Review of Ulug Kuzuoglu's Codes of Modernity

East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 2021

This study examines the script crisis that emerged in China during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the old ideology of state phonocentrism and the new wave of computer science demanded the abandoning of Chinese char- acters altogether. Under the project of establishing new human-machine inter- faces, national debates over such technical issues as the statistical properties of Chinese according to Claude Shannon’s information theory took place in various venues, challenging the conventional language ideologies. As linguists and engineers rallied to collaborate on the scriptal modernization project on the basis of the discursive space opened up by critiques of the 1977 Simplification Scheme, efforts to integrate Chinese script into computer data-storage formats ended up destabilizing the understanding of Chinese writing that conventionally takes “zi” as opposed to “ci” as its basic unit. The shifting foci of script reform discourses during the period demonstrate that the rise of information technology and resumed debates over script reform jointly instigated a retheorization of written Chinese.

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2017

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization

The study of sociolinguistics, including that of language standardization, has largely been built on cases from the West. Hence, languages, societies and historical experiences in Western, industrialized and rich democracies have disproportionately contributed to the formation of models and theories. Cases outside of Europe and North America are predestined to test, challenge and expand sociolinguistic theory and methodology (Smakman & Heinrich 2015). In this chapter, I explore how modern vocabulary was coined and shared in the Chinese Character Cultural Sphere (China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam). This case shows that language modernization in this part of the world had very strong transcultural aspects, largely due to Japan's pioneering role in language modernization in Asia and to the shared Chinese writing system. The topic discussed in this chapter has a twofold implication for our understanding of language standardization. First, standardization is not limited to linguistically separated and geographically demarcated states, but may occur across languages and states. Second, the writing system has an influence on the standardization process. With the onset of East Asian modernization in the mid-nineteenth century, Japan eclipsed for several decades China's position as the cultural centre of the Chinese Character Cultural Sphere. Japan now coined a large number of Sino-Japanese words itself-these types of Sino-Japanese words I am grateful to Richard Quang-Anh Tran for checking the Vietnamese transcriptions and to two anonymous readers for helping me better develop the subject at hand and avoid some mistakes. All remaining errors and inadequacies are mine. 9781108471817c21_p576-596.indd 576 24/09/20 9:55 PM 1 Sino-Xenic (China + foreign) refers to the systems according to which Chinese characters are read in Japan (Sino-Japanese), Korea (Sino-Korean) and Vietnam (Sino-Vietnamese). 2 In Japan and Korea, an immense number of predominantly English loanwords has been borrowed directly since 1945, and in China, new terms have been created independent of Japanese influence. In Vietnam, French terms were directly incorporated during the French colonial period, and recently English has provided loanwords.

2015

One of the main elements—if not the element—that has sustained the myth of the continuity and unity of “Chinese civilization” for so long is its writing system, which has invested upon what we now call “China” and “Chinese culture” an aura of permanence and immutability that has constantly been used as an instrument to sustain very different ideas and desires by both Westerners and Chinese. Throughout the outstanding Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture, Andrea Bachner brings forward the concept of “script politics” and, relying on a very original approach, lays bare the nuances and contradictions that question long-standing ideas characterized by cultural rigidity, while offering insight into a new way of approaching the study of Chinese cultural phenomena. Bachner does so by drawing on a wide range of theoretical resources for analysis, and a rich selection of cases and cultural manifestations—from calligraphy, photography, cinema and literature, to artistic...

Journal of Asian Studies, 2022

This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.

ChinaSource, 2023

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2012

This paper examines how the use of archaic Chinese script styles -re-discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries - became broadly popular in the waning years of the Qing dynasty and Republic period.

Journal of Chinese Humanities, 2019

China's Orthographic Dilemma, The Logic of Chinese Characters, Liùshū Revisited V2.0, 2022

In 1918, Qian Xuantong (professor of Chinese literature at Peking University) said in a letter published in New Youth magazine: "If we don’t want China to perish, and if we want it to be a civilized nation in the twentieth century, the best thing to do would be to abandon Confucianism and Daoism, and the simplest way toward this end would be to abandon written Chinese, in which the Confucian doctrines and Daoist fallacies were recorded. After written Chinese is abandoned ... we should adopt Esperanto, an artificial language that is concise in grammar, uniform in pronunciation, and elegant in its word roots." [Ping Chen, ‘China’, in Andrew Simpson (ed.), Language and National Identity in Asia, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 151.] Confucian doctrines are recorded in Chinese characters. Not just in Confucian texts such as 中庸, but in the actual Chinese characters such as 命. How do you get rid of Confucianism when Confucian doctrines are recorded in Chinese characters? That is the dilemma that the Chinese intellectual and political elites discussed publicly in newspapers and magazines during the first half of the twentieth century from 1918 during the New Culture Movement until 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. The choices they discussed were: 1) Replace both the Chinese written and spoken language with a language such as Esperanto 2) Keep spoken Chinese and replace only the Chinese writing script with a phonetic script such as Latinxua Sinwenz 3) Keep spoken and written Chinese but change Chinese characters so that Confucian doctrines could not be easily ascertained in Chinese characters and call the change 'simplification' 4) Don't change Chinese characters History shows that the PRC went for option 3 although Mao Zedong personally wanted option 2. Mao's failure to replace Chinese characters with a phonetic script may have sown the seeds for the subsequent Cultural Revolution as well as paved the way for the post-Mao Confucian revival. The title of the first century CE dictionary Shuowen Jiezi says: 說(shuō: speak) 文(wén: literature, culture, writing) 解 (jiě: untie; explain) 字(zì: character). When you 說(shuō: speak) about Chinese 文(wén: literature, culture, writing), you have to 解 (jiě: untie) the components in order to 解 (jiě: explain) what the 字(zì: character) means. This is why Xu Shen, the dictionary's author, provides the word roots for characters in the Shuowen Jiezi. This is to assist us to 解 (jiě: untie) and 解 (jiě: explain) what the characters mean. When you 解 (jiě: untie) the components in order to 解 (jiě: explain) what the 字(zì: character) means, you will find that Chinese characters are associate compounds. For example, the character 命 is an associate compound that says: 卩(jié: seal) 口(kǒu: mouth; entrance) 亼(jí: to assemble) 叩(kòu: kowtow) 令(ling: command) 合(hé: combine, unite) 命(mìng: life, fate). Life and fate combines and unites when 天命(tiānmìng: heaven’s fate, Mandate of Heaven) unites with 革命(gémìng: leather’s fate; revolution).This is Confucian philosophy that is recorded in Chinese characters, which can only be accessed through the application of logic in the analysis of what different Chinese characters say. The ancient Confucian text 中庸 has been translated into English as Doctrine of the Mean, Constant Mean, Middle Way, Middle Use, Unwobbling Pivot, and Focusing the Familiar. Logic should tell us that there is something quite wrong when just two Chinese characters can lead to such divergent translations. When we understand Chinese characters as associate compounds, we can read that 中庸 says: 丨口中, 用庚庸. You will understand what these associate compounds mean when you understand classical Chinese frames of reference, which are different from vernacular Chinese frames of reference. The Logic of Chinese Characters, Liu Shu Revisited explains how to untie and read Chinese characters as associate compounds and I explore associate compounds found in Oracle Script, Seal Script and Kai Script. 漢字 was created for 古文, therefore the examining of 漢字 logic naturally leads to an unerstanding 古文. Note that the book is written for a diverse audience from experts in 白話文 to people without any knowledge of Chinese. Please bear with the book as it goes through the basics of Chinese character composition in the early chapters. Your patience will be rewarded once you progress to and past the end of Chapter 3. In Chapter 3, I reveal a message hidden by Xu Shen in the 說文解字. I believe that sinologists would be most interested in part 3 of my book in which I explore the conundrum, which is the world's oldest crossword puzzle and may have been created by Confucius. However, in order to understand part 3 of my book, you will first have to read through part 1 (introduction) and part 2 (framework). The book is an unconventional exploration of the logic underlying 漢字, in which Confucianism and Daoism are recorded. You will find that understanding associate compounds in 漢字 will assist in understanding Chinese literature, culture, politics, philosophy and impact translations of 漢字 into other languages.

Studia Orientalia Slovaca, 2018

(1895-1976) is one of the most noted intellectuals active in the reform of written Chinese, and belongs to the circle of influential figures of the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s who were promoting baihuawen ('written vernacular') as the language (or rather: language register) for a new literature and as a medium of learned discourse. 1 However, the term baihuawen itself, despite having been a widely discussed issue for decades, was never easy to define since as a language with the aspiration to become a nationwide normative written language close to speech, it could only become a compromise within the diversity of various languages spoken in China. 2 In this respect, we should talk about diglossia-a hierarchical structured

Sinographies contains within its pages a wide array of theoretical explorations, literary critical elucidations, textual studies, historical investigations, and personal ruminations of what it means to write "China" and "Chineseness". The China that emerges from these pages is plural not primarily because of differences in political and cultural geography, but mostly because of the contributors' shared interest in the processes through which the meanings of "China" and "Chineseness" are produced. The starting point is that "China is written," not in the sense of a text to be deciphered, but rather of a writing process: "'China' is not something one thinks about but something one thinks through" (xi).

T.E. McAuley (ed.) Language Change in East Asia (Richmond, Kent: Curzon), pp.180-204

Much has been written concerning the origins of East Asian scripts. Most of this concentrates on deriving one script from another in terms of similarities of form/appearance. For example, Chen et al. (1985: 221—3) in their discussion of the various forms of pre-modern Yi script concentrate on the Chinese origins of what is essentially only a small part of the repertoire of characters. Other authors have argued for the influence of Chinese/Indian phonological theory. The influence of Chinese script/phonology on other scripts is undeniable. It is a question of the #degree# of such influence. In this paper, I put the apparent influences and connections of script upon each other into perspective. In section 2, I illustrate why positing a connection between scripts based on resemblance is false by looking at a twentieth-century case of similar-looking scripts that are - uncontroversially - not related as mother and daughter. Having established that resemblance does not necessarily constitute script borrowing, I proceed in sections 3 and 4 to look in detail at the various ways in which scripts may be related, or at least similar: in section 3, I begin by identifying universal or localised tendencies of script evolution that account for similarities without positing mother-daughter links; in section 4, I present a classification of a range of different ways in which related scripts are related. Finally, in section 5, I look at the vernacular revolution and particularly the position of han’gŭl.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:

1988