1.
Logographic
–
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
Logographic
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Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have their origins as logograms.
2.
Oracle Bone Script
–
The vast majority were found at the Yinxu site. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BCE or 1200 BCE. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c.1046 BCE, divining with milfoil became more common and it is also the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script. The term oracle bone was first coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing, because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script. As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty and it is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script, because of its mature nature. However, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered, the oracle bone script of the late Shang appears pictographic, as does its contemporary, the Shang writing on bronzes. The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period, additionally, the writing of characters in vertical columns, from top to bottom, is for the most part carried over from the bamboo books to oracle bone inscriptions. The vertical columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally ordered from right to left and this level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. Compare, for instance, the third and fourth graphs in the row below, without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented 豕 shĭ swine and 犬 quǎn dog respectively. By the late Shang oracle bone script, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds, and associative compounds were already common. Although it was a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script was not fully standardized, a graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. These irregularities persisted until the standardization of the script in the Qin dynasty. Of the thousands of characters found from all the fragments so far. One reason for this is that components of certain oracle bone script characters may differ in later script forms, such differences may be accounted for by character simplification and/or by later generations misunderstanding the original graph, which had evolved beyond recognition. Another reason is that some characters exist only in oracle bone script, in such cases, context - when available - may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character. One good example is shown in the fragment below, labeled oracle bone script for Spring, the top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an isosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the oracle bone script character for 王 wáng, the numbers of oracle bones with inscriptions contemporaneous with the end of Shang and the beginning of Zhou is relatively few in number compared with the entire corpus of Shang inscriptions
Oracle Bone Script
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Oracle bone script
Oracle Bone Script
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Wang Yirong, Chinese politician and scholar, was the first to recognize the oracle bone inscriptions as ancient writing.
Oracle Bone Script
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An oracle bone (which is incomplete) with a diviner asking the Shang king if there would be misfortune over the next ten days
Oracle Bone Script
–
Oracle script from a divining
3.
Seal Script
–
Seal script is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, arising in the Warring State of Qin, there are two uses of the word seal script, the Large or Great Seal script and the lesser or Small Seal Script, the latter is also called simply seal script. The Large Seal script was originally a later, vague Han dynasty reference to writing of the Qin system similar to and it has also been used to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bones as well. There were several different variants of seal script which developed in each kingdom independently during the warring state period and spring, the birds and worms script was used in the Kingdoms of Wu, Chu, and Yue. It was found on several artifacts including the Spear of Fuchai, on one side of the blade of Goujian, eight characters were written in an ancient script. The script was found to be the one called 鳥蟲文 birds and worms characters, initial analysis of the text deciphered six of the characters, 越王 and 自作用劍. As a southern state, Chu was close to the Wu-Yue influences, Chu produced broad bronze swords that were similar to Wuyue swords, but not as intricate. Chu also used the Birds and Worms style, which was borrowed by the Wu, the script of the Qin system had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance and this was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian and their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish. The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin, not long after, however, the Shuowen Jiezi, the lifework of Xu Shen, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, entries are categorized under 540 section headers. It has been anticipated that the Small Seal script will some day be encoded in Unicode, codepoints U+34000 to U+368FF have been tentatively allocated. Old Texts Phags-pa Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Qin Yun Song, Big Seal Script Banner Script translation Richard Sears on seal script
Seal Script
–
Seal script
Seal Script
–
Chinese characters
Seal Script
–
Small seal script
epigraph on the standard weight prototype of
Qin dynasty. Made from
iron, this prototype was unearthed in 1973 at
Wendeng,
Shandong Province.
4.
Clerical Script
–
Due to its high legibility to modern readers, it is still used for artistic flavor in a variety of functional applications such as headlines, signboards, and advertisements. This legibility stems from the rectilinear structure, a feature shared with modern regular script. Clerical script is popularly but mistakenly thought to have developed or been invented in the early Han dynasty from the seal script. Another traditional account is that it was invented by government scribes, in particular involved in the justice. Furthermore, rather than being established by government scribes, it has argued that clerical script was already in popular use. The popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing became more widespread. The Qín bamboo script is an example of this transition, having evolved from vulgar Qín writing. The etymology of the Chinese name for the script lìshū is uncertain, during Warring States, proto-clerical script emerged in casual, informal usage. During the Qin dynasty it appears to have also used in some scribal capacity. Thus, the evolution from clerical script to standard script was not a step as commonly supposed. Translation of 文字學概論 by Mattos and Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Clerical Script
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Chinese characters
Clerical Script
–
Chinese characters for "Clerical Script", in
regular script (left) and clerical script (right).
Clerical Script
–
Clerical script from the
Han Dynasty
5.
Jurchen script
–
Jurchen script was the writing system used to write the Jurchen language, the language of the Jurchen people who created the Jin Empire in northeastern China in the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Chinese, the script has only been decoded to a small extent. The Jurchens were the ancestors of the Manchu people and spoke a related to the Manchu language. The Jurchen script, however, is not ancestral to the Manchu script, according to the Sino-Jurchen glossary, the Jurchen script contains 720 characters. These comprise a mixture of logograms, which represent whole words without any element, and phonograms. Compound words consisting of two or more characters were also used, the Jurchen characters have a system of radicals similar to Chinese characters and are ordered according to radical and stroke count. The Jurchen script is part of the Chinese family of scripts, after the Jurchen rebelled against the Khitan Liao Dynasty and established the new Jin dynasty in 1115, they were using the Khitan script. In 1119 or 1120, Wanyan Xiyin, the chancellor of the early Jin Empire, acting on the orders of the first emperor, Wanyan Aguda, invented the first Jurchen script, known as the large script. The second version, the small script, was promulgated in 1138 by the Xizong Emperor. According to the Jin Shi, in 1145 the small script characters were used officially the first time. There is no information about any original books that were written in Jurchen. The translation program started in 1164, among the translations were Confucian and Taoist classics, histories, unfortunately, not even a single fragment of any of the books survived. Most of the samples of the Jurchen writing available to researchers are epigraphic ones, as well as a few short inscriptions on seals, mirrors, ceramics, graffiti. A total of nine epigraphic inscriptions are known so far and it is apparently an abbreviated translation of the Chinese text on the front of the stele. However, the inscription from Qingyuan in northern Korea is now thought to be older. The only inscription dating from after the end of the Jin dynasty is the one on the stele erected in 1413 by the Ming eunuch admiral Yishiha on the Tyr Cliff, on the lower Amur River. No paper or silk manuscripts in Jurchen were known until 1968, kychanov among the Tangut papers in the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies. It is written on two sheets of paper and dates to 1217, writing in 1990, Herbert Franke describes the Leningrad document as unique and not yet deciphered
Jurchen script
–
Jurchen script (Jurchen: dʒu ʃə bitxə) was the writing system used to write the
Jurchen language, the language of the
Jurchen people who created the
Jin Empire in northeastern China in the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the
Khitan script, which in turn was derived from
Chinese (
Han characters). The script has only been decoded to a small extent.
Jurchen script
–
A medallion with the Jurchen translation of the Chinese couplet, Ming wang shen de, si yi xian bin ("明王慎德.四夷咸宾": "When a wise king is heedful of virtue, foreigners from all quarters come as guests"). The image was preserved in a Ming Dynasty catalog of molds for making ink cakes
Jurchen script
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Jurchen inscription dated 1196, on a rock in Mongolia
Jurchen script
–
Da Jin huang di dutong jinglüe langjun xingji (大金皇弟都統經略郎君行記)
6.
Simplified Chinese
–
Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
Simplified Chinese
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Chinese characters
Simplified Chinese
–
Simplified Chinese
Simplified Chinese
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The first batch of Simplified Characters introduced in 1935 consisted of 324 characters.
Simplified Chinese
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The slogan 战无不胜的毛泽东思想万岁 (Zhàn wúbù shèng de Máo Zédōng sīxiǎng wànsuì; Long live the invincible
Mao Zedong Thought) on
Xinhua Gate in Beijing.
7.
Tangut script
–
The Tangut script was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia Dynasty. According to the latest count,5863 Tangut characters are known, as in Chinese calligraphy, regular, running, cursive and seal scripts were used in Tangut writing. According to the History of Song, the script was designed by the high-ranking official Yeli Renrong under Western Xia Emperor Li Yuanhaos supervision in 1036, the script was invented in a short period of time, and was put into use quickly. Government schools were founded to teach the script, official documents were written in the script. A great number of Buddhist scriptures were translated from Tibetan and Chinese, although the dynasty collapsed in 1227, the script continued to be used for another few centuries. The last example of the script occurs on a pair of Tangut dharani pillars found at Baoding,6,125 characters of the Tangut script were included in Unicode version 9.0 in June 2016 in the Tangut block. 755 Radicals and components used in the study of Tangut were added to the Tangut Components block. Tangut characters can be divided into two classes, simple and composite, the simple characters can be either semantic or phonetic. None of the Tangut characters are pictographic, while some of the Chinese characters were at the time of their creation, most composite characters comprise two components. A few comprise three or four, a component can be a simple character, or part of a composite character. The composite characters include semantic-semantic ones and semantic-phonetic ones, a few special composite characters were made for transliterating Chinese and Sanskrit. There are a number of pairs of special composite characters worth noting, the members of such a pair have the same components, only the location of the components in them is different. The members of such a pair have very similar meanings, tangutology List of Tangutologists List of Tangut books Chinese family of scripts Grinstead, Eric. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series No.10, Tangut, in Peter T. Daniels & William Bright, The Worlds Writing Systems, New York, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-507993-0, pp. 228–9. Seika moji, sono kaidoku no purosesu, lüelun Xixia wenzi de gouzao, in Minzu yuwen lunji, Beijing, Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, pp. 192–226. Tangut script at Omniglot Tangut script, by Andrew West Sample Tangut characters at Mojikyo 大西 磨希子・北本 朝展，『文字が語りかける民族意識：カラホトと西夏文字』，ディジタル・シルクロード 史金波
Tangut script
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Tangut
Tangut script
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Stephen Wootton Bushell 's decipherement of 37 Tangut characters
8.
Kanji
–
Kanji, or kanji, are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term kanji for the Chinese characters literally means Han characters and is using the same characters as the Chinese word hànzì. Chinese characters first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, the earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Yamato emissary in 57 AD. Chinese coins from the first century AD have been found in Yayoi-period archaeological sites, however, the Japanese of that era probably had no comprehension of the script, and would remain illiterate until the fifth century AD. The earliest Japanese documents were written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. For example, the correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read, during the reign of Empress Suiko, the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court. The Japanese language had no form at the time Chinese characters were introduced. Chinese characters also came to be used to write Japanese words, around 650 CE, a writing system called manyōgana evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Manyōgana written in cursive style evolved into hiragana, or onna-de, that is, ladies hand, major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a path, monastery students simplified manyōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are descended from kanji. Katakana are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, the names of plants and animals, and for emphasis on certain words. In 1946, following World War II and under the Allied Occupation of Japan and this was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged and these are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, these are known as hyōgaiji. The kyōiku kanji are 1,006 characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, originally the list only contained 881 characters. This was expanded to 996 characters in 1977 and it was not until 1982 the list was expanded to its current size
Kanji
–
Chinese characters
Kanji
–
A young woman practicing kanji.
Ukiyo-e woodblock print by
Yōshū Chikanobu, 1897
Kanji
–
Nihon Shoki (720 AD), considered by historians and archaeologists as the most complete extant historical record of ancient Japan, was written entirely in kanji.
Kanji
–
A jūbako (重箱
?), which has a mixed on-kun reading.
9.
Hanja
–
Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. Borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation, hanja-mal or hanja-eo refers to words that can be written with hanja, and hanmun refers to Classical Chinese writing, although hanja is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts. Because hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese, only a small number of hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in Japan and Mainland China have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding hanja characters. Today, a working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts. Learning a certain number of hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—hanja-eo —are written with the hangul alphabet most of the time. A major motivation for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism, the major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, Cheonjamun. One way of adapting hanja to write Korean in such systems was to represent native Korean grammatical particles, for example, Gugyeol uses the characters 爲尼 to transcribe the Korean word hăni, in modern Korean, that means does, and so. However, in Chinese, the characters are read as the expression wéi ní. This is an example of Gugyeol words where the radical is read in Korean for its meaning. Hanja was the means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great promoted the invention of hangul in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write in hanmun and it was not until the 20th century that hangul truly replaced hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949, additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are a number of Chinese-borrowed words in widespread usage in the North. The replacement has been less total in South Korea where, although usage has declined over time, some remains in common usage in some contexts. Each hanja is composed of one of 214 radicals plus in most cases one or more additional elements, the vast majority of hanja use the additional elements to indicate the sound of the character, but a few hanja are purely pictographic, and some were formed in other ways. This dual meaning-sound reading of a character is called eumhun, the word or words used to denote the meaning are often—though hardly always—words of native Korean origin, and are sometimes archaic words no longer commonly used. South Korean primary schools abandoned the teaching of hanja in 1971 and it is taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum
Hanja
–
Chinese characters
Hanja
–
Hanja
Hanja
–
Korean writing systems
Hanja
–
Calligraphy
10.
Zhuyin
–
Zhuyin fuhao, Zhuyin or Bopomofo is a system of phonetic notation for the transcription of spoken Chinese, particularly the Mandarin dialect. The first two are traditional terms, whereas Bopomofo is the term, also used by the ISO. Consisting of 37 characters and four marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Zhuyin was introduced in China by the Republican Government in the 1910s and used alongside the Wade-Giles system, the Wade system was replaced by Hanyu Pinyin in 1958 by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China, and at the International Organization for Standardization in 1982. The informal name Bopomofo is derived from the first four syllables in the ordering of available syllables in Mandarin Chinese. The four Bopomofo characters that correspond to these syllables are placed first in a list of these characters. The same sequence is used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems. The original formal name of the system was Guóyīn Zìmǔ and Zhùyīn Zìmǔ and it was later renamed Zhùyīn Fúhào, meaning phonetic symbols. In official documents, Zhuyin is occasionally called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I, in English translations, the system is often also called either Chu-yin or the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. A romanized phonetic system was released in 1984 as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Wu Zhihui from 1912 to 1913, created a system called Zhuyin Zimu, which was based on Zhang Binglins shorthand. A draft was released on July 11,1913, by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education and it was later renamed first Guoyin Zimu and then, in April 1930, Zhuyin Fuhao. The last renaming addressed fears that the system might independently replace Chinese characters. Zhuyin remains the predominant phonetic system in teaching reading and writing in school in Taiwan. It is also one of the most popular ways to enter Chinese characters into computers and smartphones, in elementary school, particularly in the lower years, Chinese characters in textbooks are often annotated with Zhuyin as ruby characters as an aid to learning. Additionally, one newspaper in Taiwan, the Mandarin Daily News. In teaching Mandarin, Taiwan institutions and some communities use Zhuyin as a learning tool. The Zhuyin characters were created by Zhang Binglin, and taken mainly from regularised forms of ancient Chinese characters, the modern readings of which contain the sound that each letter represents. It is to be noted that the first consonants are articulated from the front of the mouth to the back, /b/, /p/, /m/, /f/, /d/, /t/, /n/, Zhuyin is written in the same stroke order rule as Chinese characters
Zhuyin
–
An example of a Zhuyin keypad for Taiwan.
Zhuyin
–
Mandarin Phonetic Symbols
11.
Khitan scripts
–
There were two scripts, the large script and the small script. These were functionally independent and appear to have been used simultaneously, the Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the Jurchen people for several decades after the fall of the Liao dynasty until the Jurchens fully switched to a script of their own. Examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, many scholars recognize that the Khitan scripts have not been fully deciphered and that more research and discoveries would be necessary for a proficient understanding of them. The Khitan scripts are part of the Chinese family of scripts, knowledge of the Khitan language, which was written by the Khitan script, is quite limited as well. Although there are clues to its origins, which might point in different directions. Abaoji of the Yelü clan, founder of the Khitan, or Liao Dynasty, “Large script”, or “big characters, as it was referred to in some Chinese sources, was established to keep the record of the new Khitan state. The Khitan script was based on the idea of the Chinese script, the Khitan large script was considered to be relatively simple. The large script characters were equally spaced, in vertical columns. Although large script mostly uses logograms, it is possible that ideograms and syllabograms are used for grammatical functions, the large script has a few similarities to Chinese, with several words taken directly with or without modifications from the Chinese. Most large script characters, however, cannot be related to any Chinese characters. The meaning of most of them remains unknown, but that of a few of them has been established by analyzing dates in Khitan inscriptions, the Memorial for Yelü Yanning is one of the earliest inscriptions in Khitan large script. The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela and he drew his inspiration from “the Uyghur language and script, ” which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was thought to be a daughter script of the Uyghur alphabet. Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, unlike Hanguls jamo, a Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a CV or VC pair as well. Each block could incorporate two to seven such phonetic element characters, written in pairs within the block, with the first half of the pair on the left. If there were an odd number of characters in a block, although there is some speculation, it appears there are no characters that both scripts share. Periodically, epitaphs written using small script will be using the large script method of linearity. Although small script had some similarities to Chinese, Khitan characters were used to record Chinese words
Khitan scripts
–
Bronze mirror with a Khitan small script inscription
Khitan scripts
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Memorial for Yelü Yanning in Khitan large script. Dated 986.
Khitan scripts
–
Bronze 'fish tally' with small Khitan inscription owned by
Stephen Wootton Bushell
12.
Khitan people
–
They spoke the Khitan language, which is related to the Mongolic languages. As the Liao dynasty, they dominated a vast area north of and including parts of China, There is no consensus on the etymology of the name of Khitan. Feng Jiasheng argues that it comes from the Yuwen chieftains names, zhao Zhenji thinks that the term originated from Xianbei and means a place where Xianbei had resided. Japanese people scholar Otagi Matsuo considers Khitans original name is Xidan, various forms of the word Khitan survive in the many languages as the name of China. The use of the name Khitai to mean China or Chinese in such Turkic languages as Uyghur is considered pejorative by the Han Chinese and they have different stories about their origin. According to Khitan records, their ancestor was Qishou Khagan. Qishou Khagan was a man riding a white horse who floated down the Laoha River and met Kedun. At the intersection of the two rivers, at the foot of the holy Muye Mountain, they met and mated, giving birth to eight sons, a temple with portraits of Khitan ancestors was built on Mount Muye their holiest mountain. The Qidan Guozhi records a Khitan legend in its preface, There was a chief called Naihe and this chief was nothing but a skull hidden under a rug in a round felt tent, so that he was invisible. Only when something serious had happened in his state, a horse and a gray ox were sacrificed to him, then he took on a human figure. After the affairs had been settled, he returned to the tent and he disappeared, for his countrymen peeped at him. Then there was another chief called Waihe who was living in a round felt tent. He wore a head and was clad in pigskin. When there was an action he came out, then he retired, later it happened that his wife stole his pigskin, he abandoned her and nobody knew where he went. Then there was one called Zhouli Hunhe. Each day he ate nineteen and had one left. These three chiefs were known for their abilities in running their state. In 630, Tang Taizong received the capitulation in southern Manchuria, from the 5th to the 8th centuries, they were dominated by the steppe power to their West and the Chinese to their south
Khitan people
–
Depiction of Khitans by Hugui (胡瓌, 9th/10th century),
hunting with eagles
Khitan people
–
Liao dynasty in 1025
Khitan people
–
The
Pagoda of Fogong Temple, built in 1056.
13.
Liao Empire
–
The Liao dynasty was founded by Abaoji, Khagan of the Khitan people around the time of the collapse of Tang China. It was the first state to all of Manchuria. Almost immediately after its founding, the Liao dynasty began a process of territorial expansion, tension between traditional Khitan social and political practices and Chinese influence and customs was a defining feature of the dynasty. So different were Khitan and Chinese practices that Abaoji set up two parallel governments, Khitan women were taught to hunt, managed family property, and held military posts. Many marriages were not arranged, women were not required to be virgins at their first marriage, the Liao dynasty was destroyed by the Jurchen people of the Jin dynasty in 1125 with the capture of Emperor Tianzuo of Liao. However, the remnant Khitan, led by Yelü Dashi, established the Qara Khitai, the Liao dynasty was officially known as the Khitan（now known as Cathay） or Khitan state in 916. The name Great Liao began to appear as the name between 936 and 947. The dynasty name Liao means iron, but it refers to the Liao River in southern Manchuria. Since 983 the state became known as the Khitan, but Great Liao reappeared as the country name in 1066. Neither the origins, ethnic makeup, nor early history of the Khitans are well documented in historical records, the earliest reference to a Khitan state is found in the Book of Wei, a history of the Northern Wei Dynasty that was completed in 554. Several books written after 554 mention the Khitans as being active during the late third, the Book of Jin, a history of the Jin dynasty, refers to the Khitans in the section covering the reign of Murong Sheng. Samguk Sagi, a history of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, Twitchett and Klaus-Peter Tietze, it is generally held that the Khitans emerged from the Yuwen branch of the Xianbei people. Following a defeat at the hands of another branch of the Xianbei in 345, in 388 the Kumo Xi itself split, with one group remaining under the name Kumo Xi and the other group becoming the Khitans. This view is backed up by the Book of Wei. There are also several competing theories on the origin of the Khitans, beginning in the Song dynasty, some Chinese scholars suggested that the Khitans might have descended from the Xiongnu people. While modern historians have rejected the idea that the Khitan were solely Xiongnu in origin, there is support for the claim that they are of mixed Xianbei. By the time the Book of Wei was written in 554, the Khitans suffered a series of military defeats to other nomadic groups in the region, as well as to the Chinese Northern Qi and Sui Dynasties. Khitan tribes at various times fell under the influence of Turkic tribes such as the Uighurs and Chinese dynasties such as the Sui and this influence would significantly shape Khitan language and culture
Liao Empire
–
History of China
Liao Empire
–
遼朝
Liao Empire
–
Khitan man in tomb painting in Aohan Banner, Inner Mongolia
Liao Empire
–
This painting, titled Horse and Archer, is believed to have been painted by Yelü Bei.
14.
Khitan small script
–
The Khitan small script was one of two Khitan writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language. It was used during the 10th–12th century by the Khitan people, in addition to the small script, the Khitans simultaneously also used a functionally independent writing system known as the Khitan large script. Both Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the Jurchens for several decades after the fall of the Liao Dynasty, examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, although other fragments sometimes surface. The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela and he drew his inspiration from “the Uyghur language and script, ” which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was thought to be a daughter script of the Old Uyghur alphabet. Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, unlike Hanguls jamo, a Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a CV or VC pair as well. Each block could incorporate two to seven such phonetic element characters, written in pairs within the block, with the first half of the pair on the left. If there were an odd number of characters in a block, although there is some speculation, it appears there are no characters that both the small and large scripts share. Periodically, epitaphs written using small script will be using the large script method of linearity. Although small script had some similarities to Chinese, Khitan characters were used to record Chinese words. The appearance of a likeness between a script and a Chinese character does not help in the reading of Khitan. For example, the Chinese character for ‘mountain’ is the same as the Khitan small script logogram for ‘gold’, of the 378 known small script characters,125 are semantic,115 are phonetic, and the remainder have not been deciphered. Small script uses a mixture of logograms, syllabograms, and, as some as sources claim, sometimes suffixes were written with syllabograms, just as single syllables sometimes were written with three syllabograms. Sometimes the initial consonants of syllables are indicated to be dental, labial, Guttural, additionally, vowels are sometimes indicated to be labial or non-labial, or pronounced in the front or back of the mouth. A particularly valuable object of their study was the inscription on the Da Jin huangdi dotong jinglüe langjun xingji stele, produced during the Jurchen Jin Dynasty it, ironically, was originally thought to be in Jurchen. The main source of Khitan texts are inscriptions, mostly comprising memorial tablets buried in the tombs of Khitan nobility. There are about 33 known monuments with inscriptions in the Khitan small script, Kane, Daniel, The Kitan Language and Script, Brill, ISBN 978-90-04-16829-9 Činggeltei, Chen Naixiong, Xing Fuli, Liu Fengzhu, Yu Baolin. Qidan xiao zi yanjiiu, China Social Science Publishers 中国社会科学出版社),1985, Daniel Kane, The Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters
Khitan small script
–
Bronze mirror with a poetic inscription
Khitan small script
–
Bronze 'fish tally' with small Khitan inscription owned by
Stephen Wootton Bushell
15.
Jurchens
–
The Jurchen established the Jin Dynasty, whose empire conquered the Northern Song in 1127, gaining control of most of North China. Jin control over China lasted until their 1234 conquest by the Mongols, the Manchus would later conquer the Ming and establish the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until their overthrow in 1911. The obscurity of the origin of the Jurchen is reflected in the confusion surrounding their name and it is recorded variously in different languages and different eras. The apparently cognate ethnonyms Sushen and Jizhen are recorded in ancient Chinese geographical works like the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the present name dates back to at least the 10th century, when Balhae was destroyed by the Khitans. It was the source of Fra Mauros Zorça and Marco Polos Ciorcia, vajda considers that the Jurchens name probably derives from the Tungusic words for reindeer people and is cognate with the names of the Orochs of Khabarovsk Province and the Oroks of Sakhalin. In Manchu, this word was often used to describe the serfs—though not slaves—of the free Manchu people. To describe the people who founded the Jin dynasty, they reborrowed the Mongolian name as Jurcit. The initial Khitan form of the name was said to be Lüzhen, at the same time, the Jurchen were interchangeably known as the Nrjo-drik. Aisin Gioro, however, argues that this was a folk etymology. Under the Liao, a distinction was made between the Charted Jurchens who submitted to their rule and the Uncharted Jurchens who lived beyond their frontier. The former were divided into the Jianzhou and Haixi Jurchens and the latter included the Yeren Jurchens, in earlier records, this area was known as the home of the Sushen, the Yilou, the Wuji, and the Mohe or Malgal. Under the Qing and within modern scholarship, some sources stress the continuity between these peoples with the Jurchen but this remains conjectural. The Tungusic Mohe tribes were subjects of the Korean state of Balhae, the Mohe enjoyed eating pork, practiced pig farming extensively, and were mainly sedentary. They used both pig and dog skins for coats and they were predominantly farmers and grew soybean, wheat, millet, and rice in addition to hunting. By the 11th century, the Jurchens had become vassals of the Khitan rulers of the Liao dynasty, the Jin dynasty captured the Northern Song dynastys capital, Bianjing, in 1127. The name of the Jurchens dynasty—the Chinese word for gold—derived from the Gold River in their ancestral homeland, at first, the Jurchen tribesmen were kept in readiness for warfare, but decades of urban and settled life in China eroded their original warlike lifestyle in Manchurian tundra and marshes. Eventually, intermarriage with other groups in China was permitted. The Jin rulers themselves came to follow Confucian norms, by 1215, after losing much territory to the Mongols, the Jurchens moved their capital south from Zhongdu to Kaifeng
Jurchens
–
Eurasia before
Genghis Khan 's conquests, 1200
Jurchens
–
China circa 1141, superimposed on modern national borders.
Jurchens
–
Stone tortoise from the grave of a 12th-century Jurchen leader in today's
Ussuriysk
Jurchens
–
A Jurchen man hunting from his horse, from a 15th-century ink and color painting on silk.
16.
Epitaph
–
An epitaph is a short text honouring a deceased person. Strictly speaking, it refers to text that is inscribed on a tombstone or plaque, some epitaphs are specified by the person themselves before their death, while others are chosen by those responsible for the burial. An epitaph may be written in prose or in verse, poets have been known to compose their own epitaphs prior to their death. Most epitaphs are brief records of the family, and perhaps the career, of the deceased, often with an expression of love or respect—for example. Notably, the Laudatio Turiae, the longest known Ancient Roman epitaph, exceeds almost all of these at 180 lines, it celebrates the virtues of an honored wife, some are quotes from holy texts, or aphorisms. One approach of many epitaphs is to speak to the reader, a wry trick of others is to request the reader to get off their resting place, inasmuch as the reader would have to be standing on the ground above the coffin to read the inscription. Nearly all note name, year or date of birth, many list family members and the relationship of the deceased to them. Heroes and Kings your distance keep, In peace let one poor poet sleep, Who never flattered folks like you, Let Horace blush, — Alexander Pope Wir müssen wissen. — David Hilbert He never killed a man that did not need killing, — Clay Allison Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water — John Keats Undefeated — Hans-Joachim Marseille And the beat goes on. — Sonny Bono Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, — Joseph Conrad Thats all folks. — Mel Blanc Ive finally stopped getting dumber, — Paul Erdős Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by that here, obedient to their law, we lie. — Simonidess epigram at Thermopylae I told you I was ill, — Spike Milligan Here sleeps at peace a Hampshire Grenadier Who caught his early death by drinking cold small beer. Soldiers, be wise at his fall, And when youre hot. — Thomas Thetcher tombstone epitaph in Winchester Cathedral To save your world you asked this man to die, Would this man, could he see you now, ask why. — Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier, written by W. H. Auden There is borne an empty hearsecovered over for such as appear not. Heroes have the earth for their tomb. — Unknown Soldiers epitaph, Athens, passages taken from Pericles Funeral Oration Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death. — Virginia Woolf Good frend for Iesvs sake forebeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be man spares thes stones, Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he moves my bones
Epitaph
–
Epitaph on the base of the
Haymarket Riot Memorial, Waldheim Cemetery Chicago.
Epitaph
–
Lengthy epitaph for Johann Wauer a (German pastor), died 1728, concluding with a short Biblical quotation
Epitaph
–
Plaque marking
Heather O'Rourke 's interment
Epitaph
–
Ezzatollah Sahabi, Glory of Iran and his patriotic daughter
Haleh
17.
Monuments
–
The term monument is often applied to buildings or structures that are considered examples of important architectural and/or cultural heritage. Monuments have been created for thousands of years, and they are often the most durable, in more recent times, monumental structures such as the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower have become iconic emblems of modern nation-states. The term monumentality relates to the status and physical presence of a monument. Monuments are frequently used to improve the appearance of a city or location, planned cities such as Washington D. C. New Delhi and Brasília are often built around monuments, for example, the Washington Monuments location was conceived by LEnfant to help organize public space in the city, before it was designed or constructed. Older cities have monuments placed at locations that are important or are sometimes redesigned to focus on one. As Shelley suggested in his famous poem Ozymandias, the purpose of monuments is often to impress or awe. Structures created for purposes that have been made notable by their age. This can happen because of age and size, as in the case of the Great Wall of China. Monuments are also designed to convey historical or political information. They can be used to reinforce the primacy of political power. The social meanings of monuments are rarely fixed and certain and are contested by different social groups. This contention of meaning is a theme of modern post processual archaeological discourse. Until recently, it was customary for archaeologists to study large monuments, New ideas about what constitutes the archaeological record have revealed that certain legislative and theoretical approaches to the subject are too focused on earlier definitions of monuments. An example has been the United Kingdoms Scheduled Ancient Monument laws, recently, more and more monuments are being preserved digitally through organisations as CyArk. Cenotaphs and other memorials to commemorate the dead, usually war casualties, e. g. India Gate and Vimy Ridge Memorial, or disaster casualties, such as the Titanic Memorial, Belfast. Church monuments to commemorate the dead, located above or near their grave, often featuring an effigy, columns, often topped with a statue, e. g. Berlin Victory Column, Nelsons Column in London, and Trajans Column in Rome. Gravestones, small monuments to the deceased, placed at their gravesites, e. g. the tombs and vaults of veterans in Les Invalides, mausoleums and tombs to honor the dead, e. g. the Great Pyramid of Giza and Taj Mahal
Monuments
–
The
Lincoln Memorial,
Washington Monument, and
US Capitol. The planned US capital
Washington D.C. is built around monuments commemorating founding fathers of the
United States.
Monuments
–
The
Great Pyramid of
Giza built almost 5000 years ago as
pharaoh 's
tomb, one of the
Seven Wonders and enduring symbol of
ancient Egyptian civilization since antiquity.
Monuments
–
The
Parthenon is regarded as an enduring symbol of
Ancient Greece, the
Athenian democracy, as well as the symbol of
Western Civilization.
Monuments
–
The
Colosseum Flavian amphitheatre in
Rome, a popular monument of the
Roman Empire.
18.
Emperor Taizu of Liao
–
Abaoji, posthumously known as Emperor Taizu of Liao, was a Khitan leader and founder of the Liao dynasty. He had a name, Yelü Yi, some sources suggest that Abaojis family name, Yelü, was adopted during his lifetime. Abaoji was born in 872 in Southern Mongolia and had a turbulent childhood and his grandfather was killed in a conflict between tribes, and his father and uncles fled. He was hidden by his grandmother for his safety and he became khagan of the Khitans on 27 February 907, and was subsequently enthroned as emperor of the Khitans in 916, proclaiming his own era name. He died on September 6,926 and he was responsible for the conquest and unification of all of Inner Mongolia, northern China, and southern Manchuria. Once the Khitan Empire became the Liao dynasty in 942, he was considered a Liao emperor. Later generations of Chinese historians record a variety of legends that surrounded the birth of Abaoji, according to the legends, his mother dreamt that the sun fell from the sky and into her bosom, from which pregnancy followed. When she gave birth, the room is said to have filled with a mysterious light. As a newborn, his body was that of a three-year-old, and he is even recorded as being able to see events before they passed. An important point to be made was the location of the Khitans in relation to the neighbouring tribes. The Khitans resided on the east slope of the Greater Khingan Mountains, west of the mountains were other nomadic pastoral tribes such as the Shiwei, and the Xi, along with the Turkic Uighur tribe. These other tribes had inter-married with the Khitans, further west were the Tatars, a warlike tribe on the steppes of Mongolia. East and northeast lay the Jurchens all the way to the Amur river and they were a peaceful people that resided in small villages and subsisted by hunting and fishing. Across the Liao River to the east and southeast until one reached the Yalu River lay the Balhae people, the Yaolian clan had dominated the leadership of the Khitan tribes since the 750s. They maintained good relations with the Chinese Tang dynasty to the south, however, by the end of the ninth century, leaders of the powerful Yila tribe were expressing dissatisfaction with the Yaolian khans. Abaojis father had been the chieftain of the Yila tribe. As surnames were considered a marker of Chinese culture, they were not used by the Khitan people outside of the Yaolian imperial clan, Abaoji became chieftain of the Yila tribe in 901 and in 903, was named the Yuyue, Commander of all Khitan military forces. This had the effect of making him only to the great khan in the hierarchy of the Khitan nation
Emperor Taizu of Liao
–
Statues in
Huairen County, Shanxi, China, commemorating Abaoji and
Li Keyong 's meeting in 907
19.
Liao Dynasty
–
The Liao dynasty was founded by Abaoji, Khagan of the Khitan people around the time of the collapse of Tang China. It was the first state to all of Manchuria. Almost immediately after its founding, the Liao dynasty began a process of territorial expansion, tension between traditional Khitan social and political practices and Chinese influence and customs was a defining feature of the dynasty. So different were Khitan and Chinese practices that Abaoji set up two parallel governments, Khitan women were taught to hunt, managed family property, and held military posts. Many marriages were not arranged, women were not required to be virgins at their first marriage, the Liao dynasty was destroyed by the Jurchen people of the Jin dynasty in 1125 with the capture of Emperor Tianzuo of Liao. However, the remnant Khitan, led by Yelü Dashi, established the Qara Khitai, the Liao dynasty was officially known as the Khitan（now known as Cathay） or Khitan state in 916. The name Great Liao began to appear as the name between 936 and 947. The dynasty name Liao means iron, but it refers to the Liao River in southern Manchuria. Since 983 the state became known as the Khitan, but Great Liao reappeared as the country name in 1066. Neither the origins, ethnic makeup, nor early history of the Khitans are well documented in historical records, the earliest reference to a Khitan state is found in the Book of Wei, a history of the Northern Wei Dynasty that was completed in 554. Several books written after 554 mention the Khitans as being active during the late third, the Book of Jin, a history of the Jin dynasty, refers to the Khitans in the section covering the reign of Murong Sheng. Samguk Sagi, a history of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, Twitchett and Klaus-Peter Tietze, it is generally held that the Khitans emerged from the Yuwen branch of the Xianbei people. Following a defeat at the hands of another branch of the Xianbei in 345, in 388 the Kumo Xi itself split, with one group remaining under the name Kumo Xi and the other group becoming the Khitans. This view is backed up by the Book of Wei. There are also several competing theories on the origin of the Khitans, beginning in the Song dynasty, some Chinese scholars suggested that the Khitans might have descended from the Xiongnu people. While modern historians have rejected the idea that the Khitan were solely Xiongnu in origin, there is support for the claim that they are of mixed Xianbei. By the time the Book of Wei was written in 554, the Khitans suffered a series of military defeats to other nomadic groups in the region, as well as to the Chinese Northern Qi and Sui Dynasties. Khitan tribes at various times fell under the influence of Turkic tribes such as the Uighurs and Chinese dynasties such as the Sui and this influence would significantly shape Khitan language and culture
Liao Dynasty
–
History of China
Liao Dynasty
–
遼朝
Liao Dynasty
–
Khitan man in tomb painting in Aohan Banner, Inner Mongolia
Liao Dynasty
–
This painting, titled Horse and Archer, is believed to have been painted by Yelü Bei.
20.
Logogram
–
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
Logogram
–
Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have their origins as logograms.
21.
Ideogram
–
An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. In proto-writing, used for inventories and the like, physical objects are represented by stylized or conventionalized pictures, for example, the pictorial Dongba symbols without Geba annotation cannot represent the Naxi language, but are used as a mnemonic for reciting oral literature. Some systems also use ideograms, symbols denoting abstract concepts, the term ideogram is often used to describe symbols of writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters. However, these symbols are logograms, representing words or morphemes of a language rather than objects or concepts. In these writing systems, a variety of strategies were employed in the design of logographic symbols, pictographic symbols depict the object referred to by the word, such as an icon of a bull denoting the Semitic word ʾālep ox. Some words denoting abstract concepts may be represented iconically, but most other words are represented using the rebus principle, many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. Semantic compounds are semantic combinations of characters, such as 明 míng bright, composed of 日 rì sun and 月 yuè moon, or 休 xiū rest, composed of 人 rén person and 木 mù tree. An example of ideograms is the collection of 50 signs developed in the 1970s by the American Institute of Graphic Arts at the request of the US Department of Transportation, the system was initially used to mark airports and gradually got more widespread. An early proposal was An Essay towards a Real Character, a recent example is the system of Blissymbols, which was proposed by Charles K. Bliss in 1949 and currently includes over 2,000 symbols, emoji Heterogram Icon Lexigram List of symbols List of writing systems Logotype Therblig Traffic sign The Ideographic Myth Extract from DeFrancis book. American Heritage Dictionary definition Merriam-Webster OnLine definition
Ideogram
–
Ideogram in the
Church of the Visitation, Jerusalem
Ideogram
–
"No Dogs!" sign in Spain. The dog illustration is a
pictogram. The red circle and bar is an ideogram representing the idea of "no" or "not allowed".
Ideogram
–
Writing systems
22.
Syllabary
–
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
Syllabary
–
Writing systems
Syllabary
–
Each
syllable (σ) branches into
consonantal onset (ω) and
rime (ρ) that is divided into
nucleus (ν) and
coda (κ), non-/supra-segmental parameters like
tone (τ) affect the syllable as a whole
23.
Chinese character
–
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
Chinese character
–
Chinese characters
Chinese character
–
"Chinese character" in
traditional (left) and
simplified form (right)
Chinese character
–
Ox scapula with oracle bone inscription
Chinese character
24.
Huludao
–
Huludao is a prefecture-level city in southwestern Liaoning province, Peoples Republic of China, bordering Hebei to the southwest. It is one of the two cities, along with Jinzhou, in the Liaoxi Corridor. Known as Jinxi until 1994, Huludao has an area of 10,415 km2. Its name literally means Gourd Island, the area occupied by Huludao city has been settled by mankind since ancient times. Archeological evidence indicates that during the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the region enjoyed advanced Bronze Age technology, the Ming dynasty saw the construction of the Liaoning section of the Great Wall through Huludao. During this time the town of Xingcheng was fortified with a wall which still stands today. In 1906, the county of Jinxi was established and it became an important center for resistance during the Japanese occupation. During 1945-1948, it was a battleground between the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist forces, and over one million Japanese prisoners of war were repatriated from its port, Jinxi county was granted city status in 1982 under the jurisdiction of Jinzhou, before becoming a prefecture-level city in 1989. The city was renamed Huludao, originally the name of the peninsula and port in the city area, Huludao is a coastal city on the Bohai Sea at 120°38 east longitude and 40°56 north latitude. It lies in the southwest of Liaoning, at the border with Hebei, forming the Bohai Sea economic rim with such cities as Dalian, Yingkou, Qinhuangdao, as the first city outside the Shanhai Pass, it serves as the gateway into the Northeast. Huludao is in the temperate zone with a continental monsoon climate that brings cold dry winters. Annual precipitation averages between 550 to 650 millimetres while the year mean temperature is 8.5 to 9.5 °C. Huludao has six immediate sub-municipal divisions, More than 40 mineral resources have been discovered in the Huludao region, including gold, zinc, molybdenum, lime, west of the city center, the town of Yangjiazhangzi is an important global center for molybdenum mining. Huludao boasts a long coastline of 237 km, and the waters are rich in fish, shrimp and shellfish, with plentiful reserves of natural gas. Huludaos economy is dominated by some of Chinas most important industrial enterprises, the oilfield off the coast of Suizhong county produces 5 million tons of crude oil annually. Electricity generation is set to increase capacity to 3.6 million kilowatts. Huludao is an important link in rail and road networks between Beijing and northern cities such as Shenyang and Harbin, the newly renovated North Station serves high-speed passenger trains that cover the 300 km to Beijing in about three hours. Public transportation in the city is provided by over 25 bus services, traditional cycle rickshaw and auto rickshaws were banned from the city in 2010 but can be seen in smaller cities and towns in the region
Huludao
–
The new district of Huludao
Huludao
–
Huludao City Center Train Station
25.
Liaoning Province
–
Liaoning is a province of China, located in the northeast of the country. The modern province was established in 1907 as Fengtian or Fengtien province and it was also known as Mukden province at the time, for the Manchu pronunciation of Shengjing, the former name of the provincial capital Shenyang. Under the Japanese-puppet Manchukuo regime, the province reverted to its 1907 name but the name Liaoning was restored in 1945, Liaoning is the southernmost part of Manchuria, the Chinese Northeast. The Yalu River marks its border with North Korea, emptying into the Korea Bay between Dandong in Liaoning and Sinuiju in North Korea, the characters forming the provinces modern Chinese name are 辽 and 宁. They are the forms of the traditional characters 遼 and 寧. The first character literally means far, distant but is actually a reference to the Liao River which flows through the territory. The second literally means peace, calm but in such Chinese place names actually has the sense of pacified, made peaceful, here in reference to the turbulent situation of Manchuria in the late 1920s. In both English and Chinese, however, it is most common to gloss the name as the more literal Peace on the Liao, the provinces one-character abbreviation in Chinese is 辽. Liaoning is located in the part of Northeast China. In the past, it formed part of Korean kingdoms as Gojoseon, Goguryeo, and Balhae, as well as Chinese polities such as the Yan State and it was also inhabited by non-Han peoples such as Xiongnu, Donghu, Xianbei. In addition, the Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol Empire and Northern Yuan ruled Liaoning, the Ming Empire took control of Liaoning in 1371, just three years after the expulsion of the Mongols from Beijing. Around 1442, a wall was constructed to defend the agricultural heartland of the province from a potential threat from the Jurchen-Mongol Oriyanghan from the northwest. Between 1467 and 1468, the wall was expanded to protect the region from the northeast as well, although similar in purpose to the Great Wall of China, this Liaodong Wall was of a lower-cost design. While stones and tiles were used in parts, most of the wall was in fact simply an earth dike with moats on both sides. Despite the Liaodong Wall, the Manchus conquered Liaodong, or eastern Liaoning, in the early 17th century, decades before the rest of China fell to them. The Manchu dynasty, styled Later Jin, established its capital in 1616–1621 in Xingjing and it was moved to Dongjing, and finally in 1625 to Shengjing. Although the main Qing capital was moved from Shengjing to Beijing after it fell to the Qing in 1644, in the Governors words, Tieling and Fushun only have a few vagrants. West of the Liaohe, only Ningyuan, Jinzhou, and Guangning had any significant populations remaining, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the imperial Qing government recruited migrants from south of the Great Wall to settle the relatively sparsely populated area of Fengtian Province
Liaoning Province
–
Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province
Liaoning Province
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Map showing the location of Liaoning Province
Liaoning Province
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The Ming Liaodong Wall (in purple)
Liaoning Province
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The late-Ming Liaodong (eastern Liaoning) separated by the wall from the "Kingdom of the
Jurchen " (Reino di Niuche). The map was created during the early Qing, and mentions that "presently" the Jurchen (Tartari del
Kin) have already conquered the rest of China
26.
Wu Xing
–
The Five Phases are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. This order of presentation is known as the generation sequence. In the order of mutual overcoming, they are Wood, Earth, Water, Fire, the system of five phases was used for describing interactions and relationships between phenomena. The system is used as a reference in some forms of complementary and alternative medicine. Xing of Wu Xing means moving, a planet is called a star in Chinese. Wu Xing originally refers to the five planets that create five dimensions of earth life. Wu Xing is also translated as Five Elements and this is used extensively by many including practitioners of Five Element acupuncture. This translation arose by analogy with the Western system of the four elements. By the same token, Mù is thought of as Tree rather than Wood, the word element is thus used within the context of Chinese medicine with a different meaning to its usual meaning. It should be recognized that the phase, although commonly preferred, is not perfect. Phase is a translation for the five seasons mentioned below. Manfred Porkert attempts to resolve this by using Evolutive Phase for 五行 Wǔ Xíng and Circuit Phase for 五運 Wǔ Yùn, some of the Mawangdui Silk Texts also present the Wu Xing as five virtues or types of activities. Within Chinese medicine texts the Wu Xing are also referred to as Wu Yun or a combination of the two characters these emphasise the correspondence of five elements to five seasons, another tradition refers to the Wǔ Xíng as Wǔ Dé, the Five Virtues. Wood parts Earth Earth dams Water Water extinguishes Fire Fire melts Metal Metal chops Wood This cycle might also be called controls, according to Wu Xing theory, the structure of the cosmos mirrors the five phases. Each phase has a series of associations with different aspects of nature. In the ancient Chinese form of known as Feng Shui practitioners all based their art. All of these phases are represented within the trigrams, associated with these phases are colors, seasons and shapes, all of which are interacting with each other. Based on a directional energy flow from one phase to the next
Wu Xing
–
Five Chinese Elements - Diurnal Cycle
Wu Xing
–
Diagram of the interactions between the Wu Xing. The "generative" cycle is illustrated by grey arrows running clockwise on the outside of the circle, while the "destructive" or "conquering" cycle is represented by red arrows inside the circle.
Wu Xing
–
Tablet, in Chinese and
Manchu, for the gods of the five elements in the
Temple of Heaven. The Manchu word "usiha", meaning star, explains that this tablet is dedicated to the 5 basic planets, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus & Mercury rather than their respect element itself.
27.
Earthly Branches
–
The Earthly Branches provide one Chinese system for reckoning time. This system was built from observations of the orbit of Jupiter, Chinese astronomers divided the celestial circle into 12 sections to follow the orbit of 歲星 Suìxīng. Astronomers rounded the orbit of Suixing to 12 years, Suixing was associated with 攝提 Shètí and sometimes called Sheti. In correlative thinking, the years of the Jupiter cycle also identify the twelve months of the year, twelve animals, directions, seasons. When a Branch is used for an hour, the listed periods are meant. When used for a time of a day, it is the center of the period. For instance, 午 means noon or a period from 11am to 1pm, Chinese seasons are based on observations of the sun and stars. Many Chinese calendrical systems have started the new year on the new moon after the winter solstice. The Earthly Branches are today used with the Heavenly Stems in the current version of the traditional Chinese calendar and in Taoism. The Ganzhi combination is a new way to mark time, in the second millennium BC, during the Shang era. The Branches are as old as the Stems, but the Stems were tied to the calendars of Chinese kings. They were not part of the systems for the majority of Chinese people. In the traditional Kazakh version of the 12-year animal cycle, the Dragon is substituted by a snail, since twelve points were not enough for sailing, twelve midpoints were added. Instead of combining two adjacent direction names, they assigned new names as follows, For the four diagonal directions, for the rest, the Heavenly Stems were used. According to the Five Elements theory, east is assigned to wood, thus they were assigned clockwise to the two adjacent points of the east. Following is a table of the 24 directions, Advanced mariners such as Zheng He used 48-point compasses. An additional midpoint was called by a combination of its two closest basic directions, such as 丙午 for the direction of 172. 5°, the midpoint between 丙, 165°, and 午, 180°. Sexagesimal cycle Sheng Xiao Celestial stem Chinese calendar Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches - Hong Kong Observatory
Earthly Branches
–
(A study of the cardinal directions chart)
Earthly Branches
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The 24 cardinal directions (ancient Chinese convention places the south (red) at the top).
Earthly Branches
–
Geography
28.
Gravestone rubbing
–
Stone rubbing is the practice of creating an image of surface features of a stone on paper. The image records features such as textures, inscribed patterns or lettering. By rubbing hard rendering materials over the paper, pigment is deposited over protrusions and on edges, common rendering materials include charcoal, wax, graphite or inksticks. Over time, the practice of stone rubbing can cause permanent damage to cultural monuments due to abrasion, for an artist, stone rubbings can become an entire body of creative work that is framed and displayed. The paper that has been used by Chinese scholars to transfer the calligraphy from stones is made from plant fiber and it can be used in two ways to retrieve the calligraphy. One way requires the paper to be dry and then adhered to the stone through a paste made with water, the paper is then tamped into the engravings on the stone. The other technique requires the paper to be wet and tamped into the engravings without a paste. After doing either of these techniques, an ink, created through grinding an ink stick, the ink is stippled on with a cloth filled with the ink. The ink covers the paper without sinking into the engravings, when the paper is peeled off, the calligraphy engravings come out white, while everything else is black from the ink. More commonly, people use butcher paper to create stone rubbings, the butcher paper is usually taped on to the stone or grave, which contains the inscription desired, with either masking or paint tape. Then, usually, charcoal or crayon is rubbed over the stone or grave, when the butcher paper is removed, the inscriptions should be readable because they are not marked with the crayon. It can be helpful to clean the stone beforehand, to ensure optimum results, a soft brush and water is usually what works best to cleanse the stones. One should not use stiff or hard brushes, as they can scratch the stone, also, one should not use cleaning solutions or mild detergents on the stones, as they can damage the stone. When stone rubbing, one should be careful with stones that are deteriorating, gravestone rubbing also applies this technique to gravestones, often as a method of retrieving and conserving information about genealogy. For a genealogist, a gravestone rubbing may become a permanent record of death when a gravestone is rapidly deteriorating, rubbings are commonly made by visitors to the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Visitors use pencil and paper to copy the name of a member or friend who died during the Vietnam War off of the wall. The rubbing forms a type of souvenir, gravestone rubbing can be used to teach about local history. The stone’s condition, art, and inscription can tell what was going on in an area at a specific time, studying multiple gravestones in one specific area can give even more information about history
Gravestone rubbing
–
A stone rubbing (graphite on paper) for documentation of a
petroglyph.
Gravestone rubbing
–
Stone rubbing of anthropomorphic stele no 10, Sion, Petit-Chasseur necropolis, Neolithic
29.
Emperor Zhangzong of Jin
–
Emperor Zhangzong of Jin, personal name Madage, sinicised name Wanyan Jing, was the sixth emperor of the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty, which ruled northern China between the 12th and 13th centuries. He reigned from 20 January 1189 to 29 December 1208, Emperor Zhangzong was the sixth emperor of the Jin dynasty. He inherited the throne from his grandfather, Emperor Shizong and was succeeded by Wanyan Yongji, to some extent, Emperor Zhangzong continued his grandfathers policy of encouraging intensive use of the Jurchen language and promotion of Jurchen customs. He forbade wearing of Han Chinese clothes and required his subjects to perform the Jurchen kowtow ceremony and he required his mengan and mouke to take an archery test if they wanted to sit for a jinshi examination. On the other hand, he permitted Jurchens to follow Han Chinese funeral practices, resuming one of the projects of the Prince of Hailing, Emperor Zhangzong established Confucian temples in all prefectures and counties of his empire. Emperor Zhangzong ordered Taiye Lake built in Beijing for him to go fishing, unlike his grandfather, Emperor Zhangzong did not consider hunting as a natural and necessary way of military training but viewed it as recreation. When, in 1206, the troops of the Southern Song chancellor Han Tuozhou invaded the Jin dynasty, trying to reunify China from the south, the conflict began when the Song were informed of Jurchen troubles with the rising Mongols and natural disasters. The Song began provoking Emperor Zhangzong in 1204 and onward by orchestrating raids on Jin settlements, the fighting continued to escalate, partly aggravated by Song officials in support of revanchism, and war against the Jin dynasty was officially declared on June 14,1206. The Song advance was impeded by Jin military successes and declining soldier morale that forced many to desert, by the fall of 1206, multiple towns and military bases had been captured by the Jurchens. Neither side was willing to continue fighting, and a treaty was signed on November 2,1208. To obtain peace, the Song dynasty had to yield territory, pay an indemnity, the Song dynasty was obligated to pay an annual tribute of 50,000 taels of silver and 50,000 packs of fabric. They also delivered the severed head of the minister who had instigated the war to the Jurchens
Emperor Zhangzong of Jin
–
Monument in memory of the rebuilding the
Temple of Confucius in Year 2 of the Cheng'an era (1197)
30.
List of Khitan inscriptions
–
The list of Khitan inscriptions comprises a list of the corpus of known inscriptions written in the Khitan large script and the Khitan small script. These two scripts were used by the Khitan people in northern China during the 10th through 12th centuries for writing the extinct Khitan language, the Khitan language is therefore little understood, and the two Khitan writing systems are only partially deciphered. The main source of Khitan texts are inscriptions, mostly comprising memorial tablets buried in the tombs of Khitan nobility. Until the 1920s it was believed to be written in the Jurchen script, several more memorial tablets in the same script were discovered during the 1930s, including memorials for Emperor Daozong of Liao and his consort. This identification of the two Khitan scripts is now widely accepted, the two scripts are mutually exclusive, but it is not known why the Khitan people used two different scripts, or what determined the choice of which script to use. A number of bronze official seals with the seal face inscribed in the Khitan large script are also known, the Khitan characters on these seals are engraved in a convoluted calligraphic style that imitates the Chinese nine-fold seal script style of calligraphy. List of Jurchen inscriptions Nova N176, an undeciphered manuscript codex written in the Khitan large script
List of Khitan inscriptions
–
Bronze mirror from Korea with a Khitan small script inscription comprising 28 characters.
List of Khitan inscriptions
–
Detail of Khitan small script on the epitaph of Yelü Dilie (1026-1092).
31.
Nova N 176
–
Nova N176 is an undeciphered manuscript codex held at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The codex is enclosed in a leather binding of an Islamic type. Missing one leaf between leaves 112 and 113, each page of the manuscript has six ruled columns of text, each column comprising between 17 and 26 characters written in ink in cursive handwriting. Most of the manuscript appears to be written in a single hand, the earliest known location for the manuscript was the Institute of Language, Literature and History of the Kyrgyz Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Zaytsev notes the possibility that the book may have discovered during excavations of the Silk Road city of Suyab during 1953–1954. Due to the frequent occurrence of the Khitan characters for state and emperor, to date, only some individual Khitan characters and two short stretches of text that correspond to text found on monumental inscriptions in the Khitan large script have been identified and read. The characters meaning Great Central Khitan State are exactly the same as the first seven characters on the Memorial for the Princess of Yongning Commandery, dated 1087. Nova N176 is therefore the only example of a full-length manuscript text written in the Khitan language to have survived to the present day. List of Khitan inscriptions Kane, Daniel, new Materials on the Khitan Small Script, A Critical Edition of Xiao Dilu and Yelü Xiangwen. Zaytsev, Viacheslav P. Рукописная книга большого киданьского письма из коллекции Института восточных рукописей РАН, Zaytsev, Viacheslav P. Идентификация киданьского исторического сочинения в составе рукописной книги-кодекса Nova Н176 из коллекции ИВР РАН и сопутствующие проблемы. Article on the manuscript by V. P. Zaytsev
Nova N 176
–
Folio 9 of manuscript codex Nova N 176
32.
Old Uyghur alphabet
–
The Old Uyghur alphabet was used for writing the Old Uyghur language, a variety of Old Turkic spoken in Turfan and Gansu that is an ancestor of the modern Yugur language. It was an adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet used for texts with Buddhist, the last known manuscripts are dated to the 18th century. This was the prototype for the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets, the Old Uyghur alphabet was brought to Mongolia by Tata-tonga. Like the Sogdian alphabet, the Old Uyghur tended to use matres lectionis for the vowels as well as for the short ones. The practice of leaving short vowels unrepresented was almost completely abandoned, thus, while ultimately deriving from a Semitic abjad, the Old Uyghur alphabet can be said to have been largely alphabetized. Uyghur alphabets Gorelova, Liliya M. Manchu Grammar, Old Uyghur Alphabet on Omniglot Old Uyghur alphabet and Orkhon Turkic alphabet photos of the original text fragments written in Old Uyghur script discovered at Turpan
Old Uyghur alphabet
–
Yuan dynasty Buddhist inscription written in Old Uyghur on the west wall of the
Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass
Old Uyghur alphabet
–
Yuan dynasty Buddhist inscription written in Old Uyghur on the east wall of the Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass
33.
Codex
–
A codex is a book constructed of a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials, with hand-written contents. The book is bound by stacking the pages and fixing one edge. Some codices are continuously folded like a concertina, the alternative to paged codex format for a long document is the continuous scroll. Examples of folded codices include the Maya codices, sometimes people use the term for a book-style format, including modern printed books but excluding folded books. The Romans developed the form from wooden writing tablets, the codexs gradual replacement of the scroll—the dominant book form in the ancient world—has been called the most important advance in book making before the invention of printing. The codex transformed the shape of the book itself, and offered a form that lasted for centuries, the spread of the codex is often associated with the rise of Christianity, which adopted the format for use with the Bible early on. In fact, any combination of codices and scrolls with papyrus and parchment is technically feasible, the codex began to replace the scroll almost as soon as it was invented. In Egypt, by the century, the codex outnumbered the scroll by ten to one based on surviving examples. By the sixth century, the scroll had almost vanished as a medium for literature, technically, even modern paperbacks are codices, but publishers and scholars reserve the term for manuscript books produced from Late antiquity until the Middle Ages. The scholarly study of manuscripts from the point of view of the bookbinding craft is called codicology. The study of ancient documents in general is called paleography, the Romans used precursors made of reusable wax-covered tablets of wood for taking notes and other informal writings. Two ancient polyptychs, a pentatych and octotych, excavated at Herculaneum used a connecting system that presages later sewing on of thongs or cords. Julius Caesar may have been the first Roman to reduce scrolls to pages in the form of a note-book. At the turn of the 1st century AD, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin became commonly used for writing in the Roman Empire, theodore Cressy Skeat theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then spread rapidly to the Near East. Codices are described in works by the Classical Latin poet. He wrote a series of five couplets meant to accompany gifts of literature that Romans exchanged during the festival of Saturnalia. ”Early codices of parchment or papyrus appear to have widely used as personal notebooks. The parchment notebook pages were commonly washed or scraped for re-use and consequently, writings in a codex were often considered informal, as early as the early 2nd century, there is evidence that a codex—usually of papyrus—was the preferred format among Christians. In the library of the Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum, however, in the Nag Hammadi library, hidden about AD390, all texts are codices
Codex
–
The
Codex Gigas, 13th century, Bohemia.
Codex
–
Codices largely replaced scrolls similar to this.
Codex
–
Reproduced Roman-style
wax tablet, from which the codex evolved
Codex
–
Early medieval bookcase containing about ten codices depicted in the
Codex Amiatinus (ca. 700)
34.
Saint Petersburg
–
Saint Petersburg is Russias second-largest city after Moscow, with five million inhabitants in 2012, and an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea. It is politically incorporated as a federal subject, situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 271703. In 1914, the name was changed from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, in 1924 to Leningrad, between 1713 and 1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia. In 1918, the government bodies moved to Moscow. Saint Petersburg is one of the cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg is home to The Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. A large number of consulates, international corporations, banks. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in a then called Ingermanland. A small town called Nyen grew up around it, Peter the Great was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, and he intended to have Russia gain a seaport in order to be able to trade with other maritime nations. He needed a better seaport than Arkhangelsk, which was on the White Sea to the north, on May 1703121703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans, and soon replaced the fortress. On May 271703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city. The city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia, tens of thousands of serfs died building the city. Later, the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate, Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712,9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war, he referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital as early as 1704. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the bank of the Neva, near the Peter. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan, by 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. The project was not completed, but is evident in the layout of the streets, in 1716, Peter the Great appointed French Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences, University and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great, in 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two. His endeavours to modernize Russia had met opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life
Saint Petersburg
–
Top left to bottom right:
Peter and Paul Fortress on
Zayachy Island,
Smolny Cathedral,
Moyka river with the
General Staff Building,
Trinity Cathedral,
Bronze Horseman on
Senate Square, and the
Winter Palace.
Saint Petersburg
–
The
Bronze Horseman, monument to Peter the Great
Saint Petersburg
–
Palace Square backed by the General Staff arch and building, as the main square of the Russian Empire it was the setting of many events of historic significance
Saint Petersburg
–
Map of Saint Petersburg, 1903
35.
Paiza
–
A paiza or paizi or gerege was a tablet carried by Mongol officials and envoys to signify certain privileges and authority. They enabled Mongol nobles and officials to demand goods and services from civilian populations, although only someone with a paiza was required to be supplied with mounts and served specified rations, those carrying military rarities used the yam even without a paiza. The officials and nobles of the Mongol Empire issued paizas unofficially, therefore, Ögedei Khan prohibited the nobility from issuing paizas and jarliqs. To attract foreign or overseas merchants and talents, the Great Khans gave them paiza exempting them from taxes, however, Möngke Khan limited notorious abuses and sent imperial investigators to supervise the business of the merchants who were sponsored by the Mongols. He prohibited them from using the imperial relay stations or yam, marco Polo, who visited the Yuan Dynasty during the reign of Kublai Khan, left a good description of the paiza. The Ilkhan Ghazan reformed the issuance of jarliqs, creating set forms and graded seals, ordering that all jarliqs be kept on file at court and canceling jarliqs older than 30 years, although paizas were popularized by the Mongols, they were not a Mongol innovation. Similar such passports were already in use in northern China under the Liao dynasty, and their use was continued under subsequent kingdoms such as the Jin Dynasty, the Jin paiza had seven different ranks
Paiza
–
A Gerege in
Mongolian script, found in the former territory of the Mongol
Golden Horde (
Dnieper River, 1845)
Paiza
–
Official pass with
Mongolian inscription in
'Phags-pa script reading "By the power of eternal heaven, [this is] an order of the Emperor. Whoever does not show respect [to the bearer] will be guilty of an offence."
Paiza
–
A nightwatchman's pass of the Mongol empire, with inscriptions in
Persian (left),
Mongolian in
'Phags-pa script (centre), and
Uyghur (right). The Mongolian inscription reads "Announcement: Beware of evil-doers".
36.
Seal (emblem)
–
A seal is a device for making an impression in wax, clay, paper, or some other medium, including an embossment on paper, and is also the impression thus made. The original purpose was to authenticate a document, a wrapper for one such as a modern envelope, the seal-making device is also referred to as the seal matrix or die, the imprint it creates as the seal impression. In most traditional forms of dry seal the design on the matrix is in intaglio. The design on the impression will reverse that of the matrix and this will not be the case if paper is embossed from behind, where the matrix and impression read the same way, and both matrix and impression are in relief. However engraved gems were carved in relief, called cameo in this context. The process is essentially that of a mould and these pendent seal impressions dangled below the documents they authenticated, to which the attachment tag was sewn or otherwise attached. Some jurisdictions consider rubber stamps or specified signature-accompanying words such as seal or L. S. to be the equivalent of, i. e. an equally effective substitute for. In Europe, although coats of arms and heraldic badges may well feature in such contexts as well as on seals, the study of seals is known as sigillography or sphragistics. Seals were used in the earliest civilizations and are of importance in archaeology. In ancient Mesopotamia carved or engraved cylinder seals in stone or other materials were used and these could be rolled along to create an impression on clay, and used as labels on consignments of trade goods, or for other purposes. They are normally hollow and it is presumed that they were worn on a string or chain round the neck, many have only images, often very finely carved, with no writing, while others have both. From Ancient Egypt seals in the form of signet-rings, including some with the names of kings, have been found, recently, seals have come to light in South Arabia datable to the Himyarite age. One example shows a name written in Aramaic engraved in reverse so as to read correctly in the impression, from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC until the Middle Ages, seals of various kinds were in production in the Aegean islands and mainland Greece. In the Early Minoan age these were formed of stone and ivory. By the Middle Minoan age a new set for seal forms, motifs, hard stone requires new rotary carving techniques. The Late Bronze Age is the par excellence of the lens-shaped seal and the seal ring. These were a luxury art form and became keenly collected. His collection fell as booty to Pompey the Great, who deposited it in a temple in Rome, engraved gems continued to be produced and collected until the 19th century
Seal (emblem)
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Present-day impression of a Late Bronze Age seal
Seal (emblem)
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Town seal (matrix) of
Náchod from 1570
Seal (emblem)
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Mesopotamian limestone
cylinder seal and impression—worship of
Shamash
Seal (emblem)
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A Baiwen name seal, read up-down-right-left: Ye Hao Min Yin (lit. "Seal of Ye Haomin")
37.
Seal script
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Seal script is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, arising in the Warring State of Qin, there are two uses of the word seal script, the Large or Great Seal script and the lesser or Small Seal Script, the latter is also called simply seal script. The Large Seal script was originally a later, vague Han dynasty reference to writing of the Qin system similar to and it has also been used to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bones as well. There were several different variants of seal script which developed in each kingdom independently during the warring state period and spring, the birds and worms script was used in the Kingdoms of Wu, Chu, and Yue. It was found on several artifacts including the Spear of Fuchai, on one side of the blade of Goujian, eight characters were written in an ancient script. The script was found to be the one called 鳥蟲文 birds and worms characters, initial analysis of the text deciphered six of the characters, 越王 and 自作用劍. As a southern state, Chu was close to the Wu-Yue influences, Chu produced broad bronze swords that were similar to Wuyue swords, but not as intricate. Chu also used the Birds and Worms style, which was borrowed by the Wu, the script of the Qin system had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance and this was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian and their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish. The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin, not long after, however, the Shuowen Jiezi, the lifework of Xu Shen, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, entries are categorized under 540 section headers. It has been anticipated that the Small Seal script will some day be encoded in Unicode, codepoints U+34000 to U+368FF have been tentatively allocated. Old Texts Phags-pa Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Qin Yun Song, Big Seal Script Banner Script translation Richard Sears on seal script
Seal script
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Seal script
Seal script
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Chinese characters
Seal script
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Small seal script
epigraph on the standard weight prototype of
Qin dynasty. Made from
iron, this prototype was unearthed in 1973 at
Wendeng,
Shandong Province.
38.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
International Standard Book Number
–
A 13-digit ISBN, 978-3-16-148410-0, as represented by an
EAN-13 bar code
39.
Guillaume Jacques
–
Guillaume Jacques is a French linguist of Breton descent who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages, Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Rgyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also does research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families, he publishes about languages of other families. He is one of the contributors to the Pangloss Collection. He was awarded the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2015 and he taught at Paris Descartes University for four years before taking up a permanent research position at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur lAsie orientale. Guillaume Jacques is one of the Editors of the linguistics journal Cahiers de linguistique - Asie orientale and he is a member of the editorial board of Diachronica, Linguistics Vanguard, and Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. The character ywij and the reconstruction of the Zhi and Wei rhymes, Cahiers de Linguistique, Asie Orientale 29.2, jiarongyu, Zangyu ji Shanggu Hanyu de -s houzhui, Minzu Yuwen 2003.1, 12–15. Un cas de dissimilation labiale en chinois archaïque, la racine couvrir, renverser et son équivalent en tibétain, Cahiers de Linguistique, Asie Orientale 32.1, textes tangoutes I, Nouveau recueil sur lamour parental et la piété filiale. A shared suppletive pattern in the systems of Chang Naga and Southern Chang, Cahiers de Linguistique, Asie Orientale 36.1. Xixiayu de mingcixing weiyu, Minzu Yuwen 2008.4, 37–39, the origin of vowel alternations in the Tangut verb, Language and Linguistics 10.1, 17–27. The inverse in Japhug Rgyalrong, Language & Linguistics 11.1, notes complémentaires sur les verbes à alternance ‘dr/br en tibétain”, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, no. “A Panchronic Study of Aspirated Fricatives, with New Evidence from Pumi. ”In Ergativity, Valency and Voice, “Harmonization and Disharmonization of Affix Ordering and Basic Word Order. ”“Applicative and Tropative Derivations in Japhug Rgyalrong. ”Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 36.2, 1-13. “Denominal Affixes as Sources of Antipassive Markers in Japhug Rgyalrong. ”On the cluster *sr–in Sino-Tibetan, Journal of Chinese Linguistics 43.1, jacques’ page on Academia. edu Jacques research blog, Panchronica Jacques page on Google Scholar How many *-s suffixes in Old Chinese
Guillaume Jacques
–
Guillaume Jacques presenting a talk at
SOAS, University of London, April 2013
40.
List of writing systems
–
This is a list of writing systems, classified according to some common distinguishing features. There are at least 3866 writing systems, the usual name of the script is given first, the name of the language in which the script is written follows, particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. Other informative or qualifying annotations for the script may also be provided, ideographic scripts, and pictographic scripts are not thought to be able to express all that can be communicated by language, as argued by the linguists John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger. Unger disputes claims made on behalf of Blissymbols in his 2004 book Ideogram, Although a few pictographic or ideographic scripts exist today, there is no single way to read them, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between symbol and language. Hieroglyphs were commonly thought to be ideographic before they were translated, in some cases of ideographic scripts, only the author of a text can read it with any certainty, and it may be said that they are interpreted rather than read. Such scripts often work best as mnemonic aids for oral texts, aztec – Nahuatl – Although some proper nouns have phonetic components. Mixtec – Mixtec Dongba – Naxi – Although this is supplemented with syllabic Geba script. Ersu Shābā – Ersu Míkmaq hieroglyphic writing – Míkmaq – Does have phonetic components, nsibidi – Ekoi, Efik/Ibibio, Igbo Testerian – used for missionary work in Mexico Other Mesoamerican writing systems with the exception of Maya Hieroglyphs. There are also symbol systems used to represent things other than language, some of these are Blissymbols – A constructed ideographic script used primarily in Augmentative and Alternative Communication. IConji – A constructed ideographic script used primarily in social networking Isotype Sona language A wide variety of notations Linear B, in logographic writing systems, glyphs represent words or morphemes, rather than phonetic elements. Note that no logographic script is composed solely of logograms, all contain graphemes that represent phonetic elements as well. These phonetic elements may be used on their own, or may serve as phonetic complements to a logogram, in the case of Old Persian, all vowels were written regardless, so it was effectively a true alphabet despite its syllabic component. In Japanese a similar system plays a role in foreign borrowings, for example, is written +. Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries behaved as a syllabary for the consonants and as an alphabet for the rest of consonants. The Tartessian or Southwestern script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic full semi-syllabaries, Although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, as in a full semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet, zhuyin is semi-syllabic in a different sense, it transcribes half syllables. That is, it has letters for syllable onsets and rimes rather than for consonants, eskayan – Bohol, Philippines Bamum script – Bamum A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes of a language. Note that there need not be a one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes of the script and the phonemes of a language, Linear alphabets are composed of lines on a surface, such as ink on paper
List of writing systems
–
Writing systems
List of writing systems
List of writing systems
–
A
Palaung manuscript written in a Brahmic abugida
41.
Writing system
–
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
Writing system
–
Writing systems
Writing system
–
Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts
Writing system
–
Chinese characters (漢字) are morpho-syllabic. Each one represents a syllable with a distinct meaning, but some characters may have multiple meanings or pronunciations
Writing system
–
A Specimen of typefaces and styles, by
William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728
Cyclopaedia
42.
History of writing
–
The history of writing traces the development of expressing language by letters or other marks and also the study and description of these developments. One of the earliest forms of expression is cuneiform. Writing numbers for the purpose of record keeping began long before the writing of language, see History of writing ancient numbers for how the writing of numbers began. It is generally agreed that true writing of language was conceived and developed in at least two places and possibly more. Egyptian script is dissimilar from Mesopotamian cuneiform, but similarities in concepts, similar debate surrounds the Indus script of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization in Ancient India. In addition, the script is still undeciphered and there is debate whether the script is true writing at all. An additional possibility is the undeciphered Rongorongo script of Easter Island and it is debated whether this is true writing, and if it is, whether it is another case of cultural diffusion of writing. The oldest example is from 1851,139 years after their first contact with Europeans, one explanation is that the script was inspired by Spains written annexation proclamation in 1770. Recent examples are the Cherokee syllabary, invented by Sequoyah, symbolic communication systems are distinguished from writing systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. In contrast, symbolic systems such as signs, painting, maps. Every human community possesses language, a feature regarded by many as an innate, however the development of writing systems, and their partial supplantation of traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven and slow. Once established, writing systems on the change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Writing allows societies to transmit information and share knowledge, scholars make a reasonable distinction between prehistory and history of early writing, but have disagreed concerning when prehistory becomes history and when proto-writing became true writing. Writing, in its most general terms, is a method of recording information and is composed of graphemes, the emergence of writing in a given area is usually followed by several centuries of fragmentary inscriptions. Historians mark the historicity of a culture by the presence of coherent texts in the writing system. The invention of writing was not an event, but a gradual process initiated by the appearance of symbols. A conventional proto-writing to true writing system follows a series of developmental stages, Picture writing system. Transitional system, graphemes refer not only to the object or idea which it represents, phonetic system, graphemes refer to sounds or spoken symbols, and the form of the grapheme is not related to its meanings
History of writing
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Writing systems
History of writing
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Sumer, an ancient civilization of southern
Mesopotamia, is believed to be the place where
written language was first invented around 3200 BC
History of writing
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Middle Babylonian legal tablet from Alalah in its envelope
History of writing
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Sequence of ten Indus signs discovered near the northern gate of the Indus site
Dholavira
43.
Grapheme
–
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. An individual grapheme may or may not carry meaning by itself, graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. The word grapheme, coined in analogy with phoneme, is derived from Greek γράφω, meaning write, the study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is an one and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a shape that represents any particular grapheme in a specific typeface is called a glyph. For example, the corresponding to the abstract concept of the Arabic numeral one has two distinct glyphs in the fonts Times New Roman and Helvetica. Graphemes are often notated within angle brackets, as ⟨a⟩, ⟨B⟩ and this is analogous to the slash notation used for phonemes, and the square bracket notation used for phonetic transcriptions. Hence a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all semantically equivalent, for example, in written English, there are many different physical representations of the lowercase letter a, such as a, ɑ, etc. But because the substitution of any of these for any other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, italic and bold face are also allographic. There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower-case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes, some linguists consider digraphs like the ⟨sh⟩ in ship to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Ligatures, however, such as ⟨æ⟩, are distinct graphemes, as are letters with distinctive diacritics. For a full discussion of the different types, see Writing system § Functional classification, there are additional graphemic components used in writing, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, word dividers such as the space, and other typographic symbols. As mentioned in the section, in languages that use alphabetic writing systems. In practice, however, the orthographies of such languages entail at least an amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a multigraph, as the digraph sh represents a sound in English. Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, for more examples, see Alphabetical order § Language-specific conventions. Conversion of scripts Character Grapheme–color synesthesia Grapheme–color ideasthesia Sign
Grapheme
–
Writing systems
44.
List of languages by first written accounts
–
This is a list of languages arranged by the approximate dates of the oldest existing texts recording a complete sentence in the language. It does not include undeciphered scripts, though there are various claims without wide acceptance and it also does not include inscriptions consisting of isolated words or names from a language. An oral tradition of poetry may typically bridge a few centuries. An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda, the earliest parts of text may date to c.1500 BC, while the oldest known manuscript dates to the 11th century AD. Similarly the oldest Avestan texts, the Gathas, are believed to have been composed before 1000 BC, because of the way languages change gradually, it is usually impossible to pinpoint when a given language began to be spoken. In many cases, some form of the language had already been considerably earlier than the dates of the earliest extant samples provided here. For languages that have developed out of a predecessor, dates provided here are subject to conventional terminology. For example, Old French developed gradually out of Vulgar Latin, similarly, Danish and Swedish separated from common Old East Norse in the 12th century, while Norwegian separated from Old West Norse around 1300. Writing first appeared in the Near East at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, in East Asia towards the end of the second millennium BC, the Sino-Tibetan family was represented by Old Chinese. In the Early Iron Age, alphabetic writing spread across the Near East, with the emergence of the Brahmic family of scripts, languages of India are attested from after about 300 BC. There is only evidence for languages such as Iberian, Tartessian, Galatian, Thracian and Messapian. The North Picene language of the Novilara Stele from c.600 BC has not been deciphered, the earliest examples of the Central American Isthmian script date from c.500 BC, but a proposed decipherment remains controversial. From Late Antiquity, we have for the first time languages with earliest records in manuscript tradition, thus, Old Armenian is first attested in the Armenian Bible translation. The Vimose inscriptions in the Elder Futhark runic alphabet appear to record Proto-Norse names, some scholars interpret the Negau helmet inscription as a Germanic fragment. The Cambridge History of Ancient China, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 124–231, baldi, Philip, The Foundations of Latin, Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-017208-9. The Shang, Chinas first historical dynasty, in Loewe, Michael, Shaughnessy, the Cambridge History of Ancient China, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 232–291, ISBN 978-0-521-47030-8. Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju, The Dravidian Languages, Cambridge University Press, cretan Writing in the Second Millennium B. C. Pollock, Sheldon, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, Sanskrit, Culture, Language in ancient Europe, an introduction, in Woodard, Roger D
List of languages by first written accounts
–
Seal impression from the tomb of
Seth-Peribsen, containing the oldest known complete sentence in
Egyptian, c. 2690 BC
List of languages by first written accounts
–
Letter in
Sumerian cuneiform sent by the high-priest Lu'enna, informing him the king of
Lagash of his son's death in battle, c. 2400 BC
List of languages by first written accounts
–
Greek
Linear B tablet from
Pylos, recording the distribution of hides, c. 1200 BC
List of languages by first written accounts
–
Ox scapula inscribed with three records of divinations in the reign of
Wu Ding of the Chinese
Shang dynasty, c. 1200 BC
45.
Abjad
–
An abjad is a type of writing system where each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. The name abjad is derived from pronouncing the first letters of the Arabic alphabet in order, the ordering of Arabic letters used to match that of the older Hebrew, Phoenician and Semitic alphabets, ʾ b g d. According to the formulations of Daniels, abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, abugidas mark the vowels with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, or a standalone glyph. Some abugidas use a symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary, a grapheme denotes a syllable, that is. This caused fatal effects on terminology in general and especially in Semitic philology, the first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs and this made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet and Aramaic, the Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia. Impure abjads have characters for vowels, optional vowel diacritics. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators and this practice was at first rare and limited in scope, but it became increasingly common and more developed in later times. In the 9th century BC, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language, the phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when the vowels went unrepresented, so the script was modified. They did not need letters for the sounds represented by aleph, he, heth or ayin. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs, along with he, the major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants. Abugidas developed along a different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent a vowel sound, hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian alphabet evolved into the Geez alphabet between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD, similarly, around the 3rd century BC, the Brāhmī script developed. The other major family of abugidas, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, was developed in the 1840s by missionary and linguist James Evans for the Cree. Evans used features of Devanagari script and Pitman shorthand to create his initial abugida, later in the 19th century, other missionaries adapted Evans system to other Canadian aboriginal languages
Abjad
–
Writing systems
Abjad
–
A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean 'to
Baalat '. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l b c lt.
46.
Abjad numerals
–
The Abjad numerals are a decimal numeral system in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been used in the Arabic-speaking world since before the century when Arabic numerals were adopted. In modern Arabic, the word abjadīyah means alphabet in general, in the Abjad system, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, alif, is used to represent 1, the second letter, bāʾ, is used to represent 2, etc. Individual letters also represent 10s and 100s, yāʾ for 10, kāf for 20, qāf for 100, the word abjad itself derives from the first four letters in the Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet and other scripts for Semitic languages. These older alphabets contained only 22 letters, stopping at taw, the Arabic Abjad system continues at this point with letters not found in other alphabets, ṯāʾ=500, etc. The Abjad order of the Arabic alphabet has two different variants. Loss of samekh was compensated for by the split of shin ש into two independent Arabic letters, ش and ﺱ, which moved up to take the place of samekh. The most common Abjad sequence, read right to left, is, This is commonly vocalized as follows. Before the introduction of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, the numbers were used for all mathematical purposes. In modern Arabic, they are used for numbering outlines, items in lists. In English, points of information are sometimes referred to as A, B, and C, the abjad numbers are also used to assign numerical values to Arabic words for purposes of numerology. The common Islamic phrase بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم bismillāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm has a value of 786. The name Allāh الله by itself has the value 66, a few of the numerical values are different in the alternative Abjad order. For four Persian letters these values are used, The Abjad numerals are equivalent to the earlier Hebrew numerals up to 400, the Hebrew numeral system is known as Gematria and is used in Kabbalistic texts and numerology. Like the Abjad order, it is used in times for numbering outlines and points of information. The Greek numerals differ in a number of ways from the Abjad ones, the Greek language system of letters-as-numbers is called isopsephy
Abjad numerals
–
Numeral systems
47.
Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word
Aramaic alphabet
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Bilingual Greek and Aramaic inscription by the
Mauryan emperor
Ashoka the Great at
Kandahar,
Afghanistan, 3rd century BC
48.
Hatran alphabet
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Many of the contemporary ruins were destroyed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in early 2015. It was encoded in the Unicode Standard 8.0 with support from UC Berkeleys Script Encoding Initiative, the script is written from right to left, as is typical of Aramaic scripts and of most abjads. Numerals are also written from right to left, and there are two known punctuation marks as well, some common ligatures also exist, and they dont appear to be necessary, and are rather just a shorthand form of writing. Some 600 texts are known to exist, Hatran script was added to the Unicode Standard in June,2015 with the release of version 8.0. The Unicode block for Hatran is U+108E0–U+108FF
Hatran alphabet
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Hatran script Hatran Aramaic script
49.
Arabic script
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The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic, dialects of Mandinka, Central Kurdish, Luri, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, and others. Until the 16th century, it was used to write some texts in Spanish. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by the number of countries using it, the Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style. In most cases the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants and a few vowels, the script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʼān, the holy book of Islam. It is also the basis for the tradition of Arabic calligraphy, the Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages besides Arabic, including Persian, Malay and Urdu which are not Semitic. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology, the modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars. In the cases of Bosnian, Kurdish, Kashmiri, and Uyghur writing systems, the Arabic script can therefore be used in both abugida and abjad, although it is often strongly, erroneously connected to the latter. Use of the Arabic script in West African languages, especially in the Sahel, to a certain degree the style and usage tends to follow those of the Maghreb. Additional diacritics have come into use to facilitate writing of sounds not represented in the Arabic language, the term ʻAjamī, which comes from the Arabic root for foreign, has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. There is evidence that writing Arabic in this set of letters influenced the style of modern Arabic script. After this initial period, Garshuni writing has continued to the present day among some Syriac Christian communities in the Arabic-speaking regions of the Levant, Kazakh in China Kurdish in Northern Iraq and Northwest Iran. It is mainly used in Sri Lanka and the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu for religious purposes, arwi language is the language of Tamil Nadu Muslims. Malayalam language represented by Arabic script variant is known as Arabi Malayalam, the script has particular letters to represent the peculiar sounds of Malayalam. This script is used in madrasas of the South Indian state of Kerala. It is similar to Chittagonian language in neighboring Bangladesh and sometimes using the Roman script. Malay in the Arabic script known as Jawi, in some cases it can be seen in the signboards of shops or market stalls. In addition, some television programming uses Jawi, such as announcements, advertisements, news, social programs, Berber languages have often been written in an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet. The use of the Arabic alphabet, as well as the competing Latin, West Africa Zarma language of the Songhay family
Arabic script
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Basic Arabic alphabet
Arabic script
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Calligraphy
50.
Pitman shorthand
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Pitman shorthand is a system of shorthand for the English language developed by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman, who first presented it in 1837. Like most systems of shorthand, it is a system, the symbols do not represent letters, but rather sounds. As of 1996, Pitman shorthand was the most popular shorthand system used in the United Kingdom, doing this requires a writing instrument responsive to the users drawing pressure, specialist fountain pens were originally used, but pencils are now more commonly used. Pitman shorthand uses straight strokes and quarter-circle strokes, in various orientations, the predominant way of indicating vowels is to use light or heavy dots, dashes, or other special marks drawn close to the consonant. Vowels are drawn before the stroke if the vowel is pronounced ahead of the consonant and this is often enough to distinguish words with similar consonant patterns. Another method of vowel indication is to choose from among a selection of different strokes for the same consonant, for example, the sound R has two kinds of strokes, round, or straight-line, depending on whether there is a vowel sound before or after the R. There have been versions of Pitmans shorthand since 1837. The original Pitmans shorthand had an alphabet of consonants, which was later modified, additional modifications and rules were added to successive versions. Pitman New Era had the most developed set of rules and abbreviation lists, Pitman 2000 introduced some simplifications and drastically reduced the list of abbreviations to reduce the memory load, officially reduced to a list of 144 short forms. The later versions dropped certain symbols and introduced other simplifications to earlier versions, for example, strokes rer and kway are present in Pitmans New Era, but not in Pitmans 2000. Pitman was asked to create a system of his own in 1837. He had used Samuel Taylors system for seven years, but his symbols bear greater similarity to the older Byrom system, the first phonetician to invent a system of shorthand, Pitman used similar-looking symbols for phonetically related sounds. For example, the dental and alveolar consonants are upright, ⟨|⟩ = /t/, ⟨|⟩ = /d/, ⟨)⟩ = /s/, ⟨)⟩ = /z/, ⟨ There are two strokes for r, ar and ray. The former assumes the form of the top quarter of a circle, whereas the latter is like chay ⟨/⟩. There are rules governing when to use each of these forms, the long vowels in Pitmans shorthand are, /ɑː/, /eɪ/, /iː/, /ɔː/, /oʊ/, and /uː/. The short vowels are /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /ɒ/, /ʌ/, the long vowels may be remembered by the sentence, Pa, may we all go too. /pɑː | meɪ wiː ɔːl ɡoʊ tuː/, and the vowels may be remembered by the sentence. A vowel is represented by a dot or a dash, which can be written either lightly or heavily depending on the vowel needed
Pitman shorthand
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Pitman shorthand
