The latest article I've uploaded takes issue with Mark Liberman's rejection of the ideographic nature of the Chinese writing system.
Continue reading "Ideographic Nature of the Chinese Writing System" »
Yesterday I uploaded a second brief article concerning the ideographic nature of Chinese characters that derive from pictographs. The article can be found here or here. If describing pictographs as being ideographic sounds paradoxical, the article will clear things up.
Continue reading "Ideographic Nature of Pictographs among Chinese Characters" »
Mair has been generous not only with his time but in other ways I will not detail here as he may not wish to have them specified in public. Additionally, the range and scale of Mair's activities and contributions are scarcely inferior to those of DeFrancis
Continue reading "Clarification Regarding the Critique of the Critique" »
As even a slight acquaintance with their activities and writings reveals, DeFrancis and Victor Mair hold illiteracy responsible for tremendous suffering in China, and they have actively promoted script reform as a counter-measure. Both have insisted that the “script reform” at which they aim does not involve abolition, replacement or reduced use of Chinese characters but rather digraphia, the use of the characters and of the romanized script Hanyu pinyin.
Chinese characters are ideographic, but not ideographs.