The question of script was paramount in the nineteenth-century debate over Hindi and Urdu, two closely related languages that are characterised by "extreme digraphia". Rather than rehearsing the well-known story of the culturally and politically charged process of differentiation in which the two sister languages became prime markers of…

This article serves as a primer to Mandarin Chinese mainly for chemical practitioners who have no familiarity with the Mandarin Chinese language and who may travel to East Asia during their career or work in collaboration with Chinese-speaking people. Eight vocabulary lists (given in English, written Chinese, and Pinyin romanization) feature…

"Reading in Asian Languages" is rich with information about how literacy works in the non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) used by hundreds of millions of people and refutes the common Western belief that such systems are hard to learn or to use. The contributors share a comprehensive view of reading as construction…

This article argues that for students of Chinese and Japanese, learning to write Chinese characters ("hanzi/kanji") by hand from memory is an inefficient use of resources. Rather, beginning students should focus on character/word recognition (reading) and electronic writing. Although electronic technologies have diminished the usefulness of…

As Chinese characters ("hanzi") have three aspects--as a technical writing system, an aesthetic visual art (Chinese calligraphy), and a highly-charged cultural symbolic system--changing them is a complex process. In the 1950s when language planning campaigns were launched to modernise Chinese through "hanzi" standardisation,…

The Han sphere, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, adopted Han characters and classical Han writing as the official written language before the 20th century. However, great changes came with the advent of the 20th century. After World War II, Han characters in Vietnam and Korea were officially replaced by the romanised "Chu…

Chinese characters are often viewed as a premodern or incomplete form of literacy. Authors with an autonomous view of literacy view Chinese as a concrete, homeostatic language inadequate for use in abstract thought and movement toward mass literacy. Even those with an ideological model framework propose that the intrinsic nature of Chinese…

Efforts by Canada Natives to put their languages into standard written formats and to use Native languages with their children are discussed in this review of the Stoney Indian Language Project. The Stoney community is centered at Morley, Alberta (Canada), and the population of the three bands--Bear's Paw, Chiniki, and Goodstoney--is nearly 2,700.…

The 1986 report by the Canadian Task Force on Aboriginal Languages, which recommended that the writing systems used for the northern Dene languages be standardized within 10 years, resulted in the 1987 Dene Standardization Project. The mandate for the project was to make recommendations on orthography standardization as the first step in the…

EKTB, a new transliteration scheme for Hebrew based on the historical development of the alphabet, treats Latin characters as graphic variants of Hebrew letters and permits Hebrew to be used with standard equipment while maintaining its traditional writing methodology. (Author/CB)

The historical development of written Japanese has resulted in an extremely complex system. Modern Japanese is usually written in logosyllabic script consisting of a combination of "kanji," the Chinese characters, and "kana," the Japanese syllables originally formed from them. There are two types of "kana," the…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…