A g l i m p s e o f t h e C h i n e s e W r i t i n g
The Chinese language and its script are living ones, unlike the othertwo earlier ones dealt with, namely Sumerian and Egyptian. TheChinese, the people, are often called ‘inscrutable’. The script is no lessenigmatic.It is perhaps the oldest living script. Its beginning is traced to1400 BC. Most of us have seen the Chinese script. It looks quitedifferent from ‘our’scripts. Yes, it
is
different. While our writing is astring of letters, each one representing a sound, Chinese is a string of symbols, each one meaning something. (This is technically calledmorpheme.) Of course, each of these characters is also associated witha sound, that is, its pronunciation. In our languages to get a morpheme we need a few letters strung together. That is ours are phonetic, whereas Chinese is logographic. (I think, now you can understand what is meant by logography.) In short, there is no ABCD.. inChinese.
P D F C r e a t e d wi t h d e s k P D F P D F Wr i t er -T r i al : : h t t p: / / www. d o c u d e s k . c om
The present day characters originally began as pictures,simplified pictures and stylized pictures. Pictures can represent objects,but not abstract ideas, like long, short, good, bad etc. Then how didthey manage? They developed suitable methods for this, in their owninimitable way. I will attempt to explain very briefly this in my presentation. The number of characters in the language today is mindbogglingly very large, upwards of 40000. But with knowledge of about2000 you can manage even as an academician! That there is no inflection in Chinese is another feature which would intrigue us. That is ‘I’, stands for ‘me’, ‘mine’etc also. My god,then how do you write meaningful sentences? You don’t writemeaningful sentences, but make meaning out of sentences. What doesthis mean? Go through my presentation to see how their grammaticalstructure is quite different from the languages we are familiar with.
P D F C r e a t e d wi t h d e s k P D F P D F Wr i t er -T r i al : : h t t p: / / www. d o c u d e s k . c om
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| Upload Date: | 02/03/2009 |
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