Ideography and Chinese Language Theory

Ideography and Chinese Language Theory PDF Author: Timothy Michael O’Neill
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110457229
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

Ideography and Chinese Language Theory

Ideography and Chinese Language Theory PDF Author: Timothy Michael O’Neill
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110457229
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

Ideography and Chinese Language Theory

Ideography and Chinese Language Theory PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783110459241
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description


Ideography and Chinese Language Theory

Ideography and Chinese Language Theory PDF Author: Timothy Michael O’Neill
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311045923X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

Living Chinese Philosophy

Living Chinese Philosophy PDF Author: Roger T. Ames
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143849954X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
In Living Chinese Philosophy, Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with classical Chinese "zoetology" ("the art of living"), which is made explicit in the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in "being qua being" or "being per se" (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the "what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind" (eidos) of any particular thing, thus setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be "this" and not "that." In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology. It also provides the interpretive context for the canonical texts by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or "being," we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or "life" and create the neologism "zoe-tology" as "the art of living" (shengshenglun 生生論). This cosmology begins from "living" (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless "becomings": not "things" that are but "events" that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human "beings" and a process conception of what the author calls human "becomings."

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics PDF Author: Chu-Ren Huang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317231147
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 963

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics is written for those wanting to acquire comprehensive knowledge of China, the diaspora and the Sino-sphere communities through Chinese language. It examines how Chinese language is used in different contexts, and how the use of Chinese language affects culture, society, expression of self and persuasion of others; as well as how neurophysiological aspects of language disorder affect how we function and how the advance of technology changes the way the Chinese language is used and perceived. The Handbook concentrates on the cultural, societal and communicative characteristics of the Chinese language environment. Focusing on language use in action, in context and in vivo, this book intends to lay empirical grounds for collaboration and synergy among different fields.

Nominal Things

Nominal Things PDF Author: Jeffrey Moser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226822478
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
How the medieval study of ancient bronzes influenced the production of knowledge and the making of things in East Asia. This book opens in eleventh-century China, where scholars were the first in world history to systematically illustrate and document ancient artifacts. As Jeffrey Moser argues, the visual, technical, and conceptual mechanisms they developed to record these objects laid the foundations for methods of visualizing knowledge that scholars throughout early modern East Asia would use to make sense of the world around them. Of the artifacts these scholars studied, the most celebrated were bronze ritual vessels that had been cast nearly two thousand years earlier. While working to make sense of the relationship between the bronzes’ complex shapes and their inscribed glyphs, they came to realize that the objects were “nominal things”—objects inscribed with names that identified their own categories and uses. Eleventh-century scholars knew the meaning of these glyphs from hallowed Confucian writings that had been passed down through centuries, but they found shocking disconnects between the names and the bronzes on which they were inscribed. Nominal Things traces the process by which a distinctive system of empiricism was nurtured by discrepancies between the complex materiality of the bronzes and their inscriptions. By revealing the connections between the new empiricism and older ways of knowing, the book explains how scholars refashioned the words of the Confucian classics into material reality.

Redemption and Regret

Redemption and Regret PDF Author: James Scarth Gale
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148752997X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 681

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Book Description
Redemption and Regret presents two previously unpublished typescripts of James Scarth Gale, a Canadian missionary to Korea for four decades (1888–1927). During his time in Korea, Gale developed into the foremost Western scholar of Korean history, language, and literature, completing the first translation of Korean literature into a Western language, the first translation of English literature into Korean, and the first comprehensive Korean-English dictionary. In addition to these translations, the typescripts entitled Pen Pictures of Old Korea (ca. 1910) and Old Corea (ca. 1925), each presented here with introductory essays, contain Gale’s observations of various cultural artifacts, behaviours, and practices. Gale lived in Korea during a tumultuous and transformative period that witnessed the transition of the country from a "hermit" suzerain kingdom to an independent empire, and finally to a colonial possession of Japan. Pen Pictures of Old Korea and Old Corea preserve what Gale viewed as inevitably fated for extinction. This realization imbues his writings with a sense of ambivalence towards the "passing" of traditional Korea – owing to the conflict between his profound admiration for pre-modern Korean culture and his Western missionary identity, which demanded that the country adapt to a modern, Christian world.

The New Ezra Pound Studies

The New Ezra Pound Studies PDF Author: Mark Byron
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108499015
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Essays on recent developments in Pound scholarship and research, including newly available primary sources and methodological advances in cognate fields.

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文 PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004529446
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wake-up call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume. Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Binder
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226822532
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A wide-ranging history of the intellectual developments that produced the modern idea of the algorithm. Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians long before the computer age. How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? Here Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole's nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, whose name is short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. To what extent can meaning be controlled by individuals, like the values of a and b in algebra, and to what extent is meaning inevitably social? By attending to this long-neglected question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, now places this boundary in jeopardy, making its stakes all the more urgent to understand. The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.