Chinese Writing and Script

Early Cantonese

2014-04-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

There have been three main views for the development of the Cantonese language. One view stated that Chinese troops in southern China mixed with the native Yue people and the two languages converged, which explained the reason for similarities between Cantonese and the modern Zhuang and Yao languages, during the Qin and Han Dynasties. A second view placed the dating after the Tang Dynasty when the region was cut off from the rest of China which would have lent to a separate linguistic tradition being formed. And the third view, pushed the time period further, in the Song Dynasty. This view stated that immigrants during the dynasty added to the linguistic differences already present, but argued that most of the features of modern Cantonese stemmed from this immigration. Although there is no way to know for certain which view is correct, by the Qing Dynasty, Cantonese was sufficiently different as to warrant a special program that would instruct candidates looking to be government officials in the ‘correct’ pronunciation of Chinese. Once the language branched off, it was only a matter of time until the script changed as well. In order to understand the origins of the Cantonese vernacular script, it is important to look at the origins of other vernacular scripts in China. Victor Mair argued that many of the languages of China owe their vernacular scripts to Buddhism, which put an emphasis on the oral tradition. The only way to accurately record selections of speech was through the use of a vernacular script. Many of the first Cantonese vernacular script texts are Buddhist in nature, with an emphasis on singing and chanting.[1] Although early attempts were made at using a Cantonese script, nothing remotely standardized. Most of the characters used were known by the creators and few others.

[1] Snow, Donald Bruce. Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004.

The Link

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From the Shang Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese script continued to evolve to eventually produce 楷書 (Kai Shu)—the standard script. The same factors that governed the creation and standardization of earlier scripts is mirrored in the creation of the vernacular Cantonese script. This paper offers to address the differing developmental stages of the script within the historical context, to further shed light on the evolutionary process. This is completed first by explaining the narrative history surrounding the script and second by analyzing sources written in the script. Then, by setting this framework, current Hong Kong vernacular Cantonese script sources are used to show that the script’s characters are created using the same processes. The Cantonese script, like previous Chinese scripts, continues to evolve. This paper will conclude by elucidating the unstandardized nature of the Cantonese vernacular script, and explore, using the ancient Chinese sources, possible outcomes of the script. This will be done by comparing the evolution of early Chinese scripts to the evolution of the Cantonese script and projecting the outcomes of the Chinese script on the vernacular Cantonese script.

Character Simplification

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Zhou Youguang. The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003.
Summary

The character system is inherently difficult. Zhou identifies, what he calls, the "four difficulties:" complicated stroke patterns, large number of characters, chaotic pronunciation, and understanding the meaning is difficult. To counter these he shows how these difficulties have been managed in the past by listing four stabilizing features that have remedied these problems: stabilize the shapes, stabilize the amount, stabilize pronunciation, and stabilize the sequence.

Stabilizing the shape deals with the number of strokes that it takes to write a character, many characters have been written in many variant forms, depending on the time period and the script at use during that time. This is often done naturally as the script is written more often by more people. After the Qin reunification the seal script became too inconvenient to be written quickly so the clerical script was created. The clerical script drastically reduced the number of strokes to write characters and also standardized the strokes used. Later as the clerical script was used more and more, it merged with the semi-cursive script to create the standard script. This trend has continued to the present, with many of the common abbreviations of characters have become the official characters in public use. Zhou argues against the popular theory that character scripts get more and more complicated as time progressing by explaining the difference between "compounding" and "complexity." Most characters are compounds of simpler distinguishable features,which to the untrained eye have the appearance of complexity, but in reality go to distinguish important phonetic and semantic qualities. Another way that the shape has been simplified was through "assimilation." Assimilation, if done correctly, can reduce component parts without creating vagueness. An example of this is using the 月 which means "moon" to be the radical to represent 肉 or "meat." Although the 月 character itself is common enough, it is rarely used as a radical meaning "moon" which makes it a great target for assimilation.

Stabilizing the amount of characters not only includes the overall count, but also the amount that is to be used at different levels of education: professional vs grade school. There have been several attempts at this, but they have mostly failed. One example was in 1921 where Lu Feikui called for a 2,000 character limit for common usage. Although an overall cap on the number of characters has never come about the modern answer to this question limits the number used at each level. Elementary school students need to know 2,500, 3,500 for junior high, and 7,000 characters for general usage. The important thing to remember about these numbers is that they act as a cap on the number to be used and do not necessarily represent the common number used.

Stabilization of pronunciation has come about due to the inability of the phonetic element of the character to accurately express the full phonetic value of the character. According to Zhou 81% of Chinese characters have these phonetic elements. This number is misleading in the fact that these phonetic radicals play a number of different roles. With 35% of the number, the correct initial and final sounds can be determined but not the tone. With 48%, some aspect (initial, final, or tone) of the pronunciation can be determined by the phonetic element. And with 17% of the characters, the phonetic element is actually misleading in knowing the pronunciation.

Continued simplification throughout history

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Zhou Youguang. The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Summary

Most of the current list of official simplified characters in use by the PRC today have ancient origins. Out of the 2,235 characters on the list 521 are directly from ancient sources, and most of the others are derived from them. These different derived forms were in use during the height of the standard script, but used mostly in the cursive form for faster writing. Many of these simplification have become standardized over history thus making characters easier to write and remember. As a general rule with characters, they should not possess more than seven strokes for left to right and more than eight from top to bottom. This rule allows for the clear rioting of characters at any size being legible (some of the more complicated characters need to be written larger in order to distinguish the many individual strokes found within). Simplified characters add another advantage to reading, the simplified characters have clearer radicals and are therefore much easier to classify.

Although the advantages are many, there are equally as many disadvantages to this process of simplification. As the meanings of characters are combined and reduced, the number of look-alike characters is increased. An example of this is 巳,已, and 己. This is just one of the long list of look-alike characters that need to be carefully identified due to simplification. A second disadvantage is that some of these characters are created without thinking of the flow of the brush (classically), but just with how they look. This causes characters to be formed awkwardly as the strokes do not blend together as they should. Also many of these same characters (such as 长，为) contain no clear radical and are therefore harder to distinguish and order. The third problem with these simplifications is that previously they were not standardized. The standard script filled books, while these simplifications filled notes. With the Founding of the PRC and the official simplification of the character script, many books have been cast off as essentially being written in a foreign language.

Of the current PRC characters in use about 1/3 are simplifications with the majority still being in their transitional format.

There had been a move to simplify the characters two times previously by the communist government but each timed failed. It was not until the government replaced the typeset that the simplification caught on. Once the typeset was changed, then all typed material had to use the simplified characters and now longer had a choice between the two scripts. As the majority of the works were then published in simplified characters the population just became used to reading and eventually writing it. Many people thought that this simplification would adversely affect the calligraphic tradition so prevalent in China. At first there was not any backlash as only a 1/3 of the characters actually changed, but as more and more calligraphers used them they realized that a good number of the characters do not lend themselves to calligraphy (for the reasons noted above).

The Evolution from Clerical to Standard

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Qiu Xigui. Chinese Writing. New Haven, CT: Birdtrack Press, 2000.
Summary

Just like other evolutionary scripts, the clerical script was not supplanted by the standard script overnight. The Eastern and Western Han Dynasty is when the clerical script was the primary style. As the script became more used a cursive style emerged. Also at this time a simpler-to-write version of the clerical script emerged called the neo-clerical script. This neo-clerical script merged with the cursive script to create standard script. Near the end of the life of the clerical it looked very similar to the standard script. The standard script did not become the primary script until around two hundred years later.

One theory for why the standard script became the most popular script was that a calligraphic master named Zhōng Yóu created it for his calligraphy. Later the renowned Eastern Jin calligrapher Wang Xizhi and his son built on the script to standardize it even more and to even out the strokes making it even "more pleasing to the eye." Even though the script had come into existence well before this time, it was mostly just used by men of letters. The average person used either the neo-clerical script or a variation of a semi-cursive script.

The meaning of the character "楷" is pattern, this meant that this style should serve as a guide or standard. By this early stage it had completely become separate from the other semi-cursive scripts but it had hardly become the model or standard script. Also during this early stage the quality of the script would change dramatically depending on who was writing it. If the script was written quickly it would look much more like the modern cursive, and if written with more car then it would be closer to the standard. It was not until the Song Dynasty that the specific script started to be called Kai Shu, before that time Kai Shu referred to any of the semi-cursive scripts that had become the standard of time.

The period when the clerical script stopped being used and the standard script became the primary script is hard to pinpoint. Most scholars place the date of the last official clerical script use was during the Wei-Jin period. This period was more than likely the transition stage between the two scripts. After the script was adopted the characters continued to be standardized and simplified, while the style that the characters when written in changed very little. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties period has been accepted to be the first use of the script by the majority of people.

What made the standard script so popular that it moved from just a script used by the literary elite to being the script of the masses? The script was able to make the leap due to (1) its relation to the clerical script with similar stroke orders (popular at the time), and (2) that it was more simplified, but also preserved the inherent beauty.

From Oracle Bones to the Qin-Han Reforms

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Boltz, William G. The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society, 1994.
Summary

Although the script of the oracle bones and the Zhou bronzes are fairly well documented there is a gap between them and the Qin standardized script. With this lack of evidence it is hard to show a direct line of evolution between the early scripts and the Qin-Han scripts. A further complication to the matter is that most of the pre-Han works were filtered through Han scribes who revised and altered the works to align with their script. Since the early 90s, however, more and more artifacts have been uncovered that have the original text forms from the pre-Han period. These artifacts found, written on wood, bamboo, or silk, have brought new light to the evolutionary process of the script.

I order to show how the Kai Shu 楷书 (standard script) came into existence it is necessary to first look at Qin Shi Huang Di 秦始皇帝 and the reforms of Li Si 李斯. The author brings new light to the story of the Qin Emperor burning books. He argues that a main reason for the burning could have been to guarantee the success of his script standardization. At the time he came to power many different scripts were being used, but the burning of the books destroyed scholarship written in the Gu Wen 古文 (ancient script). Thereby making it useless to learn the script, as nothing was written in it. This reform led to a near millennium gap between the bone and bronze inscriptions and the Qin script. The author argues that the period of standardization lasted from Li Si (c. 200BCE) to Xu Shen 许慎 (c. 100CE). During this period there were still a number of variant scripts which slowly faded away. This variants might have had lexical differences to the standard script, but the author only focuses on the graphic variants in order to show the clear evolutionary pattern.

Next the author looks at the Ma Wang Tui manuscripts which he shows can be accurately dated to the pre and early Han Dynasty because of their use of Han Emperor's given names (which would have been avoided after they were emperor). In these pre-reform manuscripts there are several cases of graphic variation. The main example of this variation is characterized by the characters 堇 and 勤. Both characters are pronounced the same, and both have the same meaning, they just look different. This shows that the 力 radical had not yet been standardized, and it remained in flux until after the reform period. This type of variation is to be expected because the longer the script was used the more characters needed to be created by adding pieces (radicals in this case) to preexisting characters. And although the process was used regularly, there was no standard way of adding radicals until after Xu Shen. Another variation is classified by the difference in uses between 而 and 能. The characters are used in the same way, but even now we are not sure if they were pronounced the same way, or if they had the same meaning.

Chinese System Classification

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DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1986.

There are many debates on what to call Chinese characters, and hope to classify them. There are many categories that linguists group Chinese into which DeFrancis explores: ideographic, logographic, morphographic, to name the main ones. Those that argue that Chinese is ideographic say that each character represents an idea. And although it can be pronounced differently using different dialects the same idea is still present. For logographic proponents say that the Chinese characters represent a word. 'The key point of disagreement leading to these terms is whether a character conveys meaning directly or through the intermediary of the word.' Mophographic comes from the argument, what is a word? Those that claim logography say that a word is one character, where those that favor morphogrphy say that word is more than one character. This view continues by claiming that each character is actually a morpheme, the smallest meaningful unit in the language. Due to the complex nature of the characters even more classifications arise. Phonograms comes from the phonetic element that is claimed to exist in some 90 percent of Chinese characters. This grouping is further elaborated by calling them syllabic phonograms. This points to the phonetic element but also link in that the words come in the form of syllables.

It is widely known that the characters have pictographic beginnings, but they soon evolved into stylized characters. Chinese characters can be broken up into individual units called 'strokes.' These units can be further broken up into three different categories:

Dots: 丶

Lines: l，一，𠄌

Hooks:亅，乛，乙

Although characters are made up of these strokes they themselves hold no inherent meaning or sound value, just as the "丶"part of "x" has no meaning or sound value. Strokes are made by having a starting point, the moving toward any direction from northeast to southwest.

In many dictionaries characters are classified by the number of strokes that they contain. Those wanting to look up a character will not only need to know how many strokes are in a character but also in what order they are written. Ah a general rule "top before bottom" and "left before right." As an example, the 人 character is comprised of two strokes in this order: 丿then丶. The 大, is 一，丿，then 丶. And 囗 is l，𠃍，then －. Simple characters, like these, are then combined with other simple characters to make complex characters. They are usually combined by left-right or top-bottom. 唔 is made up of three simple characters, two 口 and one 五. The two 口 are added to the left and bottom of the 五. Other examples include: 叶，佫，㭉. Using these principles you can keep adding on simple or even more complex characters to the left or top to create an infinite number of characters, 舞，遲，駴，鱡. Ninety percent of the characters in the Chinese dictionary used these two rules left-right or top-bottom.

What do the Characters Mean?

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Honey, David B. "The Word Behind the Graph in Classical Chinese: Three Notes on the Logographic Writing System." Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 26, no. 4 (October 1989): 15-26.
Summary

In this article the author argues that although people think that Chinese is easy because its lack of grammatical tense, gender, and other 'syntactical signposts.' The learner of Classical Chinese soon wishes that these things did exist, because the grammatical function of a character is not apparent in the graph or the phonological aspect of the character. Although the structures of the characters do not change, depending on the context, the grammatical functions of the character can. In order to fully understand the meaning of the characters one has to 'approach Classical Chinese in terms of the words represented be the graphs.' For example 中 means middle and is one of the first characters that students learn, but in the classical phrase 「射者必中礼」(the archer must center on ritual) the 中 means 'to center.' This apparent change in means is not as radical as it can be in some cases. This is all possible through the logographic nature of the script. The article is then broken down into three different ways 'in which the words function behind the graph.' First, Polygraphy means that several graphs can represent the same word. This function is possible because graphs are often borrowed for their sound. Several graphs with the same sound can be used interchangeably to mean any one specific character. Early Chinese was phonographic, one character, one sound. And so the graphs were just used for their sound only and not for any inherent meaning behind them. Second, Polysemy means that one character can represent several different words. For example, 「独樂樂，孰樂？」the 樂 character is used three times, but each time it is pronounced a different way, with the first two together meaning music and the last one meaning 'to enjoy.' This can be understood by understanding that both meanings/words come from the same root even though over time they have changed. As in the English 'practical' and 'practice' both come from the Latin 'practicus.' The third is polyptoton, which means the same character used in two grammatical functions. More specifically this is where a character serves two different grammatical roles in one sentence, or is used in its regular fashion in addition to being used grammatically.

Creel, Herrlee Glessner. Chinese Writing. Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1943.

The main point of the article is two-fold. The first part is showing the pictographic nature within many characters and how they evolved overtime to look like and mean what they do. Characters are put together to form a sentence which is then broken apart to show how the characters' meaning is changed depending on the context. The second part of the article breaks down a phrase written in literary Chinese to show that even more inference and background knowledge is required to understand it. After each character in the saying is explained then the background story behind the phrase is shared. Even with that much insight it is still a leap between the two meanings. Context is one of the most important ways to understand what is really meant.

Chinese Writing

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Chang, Cheng-Mei. “Chinese Writing.” Expedition 31, no. 1 (1989): 40-51.
Summary

In 221BCE with the establishment of the Qin Dynasty, emperor Shih-huang unified the script. He wanted to simplify the script for less time-consuming stone carving proclamations. This script is known as the ‘lesser seal script.’ Although this script had fewer curves it was still nowhere near simplified enough. A new script was slowly created to further simplify, in it many of the remaining curves were transformed into straight or flaring lines, and many of the remaining curves were transformed into straight or flaring lines, and many strokes were abbreviated as one or two swift lines. As this script was widely used by clerks it became known as the ‘clerical script.’ Even before the end of the Qin Dynasty (221-207BCE) this script was already in wide use. The Han Dynasty (206BCE-220CE) continued the simplification process that started in the Qin with the development of three new scripts—cursive (ts’ao-shu，草書), standard (k’ai-shu，楷書), and running (hsing-shu，行書).

The cursive script further abbreviated the clerical script and became the script of short-hand.

The standard script was also a simplified version of the clerical script dropping many flaring strokes. A new type of stoke was introduced, this stroke would pause and then turn quickly as in乚.

The running script, also based off of the clerical script did not attempt to simplify but just to link the characters together. The script was mostly used by calligraphers. The Han Dynasty also added to the amount of characters to about 10,000, this number steady increased throughout the dynasties. During the Qing dynasty the total amount was around 47,000, but with only 3000-5000 to read and write well. The standard script caught on and solidified during Sui and Tang Dynasties and has remained mostly unchanged until the introduction of the simplified script.

During Shang Dynasty the script was used for spiritual communications and was usually accompanied by a sacrifice. The Zhou Dynasty continued on with the same traditions with the addition that the script was also used for secular interactions. In the Sui and Han Dynasties the script was mostly employed with monitoring and governing the vast empire. All government officials were required to have an understanding of the current scripts of the time and could be replaced if they consistently had illegible hand writing. This rule persisted until the end of the Qing Dynasty. With rules like these in place the end of the Han Dynasty was the ideal situation for the art of calligraphy to arise. During the Six Dynasties period (220-589CE) the calligraphic art flourished as the political unrest brought forward new Daoist ideas. The time period trumpeted individualism and fought against the Confucian ideals which encouraged calligraphy to take firm hold. During the period calligraphy had merged itself with the culture created some of the greatest calligraphers in Chinese history.Calligraphy continued to develop for the remainder of Chinese history, employing different combinations of brushes and ink. The three scripts created during the Han Dynasty, however, continued to be the only scripts employed.

Modern Written Chinese and Chinese Writing

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Modern Written Chinese

Chen, Ping “Modern Written Chinese in Development.” Language in Society 22, no. 4 (December 1993): 505-537.
Summary

The main point of this article is to show the development of modern written Chinese in terms of the literary classical Chinese (wényán) being replaced by the vernacular script of everyday life (báihuà).

Wényán was the writing standard for the 2,000 years before the cultural upheavals that started in 1919. It was formed from the Chinese spoken during the pre-Qin and Han periods (206 BCE to 220 CE). Even though the wényán was closely related to the spoken language early on it soon became divorced.

Báihuà was a script created during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) that was more closely aligned with the common speech. Although the vocabulary and grammar of the wényán script was different from the spoken language it was used by the literary elite who looked down on the báihuà script. Although not the elite script, báihuà gained a little higher status at the end of the Tang Dynasty and was used to write novels up to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911).

Chinese Writing

Chang, Cheng-Mei. “Chinese Writing.” Expedition 31, no. 1 (1989): 40-51.
Summary

The focus of this article is to show the progression of the script throughout the dynasties as well as the development of the art of calligraphy. The Chinese script is unique in the fact that it is understood by knowing the character regardless of the pronunciation. It therefore unifies peoples that speak many different dialects. Right at the beginning the author asserts that Chinese did not evolve from a pictographic script, but was mostly of a phonographic script with some logograms.

Shang Dynasty

The earliest evidence of writing was found written on bones, 'shell-bone script.' The script contained 3000-4000 character, of which we can identify about 1000-2000. Although the size of different characters was not standardized (depending on number of strokes), the way it was written was—vertically downward and then left to right.

Zhou Dynasty

Most of the Zhou Dynasty's 'bronze script' has been found written on ritual bronzes. The script included some 4000 characters with some Shang words being dropped and new ones added. It is hard to do too much comparison as the purpose of the Shang script was oracular and the Zhou's was bureaucratic. Over the 800 years of the Zhou Dynasty the script became more abstract and even less pictographic. 'Gracefulness' became the main focus of the scribes and character sizes were standardized and the layout balanced. Also unlike early Zhou inscriptions that contained 10-100 characters the later inscriptions reached over 200-300.

The Dynasty was split up as feudal lords ruled much of the land during the period of the Eastern Zhou. The feudal lords lacked the means for monumental inscriptions and so they published their pedigrees on specially commission vessels. As a new sign of their power they wrote in a new script—the 'seal script.' This script was more convoluted than the older script, it added new strokes to add a more ornate feel to it. Likewise in southern China a script was produced that tried to accomplish the same goal by incorporating birds into the characters. Although these ornate scripts were popular they were not as practical. A simplified version of the script came under heavy use for everyday correspondences as well as official documents. This simplified script would be the basis for future scripts. With most of the writing of this time being written on bamboo slips, paper, silk, and hemp it has been near miraculous that enough samples have survived that we can have a good idea of what writing was like over 2200 years ago.

Origins - Early Chinese Writing

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Boltz, William G. “Early Chinese Writing.” World Archaeology 17, no. 3 (February 1986): 420-436.
Summary

The article starts with the first evidences of early Chinese writing that were discovered—Shang bronze vessels. The Author notes that the writings found on these vessels fall into the categories of ‘clan names’ and ‘content inscriptions.’ These engravings are fairly simple to understand although the exact pronunciation has been lost us. A work published in 1903 by Liu O shed new light to the topic of early Chinese writing when he unveiled his collection on ‘oracle bone inscriptions.’ The author debunks the claims that the oracle bones carvings are much more archaic as opposed to the bronze vessels by noting that the differences in the quality of each script can be explained by the material used to write it on. The characters written on bones needed to be scratched whereas the bronze could be artfully crafted. Therefore the oracle bone characters are mostly made of straight lines of differing lengths, whereas the bronze character are perfectly proportioned and contain many curves. Although there seem to be many differences between the two scripts they both represent full-writing, just used for different purposes.Chinese evolved in much the same way as writing in other parts of the world. It first started off as pictographic and then slowly changed to logographic. But unlike other scripts Chinese never moved towards a syllabographic or an alphabetic script. Early Chinese evolved through three main stages: Pictographic, Multivalent, and Determinative. In the pictographic stage only tangible objects, such as animals, were represented by characters. Next ideological definitions were added to existing characters that were homophonous, the meaning ‘come’ was added to the word 'grain' (both pronounced lái). Lastly a determinative was added to clarify which meaning was meant, such as adding 亻(human) to 象 (elephant) to show that the 像 (image) meaning is meant. By 1200 B.C.E. (Shang Dynasty) all three stages had already taken place. While other scripts around the world continued to change Chinese stayed the same.
The author flatly denies the theory of stimulus-diffusion and offers other explanations to the Chinese invention of writing. Some archaeologists claim that Chinese originally came from scratches found on pottery as early as 4800 B.C.E. The main argument for theory is that some of the scratches resemble a few of the Shang characters, but this is speculative at best. A second reason for doubting this claim is, as noted above, scripts usually appear in pictographic form first which goes against what we know about the development of the Shang writing. And a third reason is the large gap of time 4800-1200 B.C.E. It is very unlikely that a ‘half-way’ developed lasted for three and a half thousand years nearly unchanged. With this said the author challenges the view of Cheng Te-k’un as stated the development of writing took no less than 6000 years. It is an invention not an evolution. A second candidate is the more likely origin of the script—marks from the Ta wen k’ou culture. These marks are obviously objects and are roughly dated to 1900 B.C.E. which puts it in a much more reasonable time frame to eventually cause the invention of the Shang script; the Ta wen k’ou graphs also share the ‘clan-name’ inscriptions found on pottery. The Author concludes with his postulation that it is not much of a jump to go to a clan being represented by a character to the character representing the pronunciation of the clan name. The Ta wen k’ou graphs are the ‘tangible’ proof to show how the script moved from ‘non-phonetic to phonetic.’

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2014-01-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

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Kwan, Tse-wan. "Abstract Concept Formation in Archaic Chinese Script Forms: Some Humboldtian Perspectives." Philosophy West & East, 61 (2011), 409-452.

Li, D.C.S. "Phonetic Borrowing: Key to the Vitality of Written Cantonese in Hong Kong." Written Language & Literacy, 3, no. 2, (2000): 199-233.

"Offering of votive image (Dizang Bodhisattva) from a Buddhist devotee De zi (Unidentified name)." Chinese rubbings Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1923.

"Offering of votive image from a Buddhist devotee Qin Minyue." Chinese rubbings Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1923.

"Offering of votive image (Mituo Buddha) from a Buddhist devotee Fu (Unidentified name)." Chinese rubbings Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1923.

"Offering of votive image (Guanyin) from a Buddhist female devotee (Unidentified name)." Chinese rubbings Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1923.

Owen, G. The Evolution of Chinese Writing: The Inaugural Lecture of the Michaelmas Term of the School of Chinese, October 4th, 1910. London: Kessinger Publishing, 2010.

Pang, Jumseo. "冇乜記錄.” Jumseo Design & Ganer's Blog, Title, http://zisgor.blog.sohu.com/ (accessed December 12, 2013).

Qiu Xigui. Chinese Writing. New Haven, CT: Birdtrack Press, 2000.

Shaughnessy, Edward L. “The Writing of a Late Western Zhou Bronze Inscription.” Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques: Zeitschrift Der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft/Revue De La Societe Suisse-Asie, 61, no. 3 (2007), 845-877.

Snow, Donald Bruce. (1994). "A short history of published Cantonese: what is dialect literature?" Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 4 (19940: 127–132.

———. Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004.

———. (1991). Written Cantonese and the Culture of Hong Kong: The Growth of a Dialect Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1991.

Von Falkenhausen, Lothar. “The Use and Significance of Ritual Bronzes in the Lingnan Region During the Eastern Zhou Period.” Journal of East Asian Archaeology, 3 (2001), 193-236.

Wen Tong. "Song Wen Tong you Shimen shi." Chinese rubbings Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 19th century.

Wenzi zuan yi in Ershier zi. Comp. Du Daojian. Zhejiang shuju keben.

Woon, Wee Lee. Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution. Macau: University of East Asia, 1987.

Youyou. "知道做乜吗." Youyou Blog, entry posted April 17, 2010, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4fc06a1d0100i0fx.html (accessed December 12, 2013).

Yu Shinan. Stele of Confucian Temple. Chinese rubbings Collection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2009.

Zhou Youguang. The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003.

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郭沫若. 甲骨文合集. 上海: 中华书局, 1978.

許慎. 說文解字. 北京: 中国书店, 1989.

劉小蟲. "2012阿根廷：《食啲乜？》," Bug's Travelography, entry posted August 18, 2013 http://blog.yahoo.com/_TJUBMUGADJPHGGTYW6PCOFHX6Q/articles/1283040 (accessed December 12, 2013).

簡敬禧. "如果當初信佢哋........" Ken's Blog, entry posted September 25, 2013, http://blogcity.me/blog/reply_blog_express.asp?f=KIQ9TUM5TX216969&id=580583 (accessed December 12, 2013).

Essay Proposal

2014-01-02T08:22:00.000-08:00

Essay Proposal

Thesis

The Chinese script has continued to evolve until the emergence of Kai Shu 楷書 (standard script). The same factors that governed the creation and standardization of earlier scripts is mirrored in the creation of the vernacular Cantonese script of Hong Kong.

Basic Outline

I plan on using Qin through Tang Dynasty texts to lay out a pattern for how the clerical script evolved into to the standard script. Also to show the standardization of the radical system by Xu Shen. I will then use blogs of current Hong Kong Chinese, newspaper articles, and signs in Hong Kong to show that they are creating characters the same way that Li Su and Xu Shen did earlier. Some of the main comparisons that I plan to draw include the following:

They borrow a character that is common use, but add a new radical to it in order to change the meaning; the original character and the new character have approximately the same pronunciation and intonation.

They borrow a character that was used in the past, but has not been used at all recently, or is very uncommon, and then assign a new meaning to it. Thus keep everything the same just adding to the polyvalence of the character.

They create a new character by modifying one that is used, but giving it a different pronunciation and a different meaning; the character is changed enough to make it obviously different from the original.

I will end by showing how the Cantonese vernacular script has yet to be officially standardized, and explore, using the Qin-Tang sources, possible outcomes of the script. This will be done by comparing the evolution of early Chinese to the evolution of the Cantonese script and projecting the outcomes of the Chinese script on the vernacular Cantonese script.

Plan to acquire background knowledge

Over the past few months I have been slowly learning about the evolution of the Chinese script. As a resource for the continuation of that study I will use the following books: Zhou Youguang. The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003. and Boltz, William G. The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1994. These two books contain mostly broad overviews of the evolution of the Chinese script, but also include more specific sections which parallel the author's area of expertise.

Plan to acquire Qin-Tang Dynasty texts

All of the books that the library does not have, which is most of them, I will acquire them the through inter-library loan service. For the rest of the sources I plan on using the Harvard University Virtual Chinese Rubbings Collection, http://vc.lib.harvard.edu/vc/deliver/home?_collection=rubbings, for many of them. The site includes scans of rice paper rubbings of stele and other carved-in-stone artifacts. My other main source for these early written and starved documents are the following: Qiu Xigui. Chinese Writing. New Haven, CT: Birdtrack Press, 2000. and De Bary, Theodore and Bloom, Irene. Sources of Chinese tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. These three sources contain hundreds of individual documents that will just need to be sifted through.

Plan to acquire examples of current vernacular Cantonese usage

The first place that I plan to get examples of Cantonese is from the blogs of high school and college age people from Hong Kong. I have already found quite a few; it is easy to locate them by searching on google. The second place to look is for newspaper articles. To find these I plan to look on the Hong Kong government website, as well as the websites of the individual newspaper companies that print in. Hong Kong. The third is mostly going to come through google image searches. I plan on locating everyday signs that people in. Hong Kong would see by searching for pictures taken in Hong Kong. These three sources will show the depth of immersion in the Cantonese characters by showing its use with teens and early adults as well as business men and everyday people. As an introduction to this section of research I plan on reading the only author who has touched on the subject of a vernacular Cantonese character script, Donald Bruce Snow. I plan on reading the book, article, and dissertation by him: Cantonese as a Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular, A Short History of Published Cantonese: What is Dialect Literature?, and Written Cantonese and the Culture of Hong Kong: The Growth of a Dialect Literature. These works also contain specific examples of Cantonese vernacular script in use in various media which I can draw from to illustrate the evolution and usage of the characters.

Plan to analyze sources

For the Qin through Tang sources I will plot a timeline of the character development and see the progression of the script. This will also show the evolution and change of the script which will show a specific trend that I can use as a map for chartering the course of the Cantonese script. Using the sources that I find on the Cantonese script I can view the different uses to show the unstandardized nature of the script, as well as show the nature of the characters. The main point that I will want to draw from the sources is to show, by breaking down the structure of the characters, how the they have been created.

Schedule

Jan. 6-11: Proposal, start to acquire the books and sources required for the paper

Jan. 13-18: Research Qin-Tang texts - make note cards

Jan. 20-25: Organize Qin-Tang sources

Jan. 27-Feb. 1: Research Hong Kong vernacular script - make note cards

Feb. 3-8: Organize Vernacular sources

Feb. 10-15: Organize final outline

Feb. 17-22: Write the introduction and background information sections

Feb. 24-Mar. 1: Write the Qin-Tang Section

Mar. 3-8: Write the Hong Kong section

Mar. 10-15: Write the comparison and future sections

Mar. 17-22: Edit and format essay

Mar. 24-29: Emergency work week

Paleography

2014-01-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

This rubbing is of an inscription from a stele at a Confucian temple found in Xi'an bei lin, Xi'an Shi, Shaanxi Sheng, China.

It records the Tang Emperor Taizong (reign 627-649) granting a title "Bao sheng ho" to Kong Delun, the 33rd generation of Kongzi's (Confucius) family. The inscription also records the reconstruction of a Confucian Temple.

Original stele dated to 29th day of 12th month of 9th year of Wude, Tang Dynasty (626). Rubbing from reproduction dated to Qiande of Northern Song Dynasty (960-967).

The rubbing currently resides at Asian Rubbings section of the Harvard Fine Arts Library.

Transcription

(Gap) táng zhī beī

(Gap) taì zi zhōng shè rén xíng zhe zuò láng jù (gap) nán lè zhuàn shēng shū sī [?] shēng zhoū mù taì zi zuô qiān (gap)

(Gap) dōng guàn yù wén qián shî yoù naî zhī jí qî shén weí ruì zuò shèng xuán miào zhī jìng xī yí bù cè sān wû dié xìng diàn fén sī zhe shén (gap) lü [?] jiân jiào ān beī dà doū hú xiāng huâng dàn shū beī

(Gap) zhì wén shū [?] jìn ràng hân tóng mí bù baì luò guàn hé yīng fú shoù mìng míng zū yù zhōng zhī dà shoú wò tiān xià zhī tú xiàng leì leì (gap) jí jì ké de yán yēn zì zhaò lì shū [?] chū fēn fù xiàng [?] [?] [?] gông fēng gé xià jiân

(Gap) yù dì huáng zhī [?] yuán jì [?] shî zhī daô ér de [?] fù zaì péng [?] rì yuè daò yì zhēng ér fú xiân lí lè chí ér gēng jiāng (gap) chéng xíng fâ yàng chūn ér liù huì zé rán hoù huà jiān bā fāng mìng xíng sì haí weì yoú yân xī láng

(Gap) zhī jīng zhông qiān nián zhī shèng gú tiān zòng

Analysis

1. There is, of course, no punctuation found anywhere on the rubbing. The spaces show that the sections are completely unrelated (see number 7).

2. There are two types of situations that I have classified the character as [?]. The first is that the character is illegible or if some of the character is cut off by missing pieces (line 1). The second is if I can clearly see what the character is but the dictionary does not count it as a character (this May be due to the the more ancient nature of the character) (line 3 end).

3. The zhī, usually written as 之, has two points in which it is disconnected. The lower '2'-like figure is usually written as one stroke, and therefore would not be disconnected. The disconnection is caused because of the writers desire to mimic the strokes of a brush on paper. The disconnects correspond to where the brush would have applied more pressure and where it would have almost lifted off the page.

4. The shè character, here written as 舎, is an older form and is now classified as a Japanese variant of the 舍 character. There are quite a few of the characters in this rubbing that are classified as Japanese variants, this could be due to the Japanese borrowing the character at this stage, then as the Chinese character finishes changing into its final shape, the Japanese one stays the same.

5. The 扐 character has, what looks to be, several other strokes on the radical 扌, but I could not find any other character that it could have been besides this one.

6. zhī, jìn, shî, and taì all show the writers desire to use the brush strokes as his way of carving. They all include strokes that start off as thin then as more pressure is applied to the brush the stroke thickens.

7. 書碑額 means that this is the front of the stele.

8. The shèng character is slightly different with a 耳 instead of what almost looks to be a 月.

9. The yì character 夷, which I have never encountered before, means eastern barbarians, or to raze/pillage.

10. 窅 not only has two extra strokes underneath the 宀, but it is also an obscure variant of 杳.

11. The difference between 日 and 曰 is the context (day and speak).

12. 㢮 is a more complicated version of the 弛 character, added the 𠂉 part.

Journal 10

2013-10-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

In order to understand the full weight of the term diglossia a western example is revealing. In medieval Europe Latin was the dominant language regardless of the local vernacular. This trend continued until the dominant language shifted to the vernacular, but Latin remained the script of the learned. In China this same type of diglossia was evident with the shift from wényán to báihuà. The only difference being that the classical wényán language was probably never very closely connected to the vernacular báihuà. This was important historically because in order to become a government official a strong command of the classical script was required. This forced out all of the poorer applicants due to the amount of time required to gain mastery over it. This diglossia unified the country with a common 'sacred' language which was used for official purposes, and then the common people would use their vernacular for their daily affairs.

As a supplemental reading to be able to add some more background information I read Chen, Ping “Modern Written Chinese in Development.” Language in Society 22, no. 4 (December 1993): 505-537. The main point of this article is to show the development of modern written Chinese in terms of the literary classical Chinese (wényán) being replaced by the vernacular script of everyday life (báihuà). Wényán was the writing standard for the 2,000 years before the cultural upheavals that started in 1919. It was formed from the Chinese spoken during the pre-Qin and Han periods (206 BCE to 220 CE). Even though the wényán was closely related to the spoken language early on it soon became divorced. Báihuà was a script created during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) that was more closely aligned with the common speech. Although the vocabulary and grammar of the wényán script was different from the spoken language it was used by the literary elite who looked down on the báihuà script. Although not the elite script, báihuà gained a little higher status at the end of the Tang Dynasty and was used to write novels up to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911).

Another main point that I researched was about the definition of a language and a dialect. Li Jingzhong, argued that Cantonese should be considered its own language and not a dialect of Chinese. One main point for why to consider it a dialect would be on more social and political grounds than on linguistic grounds.

Finally, the last thing that I have been doing is editing. I have had a bunch of information that I have written down in different sections that are important for my essay, but I just do not have them all arranged in the right areas and then edited so that they all work together with the other sections. The main problem that I have been running into has been that I just have too much information to work with, and not enough time to go through all of it, edit it, and then figure out what is the most important.

Journal 9

2013-10-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

I was able to focus on writing this week. I continued to write about the Cantonese script. I focused on how the Cantonese script has become semi-standardized among its writers. Although many official government newspapers and communications steer clear of the Cantonese script, there are some newspapers that use it quite regularly. The specific characters used in the script sometimes vary, but they always follow the same basic rules. The characters chosen for use will have the same pronunciation, but may just vary in the tone. One example of this is the Cantonese word for now ‘yi ga.’ The ‘ga’ character (家) has been constant, but the ‘yi’ character has taken several forms including 依 which is a high tone and 而 which is a low tone. It is also interesting to note that the ‘ga’ character 家 is the character for family in standard Chinese and also Cantonese; the context is what makes the difference between the meanings. Another interesting feature that I was able to write about was the fact that the ambiguity of Cantonese is what makes it difficult to understand and grasp. Generally, Chinese is made up of two character compound words; each character usually has the same meaning in order to make the intended meaning clear. Cantonese, however, in order to save on time will usually drop the second character, so the listen is, in effect, hearing one character words. Not only in speaking does this cause problems. Without the added context of a conversation, reading passages written in the Cantonese grammar structure adds to the confusion already present with a non-alphabetic script.

My paper is starting to get to the final stage. I have added the title page, the abstract page, and the list of figures. Although I still have much work to do before the final product is ready, but most of the formatting is done. I am now just working on proofreading the sections that I have already written, adding transitions to the sections, and then writing new sections, where necessary.

I have written one of the analysis sections, which I thought was going to be the bulk of my essay, but I found that my analysis was straight to the point, and did not take as many words as I expected. As of yet, I am not sure if this will hurt the length of my paper.

Most of the time this week has been spent on going through the first half of the essay. I have been using the annotated bibliography entries as the base of the essay, so most of my time was spent changing tenses and substituting quotations for summaries. I also added many of my own examples to illustrate the points. Other than that, I was just making all of the information flow together as a logical essay.

For this next week, mainly on Saturday, I will be finishing up my editing of the whole essay, as see which points need to be elaborated in order to avoid confusion.

Journal 8

2013-10-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

Arranging the pictures and generally getting them ready has been much more work than I anticipated. The first thing that I did this week was to figure out how to attach figure number to the pictures. Now that it is all worked out, I will be able to reference the pictures that I insert into the document.
I have also started to write the section on Cantonese characters and how they relate to the whole historic context of the Chinese script development. It is interesting to me that the Cantonese script, although seemingly using the same characters as the standard script has characters that would seem to not make sense in the context. Most of the grammatical characters are completely different than standard Chinese. Even if the only changes were the grammatical function words it would still be difficult for the average Chinese person to read. All of the question words, who, what, why, etc., are also different. Most of the characters representing nouns are usually the same, with the only difference being the preference of the noun used due to the linguistic region (southern and northern Chinese speakers have differing word choice). Finally the sentence structure is different. Although the structure of topicalization (bringing an element of the sentence to the front of the sentence to stress the element) is used in standard Chinese, the Cantonese dialect constantly uses it. The type of structure allows the sentence to, in a sense, be structured in any way. I plan on providing examples of these structures patterns and characters in my paper.
I have also been looking into some of the classifications of early Chinese. I was reading that pictographic scripts are scripts that communicate through pictures. The script is not full writing, it cannot reproduce any and all thought; it mainly communicates through the use of tangible nouns such as horse, rock, house, etc., with grammatical terms and intangible ideas having to be inferred or not written about. One of the prominent means of beginning a transition out of pictographic has been polyvalence. This transition is characterized by the use of a tangible noun to also represent an idea. The character 來 originally meant grain, as a pictographic character. Later on in the development the character was given the meaning ‘to come’ making the 來 character have two meanings. Eventually this ambiguity was changed so that a new character 麥 meant grain and 來 remained ‘come.’ And logographic, which means that each character represents one full word. The word is the basic building block of the language, and by compounding these blocks more complicated words can be created, although rarely more than three characters are used in a combination.
I have been able to clarify some of the rougher parts of my paper to make it flow smoothly, and also been able to add some transitions in. My big project for next week, but mostly this Saturday will be to start putting all of it together and write much on the analysis of different sources.

Journal 7

2013-10-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

This week I have been mostly working with getting all of the images ready for insertion into the body of the text. The first thing that I did was finish selecting the Shang Primary sources that I would like to use, marking them, and then scanning them. The next part was going through and editing all of the image files and converting them from a PDF format to a JPEG format. I used paint to crop, rotate, and resize all of the pictures so that anyone would be able to see the specific aspects that I want to highlight. The next thing that I did was to continue this procedure to encompass all of the different sources that I will be using through the whole of Chinese history. I was able to get most of my pre-modern sources all organized.

Although I was able to get most of the image files that I want, I still need to figure out which images that I would like to use for the Ta Wen Kou graphs section. This section is hardest to decide on what images to use because it during the pre-writing stage of Chinese writing. This section is also the most important and the most controversial. Many historians take very specific views on which specific Chinese mini culture's writing became the full writing system that the Shang Dynasty used. From from what I have read and the images that I have looked at I think that the Ta Wen Kou graphs are the mostly likely candidate for the pre-writing stage of Chinese. The most interesting thing about the evolution of the Chinese script is that many candidates abound for the role of the precursor to the full script, and we know that the Shang Dynasty is the final manifestation of this evolutionary period, but there is no in between script. There is a missing link which goes from simple scratches on pottery to full writing. Therefore, it is very hard to tell how the script evolved to the final Shang script.

As I have been just trying to get everything done as quickly as possible I have become very disorganized. Many of the materials were just saved to my computer in random locations. I spent the remainder of my time organizing all of my sources to make sure that I will have everything that I need in order to make the final product easier to produce. Specifically I was able to organize all of the image files into the separate time periods in which they were created.

Next week will be the big writing week. As I have much of the sources compiled and much of the background information written I will now be looking at the primary sources and then discussing the implications of the specific sources. I will start to insert the images into the background information that I have already written and then deal with the sources in the order in which they appear in the timeline.

Journal 6

2013-10-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

I have been spending a lot of time on my project this and have finished some very important parts. The first thing that I did was finish arranging most of my image sources. I edited all of the images that I currently have, and then I organized them by time period to make them easy to find when I add them to my paper. I opened them all up, individually, and edited them to remove excess space, and then I changed the formatting on them. Also for convenience later on, I named them the name of the source location for easier citing.

I spent a bit of time just reviewing everything that needs to get done in order to finish the paper on time. I am currently a little off schedule. I have the page count that I was planning on at this time, but I needed more time during my research for the Cantonese section of the paper. I will need to spend some time next week and the week after catching up on that research.

Although I started writing my paper last week, I have continued to do research in order to make sure that I have the necessary information to write 40 pages. So this week I also spent time looking for key images in the seven-volume set the I received from Inter-library loan on the oracle bone script. I marked about twenty of them and scanned them all. Some of these scanned images were edited, named, and organized as stated above. I was also able to pick up two more books from Inter-library loan and start to look at them and see what information will be helpful for my research. One of the books that I received was on the earlier development of Chinese and the other was on the Cantonese vernacular script.

The end of this week, and the beginning of next week I will start to write my primary source analysis. What I plan to do to accomplish this is to look at each source and then determine its purpose and value. From there, I plan on listing the key features of each source and why it is important and a good representative sample of the snapshot of script development. Then at the end of each explanation of the sources I will highlight the main idea that gets carried on into the later scripts, to show how the different scripts are linked together.

The last thing that I did this week was to edit my original outline. At first I planned on having a quarter of my paper focus on the historical narrative, and then another quarter on the primary sources. As I was writing and thinking about the paper, I decided that it would be much easier for the reader to follow the importance of the sources if they were embedded within the narrative history. This way the context of each source will be remembered as the reader is learning about the importance of the source. This should make the essay less choppy and allow the reader to focus more on the information and less on the structure of the essay.

Journal 5

2013-10-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

This week I was able to add an additional six pages to my essay bringing the total number of pages to 12. I was able to finish discussing the background information in order to place the source analysis and the correct context to be understood fully. Last week I was able to work through the pre-writing time period up to the late Shang Period. This week I was able to work from that point to the conclusion of the development of the standard script which remains in effect from the early Tang Dynasty up until 1911. Most of the information that I used to write these sections were pulled from the annotated bibliography notes that I had written previously. From this point on I plan to structure the essay as follows: first an introduction to the script of the time period, and then an in-depth look at some of the primary source material for the script. Each individual section will end with my analysis of the primary source material as well as buying analysis and interpretation of the background information and the insights of other scholars that I bring into the paper. I am also working on putting together a collection of pictures and scan documents that I will need to insert into the paper during the final stage. For convenience sake I have all of the information split up into two separate word document files. One document has all of the text double-spaced saying get an accurate count of how many pages I currently have, and the second document contains all the pictures and primary source games that I will add in later. I also have continue to add the source information in the footnotes.

One unforeseen little glitch that I have noticed as I have been writing my paper is that the Chinese characters that I insert mess up the spacing of the regular document. I had noticed this in the past but forgot about it so I am currently trying to figure out a way to make all of this spacing between lines equal whether or not they have a Chinese character.

There are two main things that I will work on next week. One of them will be researching how to properly cite images and primary text scans in the Chicago style. I plan to look at the Chicago manual of style as well as the Kate L. Tarabian book. The second main thing that I will be working on will be to start my analysis of the early Chinese writing primary sources. From here on out until I reach the Cantonese vernacular section I will be writing much more slowly as much of what I will be writing will be my personal analysis and not summaries, paraphrases, or quotes of the scholarship of other individuals. With many of the other primary source sections I will use my own scholarship and ability to read Chinese to aid in my analysis, however, the shop Dynasty characters are so far from removed from the standard script characters that I will, in many cases, be relying on outside scholarship or just my educated guess from my knowledge of the later Chinese script.

Journal 4

2013-10-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

This week has been very productive. The biggest thing that I was able to accomplish was writing three pages of my final paper. I was able to sit down and write the pages and then took a lot of time to edit the pages. I was not able to fix all of the problems, but that was not my goal. I added bolded points of things that I need to add or change for later, but as this is the first draft I am not worried about taking too much time to edit because I will change it many times before a final draft comes out. After writing these first few pages I went back through and added the citations for the information that I learned from different sources. Although I did not put the citations in notes format, they are currently in bibliography format, I will change the formatting later when it gets closer to the week that I have set aside for formatting and grammar.

I was also able spend a good deal finding some more articles and books that I can use for my essay. I went on inter-library loan and was able to request seven more books and articles. Several of the books I have already been able to look through, so it will not take me too long to extract the information that I need. The main piece of information that I am looking for is any information of the pre-writing tradition of ancient China, a period from about 4000-1200 B.C.E. Not much remains from this period except from some pottery shards. Some of these shards have markings on them. Some archaeologists claim that these markings are the first signs of writing in China. I plan on looking at the markings myself and evaluate the claims of other historians and archaeologists.

The last thing that I did was compile a preliminary bibliography list. I currently have 42 sources in my bibliography. All of the sources are arranged in alphabetic order and are all formatted correctly and am ready to be a final draft. Other sources that I find throughout the last of my research I will just add in to its appropriate spot.

As I was writing my paper this week I realized that in order for my analysis to be clear I need to spend some time talking about the nature of the Chinese language, and why its development makes sense in lieu of the grammatical structure and feature that are distinctive in the language. Before I move rough the history of China and its script I will explain the language. I will use two different resources to show the linguistic side of Chinese and the main theories that have been postulated throughout history as to the nature of the language. Finally, next week I plan on writing this section and will include it right after the introduction, or part of the introduction, and before the other pages that I have already written.

Journal 3

2013-10-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

This week I started off by reading through the dissertation written by Donald Snow titled Written Cantonese and the Culture of Hong Kong: The Growth of a Dialect Literature. He argues that although the standard Chinese used in Hong Kong is essentially the same as Taiwan and the PRC there are different choices in words that have a distinctly Cantonese flavor. This difference is just the differences in the usage of standard Chinese, not to mention the differences between the standard Chinese and the Cantonese vernacular script.

The last thing that I did this week was to start on my outline. I have decided to write my essay in a chronological fashion and then run my findings into the narrative. I plan on starting with the early pottery fragments and how I think that are related to the I regency of full writing in China. Next I will spend a large amount of time looking at oracle bone sources and laying down the characteristics of the characters during that time period. After, I will quickly move through some Zhou Dynasty ritual bronzes and then move into one of the more critical portions of my essay---the Qin Dynasty reforms. From here I plan on linking back to the oracle bones to show the progression of the script up to that point. I will highlight the major features of change which will set the stage for my later analysis of the Cantonese vernacular script. During this time period I will focus on the two main scripts, the greater and lesser seal scripts. Next I will turn to the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the clerical script with its spin-off scripts the running and the cursive script. Before writing about the final creation of Kai Shu, or the standard script, I will look at the progress of the script from the two seal scripts to the clerical, further cementing my claims about the evolution. Finally I will look at Wang Xi Zhi and his son and their key role during the creation of standard Chinese. This will set up for the final examination of the script in the form that would last from the Wei-Jin period all the way to 1911 with the writing reformation, with a break during the Tang Dynasty to write about the reforms of Xu Shen and the impact of the radical system that he created. From this point I will mention the key elements of the reformation and then discuss the character simplification during the Mao years, although not in any great depth as it has little baring on the thesis. Finally I will advance to, more or less, modern Hong Kong. I will recreate the same analysis, that spanned all of Chinese history, in the roughly forty years of the progression of the Cantonese script. Starting with the first emergence of the characters and the moving slowly to the modern day. I plan to conclude by showing that the progression and evolution of both sets of scripts, standard Chinese and vernacular Cantonese both followed the same path and used the unwritten rules to guide them to their final forms.

Journal 2

2013-10-03T16:08:00.000-07:00

One of the main uses of my time this week was spent finishing up my study of the Qin-Han sources and then the second use of my time was researching the possible Cantonese sources.

I spent most of the Qin-Han time looking through the book Chinese Writing by Qiu Xigui. The book chronicles the evolution of the Chinese script. The book has 107 scanned artifacts and sources from which I will be drawing a large part of my analysis.

Thursday I received the 7 volume set of Jia Gu Wen He Ji (the standard work on the Chinese oracle bones). Each book contains several thousand scanned images of oracle bones and their fragments. I spent several hours and was able to look through one thousand of the images. Out of that thousand I was able to find a few that were a high enough quality for the average person to recognize the basic shapes. I am still not sure if I will need to use these sources, but I will have the collection until March, long enough for me to make a decision.

I did much research on newspapers in Hong Kong, and chose as one of my main sources the Apple Daily newspaper. Many of the newspapers are very pro-Beijing and would therefore not give a clear picture of the Cantonese vernacular language in use. The Apple Daily is a more Western style newspaper and is conservative. All of the bigger and more prestigious newspapers are trying to reach a larger audience and many of them are trying to gain favor with mainland China. I was able to find upwards of 5 newspaper articles that have at least some use of Cantonese characters.

On top of looking at the newspapers, I was able to spend some time reading through Cantonese as a Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular by Don Snow. The book is full of informative charts and transcripts of formal and more informal radio shows showing their use of Cantonese Characters. After analyzing the transcripts in paragraph form, he show charts about what it means. Both of these resources can work with paper to provide some of the background information for the Cantonese Vernacular section.

I also did searches on Google to find blogs of people from Hong Kong. My technique for searching was to add a Cantonese character to my search terms. Although this guaranteed finding a blog that was using Cantonese characters it eliminated more formal blogs that, just like the newspapers above, want to reach a large audience. The blogs that I did use are have common characteristics, many of them code-switch by adding random English words (common in Hong Kong speech as well), and are not any more formal than a Facebook post. It has been harder than I thought to track the use of these characters because anybody that has any voice will be writing more formally. As I finish up my search I plan to look for more revolutionary sources, people not afraid to write using the Cantonese characters.

This next week I will finish up my look at Cantonese and then organize all of the sources to start to prepare an outline for my paper.

Journal 1

2013-10-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

Most of my time, so far, has been spent on researching and the ordering, through interlibrary loan, all of the books that I will need. I have already received Qiu Xigui. Chinese Writing. New Haven, CT: Birdtrack Press, 2000. Which has many sources scanned in the bibliography. I have also been able to get De Bary, Theodore and Bloom, Irene. Sources of Chinese tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. which, I hope, will supply most of the sources required to write the Qin-Han sections of the paper. I have also considered broadening my scope in order to make sure that I have the right amount ancient sources by expanding my analysis to include the Shang and Zhou Dynasty materials. This would include oracle bones and Zhou bronzes.

I looked through the Sources of Chinese Tradition book, and it has no relevant information. So as of right now I have two media that I can turn to for my ancient sources, Chinese Writing, and the Harvard University Chinese Rubbings Collection. I also just submitted an ILL for Jia Gu Wen He Ji, the standard collection of oracle bones, and a book on the Ma Wang Tui manuscripts which was a "missing link" in the evolutionary process of the Chinese script.

I was able to look through the Harvard University Chinese Rubbings Collection. The collection is not organized very well so I had to just arrange the rubbings by title and then just look at each one to see if it falls in the date range that I am looking for. I spent hours clicking on each one and only worked from ?-C and was able to find and save 16 sources from the early Han until the Song Dynasty. This shows a fairly good range of the evolution of the script, but I have yet to locate any Qin Dynasty Sources. At least one of the sources that I was able to find was written by Wang Xi Zhi, who as instrumental in the formation of the script that was used from the Tang to the Qing Dynasty.

Also as a preparation I organized all of the reading that I have done into an annotated bibliography blog, www.mychineseresearch.blogspot.com. On the blog I have compiled an all encompassing list of the resources that I plan on using (Books, articles, Blogs, etc), as well as the works that I have read as a background for understanding the material up to this point. I have read through the relevant sections of books and articles that pertain to this first part of my research, the Qin-Han writing reforms.

I have also decided that taking a look at the separate cultural development of Hong Kong under the British rule will give me a better idea of how the mindset of the people played a role in the script development. Also how the western influenced caused them to feel apart from the rest of China.

For next week I plan to start looking at the Cantonese sources. I plan to first look at blogs, then try to find some government sources for use of the Cantonese characters.