The past, present, and future of Sinography
« previous post | next post »
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-second issue: "Dramatic Transformations of Sinography in East Asia and the World" (pdf), edited by Victor H. Mair (August, 2024).
Foreword
The three papers in this collection were written for my “Language, Script, and Society in China” course during the fall semester of 2023. All three of them are concerned with radical changes made to Sinographic script during its adjustment to modernity.
Aleena Parenti shows how, during medieval times, Vietnamese acquired a written form known as chữ Nôm (lit., “writing of the south”) under the impact of the Chinese script, which in turn yielded to romanization brought by the French colonialists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That resulted in the current Vietnamese alphabet known as chữ Quốc ngữ (“writing of the National Language”).
Zhaofei Chen’s paper reveals the tremendous impact of the vernacularizing influence of Western missionaries during the late imperial period of Chinese history (from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries). Through translation, romanization, and their own writings, the missionaries contributed massively to the eventual demise of Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese as the official written language, at the hands of Modern Standard Mandarin.
Yifei Yang explores how the Japanese development of emoji 絵文字 (lit., “picture writing”) has escaped the confines of any particular language and, as pictograms, logograms, ideograms, and smileys, can be adopted into the writing of any language. Emojis are widespread on social media, are especially favored by young people, and are by no means limited to East Asia. !
Taken all together, these three papers presage tumultuous developments in the further evolution of Sinography during the rest of this century and beyond.
—–
All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
- "Parenthetical, alphabetical, ironical commentary in Sinographic texts" (12/29/21) — with a long bibliography (digraphia, romanization…)
- "Sinographic inputting: 'it's nothing' — not" (2/22/21)
- "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)
- "Vietnamese in Chinese and Nom characters" (5/28/13)
- "Update on Nom" (7/16/13)
- "The Miracle of Western Writing" (12/31/23)
- "The invention of an alphabet for the transcription of Chinese characters half a millennium ago" (11/21/22) — based on Takata Tokio's detailed codicological study of Matteo Ricci's Jesuit colleague, Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), whose Xīrú ěrmù zī 西儒耳目資 (An Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati)
- "Candida Xu: a highly literate Chinese woman of the 17th century" (7/7/20)
- Victor H. Mair, "Sound and Meaning in the History of Characters: Views of China's Earliest Script Reformers", pinyin.info. From Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing, edited by Mary S. Erbaugh, copyright © 2002 by the National East Asian Languages Resource Center of the Ohio State University. Used by permission of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center.