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.