Open Educational Resources | Pao Yue-kong Library, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Video

Writing-mediated Cross-border Communication Face-to-face: From Sinitic Brush-talk (漢文筆談) to Pen-assisted Conversation

In this CIHK webinar, we will discuss the material conditions of and historical background to the use of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic in writing-mediated brush conversation between literati of Sinitic engaged in cross-border communication within Sinographic East Asia or the Sinographic cosmopolis, which corresponds with today’s China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan (including Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom) and Vietnam. Compared with speech as a modality of communication, real-time writing-mediated interaction between talking humans, synchronously face-to-face, seems uncommon. In any society, speaking is premised on one condition: the interlocutors must have at least one shared spoken language at their disposal, but even then, there are circumstances under which speaking is either physically not feasible or socially inappropriate. Could writing function as an alternative modality of communication when speaking is not an option due to the absence of a shared spoken language, as in cross-border communication settings? Whereas real-time writing-mediated face-to-face interaction is rare where a regional lingua franca was known to exist (e.g., Latin and Arabic), there is ample historical evidence of literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia conducting ‘silent conversation’, synchronously and interactively in writing mode using brush, ink, and paper. Such a pattern of writing-assisted interaction is still practiced and observable in pen-assisted conversation – pen-talk – between Chinese and Japanese speakers today, thanks to the pragma-linguistic affordance of morphographic, non-phonographic sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters and Japanese kanji). We will outline the historical spread of Classical Chinese or Sinitic texts from the ‘center’ to the ‘peripheries’, and the historical background to the acquisition of literacy in Sinitic by the people there. Their shared knowledge of Sinitic helps explain why, for well over a thousand years until the 1900s, literati from these places were able to speak their mind by engaging in ‘Sinitic brush-talk’ 漢文筆談 in cross-border communication.
Even date: 13/5/2022
Speaker: Prof. David C. S. Li
Hosted by: Confucius Institute of Hong Kong, Department of Chinese Culture

Subjects:: Chinese Language and Language and Languages
Keywords:: Chinese characters History Chinese language -- Written Chinese Written communication China East Asia
Resource Type:: Video

Video

漢字動畫-六書篇

This video explains the topic of Chinese character classification.

Course related:: CBS2C10P An Exploration of Chinese Characters and Scripts
Subjects:: Chinese Language
Keywords:: Chinese language -- Etymology Chinese characters
Resource Type:: Video

e-book

Chinese Rhetoric and Writing: An Introduction for Language Teachers

The authors of Chinese Rhetoric and Writing offer a response to the argument that Chinese students' academic writing in English is influenced by "culturally nuanced rhetorical baggage that is uniquely Chinese and hard to eradicate." Noting that this argument draws from "an essentially monolingual and Anglo-centric view of writing," they point out that the rapid growth in the use of English worldwide calls for "a radical reassessment of what English is in today's world." The result is a book that provides teachers of writing, and in particular those involved in the teaching of English academic writing to Chinese students, an introduction to key stages in the development of Chinese rhetoric, a wide-ranging field with a history of several thousand years. Understanding this important rhetorical tradition provides a strong foundation for assessing and responding to the writing of this growing group of students.

Subjects:: Chinese Language
Keywords:: China Chinese language -- Rhetoric -- Study teaching Report writing -- Study teaching Textbooks
Resource Type:: e-book

Others

粵語審音配詞字庫

This database is constructed on the basis of two earlier databases developed by the Research Centre for the Humanities Computing (formerly the Humanities Computing Programme). Since the appearance of the Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton in 1996 and the Chinese Talking Syllabary of the Cantonese Dialect: An Electronic Repository in 1998, we have been receiving notes of gratitude from users from all over the Internet. Out of the many suggestions they made, the crucial one was the expansion of our databases from a pure syllabary structure into one which covers semantic information of the characters. In response to this suggestion of our users, in particular their concern for the semantic disambiguation of Chinese polyphonic characters, a database carrying the current title was planned. Being functionally versatile and user-friendly like its two predecessors, the current new database excels further in the following respects: This fully revised and expanded database covering the complete Big5 Chinese character set is now the most comprehensive syllabary of the Cantonese dialect on the Internet. It covers in the first place the syllabric data of four major works, namely, 1) S. L. Wong's A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton, 2) Li Chomin's Lishi Zhongwen Zidian, 3) Zhou Wuji and Rao Bingcai's Guangzhou Hua Biaozunyin Zihui and 4) Richard Ho and Chu Kwok-fan's Yuehyin Zhengdu Zihui. To make up what is still missing, linguistic information of nine other major works are consulted. To take into account the linguistic reality of the Hong Kong society, vernacular pronunciation data provided by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong are also included. Besides pronunciations, typical word-forms or vocabularies are provided for every character in this database. These word-forms are grouped with respect to the proper pronunciation(s) of the respective head characters so that users can disambiguate polyphonic characters that are phonologically ambiguous. In cases where common vocabularies are not readily available, brief remarks or explanations will be given. It supports up to seven transciption (romanization) schemes of the Cantonese dialect. Users can switch from one scheme to the other wherever necessary. When a certain head character is being featured, basic information such as pronunciation(s), homophones, vocabularies etc. are tabulated. In addition to these, further lexical information related to that particular character will also be provided for easy reference, as, for instances, internal codes (Big5 and Unicode), Cangjie input code, radical belonging , number of strokes, basic English translation, pagination of important references and hyperlinks pointing to various online resources. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Ms. Ginny Chan, former instructor of Yale-China Chinese Language Center, CUHK, for her courtesy in demonstrating 1,900 unique Cantonese pronunciations on a volunteer basis.

Course related:: CBS 3407 Chinese Academic Writing in Language and Speech Science, CBS532 Description of Chinese I: Words and Sentences, CBS4901 Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English, and CBS514 Introduction to Cantonese studies
Subjects:: Chinese Language
Keywords:: Chinese language -- Dialects Dictionaries Cantonese dialects -- Pronunciation
Resource Type:: Others

Courseware

Functional Approaches to Mandarin Chinese

The purpose of this course is to provide students with in-depth introduction on the articulation mechanism in human speech. Three main modules covered in the class are 1) Fundamentals of Articulation 2) Software 3) Enact Accent. Lectures of Articulatory Phonetics will equip student will important knowledge on the field. They will then have hand-on training on tools which greatly facilitate articulatory/acoustic analysis of speech. The students’ performance will be evaluated based on a clip (with distinct accent) they choose to enact.　