Orthography of Early Chinese Writing PDF Download

Author: Imre Galambos
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chinese characters
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Author: Feng Li
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
The emergence and spread of literacy in ancient human society an important topic for all who study the ancient world, and the development of written Chinese is of particular interest, as modern Chinese orthography preserves logographic principles shared by its most ancient forms, making it unique among all present-day writing systems. In the past three decades, the discovery of previously unknown texts dating to the third century BCE and earlier, as well as older versions of known texts, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese writing. The long-term continuity and stability of the Chinese written language allow for this detailed study of the role literacy played in early civilization. The contributors to Writing and Literacy in Early China inquire into modes of manuscript production, the purposes for which texts were produced, and the ways in which they were actually used. By carefully evaluating current evidence and offering groundbreaking new interpretations, the book illuminates the nature of literacy for scribes and readers.

Author: John Lagerwey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004168354
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1281

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Together, and for the first time in any language, the 24 essays gathered in these volumes provide a composite picture of the history of religion in ancient China from the emergence of writing ca. 1250 BC to the collapse of the first major imperial dynasty in 220 AD. It is a multi-faceted tale of changing gods and rituals that includes the emergence of a form of “secular humanism” that doubts the existence of the gods and the efficacy of ritual and of an imperial orthodoxy that founds its legitimacy on a distinction between licit and illicit sacrifices. Written by specialists in a variety of disciplines, the essays cover such subjects as divination and cosmology, exorcism and medicine, ethics and self-cultivation, mythology, taboos, sacrifice, shamanism, burial practices, iconography, and political philosophy. Produced under the aegis of the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations chinoise, japonaise et tibétaine (UMR 8155) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris).

Author: Haeree Park
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110459310
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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This book investigates the nature of regional variation in the early Chinese writing system through bamboo manuscripts and inscriptions dating from the late pre-imperial China (5th-3rd centuries BCE). Diachronic and synchronic comparisons of graphic details show that none of the well-recognized regional varieties developed independently from one another. Furthermore, differences in graphic components can be accounted for as alternations of graphs that are compatible in their semantic or phonetic values. The phonological systems underlying various regional orthographies unanimously point to a single coherent sound system with some mixture of dialect pronunciations. This strongly suggests that all the late pre-imperial regional scripts derived from a kind of orthographic meta-system based on one spoken standard language. This orthography and its phonological systems should reasonably be dated to ca. 9th century BCE, just about the time when the earliest known Chinese lexicography "Book of Scribe Zhou" (ca. 830 BCE) was written. The conclusions of this book have further implications on reading and understanding manuscript texts in general as well as on using them as data for linguistic studies.

Author: Jane Geaney
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438468628
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney's interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers' intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius's proposal to rectify names (zhengming).

Author: Jing Tsu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735214743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Author: Paul R. Goldin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317681916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 726

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The study of early China has been radically transformed over the past fifty years by archaeological discoveries, including both textual and non-textual artefacts. Excavations of settlements and tombs have demonstrated that most people did not lead their lives in accordance with ritual canons, while previously unknown documents have shown that most received histories were written retrospectively by victors and present a correspondingly anachronistic perspective. This handbook provides an authoritative survey of the major periods of Chinese history from the Neolithic era to the fall of the Latter Han Empire and the end of antiquity (AD 220). It is the first volume to include not only a comprehensive review of political history but also detailed treatments of topics that transcend particular historical periods, such as: Warfare and political thought Cities and agriculture Language and art Medicine and mathematics Providing a detailed analysis of the most up-to-date research by leading scholars in the field of early Chinese history, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, Asian archaeology, and Chinese studies in general.

Author: Edward L. Shaughnessy
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791482359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Rewriting Early Chinese Texts examines the problems of reconstituting and editing ancient manuscripts that will revise—indeed "rewrite"—Chinese history. It is now generally recognized that the extensive archaeological discoveries made in China over the last three decades necessitate such a rewriting and will keep an army of scholars busy for years to come. However, this is by no means the first time China's historical record has needed rewriting. In this book, author Edward L. Shaughnessy explores the issues involved in editing manuscripts, rewriting them, both today and in the past. The book begins with a discussion of the difficulties encountered by modern archaeologists and paleographers working with manuscripts discovered in ancient tombs. The challenges are considerable: these texts are usually written in archaic script on bamboo strips and are typically fragmentary and in disarray. It is not surprising that their new editions often meet with criticism from other scholars. Shaughnessy then moves back in time to consider efforts to reconstitute similar bamboo-strip manuscripts found in the late third century in a tomb in Jixian, Henan. He shows that editors at the time encountered many of the same difficulties faced by modern archaeologists and paleographers, and that the first editions produced by a court-appointed team of editors quickly prompted criticism from other scholars of the time. Shaughnessy concludes with a detailed study of the editing of one of these texts, the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian), arguably the most important manuscript ever discovered in China. Showing how at least two different, competing editions of this text were produced by different editors, and how the differences between them led later scholars to regard the original edition—the only one still extant—as a forgery, Shaughnessy argues for this text's place in the rewriting of early Chinese history.

Author: Rens Krijgsman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004540849
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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As the first study of manuscript collections, this book asks what changes when sayings, stories, songs, and spells are brought together on the same carrier. Covering a plethora of manuscripts from the Warring States and early empires, and spanning sources from philosophy, historiography, poetry, and technical literature, this study describes the whole life-cycle of multiple texts collected on a single manuscript. Drawing on comparative and interdisciplinary advances and based on careful study of manuscript materiality and textuality, this book shows the importance of collections in the development of and access to text and knowledge in early China.

Author: N. Harry Rothschild
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824867823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.