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.