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A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, by Peter S. Du Ponceau. to which are Subjoined a Vocabulary of the Cochinchinese Language, by Father Joseph Morrone, with References to Plates, Containing the Characters Belonging to Each Word, and with Notes, Showing the Degree of Affinity Existing Between the Chinese and Cochinchinese Languages, and the Use They Respectively Make of Their Common System of Writing by M. de la Palun and a Cochinchinese and Latin Dictionary

Peter Stephen Du_Ponceau

Published: 1838

Total Pages: 438


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Reprint of the original, first published in 1838.
For nearly half a century, Professor M.A.K. Halliday has been enriching the discipline of linguistics with his keen insights into the social demiotic phenomenon we call language. This volume includes papers that explore different aspects of language froma systemic functional perspective.
This book examines the discrepancies between various Western representations of China and the reality of China. It inquires into the cultural, historical, and political contexts within which such discrepancies arise, and it points out the distortion of reality in the tendency toward cultural dichotomies, the tendency to view China as the conceptual opposite of the West.
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for “Jesus" to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained “typewriter girls” and “typewriter boys.” Still later was the “Double Pigeon” typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of “predictive text.” Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an “object history” but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University