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…

In order to preserve distinctive cultures, people anxiously figure out writing systems of their languages as recording tools. Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka languages are three major and the most popular dialects of Han languages spoken in Chinese society. Their writing systems are all in Han characters. Various and independent phonetic…

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…

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…

Discusses problems of information distortion resulting from romanization (i.e., representation of nonroman scripts in Latin characters) and modifications of USMARC format to support nonroman scripts in library catalogs. Efforts to develop a universal character set and its potential effects on USMARC are considered. (45 references) (MES)

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…

Describes how the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei has used computers: 1) to select new vocabulary from texts for glossing; 2) to sort vocabulary for index listings; and 3) to print portions of textbooks. Problems with phonetic transcriptions and quality of print for Chinese characters are discussed. Samples are…

Describes an answer analysis system, called Answer Pattern Manager, that solves the difficult problem of recognizing student reproduction of spoken Japanese sentences. It allows all reasonable Roman spellings of Japanese words, while at the same time detecting mishearings and distinguishing between important and unimportant words. (Contains eight…

Discusses the romanization of Chinese characters in U.S. library bibliographic records; considers the advantages and disadvantages of changing from Wade-Giles romanization to pinyin; describes word division problems; proposes an alternative that uses a computer program; and considers the future possibilities of a multiscript, general purpose…

Discusses some of the problems in creating bibliographic descriptions for materials published in languages which employ nonroman scripts, analyzes the impact of online catalog systems in overcoming some of these difficulties, and describes some of the computer hardware, particularly terminals, being developed to handle nonroman scripts. (JL)

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)

To master the subtleties of Chinese takes years, but most Americans can learn some basic spoken and written Chinese in a matter of weeks or months. A new phonic system, Pin Yin Romanizing System, tones, structure, and characters, and a comparison of Japanese and Chinese are discussed. (MLW)

The Romanization of Yiddish in Hebraica cataloging is problematic; inconsistencies are found in machine-readable catalog (MARC) records of various bibliographic utilities. The article describes insufficiencies in the Library of Congress's Romanization table and disparate systems used in transliterating Yiddish dictionaries. Solutions may include…