1.
Dunhuang manuscripts
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The Dunhuang manuscripts are a cache of important religious and secular documents discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, in the early 20th century. Dating from the 5th to early 11th centuries, the manuscripts include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs, there are also a large number of religious documents, most of which are Buddhist, but other religions including Daoism, Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism are also represented. The majority of the manuscripts are in Chinese, other languages represented are Khotanese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tangut, Tibetan, Old Uyghur language, Hebrew and Old Turkic. The manuscripts are a resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics. The documents were discovered in a cave by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu on June 25,1900. From 1907 onwards he began to sell them to Western explorers, notably Aurel Stein, japanese, Russian and Danish explorers also acquired collections of manuscripts. Several thousands of folios of Tibetan manuscripts were left in Dunhuang and are now located in several museums and those purchased by Western scholars are now kept in institutions all over the world, such as the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All of the collections are being digitized by the International Dunhuang Project. Various reasons have been suggested for the placing of the manuscripts in the library cave, Aurel Stein suggested that the manuscripts were sacred waste, an explanation that found favour with later scholars including Fujieda Akira. More recently, it has suggested that the cave functioned as a storeroom for a Buddhist monastic library. The reason for the caves sealing has also been the subject of speculation, even though cave 16 could easily have been enlarged or extended to cave 17, Yoshiro Imaeda has suggested cave 16 was sealed because it ran out of room. The variety of languages and scripts found among the Dunhuang manuscripts is a result of the nature of the region in the first millennium AD. The largest proportion of the manuscripts are written in Chinese, both Classical and, to an extent, vernacular Chinese. Most manuscripts, including Buddhist texts, are written in Kaishu or regular script, an unusual feature of the Dunhuang manuscripts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries is that some appear to have been written with a hard stylus rather than with a brush. According to Akira Fujieda this was due to the lack of materials for constructing brushes in Dunhuang after the Tibetan occupation in the late 8th century, the Dunhuang manuscripts represent some of the earliest examples of Tibetan writing. Several styles are represented among the manuscripts, forebears of the later Uchen, both Old Tibetan and Classical Tibetan are represented in the manuscripts, as well as the undeciphered Nam language and a language that some have identified as the Zhang-zhung language. Other languages represented are Khotanese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tangut, Tibetan, Old Uyghur language, by far the largest proportion of manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave contain Buddhist texts. These include Buddhist sutras, commentaries and treatises, often copied for the purpose of generating religious merit, several hundred manuscripts have been identified as notes taken by students, including the popular Buddhist narratives known as bian wen
2.
Han dynasty
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The Han dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms period. Spanning over four centuries, the Han period is considered an age in Chinese history. To this day, Chinas majority ethnic group refers to itself as the Han people and it was founded by the rebel leader Liu Bang, known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu of Han, and briefly interrupted by the Xin dynasty of the former regent Wang Mang. This interregnum separates the Han dynasty into two periods, the Western Han or Former Han and the Eastern Han or Later Han, the emperor was at the pinnacle of Han society. He presided over the Han government but shared power with both the nobility and appointed ministers who came largely from the gentry class. The Han Empire was divided into areas controlled by the central government using an innovation inherited from the Qin known as commanderies. These kingdoms gradually lost all vestiges of their independence, particularly following the Rebellion of the Seven States, from the reign of Emperor Wu onward, the Chinese court officially sponsored Confucianism in education and court politics, synthesized with the cosmology of later scholars such as Dong Zhongshu. This policy endured until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 AD, the Han dynasty was an age of economic prosperity and saw a significant growth of the money economy first established during the Zhou dynasty. The coinage issued by the government mint in 119 BC remained the standard coinage of China until the Tang dynasty. The period saw a number of limited institutional innovations, the Xiongnu, a nomadic steppe confederation, defeated the Han in 200 BC and forced the Han to submit as a de facto inferior partner, but continued their raids on the Han borders. Emperor Wu of Han launched several campaigns against them. The ultimate Han victory in these wars eventually forced the Xiongnu to accept vassal status as Han tributaries, the territories north of Hans borders were quickly overrun by the nomadic Xianbei confederation. Imperial authority was seriously challenged by large Daoist religious societies which instigated the Yellow Turban Rebellion. When Cao Pi, King of Wei, usurped the throne from Emperor Xian, following Liu Bangs victory in the Chu–Han Contention, the resulting Han dynasty was named after the Hanzhong fief. Chinas first imperial dynasty was the Qin dynasty, the Qin unified the Chinese Warring States by conquest, but their empire became unstable after the death of the first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. Within four years, the authority had collapsed in the face of rebellion. Although Xiang Yu proved to be a commander, Liu Bang defeated him at Battle of Gaixia. Liu Bang assumed the title emperor at the urging of his followers and is known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu, Changan was chosen as the new capital of the reunified empire under Han
3.
Chinese language
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Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language, the varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin, followed by Wu, Min, and Yue. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. Standard Chinese is a form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six languages of the United Nations. The written form of the language, based on the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is the spoken language and official in Hong Kong and Macau. It is also influential in Guangdong province and much of Guangxi, dialects of Southern Min, part of the Min group, are widely spoken in southern Fujian, with notable variants also spoken in neighboring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia. Hakka also has a diaspora in Taiwan and southeast Asia. Shanghainese and other Wu varieties are prominent in the lower Yangtze region of eastern China, Chinese can be traced back to a hypothetical Sino-Tibetan proto-language. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty, as the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have sought to promulgate a unified standard. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, in addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, and are often also sensitive border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, the earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty
4.
Chinese (language)
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Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language, the varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin, followed by Wu, Min, and Yue. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. Standard Chinese is a form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six languages of the United Nations. The written form of the language, based on the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is the spoken language and official in Hong Kong and Macau. It is also influential in Guangdong province and much of Guangxi, dialects of Southern Min, part of the Min group, are widely spoken in southern Fujian, with notable variants also spoken in neighboring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia. Hakka also has a diaspora in Taiwan and southeast Asia. Shanghainese and other Wu varieties are prominent in the lower Yangtze region of eastern China, Chinese can be traced back to a hypothetical Sino-Tibetan proto-language. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty, as the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have sought to promulgate a unified standard. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, in addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, and are often also sensitive border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, the earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty
5.
Chinese characters
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Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, and sometimes also in English, they are called hànzì. They have been adapted to write a number of languages including, Japanese, where they are known as kanji, Korean, where they are known as hanja. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters, in English, they are sometimes called Han characters. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world, Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan,2,136 are taught through secondary school, the characters used in Japan are distinct from those used in China in many respects. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, in South Korea, when Chinese characters are used they are of the traditional variant and are almost identical to those used in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Old Chinese, most words were monosyllabic and there was a correspondence between characters and words. Rather, a character almost always corresponds to a syllable that is also a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes. Modern Chinese has many homophones, thus the same syllable may be represented by many characters. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations and these foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations, and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic, increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day. The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones and it has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables. The most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, words have also been created by adding affixes, reduplication and borrowing from other languages. Polysyllabic words are written with one character per syllable
6.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
7.
Shuowen Jiezi
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Shuowen Jiezi, often shortened to Shuowen, was an early 2nd-century Chinese dictionary from the Han Dynasty. Xu Shen, a Han Dynasty scholar of the Five Classics, according to Boltz, Xus compilation of the Shuowen cannot be held to have arisen from a purely linguistic or lexicographical drive. His motives were more pragmatic and political, during the Han era, the prevalent theory of language was Confucianist Rectification of Names, the belief that using the correct names for things was essential for proper government. The postface to the Shuowen Jiezi explains, Now the written language is the foundation of classical learning, pre-Shuowen Chinese dictionaries like the Erya and the Fangyan were limited lists of synonyms loosely organized by semantic categories, which made it difficult to look up characters. Thus, Needham et al. describe the Shuowen jiezi as a paleographic handbook as well as a dictionary, the dictionary includes a preface and 15 chapters. The first 14 chapters are character entries, the 15th and final chapter is divided into two parts, a postface and an index of section headers. Xǔ Shèn states in his postface that the dictionary has 9,353 character entries, plus 1,163 graphic variants, with a total length of 133,441 characters. The transmitted texts vary slightly in content, owing to omissions and emendations by commentators, the number of section headers,540, numerologically equals 6 ×9 ×10, the product of the symbolic numbers of Yin and Yang and the number of the Heavenly Stems. The first section header was 一 and the last was 亥, in the process, he included many section headers that are not considered ones today, such as 炎 and 熊, which modern dictionaries list under the 火 or 灬 heading. He also included as section headers all the sexagenary cycle characters, that is, as a result, unlike modern dictionaries which attempt to maximize the number of characters under each section header,34 Shuowen headers have no characters under them, while 159 have only one each. From a modern perspective, Xus system of 540 headings can seem enigmatic. For instance, he included the singular section header 409 惢, with one rare character. In addition to the graph, Xu included two kinds of variant graphs when they differed from the standard seal, called ancient script. The Zhòu characters were taken from the no-longer extant Shizhoupian, an early copybook traditionally attributed to a Shĭ Zhòu, or Historian Zhou, in the court of King Xuan of Zhou. Wang Guowei and Tang Lan argued that the structure and style of these suggested a later date. Xu believed that these were the most ancient characters available, since Confucius would have used the oldest characters to best convey the meaning of the texts. However, Wang Guowei and other scholars have shown that they were regional variant forms in the areas during the Warring States period. Note that the character 文 itself exemplifies the category wén 文, thus, Shuōwén Jiězì means commenting on the wén, which cannot be deconstructed, and analyzing the zì
8.
Cangjie
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Cang Jie is a legendary figure in ancient China, claimed to be an official historian of the Yellow Emperor and the inventor of Chinese characters. Legend has it that he had four eyes and four pupils, and that when he invented the characters, the deities and ghosts cried and he is considered a legendary rather than historical figure, or at least, not considered to be sole inventor of Chinese characters. There are several versions of the legend, Cang Jie then settled down on the bank of a river, and devoted himself to the completion of the task at hand. Even after devoting much time and effort, however, he was unable to even one character. One day, Cang Jie suddenly saw a phoenix flying in the sky above, the object fell to the ground directly in front of Cang Jie, and he saw it to be an impression of a hoof-print. Not being able to recognize which animal the print belonged to, the hunter told him that this was, without a doubt, the hoof print of a Pixiu, being different from the hoof-print of any other beast that was alive. From that day forward, Cang Jie paid close attention to the characteristics of all things, including the sun, moon, stars, clouds, lakes, oceans, as well as all manner of bird and beast. He began to create characters according to the characteristics he found. To the delight of the Yellow Emperor, Cang Jie presented him with the set of characters. The emperor then called the premiers of each of the nine provinces together in order for Cang Jie to teach them this new writing system, monuments and temples were erected in Cang Jies honor on the bank of the river where he created these characters. Another version of the legend tells that Cang Jie was inspired by observing the network of veins on a turtle, there are tombs dedicated to Cang Jie in the provinces of Shandong, Henan, Hebei, and Shaanxi. Neolithic signs in China Oracle bone script Media related to Cangjie at Wikimedia Commons
9.
Small seal script
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Small Seal Script, formerly romanized as Hsiao-chuan and also known as Seal Script, Lesser Seal Script and Qin Script, is an archaic form of Chinese calligraphy. It was standardized and promulgated as a standard by Li Si, prime minister under Shi Huangdi. Hence coaches, roads, currency, laws, weights, measures, characters which were different from those found in Qin were discarded and Li Sis small seal characters became the standard for all regions within the empire. This policy came in about 220 BC, the year after Qins unification of the Chinese states, the small cursive form clerical script came after the small script. Li Sis compilation is only through Chinese commentaries through the centuries. It is stated to contain 3,300 characters, small Seal Script has been proposed for inclusion in Unicode
10.
Qin dynasty
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The Qin dynasty was the first dynasty of Imperial China, lasting from 221 to 206 BCE. The strength of the Qin state was increased by the Legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the fourth century BC. It is also the shortest dynasty in Chinese history, lasting only 15 years with two emperors, Qin administration was by no means purely punitive, and was not harsher than was generally prevalent at the time. Though often anathema to Legalist philosophy, Confucianism and its values too coexisted with Legalism during the reign of the First Emperor, Qin administrative documents considered such matters as filial piety, and one circulated letter reads that The purpose of all standards. Is to teach and lead the people, rid them of dissoluteness and depravity. during its reign over China, the Qin sought to create an imperial state unified by highly structured political power and a stable economy able to support a large military. This allowed for the construction of projects, such as a wall on the northern border. For years, local rulers built walls along Chinas northern border to protect their villages from invaders, Three hundred thousand peasants and convicts were forced to work on this 1,400 mile wall. The Qin dynasty introduced reforms, currency, weights and measures were standardized. The Qins military was revolutionary in that it used the most recently developed weaponry, transportation, an attempt to restrict criticism and purge all traces of old dynasties led to the supposed burning of books and burying of scholars later espoused by Confucians. Despite its military strength, the Qin dynasty did not last long, the advisors squabbled among themselves, however, resulting in both their deaths and that of the second Qin emperor. Popular revolt broke out a few later, and the weakened empire soon fell to a Chu lieutenant. Despite its rapid end, the dynasty influenced future Chinese empires, particularly the Han, in the 9th century BC, Feizi, a supposed descendant of the ancient political advisor Gao Yao, was granted rule over Qin City. The modern city of Tianshui stands where this city once was, during the rule of King Xiao of Zhou, the eighth king of the Zhou dynasty, this area became known as the state of Qin. In 897 BC, under the regency of Gonghe, the became a dependency allotted for the purpose of raising and breeding horses. One of Feizis descendants, Duke Zhuang, became favoured by King Ping of Zhou, as a reward, Zhuangs son, Duke Xiang, was sent eastward as the leader of a war expedition, during which he formally established the Qin. The state of Qin first sent an expedition into central China in 672 BC. By the dawn of the fourth century BC, however, the tribes had all been either subdued or conquered. The resulting city greatly resembled the capitals of other Warring States, notably, Qin Legalism encouraged practical and ruthless warfare
11.
Lexicographical order
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In mathematics, the lexicographic or lexicographical order is a generalization of the way the alphabetical order of words is based on the alphabetical order of their component letters. This generalization consists primarily in defining a total order over the sequences of elements of a totally ordered set. There are several variants and generalizations of the lexicographical ordering, another generalization defines an order on a Cartesian product of partially ordered sets, this order is a total order if and only if the factors of the Cartesian product are totally ordered. The word lexicographic is derived from lexicon, the set of words that are used in language and appear in dictionaries. The lexicographic order has thus been introduced for sorting the entries of dictionaries and this has been formalized in the following way. Consider a finite set A, often called alphabet, which is totally ordered, in dictionaries, this is the common alphabet, ordered by the alphabetical order. In book indexes, the alphabet is generally extended to all alphanumeric characters, the lexicographic order is a total order on the sequences of elements of A, often called words on A, which is defined as follows. Given two different sequences of the length, a1a2. ak and b1b2. bk, the first one is smaller than the second one for the lexicographical order, if ai<bi, for the first i where ai. To compare sequences of different lengths, the sequence is usually padded at the end with enough blanks. This way of comparing sequences of different lengths is always used in dictionaries, however, in combinatorics, an other convention is frequently used, whereby a shorter sequence is always smaller than a longer sequence. This variant of the order is sometimes called shortlex order. In dictionary order, the word Thomas appears before Thompson because the letter a comes before the letter p in the alphabet, the 5th letter is the first that is different in the two words, the first four letters are Thom in both. Because it is the first difference, the 5th letter is the most significant difference for the alphabetical ordering. An important property of the order on words of a fixed length on a finite alphabet is that it is a well-order. The lexicographical order is used not only in dictionaries, but also commonly for numbers, one of the drawbacks of the Roman numeral system is that it is not always immediately obvious which of two numbers is the smaller. When negative numbers are considered, one has to reverse the order for comparing negative numbers. This is not usually a problem for humans, but it may be for computers and this is one of the reasons for adopting twos complement representation for representing signed integers in computers. Another example of a use of lexicographical ordering appears in the ISO8601 standard for dates
12.
Writing system
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A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
13.
Alphabet
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An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. Under a terminological distinction promoted by Peter T. Daniels, an alphabet is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, in other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants, such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal letters, as in Devanagari. The Khmer alphabet is the longest, with 74 letters, there are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet. Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks, while most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Alphabets are usually associated with an ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order and it also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of numbering ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, the Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, in the alphabet song in English, the term ABCs is used instead of the word alphabet. Knowing ones ABCs, in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything, the history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. These glyphs were used as guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and this script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit, the Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called Proto-Canaanite before ca.1050 BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram and this script is the parent script of all western alphabets
14.
Syllabary
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A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or moras which make up words. This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems, most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules. Otherwise they are synthetic, if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus or coda, or systematic, some scholars, e. g. Daniels, reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms as necessary. Some system provides katakana language conversion, in addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven. Chinese characters, the script used for Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages. They are therefore referred to as logosyllabic. The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana, namely hiragana and katakana, which were developed around 700. They are mainly used to some native words and grammatical elements, as well as foreign words. Because Japanese uses mainly CV syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language, as in many syllabaries, however, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both atta and kaita are written with three kana, あった and かいた. It is therefore called a moraic writing system. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics, with a predominance of monomoraic syllables, few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda, the modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. g. Ko-no-so for Κνωσός Knōsos, pe-ma for σπέρμα sperma, the Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has a segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster. The languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages, have a type of alphabet called an abugida or alphasyllabary, in the 19th century these systems were called syllabics, a term which has survived in the name of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or close to regular. For example, the characters for ke, ka, and ko in Japanese hiragana have no similarity to indicate their common k sound, compare abugida, where each grapheme typically represents a syllable but where characters representing related sounds are all similar graphically. For example, in Devanagari, an abugida, the characters for ke, ka and ko are के, का and को respectively. English, along many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures
15.
Samuel Johnson
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Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and is described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history. He is also the subject of perhaps the most famous biography in English literature, born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London, where he began to write for The Gentlemans Magazine and his early works include the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage, the poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, and the play Irene. After nine years of work, Johnsons A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 and it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship. This work brought Johnson popularity and success, until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnsons was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an annotated edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he travelled to Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Johnson was a tall and robust man. His odd gestures and tics were disconcerting to some on first meeting him, after a series of illnesses, he died on the evening of 13 December 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Born on 18 September 1709, to Michael Johnson, a bookseller and he did not cry and, with doubts surrounding the newborns health, his aunt exclaimed that she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street. Since it was feared that the baby die, the vicar of St Marys was summoned to perform a baptism. Two godfathers were chosen, Samuel Swynfen, a physician and graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Richard Wakefield, a lawyer, coroner, Johnsons health improved and he was put to wet-nurse with Joan Marklew. He soon contracted scrofula, known at time as the Kings Evil because it was thought royalty could cure it. Sir John Floyer, former physician to King Charles II, recommended that the young Johnson should receive the royal touch, however, the ritual was ineffective, and an operation was performed that left him with permanent scars across his face and body. Johnson demonstrated signs of intelligence as a child, and his parents, to his later disgust. His education began at the age of three, and was provided by his mother, who had him memorise and recite passages from the Book of Common Prayer. When Samuel turned four, he was sent to a nearby school, a year later, Johnson went to Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin. During this time, Johnson started to exhibit the tics that would influence how people viewed him in his years
16.
A Dictionary of the English Language
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Johnson took nearly nine years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. Remarkably, he did so single-handedly, with clerical assistance to copy out the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life, until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnsons was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. A hundred years earlier, books had been regarded with something approaching veneration, such an explosion of the printed word demanded a set pattern of grammar, definition, and spelling for those words. This could be achieved by means of a dictionary of the English language. Johnsons dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen, over the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English wordbook by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538. The next to appear was by Richard Mulcaster, a headmaster, Mulcaster compiled what he termed a generall table we commonlie use. It were a thing verie praise worthy. if som well learned. would gather all words which we use in the English tung. into one dictionary, in 1598 an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio was published. It was the first English dictionary to use quotations to give meaning to the word, surprisingly and this was to change, to a small extent, in schoolmaster Robert Cawdreys Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604. Though it contained only 2,449 words, and no word beginning with the letters W, X, or Y, several more dictionaries followed, in Latin, English, French and Italian. Benjamin Martins Lingua Britannica Reformata and Ainsworths Thesaurus Linguae Latinae are both significant, in that they define entries in separate senses, or aspects, of the word. But perhaps the greatest single fault of these early lexicographers was, as historian Henry Hitchings put it, in that sense Dr. Johnsons dictionary was the first to comprehensively document the English lexicon. Johnsons dictionary was prepared at 17 Gough Square, London, an eclectic household, by 1747 Johnson had written his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, which spelled out his intentions and proposed methodology for preparing his document. Johnsons Plan received the patronage of Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Chesterfield did not care about praise, but was instead interested by Johnsons abilities. Seven years after first meeting Johnson to discuss the work, Chesterfield wrote two essays in The World that recommended the Dictionary. He complained that the English language was lacking structure and argued, We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr Johnson to fill that great and arduous post. However, Johnson did not appreciate the tone of the essay, such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, a Dictionary of the English Language was somewhat large and very expensive
17.
Logogram
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In written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or phrase. Chinese characters and Japanese kanji are logograms, some Egyptian hieroglyphs, the use of logograms in writing is called logography. A writing system that is based on logograms is called a logographic system, in alphabets and syllabaries, individual written characters represent sounds rather than concepts. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not necessarily have meaning by themselves, Writing language in this way is called phonemic orthography. Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems, the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, a more recent attempt is Zlango, intended for use in text messaging, currently including around 300 icons. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the domain is the syllable. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ duck and sȝ son, though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants and this can be illustrated with Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes, some morphemes are composed of more than one character, for example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū with the bug determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately, in Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse, a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king, in modern Mandarin, bimorphemic syllables are always written with two characters, for example 花儿 huār flower. These logograms, called hozwārishn, were dispensed with altogether after the Arab conquest of Persia, logograms are used in modern shorthand to represent common words. In addition, the numerals and mathematical symbols used in systems are logograms—1 one,2 two, + plus, = equals, and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for and and et, % for percent, # for number, § for section, $ for dollar, € for euro, £ for pound, ° for degree, @ for at, etc. All historical logographic systems include a dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component, called determinatives in the case of Egyptian and radicals in the case of Chinese. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters hanzi into six types by etymology. The first two types are single-body, meaning that the character was created independently of other characters, single-body pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms
18.
James Boswell
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James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, was a Scottish biographer and diarist, born in Edinburgh. Boswells surname has passed into the English language as a term for a constant companion and observer, Boswell was born in Blairs Land on the east side of Parliament Close behind St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh on 29 October 1740. He was the eldest son of a judge, Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, as the eldest son, he was heir to his familys estate of Auchinleck in Ayrshire. Boswells mother was a strict Calvinist, and he felt that his father was cold to him, as a child, he was delicate and suffered from some type of nervous ailment which appeared to be inherent and would afflict him sporadically all through his life. At the age of five, he was sent to James Mundells academy, an institution by the standards of the time. Boswell was unhappy there, and his sickliness began to manifest itself in the physical incidents associated with nightmares, in view of this, the now-eight-year-old was removed from the academy and educated by a string of private tutors who included John Dunn and a Mr. Fergusson. The former had more success than his successor, he versed his charge in the joys of literature. Dunn was also present during, if not directly involved in, Boswells serious affliction of 1752 and this afforded him his first experience of genuine society, and his recovery was rapid and complete. It may, however, have inculcated the notion that travel, at thirteen, Boswell was enrolled into the arts course at the University of Edinburgh, studying there from 1753 to 1758. Midway through his studies, he suffered a depression and nervous illness, but. Boswell had swarthy skin, black hair and dark eyes, he was of average height and his appearance was alert and masculine, and he had an ingratiating sense of good humour. Upon turning nineteen, he was sent to continue his studies at the University of Glasgow, while at Glasgow, Boswell decided to convert to Catholicism and become a monk. Upon learning of this, his father ordered him home, instead of obeying, though, Boswell ran away to London, where he spent three months, living the life of a libertine, before he was taken back to Scotland by his father. Upon returning, he was re-enrolled at Edinburgh University and forced by his father to sign away most of his inheritance in return for an allowance of £100 a year, on 30 July 1762, Boswell took his oral law exam, which he passed with some skill. Upon this success, Lord Auchinleck decided to raise his sons allowance to £200 a year and it was during his second spell there that Boswell wrote his London Journal and, on 16 May 1763, met Johnson for the first time. The pair became friends almost immediately, the first conversation between Johnson and Boswell is quoted in Life of Samuel Johnson as follows, Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it. That, Sir, I find, is what a great many of your countrymen cannot help. It was around three months after this first encounter with Johnson that Boswell departed for Europe with the goal of continuing his law studies at Utrecht University
19.
Erya
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The Erya or Erh-ya is the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary or Chinese encyclopedia known. Bernhard Karlgren concluded that the part of its glosses must reasonably date from the 3rd century BC. Chinese scholars interpret the first title character ěr as a loan character for the homophonous ěr. South Coblin, The interpretation of the title as something like approaching what is correct, proper and it has been translated as The Literary Expositor or The Ready Rectifier, Progress Towards Correctness, and The Semantic Approximator. Joseph Needham et al.325 BCE onwards, and the text was enlarged and stabilized during the Qin and Western Han dynasty. Most of these texts about the Erya were still extant in the Tang dynasty but had disappeared by the Song dynasty, the Northern Song dynasty scholar Xing Bing wrote the Erya shu, which quoted many descriptions from both ordinary literature and medicinal bencao texts. A century later, Lu Dian wrote the Piya and the Erya Xinyi commentary, the Southern Song dynasty scholar Luo Yuan subsequently wrote the Eryayi interpretation. During the Qing Dynasty, Shao Jinhan published the Erya Zhengyi, in the history of Chinese lexicography, nearly all dictionaries were collated by graphic systems of character radicals, first introduced in the Shuowen Jiezi. However, a few exceptions, called yashu 雅書 ya-type books, adopted collation by semantic categories such as Heaven. The Ming Dynasty scholar Lang Kuijin categorized and published the Wuya, Erya, Xiao Erya, Yiya, Guangya, Chinese leishu encyclopedias, such as the Yongle Encyclopedia, were also semantically arranged. Needham takes the Eryas derivative literature as the line of descent for the encyclopedia in China. The Erya has been described as a dictionary, glossary, synonymicon, thesaurus, Karlgren explains that the book is not a dictionary in abstracto, it is a collection of direct glosses to concrete passages in ancient texts. The received text contains 2094 entries, covering about 4300 words, and it is divided into nineteen sections, the first of which is subdivided into two parts. The title of each chapter combines shi with a term describing the words under definition, seven chapters are organized into taxonomies. For instance, chapter 4 defines terms for, paternal clan, maternal relatives, wifes relatives, the text is divided between the first three heterogeneous chapters defining abstract words and the last sixteen semantically-arranged chapters defining concrete words. The last seven – concerning grasses, trees, insects and reptiles, fish, birds, wild animals and it is a notable document of natural history and historical biogeography. Owing to its laconic lexicographical style, the Erya is the only Chinese classic that has not been translated into English. However, there are several unpublished PhD dissertations translating particular chapters, Xiao Erya Shiming Guangya Piya Urra=hubullu, Babylonian glossary Coblin, W. South
20.
Northern Wei
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During the Taihe period of Emperor Xiaowen, court advisers instituted sweeping reforms and introduced changes that eventually led to the dynasty moving its capital from Datong to Luoyang, in 494. The Tuoba renamed themselves the Yuan as a part of systematic Sinicization, towards the end of the dynasty there was significant internal dissension resulting in a split into Eastern Wei and Western Wei. Many antiques and art works, both Daoist and Buddhist, from this period have survived, the Jin Dynasty had developed an alliance with the Tuoba against the Xiongnu state Han Zhao. In 315 the Tuoba chief was granted the title of the Prince of Dai, after Former Qins emperor Fu Jiān was defeated by Jin forces at the Battle of Fei River in his failed bid to unify China, the Former Qin state began to break apart. By 386, Tuoba Gui, the son of Tuoba Shiyijian, Later he changed his title to the Prince of Wei, and his state was therefore known as Northern Wei. In 391, Tuoba Gui defeated the Rouran tribes and killed their chief, Heduohan, initially Northern Wei was a vassal of Later Yan, but by 395 had rebelled and by 398 had conquered most of Later Yan territory north of the Yellow River. In 399 Tuoba Gui he declared himself Emperor Daowu, and that title was used by Northern Weis rulers for the rest of the states history, as the empires history progressed, this appeared to be a major contributing factor leading to corruption among officials. Not until the 2nd century of the empires existence did the state begin to distribute salaries to its officials, only an imperial consort who was successful in forging a golden statue could become the empress. All men, regardless of ethnicity, were ordered to tie their hair into a braid that would then be rolled and placed on top of the head. When a crown prince is named, his mother, if still alive, as a result, because emperors would not have mothers, they often honored their wet nurses with the honorific title, Nurse Empress Dowager. As sinicization of the Northern Wei state progressed, these customs, Five families formed a neighborhood Five lin formed a village Five li formed a commune At each of these levels, leaders that were associated with the central government were appointed. In order for the state to reclaim dry, barren areas of land, the Sui and Tang Dynasties later resurrected this system in the 7th century. During the reign of Emperor Daowu, the number of deported people from the regions east of Taihangshan to Datong was estimated to be around 460,000. Deportations typically took place once a new piece of territory had been conquered, as the Northern Wei state grew, the emperors desire for Han Chinese institutions and advisors grew. Cui Hao, an advisor at the courts in Datong played a part in this process. He introduced Han Chinese administrative methods and penal codes in the Northern Wei state, Chinese influence accelerated during the capitals move to Luoyang in 494 and Emperor Xiaowen continued this by establishing a policy of systematic sinicization that was continued by his successors. The royal family took the sinicization a step further by changing their name to Yuan. Marriages to Chinese families were encouraged, with this, Buddhist temples started appearing everywhere, displacing Taoism as the state religion
21.
Song dynasty
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The Song dynasty was an era of Chinese history that began in 960 and continued until 1279. It succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, coincided with the Liao and Western Xia dynasties and it was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or true paper money nationally and the first Chinese government to establish a permanent standing navy. This dynasty also saw the first known use of gunpowder, as well as the first discernment of true north using a compass, the Song dynasty is divided into two distinct periods, Northern and Southern. During the Northern Song, the Song capital was in the city of Bianjing. The Southern Song refers to the period after the Song lost control of its half to the Jurchen Jin dynasty in the Jin–Song Wars. During this time, the Song court retreated south of the Yangtze, the Southern Song dynasty considerably bolstered its naval strength to defend its waters and land borders and to conduct maritime missions abroad. To repel the Jin, and later the Mongols, the Song developed revolutionary new military technology augmented by the use of gunpowder, in 1234, the Jin dynasty was conquered by the Mongols, who took control of northern China, maintaining uneasy relations with the Southern Song. Möngke Khan, the fourth Great Khan of the Mongol Empire and his younger brother Kublai Khan was proclaimed the new Great Khan, though his claim was only partially recognized by the Mongols in the west. In 1271, Kublai Khan was proclaimed the Emperor of China, after two decades of sporadic warfare, Kublai Khans armies conquered the Song dynasty in 1279. The Mongol invasion led to a reunification under the Yuan dynasty, the population of China doubled in size during the 10th and 11th centuries. The Northern Song census recorded a population of roughly 50 million, much like the Han and this data is found in the Standard Histories. However, it is estimated that the Northern Song had a population of some 100 million people and this dramatic increase of population fomented an economic revolution in pre-modern China. The expansion of the population, growth of cities, and the emergence of a national economy led to the withdrawal of the central government from direct involvement in economic affairs. The lower gentry assumed a role in grassroots administration and local affairs. Appointed officials in county and provincial centers relied upon the gentry for their services, sponsorship. Social life during the Song was vibrant, citizens gathered to view and trade precious artworks, the populace intermingled at public festivals and private clubs, and cities had lively entertainment quarters. The spread of literature and knowledge was enhanced by the expansion of woodblock printing. Technology, science, philosophy, mathematics, and engineering flourished over the course of the Song, although the institution of the civil service examinations had existed since the Sui dynasty, it became much more prominent in the Song period
22.
Radical (Chinese characters)
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A Chinese radical is a graphical component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. This component is often an indicator, though in some cases the original semantic connection has become obscure. In other cases, the radical may be a component or even an artificially extracted portion of the character. The English term radical is based on an analogy between the structure of characters and inflection of words in European languages, radicals are also sometimes called classifiers, but this name is more commonly applied to grammatical classifiers. In the earliest Chinese dictionaries, such as the Erya, characters were grouped together in broad semantic categories, in the 2nd century AD, the Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen organized his etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi by selecting 540 recurring graphic elements he called bù. Most were common semantic components, but they also included shared graphic elements such as a dot or horizontal stroke, some were even artificially extracted groups of strokes, termed glyphs by Serruys, which never had an independent existence other than being listed in Shuowen. Each character was listed only one element, which is then referred to as the radical for that character. For example, characters containing 女 nǚ female or 木 mù tree, Mei Yingzuos 1615 dictionary Zihui made two further innovations. These innovations were adopted by the more famous Kangxi Dictionary of 1716. Thus the standard 214 radicals introduced in the Zihui are usually known as the Kangxi radicals and these were first called bùshǒu in the Kangxi Dictionary. Some of the similar radicals are combined in many dictionaries, such as 月 yuè moon. Radicals may appear in any position in a character, for example, the radical 女 appears on the left side in the characters 姐, 媽, 她, 好 and 姓, but it appears at the bottom in 妾. However, there are two radicals that have the shape 阝, but are indexed as different radicals depending on where they appear in the character and these are only loose rules, though, and have exceptions. Many character components are distorted or change in form in order to fit into a block with other components and they may be narrowed, shortened, or may have different shapes entirely. Changes in shape, rather than simple distortion, may result in a reduction in the number of used to write a component. In some cases, these forms may have several variants. The actual shape of the component when it is used in a character can depend on its placement with respect to the elements in the character. Usually, the radical is also the component, but that is not always the case
23.
Yupian
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The Yupian is a c.543 Chinese dictionary edited by Gu Yewang during the Liang dynasty. It arranges 12,158 character entries under 542 radicals, which differ somewhat from the original 540 in the Shuowen Jiezi, each character entry gives a fanqie pronunciation gloss and a definition, with occasional annotation. In 760, during the Tang dynasty, Sun Jiang compiled a Yupian edition, in 1013, Song dynasty scholar Chen Pengnian published a revised Daguang yihui Yupian. The Japanese monk Kūkai brought an original version Yupian back from China in 806, and modified it into his c.830 Tenrei Banshō Meigi, a Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology
24.
Liang dynasty
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The Liang dynasty, also known as the Southern Liang dynasty, was the third of the Southern Dynasties during Chinas Southern and Northern Dynasties period. Located in central China, north of Lake Dongting, the Liang dynasty was followed by the Chen dynasty, during the Liang dynasty, in 547 a Persian embassy paid tribute to the Liang, amber was recorded as originating from Persia by the Book of Liang. The ending date for Liang dynasty itself is a matter of controversy among historians, many historians consider the end of Emperor Jings reign in 556, when he was forced to yield the throne to Chen Baxian, who established Chen dynasty, to be Liangs end date. Others regard the abolition of Western Liang in 587 to be the end of Liang. A Liang scion named Xiao Xian attempted to revive the Liang dynasty during the collapse of the Sui dynasty and he was defeated and executed by Emperor Gaozu of Tang. Tombs of a number of members of the ruling Xiao family, with their sculptural ensembles, the best surviving example of the Liang dynastys monumental statuary is perhaps the ensemble of the Tomb of Xiao Xiu, a brother of Emperor Wu, located in Qixia District east of Nanjing. Tombs of the Liang Dynasty King of Liang Book of Liang Book of Zhou History of Northern Dynasties History of Southern Dynasties Zizhi Tongjian Media related to Liang dynasty at Wikimedia Commons
25.
Zihui
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The Zìhuì is a Chinese dictionary, edited by Mei Yingzuo during the late Ming Dynasty and published in 1615, the forty-third year of the Ming Wanli Emperor. The work is divided into 14 scrolls and contains a total of 33,179 Chinese characters and it was the first dictionary to introduce the modern radical-stroke system. Whilst the ancillary first and last fascicles explain topics like stroke order and radicals, the Qing Dynasty scholar Wu Renchen published the 1666 Zihui Bu. The Zihui also formed the basis for the later Zhengzitong written by Zhang Zilie, for instance, its man radical 男, which compounds the field radical 田 and the power radical 力, only lists three, nan 男, sheng 甥, and jiu 舅. The Zihui more efficiently lists nan 男 under the radical, sheng 甥 under the life radical 生. The Zihui is renowned for establishing the system of 214 radicals still used in dictionaries today as the basis for the collation of Chinese characters and it also introduced the radical-and-stroke sorting principle of arranging characters under a radical according to the number of residual strokes. After the noted 1716 Kangxi Dictionary adopted these 214 graphic elements, in modern Chinese usage, zihui can mean glossary, wordbook, or lexicon. 字彙補 – Chinese Text Project The 214 Radicals 部首, ChinaKnowledge
26.
Ming dynasty
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The Ming dynasty was the ruling dynasty of China – then known as the Empire of the Great Ming – for 276 years following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming, described by some as one of the greatest eras of orderly government, although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng, regimes loyal to the Ming throne – collectively called the Southern Ming – survived until 1683. He rewarded his supporters and employed them as a counterweight against the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats. One, Zheng He, led seven enormous voyages of exploration into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia, the rise of new emperors and new factions diminished such extravagances, the capture of the Zhengtong Emperor during the 1449 Tumu Crisis ended them completely. The imperial navy was allowed to fall into disrepair while forced labor constructed the Liaodong palisade, haijin laws intended to protect the coasts from Japanese pirates instead turned many into smugglers and pirates themselves. The growth of Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch trade created new demand for Chinese products and produced an influx of Japanese. This abundance of specie remonetized the Ming economy, whose money had suffered repeated hyperinflation and was no longer trusted. While traditional Confucians opposed such a prominent role for commerce and the newly rich it created, combined with crop failure, floods, and epidemic, the dynasty collapsed before the rebel leader Li Zicheng, who was defeated by the Manchu-led Eight Banner armies who founded the Qing dynasty. The Mongol-led Yuan dynasty ruled before the establishment of the Ming dynasty, consequently, agriculture and the economy were in shambles, and rebellion broke out among the hundreds of thousands of peasants called upon to work on repairing the dykes of the Yellow River. A number of Han Chinese groups revolted, including the Red Turbans in 1351, the Red Turbans were affiliated with the White Lotus, a Buddhist secret society. Zhu Yuanzhang was a peasant and Buddhist monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352. In 1356, Zhus rebel force captured the city of Nanjing, with the Yuan dynasty crumbling, competing rebel groups began fighting for control of the country and thus the right to establish a new dynasty. In 1363, Zhu Yuanzhang eliminated his archrival and leader of the rebel Han faction, Chen Youliang, in the Battle of Lake Poyang, arguably the largest naval battle in history. Known for its ambitious use of ships, Zhus force of 200,000 Ming sailors were able to defeat a Han rebel force over triple their size, claimed to be 650. The victory destroyed the last opposing rebel faction, leaving Zhu Yuanzhang in uncontested control of the bountiful Yangtze River Valley, Zhu Yuanzhang took Hongwu, or Vastly Martial, as his era name. Hongwu made an effort to rebuild state infrastructure. He built a 48 km long wall around Nanjing, as well as new palaces, Hongwu organized a military system known as the weisuo, which was similar to the fubing system of the Tang dynasty. With a growing suspicion of his ministers and subjects, Hongwu established the Jinyiwei, some 100,000 people were executed in a series of purges during his rule
27.
Stroke order
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Stroke order refers to the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character are written. A stroke is a movement of an instrument on a writing surface. Chinese characters are used in forms in Chinese, Japanese, Korean. They are known as Hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Chinese characters are basically logograms constructed with strokes. Over the millennia a set of agreed rules have been developed by custom. This promotes writing speed, accuracy, and readability and this idea is particularly important since as learners progress, characters often get more complex. Since stroke order also aids learning and memorization, students are taught about it from a very early age in schools. The Eight Principles of Yong uses the single character 永, meaning eternity, in ancient China, the Jiǎgǔwén characters carved on ox scapula and tortoise plastrons showed no indication of stroke order. The characters show huge variations from piece to piece, sometimes even within one piece, during the divination ceremony, after the cracks were made, the characters were written with a brush on the shell or bone. In early Imperial China, the script was the Xiaozhuan style. About 220 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first to all of China, imposed Li Sis character uniformisation. Its graphs on old steles — some dating from 200 BC — reveal indications of the order of the time. However, stroke order could not yet be ascertained from the steles. The true starting point of order is the Lìshū style which is more regularized. Kǎishū style — still in use today — is more regularized, the stroke order 1000 years ago was similar to that toward the end of Imperial China. For example, the order of 广 is clear in the Kangxi dictionary of 1716, but in a modern book. The Kangxi and current shapes have tiny differences, while current stroke order is still the same, however, the stroke orders implied by the Kangxi dictionary are not necessarily similar to nowadays norm. Cursive styles such as Xíngshū and Cǎoshū show stroke order more clearly than Regular Script, the modern governments of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan have standardized official stroke orders to be taught in schools
28.
Kangxi Dictionary
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The Kangxi Dictionary was the standard Chinese dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kangxi Emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty ordered its compilation in 1710 and it used the earlier Zihui system of 214 radicals, today known as 214 Kangxi radicals, and was published in 1716. The dictionary is named after the Emperors era name, the dictionary contains more than 47,000 characters, though some 40% of them are graphic variants. In addition, there are rare or archaic characters, some which had been attested only once, less than a quarter of these characters are now in common use. The Kangxi Dictionary editors, including Zhang Yushu and Chen Tingjing, since the imperial edict required that the Kangxi Dictionary be compiled within five years, a number of errors were inevitable. The Daoguang Emperor established a board and their 1831 Zidian kaozheng corrected 2,588 mistakes. The supplemented dictionary contains 47,035 character entries, plus 1,995 graphic variants and they are grouped under the 214 radicals and arranged by the number of additional strokes in the character. The character entries give variants, pronunciations in traditional spelling and in modern reading of a homophone, different meanings. The dictionary also contains tables with characters ordered under syllable rime classes, tones. The Kangxi Dictionary is one of the Chinese dictionaries used by the Ideographic Rapporteur Group for the Unicode standard, an Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works, 3rd ed. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. Chinese and English dictionary, containing all the words in the Chinese imperial dictionary, arranged according to the radicals, Kangxi Zidian, with dictionary lookup – Chinese Text Project Kangxi. Chinese and English dictionary, containing all the words in the Chinese imperial dictionary, arranged according to the radicals, Volume 1
29.
Kangxi Emperor
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The Kangxi Emperors reign of 61 years makes him the longest-reigning emperor in Chinese history and one of the longest-reigning rulers in the world. However, since he ascended the throne at the age of seven, actual power was held for six years by four regents and his grandmother, the Kangxi Emperor is considered one of Chinas greatest emperors. The Kangxi Emperors reign brought about stability and relative wealth after years of war. He initiated the period known as the Prosperous Era of Kangxi and Qianlong or High Qing and his court also accomplished such literary feats as the compilation of the Kangxi Dictionary. Born on 4 May 1654 to the Shunzhi Emperor and Empress Xiaokangzhang in Jingren Palace, the Forbidden City, Beijing and he was enthroned at the age of seven, on 7 February 1661. His era name Kangxi, however, only started to be used on 18 February 1662, large bright eyes lighted up his face, which was pitted with smallpox. Before the Kangxi Emperor came to the throne, Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang had appointed the powerful men Sonin, Suksaha, Ebilun, Sonin died after his granddaughter became Empress Xiaochengren, leaving Suksaha at odds with Oboi in politics. In a fierce struggle, Oboi had Suksaha put to death. The Kangxi Emperor and the rest of the imperial court acquiesced in this arrangement, in 1669, the Kangxi Emperor had Oboi arrested with the help of his grandmother Grand Dowager Empress Xiaozhuang, who had raised him. And began taking control of the empire. He listed three issues of concern, flood control of the Yellow River, repair of the Grand Canal, the Grand Empress Dowager influenced him greatly and he took care of her himself in the months leading up to her death in 1688. The main army of the Qing Empire, the Eight Banners Army, was in decline under the Kangxi Emperor. It was smaller than it had been at its peak under Hong Taiji and in the reign of the Shunzhi Emperor, however. In addition, the Green Standard Army was still powerful with generals such as Tuhai, Fei Yanggu, Zhang Yong, Zhou Peigong, Shi Lang, Mu Zhan, Shun Shike and Wang Jingbao. The main reason for decline was a change in system between the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors reigns. The Kangxi Emperor continued using the military system implemented by his predecessors. According to the system, a commander who returned from a battle alone would be put to death and this was meant to motivate both commanders and soldiers alike to fight valiantly in war because there was no benefit for the sole survivor in a battle. By the Qianlong Emperors reign, military commanders had become lax and this was because commanders statuses had become hereditary, a general gained his position based on the contributions of his forefathers
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Qing dynasty
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It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China. The Qing multi-cultural empire lasted almost three centuries and formed the base for the modern Chinese state. The dynasty was founded by the Jurchen Aisin Gioro clan in Manchuria, in the late sixteenth century, Nurhaci, originally a Ming vassal, began organizing Banners, military-social units that included Jurchen, Han Chinese, and Mongol elements. Nurhaci formed the Jurchen clans into an entity, which he renamed as the Manchus. By 1636, his son Hong Taiji began driving Ming forces out of Liaodong and declared a new dynasty, in 1644, peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng conquered the Ming capital, Beijing. The Ten Great Campaigns of the Qianlong Emperor from the 1750s to the 1790s extended Qing control into Central Asia, the early rulers maintained their Manchu ways, and while their title was Emperor, they used khan to the Mongols and they were patrons of Tibetan Buddhism. They governed using Confucian styles and institutions of government and retained the imperial examinations to recruit Han Chinese to work under or in parallel with Manchus. They also adapted the ideals of the system in dealing with neighboring territories. The Qianlong reign saw the apogee and initial decline in prosperity. The population rose to some 400 million, but taxes and government revenues were fixed at a low rate, corruption set in, rebels tested government legitimacy, and ruling elites did not change their mindsets in the face of changes in the world system. Following the Opium War, European powers imposed unequal treaties, free trade, the Taiping Rebellion and the Dungan Revolt in Central Asia led to the deaths of some 20 million people, most of them due to famines caused by war. In spite of disasters, in the Tongzhi Restoration of the 1860s, Han Chinese elites rallied to the defense of the Confucian order. The initial gains in the Self-Strengthening Movement were destroyed in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895, in which the Qing lost its influence over Korea, New Armies were organized, but the ambitious Hundred Days Reform of 1898 was turned back by Empress Dowager Cixi, a conservative leader. Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries competed with reformist monarchists such as Kang Youwei, after the deaths of Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor in 1908, the hardline Manchu court alienated reformers and local elites alike. The Wuchang Uprising on October 11,1911, led to the Xinhai Revolution, General Yuan Shikai negotiated the abdication of Puyi, the last emperor, on February 12,1912. Nurhaci declared himself the Bright Khan of the Later Jin state in both of the 12–13th century Jurchen Jin dynasty and of his Aisin Gioro clan. His son Hong Taiji renamed the dynasty Great Qing in 1636, there are competing explanations on the meaning of Qīng. The character Qīng is composed of water and azure, both associated with the water element and this association would justify the Qing conquest as defeat of fire by water
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Syllable
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A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the water is composed of two syllables, wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the building blocks of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur and this shift from pictograms to syllables has been called the most important advance in the history of writing. A word that consists of a syllable is called a monosyllable. Syllable is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French sillabe, from Latin syllaba, συλλαβή means what is taken together, referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound. συλλαβή is a noun from the verb συλλαμβάνω syllambánō, a compound of the preposition σύν sýn with. The noun uses the root λαβ-, which appears in the aorist tense, the present tense stem λαμβάν- is formed by adding a nasal infix ⟨μ⟩ ⟨m⟩ before the β b and a suffix -αν -an at the end. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the period ⟨. ⟩ marks syllable breaks, in practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. When a word comes in the middle of a syllable. The liaison tie is used to join lexical words into phonological words. In the typical theory of structure, the general structure of a syllable consists of three segments. e. Nucleus and coda are grouped together as a rime and onset are only distinguished at the second level, the nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and they are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda, in the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a, the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC, languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a languages phonotactics
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Tone (linguistics)
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages, the tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/. Tonal languages are common in Africa, East Asia, and Mexico. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, I versus you, many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone, unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance. Contour systems are typical of languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, including Tai–Kadai, Vietic, the Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are dominated by register systems. Many languages use tone in a limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch, such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal, notably excepting Swahili, most languages spoken in the Senegambia, Koyra Chiini and Fulani. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal and nontonal branches, numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China and Mainland Southeast Asia. Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai languages are tonal, including Thai, Lao. The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the most tonal languages in the world, Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Utsul. Tones in Vietnamese and Utsul may result from heavy Chinese influence on both languages, there were tones in Middle Korean. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, in Europe, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Lithuanian, Latvian and Luxemburgish have tonal characteristics. Among the Indo-European languages of Asia, three Indo-Aryan languages have tonality, Punjabi, Dogri and Lahnda, although the Austronesian language family has some tonal members such as New Caledonias Cèmuhî language, no tonal languages have been discovered in Australia. A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec, Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tone systems
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Rime dictionary
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A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary that collates characters by tone and rhyme, instead of by radical. This work became popular during the Tang dynasty, and went through a series of revisions and expansions. These dictionaries also record the pronunciations of characters by the method, using a pair of characters to indicate the onset. The later rime tables gave a more precise and systematic account of the sounds of these dictionaries by tabulating syllables by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones. It incorporates most of the found in modern varieties of Chinese. It has also used together with other evidence in the reconstruction of Old Chinese. Some scholars use the French spelling rime, as used by the Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren, for the categories described in these works, Chinese scholars produced dictionaries to codify reading pronunciations for the correct recitation of the classics and the associated rhyme conventions of regulated verse. The earliest rime dictionary was the Shenglei by Li Deng of the Three Kingdoms period, the book did not survive, and is known only from descriptions in later works. Various schools of the Jin dynasty and Northern and Southern dynasties produced their own dictionaries, the most prestigious standards were those of the northern capital Luoyang and the southern capital Jinling. In 601, Lù Fǎyán published his Qieyun, an attempt to merge the distinctions in five earlier dictionaries. According to Lu Fayans preface, the plan of the work was drawn up 20 years earlier in consultation with a group of scholars. However the final compilation was by Lu alone, after he had retired from government service, the Qieyun quickly became popular as the standard of cultivated pronunciation during the Tang dynasty. The dictionaries on which it was based out of use. Several revisions appeared, of which the most important were, In 1008, during the Song dynasty, the Jiyun was a greatly expanded revision of the Guangyun. Lus initial work was primarily a guide to pronunciation, with very brief glosses, until the mid-20th century, the oldest complete rime dictionaries known were the Guangyun and Jiyun, though extant copies of the latter were marred by numerous transcription errors. Thus all studies of the Qieyun tradition were actually based on the Guangyun, fragments of earlier revisions of the Qieyun were found early in the century among the Dunhuang manuscripts, in Turfan and in Beijing. When the Qieyun became the standard in the Tang dynasty. Particularly prized were copies of Wáng Rénxūs edition, made in the early 9th century, by Wú Cǎiluán, one of these copies was acquired by Emperor Huizong, himself a keen calligrapher
