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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals On Sino-Turkic, a First Glance (北俗初探)

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-476
Author(s):  
An-King Lim ◽  
林安 慶
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
National Language ◽  
List Type ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Free Relative ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing

When Turkic-speaking Tabghatch conquered China in 386 ce and ruled her for nearly 200 years, they, being minority rulers, elected to take up Chinese writing system and language as the official means of communication with its subject population. They also ended up adopting the writing system to script the Turkic language for their Turkic population resulting into a Xianbei National Language (xnl). This work describes 7 cases of Turkic-rooted Sinitic functional expressions, all featuring the word 的 [d-], supported with historical citations in Chinese documents, believed to be cultural continua of the xnl: 1) The constative preterite -dI, -dXŋ → the constative 的 [də], 底 [di], 端 [duan] 2) The nominalizer -dOk+ in free relative clause → Sinitc 的 [də], 底 [di], 得 [də] in free relative clause 3) The nominalizer -dOk+ in bound relative clause → Sinitic 底 [di], 的 [də] in bound relative clause 4) The adverb of manner suffix +tI/+dI → the adverb of manner suffixes 地 [di], 底 [di], 的 [də] 5) The locative-ablative case suffixes +dA/+tA → the locative suffixes 底 [di], 頭 [tou], 的 [də] 6) The perfect participle -dOk → the perfect participles 得 [də], 的 [di] 7) The completive perfect formative ïd- → the completive perfect formatives 得 [də], 的 [di]

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