Public Lecture by Professor Jing Tsu Lecture in English
Chinese Script in the Alphabetic Age
字母时代的汉语书写
Co-organisers
Centre for Chinese Language & Culture (NTU)
The Association of Nanyang Univerysity Graduates
Abstract
For more than five centuries, the Chinese script has wrestled with the question of its fate in the modern age. From early Jesuit bilingual dictionaries to typewriting, phonology (yinyun xue) to character retrieval methods (jianzi fa), the Chinese script’s strivance for modernity was the longest revolution of the twentieth century and continues in the digital age. This phenomenon has been of obvious interest to the Chinese, especially in the general atmosphere of national standardization. But the Chinese script revolution was never just a question about the Chinese language for the Chinese. Unlike most writing systems, it has been a global multi-scriptive venture in pursuit of an ever larger medium that involves as many outsiders as insiders. Deriving impetus from character philology, missionary linguistics, lexicography, telegraphy and typewriting, Latinization and simplification schemes, it claims a contemporary presence in computer language encoding, automatic translation, and neurolinguistics.
Examining some of its many faces, Professor Jing Tsu’s lecture constructs the first material and technological account of how the Chinese scripts became modern under the condition of alphabetic dominance. Professor Tsu argues that the Chinese script revolution persisted and succeeded by first bending, then reinserting, its historical myths and descriptions into the era of western science and empirical methods. Instead of succumbing its own history to the modern power of western science, the Chinese writing system brought its own empirical truths and methods to bear on the possibility of a scientific operation.
Chairperson
Professor LUKE Kang Kwong
Associate Dean (Research), College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences (NTU)
Time
3 December 2014 (Wednesday)
5.00pm – 6.30pm
Venue
Seminar Room 9 (HSS-B1-11)
School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University
14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332