vizcaya colonial (hoy Durango y Chihuahua). Contrastamos entre las vajillas que emplearon las personas con alto poder adquisitivo y los de uso entre el común de la gente, según los registros documentales y los contextos arqueológicos con diversas funciones y temporalidades registrados en el valle del Rí­o Sextí­n, Durango.   Palabras clave: Nueva Vizcaya, Camino Real, consumo cotidiano, haciendas, identidad Abstract   The residents along the Royal Road used material culture, including everyday life objects related to the preparation, storage and serving of foods, to construct and reaffirm aspects of their social identity and status. In this article, based on our research finished in 2013, we consider their consumption as reflected in 18th to 20th century documents and archaeological contexts from southern New Biscay (modern-day Durango and Chihuahua). We compare ceramic goods used by individuals with high economic standing with those employed by commoners, as registered in historical sources and data from archaeological sites with diverse functions and temporalities, recorded in the Sextí­n valley, Durango. Keywords: New Biscay, Royal Road, everyday life consumption, haciendas, identity


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Liu ◽  
James R. Booth

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.


Author(s):  
Delyash N. Muzraevа ◽  

Introduction. The written heritage of Kalmyk Buddhist priests, their daily practices, liturgical repertoire still remain a poorly studied page in the history of Buddhism among Mongolic peoples in the 20th century. The survived collections, clusters of religious texts prove instrumental in revealing most interesting aspects of their activities, efforts aimed at preservation of Buddhist teachings, their popularization and dissemination among believers. Goals. The paper examines two Oirat copies of the Precepts of the Omniscient [Manjushri] from N. D. Kichikov’s collection, transliterates and translates the original texts, provides a comparative analysis, and notes differences therein that had resulted from the scribe’s work, thereby introducing the narratives into scientific circulation. Materials. The article describes two Oirat manuscripts bound in the form of a notebook and contained in different bundles/collections of Buddhist religious texts stored at Ketchenery Museum of Local History and Lore. As is known, the collection is largely compiled from texts that belonged to the famous Kalmyk Buddhist monk Namka (N. D. Kichikov). Results. The analysis of the two Oirat texts with identical titles — Precepts of the Omniscient [Manjushri] — shows that their contents coincide generally but both the texts contain fragmented omissions (separate words, one or several sentences) that are present in the other. At the same time, when omitting fragments of the text addressed to the monastic community, the scribe was obviously guided by that those would be superfluous for the laity. Thus, our comparative analysis of the two manuscript copies demonstrates the sometimes dramatic role of the scribe in transmitting Buddhist teachings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
José Edilson Amorim

ResumoA partir de uma crônica de Bráulio Tavares, este artigo reflete sobre cenas da precariedade de ontem e de hoje. A primeira cena está em Lima Barreto, em Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha, ao referir a Revolta da Vacina no Rio de Janeiro do século XX, comparada às manifestações de 2013 e 2014 no país; a segunda é a espetacularização da mídia sobre as manifestações de rua em 2013 e 2014, e sobre o processo de impedimento do mandato presidencial de Dilma Rousseff em 2015; a terceira é uma cena da vida cotidiana de uma moça de Brasília em outubro de 2014. As três situações revelam o mundo da classe trabalhadora e seu desamparo em meio ao espetáculo midiático.Palavras-chave: Trabalho. Mídia. Política. Espetáculo. AbstractFrom a chronicle by Bráulio Tavares, this paper reflects about scenes of the precariousness of yesterday and today. The first scene is in Lima Barreto’s novel Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha (Memories of the scrivener Isaías Caminha), when referring to the Vaccine Revolt in the Rio de Janeiro of the 20th century, compared to the manifestations of 2013 and 2014 in Brazil; the second is about the media spectacularization of the street manifestations between 2013 e 2014 in Brazil, and also on Dilma Rousseff's impeachment process in 2015; the third one is from the everyday life of a girl from Brasília in October of 2014. All those three situations reveal the world of the working class and its helplessness in the face of the media spectacularization.Keywords: Work. Media. Politics. Spectacle.


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