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…

Bilingual teaching in which ethnic minority spoken and written language are used along with the Han language is China's basic policy for minority education. By means of a survey of the present state of the use of Miao written language in teaching, this article analyzes problems in the policies for minority-language teaching in ethnically mixed…

Although the main characteristics of procedural discourse are well known, less is known about its various subtypes. Most of the data for the present paper are taken from Category E (skills, trades, and hobbies) in the Brown and LOB corpora, supplemented with examples from computer manuals and a manual for drivers. Following a survey of previous…

From a definition of the terms "vowel,""consonant,""syllable," and "word," rules for the syllabification of Italian are formulated. Syllabification in musical composition is briefly mentioned. (AM)

From the sixth to the eighth century A.D., Japan was the recipient of massive cultural infusions from China. This acceptance of the Chinese pattern included, and to a great extent was based on, the acceptance of the Chinese language. The Chinese writing system was applied to Japanese because there was no other model to follow and in spite of the…

The relative merits of Chinese characters as a writing system are discussed as an introduction to the proceedings of the CLTA panel on Chinese characters. (KM)

All visual signals need to be interpreted. The educational system needs to teach students to interpret various media in addition to the printed word. (Author/STS)

Summarizes some of the major pieces of evidence concerning the archeological clay tokens, specifically the technique for their manufacture, their geographic distribution, chronology, and the context in which they are found. Discusses the interpretation of tokens as the first example of visible language, particularly as an antecedent of Sumerian…

Five propositions and observations and six guidelines on the subject of non-sexist language and editorial policies. (LS)

Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of language and literature can illuminate the workings of multigenre compositions. Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia and novelization are applicable because they are not genre dependent. As he says, they reach "beyond the bounds of the novel as genre" to reflect the ways all kinds of written language may…

A count of the characters in two combined groups of local and United Press International news stories suggests that the frequency ranking of the letters used most in typesetting is ETAOIN RSHLDCU, rather than the traditional ETAOIN SRHLDCU or the order reported by I. E. Fang in 1966. (GT)

Presents a functional description of punctuation as a delimiter of words, sentences, and paragraphs, and as a semantic and extralinguistic indicator. (AM)

Examines the notion that shorthand systems derive their efficiency from the operation of a nonlexical sound-to-writing route. In an experiment, word frequency and accurate phoneme transcription accuracy were correlated whereas nonsense words resulted in decreased transcription accuracy, indicating that lexical effects for shorthand are just as…