These ink brushed images evolved from over 200 basic symbols or
radicals, that, when combined and sometimes even contorted, could be basically
understood because of the graphic similarity to a well-recognized symbol. If a
picture is worth a thousand words, then by adding three more zeros to the
already 54,000 distinct hanzi, the opportunities for expressing ideas to
this day seem endless. (The total is unknown, as are some of the meanings and
vocalized values of many today.)
“You can put so much in the volume of Chinese words because the
structure is so symbolic and dense with meaning, said bilingual Ai
Weiwei, China’s renown contemporary artist turned political dissident in
the August 2013 Interview magazine. Ai, an inveterate
Twitterist noted, “I can write a novel in 140 characters. ”His @aiww is
automatically translated into English.
While it is possible to conduct daily life (and read a newspaper)
in the 21st century by knowing how to read “only” 3500 of them, the
average East Asian needed something simpler that would enable literacy to
spread, not to mention to allow “new” ideas to be expressed.
According to tradition, the 9th century the Japanese
Buddhist priest Kukai invented the bilateral Kana system: two sets of 51
characters, with one set for foreign (originally Chinese Buddhist scripture)
words and, later, another for the vernacular. In 1443 Korea’s King Sejung the
Great created the 24 characters for Hangeul, to expand literacy
and were designed to replicate the position of the tongue in the mouth when
speaking. Around the same time, Koreans invented moveable type (78 years prior to Guttenberg.) Much later, during
the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, the
progressive linguistic democratization movement simplified
the written hanzi system, and the majority of the population was lifted out of
illiteracy. (Taiwan does not use this simplified system.)
A major challenge to rendering meaning through hanzi and its related
brush-and-ink system of writing. Because 1/ a single character have many
meanings and 2/ many characters produce a similar vocalized sound, all writing
must be understood in context of cultural realities, historical and
cotemporary.
All of this accommodation to language follows the evolution of the
complexity of life; while verbs and modifiers haven’t changed much, the stock
of nouns have grown with each new planetary exploit and thing-a-ma-jig. So,
while the sounds value of the characters didn’t change, the choice of
appropriate written character to render a new word required a creative, open
mind. It is not unusual for a reader of hanzi (or its cousins) to be
stumped about meaning of a statement when seeing an unexpected logograph in an “unlikely”
place or rendered with a writing style that seems illegible. In the case of the
later, a character may be reconstructed through its official stroke order by
tracing it with one’s finger in the palm of the other hand.
As the distance between East and West grew shorter, the use of the
Latin or Romanized alphabet became known in the East. Not only did it enable
the learning of proper vocalization of Germanic and Romance languages, but it
also became fashionable. In Japan, it is possible that four writing systems (kanji,
katakana, hiragana and Romaji) might appear in a single sentence, if only to lend a
splash of westernized spice.
What seems more important is that , for all their complexity, hanzi
logographs
themselves do not fully convey emotional intent of the writer. This is inferred
from the style of the calligraphy. There are five to eight recognized basic calligraphy styles of the hanzi-based symbols. It is
easy to see how brush rendered “words” have been
seamlessly incorporated into paintings, including the artist's signature as
well as poems. In the case of literature, the choice of one character over
another can add a critical poetic / thematic / historic reference.
No matter which character is used, however, emotionality has been
lost since the mechanical renderings of hanzi, from moveable type
utilized in early printing to the digital forms familiar today. Despite its
other limitations, this is not a problem for Romanized writing. All Latin-based
letterforms but “I” have no intrinsic meanings. Computer keyboards, reliant on Unicode text, are even more limiting, however compact.
Sourcing hanzii via phonetic Romaji spelling is laborious. Beyond the @ and #
symbols that have been appropriated for a variety of technical functionality,
it is no wonder that symbols, such as☺ began to creep into communications.
With the explosive use of mobile phones for text messaging,
emoticons, emotional icons have been informally crafted and widely adopted to
efficiently express emotionality for written communications. Wikipedia defines “emoticon”, emotion icons, 表情符号 in hanzi (literally, surface
sentiment feeling mark) as “metacommunicative pictorial representations of “facial
expression which in the absence of body language and prosody serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or
temper of a sender's nominal verbal communication, changing and improving its
interpretation.”
Unlike brushing a hanzi character with a just a breath of ink onto a
thirsty piece of rice paper or playing a piano with a soft touch to produce a
quiet sound, or might both be appropriate for a lullaby, pressing lightly on
the keypad will not make a difference in the sentiment of a Twitter posting. “Spelling”,
or in this case, constructing a prs did.oper image from available elements, is
the key to uccess.
There is almost universal consensus that for Westerners, the
Smiley Face is rendered from the keypad as :) or :-). On the other hand, Japanese emoticons, kamoji (literally “face mark”) render it as (^_^).
Beyond the distinct vertical vs horizontal readings, there is a critical
difference in these two basically similar anthropomorphic symbols.
According to a behavioral scientist in Hokkaido
University, the selection or creation of the right “mouth” or “eye” styles are
critical to meaning. “In Japan people tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues,
whereas Americans tend to look to the mouth. ... Perhaps it is because the
Japanese, when in the presence of others, try to suppress their emotions more
than Americans do.” He further notes, “American subjects in the research rated
smiling emoticons with sad-looking eyes as happier than the Japanese
subject.
When you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!!!!
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