Journal 10

In order to understand the full weight of the term diglossia a western example is revealing. In medieval Europe Latin was the dominant language regardless of the local vernacular. This trend continued until the dominant language shifted to the vernacular, but Latin remained the script of the learned. In China this same type of diglossia was evident with the shift from wényán to báihuà. The only difference being that the classical wényán  language was probably never very closely connected to the vernacular báihuà. This was important historically because in order to become a government official a strong command of the classical script was required. This forced out all of the poorer applicants due to the amount of time required to gain mastery over it. This diglossia unified the country with a common 'sacred' language which was used for official purposes, and then the common people would use their vernacular for their daily affairs.

  As a supplemental reading to be able to add some more background information I read Chen, Ping “Modern Written Chinese in Development.” Language in Society 22, no. 4 (December 1993): 505-537. The main point of this article is to show the development of modern written Chinese in terms of the literary classical Chinese (wényán) being replaced by the vernacular script of everyday life (báihuà). Wényán was the writing standard for the 2,000 years before the cultural upheavals that started in 1919. It was formed from the Chinese spoken during the pre-Qin and Han periods (206 BCE to 220 CE). Even though the wényán was closely related to the spoken language early on it soon became divorced. Báihuà was a script created during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) that was more closely aligned with the common speech. Although the vocabulary and grammar of the wényán script was different from the spoken language it was used by the literary elite who looked down on the báihuà script. Although not the elite script, báihuà gained a little higher status at the end of the Tang Dynasty and was used to write novels up to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911).

 Another main point that I researched was about the definition of a language and a dialect. Li Jingzhong, argued that Cantonese should be considered its own language and not a dialect of Chinese. One main point for why to consider it a dialect would be on more social and political grounds than on linguistic grounds. 

 Finally, the last thing that I have been doing is editing. I have had a bunch of information that I have written down in different sections that are important for my essay, but I just do not have them all arranged in the right areas and then edited so that they all work together with the other sections. The main problem that I have been running into has been that I just have too much information to work with, and not enough time to go through all of it, edit it, and then figure out what is the most important.

Journal 9

I was able to focus on writing this week. I continued to write about the Cantonese script. I focused on how the Cantonese script has become semi-standardized among its writers. Although many official government newspapers and communications steer clear of the Cantonese script, there are some newspapers that use it quite regularly. The specific characters used in the script sometimes vary, but they always follow the same basic rules. The characters chosen for use will have the same pronunciation, but may just vary in the tone. One example of this is the Cantonese word for now ‘yi ga.’ The ‘ga’ character (家) has been constant, but the ‘yi’ character has taken several forms including 依 which is a high tone and 而 which is a low tone. It is also interesting to note that the ‘ga’ character 家 is the character for family in standard Chinese and also Cantonese; the context is what makes the difference between the meanings. Another interesting feature that I was able to write about was the fact that the ambiguity of Cantonese is what makes it difficult to understand and grasp. Generally, Chinese is made up of two character compound words; each character usually has the same meaning in order to make the intended meaning clear. Cantonese, however, in order to save on time will usually drop the second character, so the listen is, in effect, hearing one character words. Not only in speaking does this cause problems. Without the added context of a conversation, reading passages written in the Cantonese grammar structure adds to the confusion already present with a non-alphabetic script.

 My paper is starting to get to the final stage. I have added the title page, the abstract page, and the list of figures. Although I still have much work to do before the final product is ready, but most of the formatting is done. I am now just working on proofreading the sections that I have already written, adding transitions to the sections, and then writing new sections, where necessary.

 I have written one of the analysis sections, which I thought was going to be the bulk of my essay, but I found that my analysis was straight to the point, and did not take as many words as I expected. As of yet, I am not sure if this will hurt the length of my paper.

 Most of the time this week has been spent on going through the first half of the essay. I have been using the annotated bibliography entries as the base of the essay, so most of my time was spent changing tenses and substituting quotations for summaries. I also added many of my own examples to illustrate the points. Other than that, I was just making all of the information flow together as a logical essay.

 For this next week, mainly on Saturday, I will be finishing up my editing of the whole essay, as see which points need to be elaborated in order to avoid confusion.

Journal 8

Arranging the pictures and generally getting them ready has been much more work than I anticipated. The first thing that I did this week was to figure out how to attach figure number to the pictures. Now that it is all worked out, I will be able to reference the pictures that I insert into the document.
 I have also started to write the section on Cantonese characters and how they relate to the whole historic context of the Chinese script development. It is interesting to me that the Cantonese script, although seemingly using the same characters as the standard script has characters that would seem to not make sense in the context. Most of the grammatical characters are completely different than standard Chinese. Even if the only changes were the grammatical function words it would still be difficult for the average Chinese person to read. All of the question words, who, what, why, etc., are also different. Most of the characters representing nouns are usually the same, with the only difference being the preference of the noun used due to the linguistic region (southern and northern Chinese speakers have differing word choice). Finally the sentence structure is different. Although the structure of topicalization (bringing an element of the sentence to the front of the sentence to stress the element) is used in standard Chinese, the Cantonese dialect constantly uses it. The type of structure allows the sentence to, in a sense, be structured in any way. I plan on providing examples of these structures patterns and characters in my paper.
 I have also been looking into some of the classifications of early Chinese. I was reading that pictographic scripts are scripts that communicate through pictures. The script is not full writing, it cannot reproduce any and all thought; it mainly communicates through the use of tangible nouns such as horse, rock, house, etc., with grammatical terms and intangible ideas having to be inferred or not written about. One of the prominent means of beginning a transition out of pictographic has been polyvalence. This transition is characterized by the use of a tangible noun to also represent an idea. The character 來 originally meant grain, as a pictographic character. Later on in the development the character was given the meaning ‘to come’ making the 來 character have two meanings. Eventually this ambiguity was changed so that a new character 麥 meant grain and 來 remained ‘come.’ And logographic, which means that each character represents one full word. The word is the basic building block of the language, and by compounding these blocks more complicated words can be created, although rarely more than three characters are used in a combination.
 I have been able to clarify some of the rougher parts of my paper to make it flow smoothly, and also been able to add some transitions in. My big project for next week, but mostly this Saturday will be to start putting all of it together and write much on the analysis of different sources.

Journal 7

This week I have been mostly working with getting all of the images ready for insertion into the body of the text. The first thing that I did was finish selecting the Shang Primary sources that I would like to use, marking them, and then scanning them. The next part was going through and editing all of the image files and converting them from a PDF format to a JPEG format. I used paint to crop, rotate, and resize all of the pictures so that anyone would be able to see the specific aspects that I want to highlight. The next thing that I did was to continue this procedure to encompass all of the different sources that I will be using through the whole of Chinese history. I was able to get most of my pre-modern sources all organized.

 Although I was able to get most of the image files that I want, I still need to figure out which images that I would like to use for the Ta Wen Kou graphs section. This section is hardest to decide on what images to use because it during the pre-writing stage of Chinese writing. This section is also the most important and the most controversial. Many historians take very specific views on which specific Chinese mini culture's writing became the full writing system that the Shang Dynasty used. From from what I have read and the images that I have looked at I think that the Ta Wen Kou graphs are the mostly likely candidate for the pre-writing stage of Chinese. The most interesting thing about the evolution of the Chinese script is that many candidates abound for the role of the precursor to the full script, and we know that the Shang Dynasty is the final manifestation of this evolutionary period, but there is no in between script. There is a missing link which goes from simple scratches on pottery to full writing. Therefore, it is very hard to tell how the script evolved to the final Shang script.

 As I have been just trying to get everything done as quickly as possible I have become very disorganized. Many of the materials were just saved to my computer in random locations. I spent the remainder of my time organizing all of my sources to make sure that I will have everything that I need in order to make the final product easier to produce. Specifically I was able to organize all of the image files into the separate time periods in which they were created.

 Next week will be the big writing week. As I have much of the sources compiled and much of the background information written I will now be looking at the primary sources and then discussing the implications of the specific sources. I will start to insert the images into the background information that I have already written and then deal with the sources in the order in which they appear in the timeline.

Journal 6

I have been spending a lot of time on my project this and have finished some very important parts. The first thing that I did was finish arranging most of my image sources. I edited all of the images that I currently have, and then I organized them by time period to make them easy to find when I add them to my paper. I opened them all up, individually, and edited them to remove excess space, and then I changed the formatting on them. Also for convenience later on, I named them the name of the source location for easier citing.

I spent a bit of time just reviewing everything that needs to get done in order to finish the paper on time. I am currently a little off schedule. I have the page count that I was planning on at this time, but I needed more time during my research for the Cantonese section of the paper. I will need to spend some time next week and the week after catching up on that research.

Although I started writing my paper last week, I have continued to do research in order to make sure that I have the necessary information to write 40 pages. So this week I also spent time looking for key images in the seven-volume set the I received from Inter-library loan on the oracle bone script. I marked about twenty of them and scanned them all. Some of these scanned images were edited, named, and organized as stated above. I was also able to pick up two more books from Inter-library loan and start to look at them and see what information will be helpful for my research. One of the books that I received was on the earlier development of Chinese and the other was on the Cantonese vernacular script.

The end of this week, and the beginning of next week I will start to write my primary source analysis. What I plan to do to accomplish this is to look at each source and then determine its purpose and value. From there, I plan on listing the key features of each source and why it is important and a good representative sample of the snapshot of script development. Then at the end of each explanation of the sources I will highlight the main idea that gets carried on into the later scripts, to show how the different scripts are linked together.

The last thing that I did this week was to edit my original outline. At first I planned on having a quarter of my paper focus on the historical narrative, and then another quarter on the primary sources. As I was writing and thinking about the paper, I decided that it would be much easier for the reader to follow the importance of the sources if they were embedded within the narrative history. This way the context of each source will be remembered as the reader is learning about the importance of the source. This should make the essay less choppy and allow the reader to focus more on the information and less on the structure of the essay.

Journal 5

This week I was able to add an additional six pages to my essay bringing the total number of pages to 12. I was able to finish discussing the background information in order to place the source analysis and the correct context to be understood fully. Last week I was able to work through the pre-writing time period up to the late Shang Period. This week I was able to work from that point to the conclusion of the development of the standard script which remains in effect from the early Tang Dynasty up until 1911. Most of the information that I used to write these sections were pulled from the annotated bibliography notes that I had written previously. From this point on I plan to structure the essay as follows: first an introduction to the script of the time period, and then an in-depth look at some of the primary source material for the script. Each individual section will end with my analysis of the primary source material as well as buying analysis and interpretation of the background information and the insights of other scholars that I bring into the paper. I am also working on putting together a collection of pictures and scan documents that I will need to insert into the paper during the final stage. For convenience sake I have all of the information split up into two separate word document files. One document has all of the text double-spaced saying get an accurate count of how many pages I currently have, and the second document contains all the pictures and primary source games that I will add in later. I also have continue to add the source information in the footnotes.

 One unforeseen little glitch that I have noticed as I have been writing my paper is that the Chinese characters that I insert mess up the spacing of the regular document. I had noticed this in the past but forgot about it so I am currently trying to figure out a way to make all of this spacing between lines equal whether or not they have a Chinese character.

 There are two main things that I will work on next week. One of them will be researching how to properly cite images and primary text scans in the Chicago style. I plan to look at the Chicago manual of style as well as the Kate L. Tarabian book. The second main thing that I will be working on will be to start my analysis of the early Chinese writing primary sources. From here on out until I reach the Cantonese vernacular section I will be writing much more slowly as much of what I will be writing will be my personal analysis and not summaries, paraphrases, or quotes of the scholarship of other individuals. With many of the other primary source sections I will use my own scholarship and ability to read Chinese to aid in my analysis, however, the shop Dynasty characters are so far from removed from the standard script characters that I will, in many cases, be relying on outside scholarship or just my educated guess from my knowledge of the later Chinese script.

Journal 4

This week has been very productive. The biggest thing that I was able to accomplish was writing three pages of my final paper. I was able to sit down and write the pages and then took a lot of time to edit the pages. I was not able to fix all of the problems, but that was not my goal. I added bolded points of things that I need to add or change for later, but as this is the first draft I am not worried about taking too much time to edit because I will change it many times before a final draft comes out. After writing these first few pages I went back through and added the citations for the information that I learned from different sources. Although I did not put the citations in notes format, they are currently in bibliography format, I will change the formatting later when it gets closer to the week that I have set aside for formatting and grammar.

 I was also able spend a good deal finding some more articles and books that I can use for my essay. I went on inter-library loan and was able to request seven more books and articles. Several of the books I have already been able to look through, so it will not take me too long to extract the information that I need. The main piece of information that I am looking for is any information of the pre-writing tradition of ancient China, a period from about 4000-1200 B.C.E. Not much remains from this period except from some pottery shards. Some of these shards have markings on them. Some archaeologists claim that these markings are the first signs of writing in China. I plan on looking at the markings myself and evaluate the claims of other historians and archaeologists.

 The last thing that I did was compile a preliminary bibliography list. I currently have 42 sources in my bibliography. All of the sources are arranged in alphabetic order and are all formatted correctly and am ready to be a final draft. Other sources that I find throughout the last of my research I will just add in to its appropriate spot.

 As I was writing my paper this week I realized that in order for my analysis to be clear I need to spend some time talking about the nature of the Chinese language, and why its development makes sense in lieu of the grammatical structure and feature that are distinctive in the language.  Before I move rough the history of China and its script I will explain the language. I will use two different resources to show the linguistic side of Chinese and the main theories that have been postulated throughout history as to the nature of the language. Finally, next week I plan on writing this section and will include it right after the introduction, or part of the introduction, and before the other pages that I have already written.

Journal 3

This week I started off by reading through the dissertation written by Donald Snow titled Written Cantonese and the Culture of Hong Kong: The Growth of a Dialect Literature. He argues that although the standard Chinese used in Hong Kong is essentially the same as Taiwan and the PRC there are different choices in words that have a distinctly Cantonese flavor. This difference is just the differences in the usage of standard Chinese, not to mention the differences between the standard Chinese and the Cantonese vernacular script.

The last thing that I did this week was to start on my outline. I have decided to write my essay in a chronological fashion and then run my findings into the narrative. I plan on starting with the early pottery fragments and how I think that are related to the I regency of full writing in China. Next I will spend a large amount of time looking at oracle bone sources and laying down the characteristics of the characters during that time period. After, I will quickly move through some Zhou Dynasty ritual bronzes and then move into one of the more critical portions of my essay---the Qin Dynasty reforms. From here I plan on linking back to the oracle bones to show the progression of the script up to that point. I will highlight the major features of change which will set the stage for my later analysis of the Cantonese vernacular script. During this time period I will focus on the two main scripts, the greater and lesser seal scripts. Next I will turn to the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the clerical script with its spin-off scripts the running and the cursive script. Before writing about the final creation of Kai Shu, or the standard script, I will look at the progress of the script from the two seal scripts to the clerical, further cementing my claims about the evolution. Finally I will look at Wang Xi Zhi and his son and their key role during the creation of standard Chinese. This will set up for the final examination of the script in the form that would last from the Wei-Jin period all the way to 1911 with the writing reformation, with a break during the Tang Dynasty to write about the reforms of Xu Shen and the impact of the radical system that he created. From this point I will mention the key elements of the reformation and then discuss the character simplification during the Mao years, although not in any great depth as it has little baring on the thesis. Finally I will advance to, more or less, modern Hong Kong. I will recreate the same analysis, that spanned all of Chinese history, in the roughly forty years of the progression of the Cantonese script. Starting with the first emergence of the characters and the moving slowly to the modern day. I plan to conclude by showing that the progression and evolution of both sets of scripts, standard Chinese and vernacular Cantonese both followed the same path and used the unwritten rules to guide them to their final forms.

  

Journal 2

One of the main uses of my time this week was spent finishing up my study of the Qin-Han sources and then the second use of my time was researching the possible Cantonese sources.

I spent most of the Qin-Han time looking through the book Chinese Writing by Qiu Xigui. The book chronicles the evolution of the Chinese script. The book has 107 scanned artifacts and sources from which I will be drawing a large part of my analysis.

Thursday I received the 7 volume set of Jia Gu Wen He Ji (the standard work on the Chinese oracle bones). Each book contains several thousand scanned images of oracle bones and their fragments. I spent several hours and was able to look through one thousand of the images. Out of that thousand I was able to find a few that were a high enough quality for the average person to recognize the basic shapes. I am still not sure if I will need to use these sources, but I will have the collection until March, long enough for me to make a decision.

I did much research on newspapers in Hong Kong, and chose as one of my main sources the Apple Daily newspaper. Many of the newspapers are very pro-Beijing and would therefore not give a clear picture of the Cantonese vernacular language in use. The Apple Daily is a more Western style newspaper and is conservative. All of the bigger and more prestigious newspapers are trying to reach a larger audience and many of them are trying to gain favor with mainland China. I was able to find upwards of 5 newspaper articles that have at least some use of Cantonese characters.

On top of looking at the newspapers, I was able to spend some time reading through Cantonese as a Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular by Don Snow. The book is full of informative charts and transcripts of formal and more informal radio shows showing their use of Cantonese Characters. After analyzing the transcripts in paragraph form, he show charts about what it means. Both of these resources can work with paper to provide some of the background information for the Cantonese Vernacular section. 

I also did searches on Google to find blogs of people from Hong Kong. My technique for searching was to add a Cantonese character to my search terms. Although this guaranteed finding a blog that was using Cantonese characters it eliminated more formal blogs that, just like the newspapers above, want to reach a large audience. The blogs that I did use are have common characteristics, many of them code-switch by adding random English words (common in Hong Kong speech as well), and are not any more formal than a Facebook post. It has been harder than I thought to track the use of these characters because anybody that has any voice will be writing more formally. As I finish up my search I plan to look for more revolutionary sources, people not afraid to write using the Cantonese characters.

This next week I will finish up my look at Cantonese and then organize all of the sources to start to prepare an outline for my paper. 

Journal 1

Most of my time, so far, has been spent on researching and the ordering, through interlibrary loan, all of the books that I will need. I have already received Qiu Xigui. Chinese Writing. New Haven, CT: Birdtrack Press, 2000. Which has many sources scanned in the bibliography. I have also been able to get De Bary, Theodore and Bloom, Irene. Sources of Chinese tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. which, I hope, will supply most of the sources required to write the Qin-Han sections of the paper. I have also considered broadening my scope in order to make sure that I have the right amount ancient sources by expanding my analysis to include the Shang and Zhou Dynasty materials. This would include oracle bones and Zhou bronzes.

I looked through the Sources of Chinese Tradition book, and it has no relevant information. So as of right now I have two media that I can turn to for my ancient sources, Chinese Writing, and the Harvard University Chinese Rubbings Collection. I also just submitted an ILL for Jia Gu Wen He Ji, the standard collection of oracle bones, and a book on the Ma Wang Tui manuscripts which was a "missing link" in the evolutionary process of the Chinese script.

I was able to look through the Harvard University Chinese Rubbings Collection. The collection is  not organized very well so I had to just arrange the rubbings by title and then just look at each one to see if it falls in the date range that I am looking for. I spent hours clicking on each one and only worked from ?-C and was able to find and save 16 sources from the early Han until the Song Dynasty. This shows a fairly good range of the evolution of the script, but I have yet to locate any Qin Dynasty Sources. At least one of the sources that I was able to find was written by Wang Xi Zhi, who as instrumental in the formation of the script that was used from the Tang to the Qing Dynasty.

Also as a preparation I organized all of the reading that I have done into an annotated bibliography blog, www.mychineseresearch.blogspot.com. On the blog I have compiled an all encompassing list of the resources that I plan on using (Books, articles, Blogs, etc), as well as the works that I have read as a background for understanding the material up to this point. I have read through the relevant sections of books and articles that pertain to this first part of my research, the Qin-Han writing reforms. 

I have also decided that taking a look at the separate cultural development of Hong Kong under the British rule will give me a better idea of how the mindset of the people played a role in the script development. Also how the western influenced caused them to feel apart from the rest of China.

For next week I plan to start looking at the Cantonese sources. I plan to first look at blogs, then try to find some government sources for use of the Cantonese characters.