How did the Chinese language and script evolve?

3 Comments

1. Taivo says:

   November 21, 2009 at 11:53 am

   Well, I’m not going to write your paper for you, but here are some excellent resources:

   Jerry Norman. 1988. Chinese. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

   Henry Rogers. 2005. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics 18. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

   Peter T. Daniels & William Bright, ed. 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

   The chapter on Chinese in the Rogers book is especially good. Most of the stuff on the Internet or in popular works on the history of writing or the Chinese languages is garbage, but these three sources are very good and I use them when preparing my lectures on East Asian languages and Chinese writing.

   The following is the ONLY internet source that I would recommend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_writing
2. bryan_q says:

   November 21, 2009 at 11:53 am

   you could use
   http://www.zhongwen.com, http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html, http://www.logoi.com/notes/chinese_origins.html

   or

   http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm

   Below is a translated page from Spanish to English, but some terms are still in Spanish, so get a Spanish to English dictionary.
   http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?tt=url&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.proel.org%2Fmundo.html&lp=es_en&.intl=us&fr=moz2
3. hznfrst says:

   November 21, 2009 at 11:53 am

   It started out as pictures (pictograms), as did most writing. Ancient Chinese writing is much simpler than the modern, and you can almost figure it out just by looking at it. As time went by it added "ideograms" to its symbol vocabulary, which are more complex and arbitrary since ideas don’t have obvious pictures associated with them.

   Turn the first letter of out Latin alphabet upside down and you will notice it looks like the head of an ox, which was its original meaning way back when.

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