My only comment, which is just a reminiscence, is that one of the first books I bought when I started studying Japanese seriously at 18 was a guide to “grass-script” characters. I still have it. It had been produced in the early 1940s (cheap paper, thin binding) in the U.K. for military use in reading Japanese intercepts; to be useful, it includes forms that are calligraphically incorrect but common. I recall that “airman” Edwin McClellan, by then the chair of East Asian at Chicago, which I entered that year, was among those acknowledged for their help by the compiler (Otome Daniels, about whom see "How the UK found Japanese speakers in a hurry in WW2", BBC News (8/12/15).
This is a story about the frustration of a mom in China over the fact that the character for her child's surname, cuàn 爨, has 30 strokes (some sources say 29).
Aside from its use as a surname, this monstrosity of a glyph can also mean "to cook" and "oven; cooker; cookstove". Although cuàn 爨 certainly should have been a candidate for simplification, so far as I know, no simplified character for it exists, at least none that is official.
There are a dozen or so alternate forms, e.g., 熶, but most of them are very obscure and cannot be found in electronic fonts. See here for a few.
I am making this post because I think it is something that we should be aware of and try to understand in terms of the motivations of the Chinese government in enacting and carrying out these policies.
The Chinese term for "first level discipline" is "yī jí xuékē 一级学科". Here's a recent list of the first level disciplines in the Chinese educational system. You will note that the disciplines are arranged from sciences at the top (with math at the very top), then moving down through history, engineering, agriculture, medicine, military science, management, philosophy, economics, law, educational science, literature, and art. Calligraphy (shūfǎ 書法) was not included on this list of first level disciplines, which accords with the great commotion its addition to the list is currently causing.
New article by Nyri Bakkalian in Unseen Japan (9/17/22):
"New App Promises Greater Convenience in Reading Old Japanese Cursive:
Kuzushiji, the 'crushed letters' found in historical Japanese documents, have long been the bane of scholars. A new app may change all that."
The author bemoans:
During my graduate education in Japanese history, interpreting handwritten primary source material from the 19th century and earlier was one of my greatest challenges. Typeset historic documents exist, especially in my period of focus during the Bakumatsu-Meiji transition. But the further back in time one’s research focus is situated, the rarer these documents become. There is a plethora of handwritten documents, written in historic cursive, but learning how to read them is a significant investment of time and resources beyond the means of most people who might otherwise have the inclination to learn.
✨ The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Though Emoji ✨ — by me, An Xiao Mina & @jenny8lee, published by @MITeenPress — appears in bookshops across the US and Canada today! pic.twitter.com/sTkudPAwxb
I happened to notice the following bit of character-shape play on a YouTube site called "Wen Zhao tangu lunjin" 《文昭谈古论今》。 He's talking about the tourists on Hainan island who were stuck there after a sudden Covid breakout. In expressing the observation that these sudden incidents occur time and time again, he used a four-character phrase that is evidently a new Internet slang, 又双叒叕 yòu shuāng ruò zhuó, in which each subsequent character adds another 又 component, a visual representation of the concept "over and over again".
My entire career as a Sinologist has been based on the study of archeologically recovered materials. I'm talking particularly about the medieval Dunhuang manuscripts, but also the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Tarim mummies and their associated artifacts. It's no wonder, therefore, that I have featured the importance of archeology for the study of language and linguistics so often in my posts (see "Selected readings" below for a small sample).
Now comes news of the recovery of a spectacular cache of bamboo strip manuscripts from a Chu culture site kindly provided by Keith Knapp (with some Romanizations, links, and annotations by me):
[This is a guest post by Sara de Rose, responding to requests for more information on the subject prompted by her previous post.]
This post discusses a possible connection between the Mesopotamian tonal system, documented on cuneiform tablets that span over 1000 years (from 1800 BC to 500 BC), and the musical system of ancient China. For a more detailed discussion, see the paper "A Proposed Mesopotamian Origin for the Ancient Musical and Musico-Cosmological Systems of the West and China", Sino-Platonic Papers, 320 (December, 2021) written by myself, Sara de Rose.
Since 1996, twenty-three harps (Chinese: “konghou”) that resemble the angular harp that was invented in Mesopotamia circa 2000 BC have been found in the graves of the Tarim mummies, in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area of modern-day, western China. These harps date from 1000 BC to 200 BC (see photo).
I was aware of this article more than four years ago when it first appeared, but didn't post on it then because I didn't think many people would be interested in it:
Now that we're on a Chinese calligraphy and philosophy roll and have a number of robot calligraphy posts under our belt (see "Selected readings" below), writing a post about a robotic philosopher-calligrapher is not so outlandish after all.
