Chinese Alphabet Research Articles

Assessment of Phenolic Acid Content and Antioxidant Properties of the Pulp of Five Pumpkin Species Cultivated in Southeastern Poland.

Antioxidant properties and phenolic acid content in the pulp of five pumpkin species were evaluated. The following species cultivated in Poland were included: Cucurbita maxima 'Bambino', Cucurbita pepo 'Kamo Kamo', Cucurbita moschata 'Butternut', Cucurbita ficifolia 'Chilacayote Squash', and Cucurbita argyrosperma 'Chinese Alphabet'. The content of polyphenolic compounds was determined by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with HPLC, while the total content of phenols and flavonoids and antioxidant properties were determined by spectrophotometric methods. Ten phenolic compounds (protocatechuic acid, p-hydroxybenzoic acid, catechin, chlorogenic acid, caffeic acid, p-coumaric acid, syringic acid, ferulic acid, salicylic acid, kaempferol) were identified. Phenolic acids were the most abundant compounds; the amount of syringic acid was found to be the highest, ranging from 0.44 (C. ficifolia) to 6.61 mg∙100 g-1 FW (C. moschata). Moreover, two flavonoids were detected: catechin and kaempferol. They were found at their highest level of content in C. moschata pulp (catechins: 0.31 mg∙100 g-1 FW; kaempferol: 0.06 mg∙100 g-1 FW), with the lowest amount detected in C. ficifolia (catechins: 0.15 mg∙100 g-1 FW; kaempferol below the limit of detection). Analysis of antioxidant potential showed significant differences depending on the species and the test used. The DPPH radical scavenging activity of C. maxima was 1.03 times higher than C. ficiofilia pulp and 11.60 times higher than C. pepo. In the case of the FRAP assay, the multiplicity of FRAP radical activity in C. maxima pulp was 4.65 times higher than C. Pepo pulp and only 1.08 times higher compared to C. ficifolia pulp. The study findings show the high health-promoting value of pumpkin pulp; however, the content of phenolic acids and antioxidant properties are species dependent.

Chinese Writing: Soviet Experiments of the 1920s and 1930s

Attempts to translate Chinese writing from a hieroglyphic basis to a phonetic one have been known since the 19th century. In the 1920s in the Soviet Union, for political, “technical” and other reasons, a course was taken to transfer hieroglyphic writing to a Latin basis. This process also affected the Chinese language. The second reason for the course towards the romanization of Chinese writing was the hope of the USSR authorities for the development of the revolutionary movement in China — the Latin alphabet was considered to be one of the “revolutionization” aspects for Chinese population. In 1929, the “Project of the Chinese alphabet on a Latinized basis” was published in the USSR. In 1931, the revised project was approved at a conference in Vladivostok. However, the subsequent introduction of the new Chinese alphabet in the USSR gradually turned into clashes “with political overtones”. The main “stumbling block” was the orientation of this alphabet towards “foreign” (“English”) standards, which some Soviet experts considered a “gross political mistake.” After gradual shift away from romanization in the USSR in 1935 and Japan’s attack on China in 1937, the romanization of Chinese writing lost its relevance. In general, the experiment with Chinese writing was an original page of “language construction” in the USSR, although in fact it ended in failure.

A Common Necessity from Cunieform to Arabic Alphabet: Alphabet and Writing Systems

Geçmiş uygarlıklara bakıldığında bir medeniyeti oluşturan kilit noktanın dil olduğunu ve bu kilidin anahtarının alfabe olduğunu belirtmek gerekir. Çivi yazısı ile hiyeroglif yazısının yaklaşık 3000 yıllık kendi saltanatlarından doğurdukları alfabenin tüm uygarlıklarda sürdürdüğü hükümranlık göz alıcı nitelikler ortaya koymuştur. Fenike kökenli Latin alfabesi, kendine özgü işaretlerden oluşan Çin alfabesi, Sami dillerinden türeyen Arap alfabesi gibi her alfabe türü kendi sitilini oluşturana kadar uzun yol kat etmişlerdir. Osmanlı alfabesinin de yer aldığı Sami dilinden türeyen Arap alfabesinin serüveni oldukça uzun bir geçmişi kapsamaktadır. Arşivlerde kullanılan yazı dilinin ne kadar köklü bir tarihi olduğu belirtmek gerekirse Arap alfabesinin çıkış noktasını araştırmak için bu yolculuğun bizi yazının ilk çıktığı noktaya götürmesi kaçınılmazdır.

APLICAÇÃO DE REDES NEURAIS CONVOLUCIONAIS NO RECONHECIMENTO DE CARACTERES EM PLACAS INFORMATIVAS JAPONESAS

Unlike most Western countries, which have a Latin-derived base alphabet, Japan has two syllabic alphabets called Hiragana and Katakana, and a Chinese alphabet, called Kanji. The vast differences in the writing of these Eastern alphabets to Western alphabets, Western alphabet-based OCR algorithms tend not to efficiently detect Japanese characters. This work contributes to a methodology applying digital image processing techniques, such as color range-based segmentation, edge detection and mathematical morphology techniques, to detect Japanese traffic informationalplates correctly the perspective and segment the characters contained in it. A convolutional neural network wasused to perform the classification of Hiragana characters contained in the segmented plates, withaccuracyof 94.37%.

"Pinyin Tzimu Project" — a Landmark Event in the History of Chinese Civilization Initiated and Supported by the CPC

The Creation of the Alphabet and words spelling of Chinese Mandarin (Pinyin tsimu project) is a landmark event in the history of Chinese civilization. It breathes new life into ancient Chinese characters. Great "dumb" − the Chinese character − for the first time since 1958 has become known to the whole world by sounds of Beijing speech. Today the two types of writing − Chinese Mandarin traditional ideographic and innovative phonographic writing, in their unity, provide the linguocultural unity of the Chinese society and the progress of science and technology of China. Millions of people in China and beyond are studying the Chinese language based on the sound letter standard of the words of Chinese Putonghua. Letter orthogramms of Chinese words provide tele- and Internet communication of hundreds of millions of Chinese. In the 20 century the first Latinized alphabet for the Chinese language was created with the leading participation of one of the founders and leaders of the CPC, Qu Qiubo, (included in the official list of "100 Greatest Figures of New China") under the influence of the experience of creating alphabets for the peoples of the USSR in 1921-26. Chinese alphabet, based on Latin letters and letter-spelling forms of Putonghua words are a huge scientific achievement of Chinese linguists. Outstanding contribution to the creation of the alphabet and letter words of Chinese Mandarin was made by a brilliant Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang (1906-2011), called the «father of pinyin zimu» or Chinese alphabet in China. The top leaders of the Communist Party of China, Mao Tsedong, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi led the creation of the "pinyin" alphabet. The political will and wisdom of the CPC's senior leadership, combined with the creative genius of Chinese linguists, ensured the creation of a letter writing for the people of China, which was "an epochal event in the history of the development of Chinese civilization".

Chinese Pinyin: Overview, History and Use in Language Learning for Young Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students in China.

The authors discuss Pinyin, a phonetic system based on the Latin alphabet, as an auxiliary pedagogical tool in literacy instruction in China. They provide a brief history of Pinyin and its educational purposes, then describe how it is used in its spoken/auditory, written, and signed forms by teachers with students who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Classroom transcripts demonstrate how Pinyin is taught via visual and tactile/kinesthetic tools such as pictures, sign language, and the Chinese Manual Alphabet for purposes of making the phonological information visible to DHH learners. The authors further discuss the different functions of Pinyin for students who are hearing versus students who are DHH and present new insights that may lead to future empirical studies on Pinyin use in early literacy interventions.

The linguistic principles of creating Alphabet and word orthogramms of Chinese putonghua

The Creation of the Alphabet and words spelling of Chinese Mandarin is a landmark event in the history of Chinese civilization. It breathes new life into ancient Chinese characters. Great “dumb” the Chinese character − for the first time since 1958 has become known to the whole world by sounds of Beijing speech. Today the two types of writing − Chinese Mandarin traditional ideographic and innovative phonographic writing, in their unity, provide the linguocultural unity of the Chinese society and the progress of science and technology of China. Millions of people in China and beyond are studying the Chinese language based on the sound letter standard of the words of Chinese Putonghua. Letter orthogramms of Chinese words provide tele- and Internet communication of hundreds of millions of Chinese. Based on the theory of Chinese phonological system elaborated within the frames of Russian Chinese studies, the technology of phonological system of Chinese in the alphabet and orthogramms of words of Chinese Putonghua is considered for the first time . Chinese alphabet, based on Latin letters and letter-spelling forms of Putonghua words are a huge scientific achievement of Chinese linguists. Outstanding contribution to the creation of the alphabet and letter words of Chinese Mandarin was made by a brilliant Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang (1906-2011), called the «father of pinyin zimu» or Chinese alphabet in China.

Multi-level Fuzzy Based Renyi Entropy for Linguistic Classification of Texts in Natural Scene Images

This paper focuses on linguistic classification of scene texts in natural scene images. In this paper, an attempt is made to localize texts based on multi-level thresholding by fuzzy-based Renyi entropy. Complex natural scene images with diversified challenges are considered. A set of heuristic rules comprising geometric filters and stroke width transform govern the process of locating potential text regions. The scene images may contain more than one language, where text recognition by optical character recognition system becomes challenging. Manual intervention is needed to specify the language of each text. To overcome this hurdle, linguistic classification of text regions is suggested in this paper. The proposed method is validated using publicly available dataset—MSRA-TD500. Results show that fuzzy-based Renyi entropy thresholding is able to segment the foreground text from complex natural scene images. Geometric filters could capture the inherent uniformity of the text. Stroke width transform eliminates the non-text regions. The performance measures such as precision, recall and F-measures are 78%, 77% and 76%, respectively. This shows the ability of the algorithm to extract the text from the scenes. The geometric feature such as area and corner shows better variation in discriminating the linguistic texts. Further, the first three Hu moment features also contribute remarkable role in analyzing the shape of extracted text regions. The classifier based on support vector machine (SVM) yields classification accuracy of 85.45% in discriminating English and Chinese alphabets. Area under the ROC curve (AUC) is 0.851 for SVM classifier. The proposed methodology has proved its robustness against common degradations, such as uneven illumination, varying font characteristics and blurring effects. Experimental results show that our method achieves better performance in linguistic classification.

The Font that Never Was: Linotype and the “Phonetic Chinese Alphabet” of 1921

Abstract Since the invention and globalization of hot metal printing in the United States and Europe, engineers and entrepreneurs dreamt of a day when linotype and monotype technologies would absorb Chinese script into its growing repertoire of non-Latin writing systems, just as they had Arabic, Armenian, Burmese, Devanagari, Hebrew, Korean, and over one hundred other scripts. In the early 1920s, the much-celebrated release of a new font—the “Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” by Mergenthaler Linotype, and later by the Monotype corporation—led many to believe that the day had finally come. This article charts out the quixotic history of Linotype and Monotype’s efforts to enter the Chinese market, examining the linguistic challenges that had long prevented China’s absorption into a Western-dominated “hot metal empire,” the design process by which artists in Brooklyn and London crafted these new fonts, and ultimately the cultural misunderstandings that doomed the projects to failure.

QWERTY in China: Chinese Computing and the Radical Alphabet.

Since the late 1980s, computers throughout the Sinophone world have featured QWERTY keyboards, employing input techniques that rely upon the Latin alphabet. In this article, I argue that historians of modern China and modern information technology alike have profoundly misunderstood China's QWERTY keyboard and oversimplified the history of China's engagement with the Latin alphabet during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Scholars have been too quick to fixate on the narrower issue of phoneticization: that is, of attempts to re-inscribe Chinese by creating Latin alphabet-based writing systems that rewire the circuitry of Chinese linguistic signification with the goal of bypassing (and ultimately abolishing) Chinese characters altogether. The historical record alerts us to a much broader history of "Chinese alphabets," however. Based upon three cases, this article explores some of the many schemes in which the goal was to alphabetize Chinese, while also leaving character-based Chinese writing intact.

Note-Taking Assisted with Computers—A Practical Method to Build a Connection between Chinese Pinyin & Characters

Chinese beginners often find themselves in struggling for learning complicated Chinese characters (also known as Hanzi), after the acquisition of Chinese pronunciation (Chinese Phonetic Alphabets, also called Pinyin). Actual experience of living and studying in China exposes a fact that people on daily basis are not using Pinyin to assist pronunciation. All means of social media only have Hanzi for people to recognize. The connection between Pinyin and Hanzi is a difficult part to accomplish for Chinese language beginners. Based on several years of teaching experience of Chinese language to speakers of other languages and working memory drill in English-Chinese interpretation, the author explores a practical way to build this connection between Pinyin and Hanzi by taking-notes using computers and mobile phones in class. In alliance with fun language teaching methodologies, i.e., the Audiolingual method, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to reassure the memory rehearsal drill in association with imaginary situations. The research experiment results show that this method can stimulate beginners’ learning enthusiasm and arouse their confidence and initiative in the long-run Chinese language learning process and it can facilitate Chinese beginners to better communicate in the fast-changing social media.

영시와 한국시의 감각성 비교

The Korean poets in Colonial Period were fallen in great inferiority complex to great Japanese cultural power comparing with their native Korea. They were searching new poetic method in Western literature, English poetry in particular, and thought they should learn anything in much advanced English literature. Almost all of the Korean poets in that Colonial Period majored English literature in Japanese university. They were much surprised and influenced in that new poetry comparing to the traditional Korean poems written in Chinese alphabet. Then they began to write new poems in Korean alphabet being much influenced from English poetry. I think one of the most important quality they learned from English poetry is the literary sensualism. It started from John Keats of Romantic period and succeeded to Alfred Tennyson and the poets of Fin de Siecle. The sensualism of Keats are wonderful and his influence to next generation had been powerful. The Korean poets in those days seemed to admire in that quality of English poetry and began to imitate it in their poetic writing. The most representative poet is Jung Ji-Yong whose poem named “Hyangsu” is much famous. The other poets are Kim Kwang-Gyun or Seo Jung-Joo. These poets are the representative ones in Korean poetic history. I think the literary sensualism is one of the most important quality which makes them modern and excellent.

A Typeface Searching Technique Using Evaluation Functions for Shapes and Positions of Alphabets Used in Ancient Books for Image Searching

Various projects to digitize the document and book inventories around the world are proceeding recently. At the same time, utilizing the IT/ICT technologies for the paleographic works is becoming an interesting issue among the historical and academic circles especially in the Republic of Korea where both Chinese characters and native Korean alphabets have been used in their ancient articles. There are some subtle differences in the typefaces and Great Seals used in each dynasty or year depending on the writers or the popular writing style of the time. The typeface recognition technique proposed in this article includes an alphabet analysis DTW algorithm and an alphabet position analysis method to determine the periods and possible authors of old documents. The results of analysis showed that the former was more reliable compared to the latter.

Tales from "Finnegans Wake" by Chong-keon Kim

Reviewed by: Tales from "Finnegans Wake" by Chong-keon Kim Younghee Kho (bio) TALES FROM "FINNEGANS WAKE," by Chong-keon Kim. Seoul: Amunhaksa Books, 2015. 993 pp. ₩ 48,000 ( $40.00). As he advanced in his writing career, Joyce was uncompromising in carrying out his literary and linguistic experiments, the culmination of which manifested itself in Finnegans Wake. This multidimensional and multidirectional text requires the similarly arduous efforts of Joycean scholars and readers who attempt to understand it. Chong-keon Kim makes such an effort in his Tales from "Finnegans Wake." In translating and introducing Joyce's last masterpiece to Korean readers, he has also been uncompromising and persistent. He acknowledges he had to reduce the number of Chinese words that were at the core of the portmanteau words of the Wake. The reduction, however, does not mean a decline in the importance of the Chinese alphabet in his thought. On the contrary, he firmly believes in its usefulness and necessity. While admitting that the linguistic environment in Korea has been [End Page 449] rapidly changing, as fewer Sino-Korean words are used, Kim nevertheless emphasizes the necessity of borrowing Chinese letters as an aid to deciphering Joyce's language. The use of Chinese letters arises from Kim's view that its oppositional character to Korean can form a complementary relationship with the latter. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters, he claims, makes it possible to explain homonyms and what they create in the mixture of meanings and sounds (18).1 This is where Korean language, which is essentially phonetic, would be inadequate if the Wake were translated into Korean only (18). One example Kim gives us is "all thim liffeying waters of," a phrase from the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter (FW 215.33-34). To translate the phrase "exegetically," he includes the Chinese words 生跳葉 (each letter/word meaning living, leaping, and leafy respectively) right after its Korean word 리피 (880). The advantage of such a method is obvious when compared to interpretational translation. The exegetical translation that retains every connotation of a word can convey multiple meanings at the same time, a conveyance made impossible by Charles K. Ogden's interpretational translation, which focuses on the words' denotation only (882).2 Kim sees both connotation and poetic compression, which he accomplishes using Chinese, as being vital to the language of the Wake (888). Such deployment of the Chinese language leaves Kim's translation vulnerable to two limitations. He concedes that even with the help of Chinese, the slipperiness of translation never goes away. Perhaps this is a problem every translator encounters, but it is even more the case with this modernist/postmodernist text, whose meaning is found in the process of deferring among numerous action-reaction phonemes. Kim's experience attests to such a difficulty. He admits that the exact rendering of its contents is often lost in the struggle to translate formal aspects of Joyce's language (892). The second conundrum comes from the translation's compromised accessibility to its reader. In present-day Korea, younger generations are no longer generally educated in reading and writing Chinese or otherwise exposed to the language in everyday life. Accordingly, Kim has to limit his use of Chinese words both in number and in location, and he inserts them in parentheses. His juggling seems to continue in this abridged version of the Wake, as in the full version of its translation which was published in 2002 after thirteen years of effort.3 This publication was foundational in exposing the Wake to more Korean readers, yet it did not really induce them to engage with the text. The failure to attract more Wakeans is presumably due to the inaccessibility of the translation itself. The adoption of Chinese letters, despite the translator's attempt to justify a heavy reliance on them, almost made the translation another "text" to study with a Chinese-Korean [End Page 450] dictionary at hand. A conflicted response between older and younger generations was inevitable. In 2012, in order to help readers, Kim published a revised version of the translation4 along with annotations.5 These annotations were written in a prose style but received little attention like the first...

An Integrated Design Flow in Developing An Augmented Reality Game for Enhancing Children Chinese Learning Experience

With advanced information technologies were widely embedded into children’s learning environment, the learning experience were augmented. Augmented Reality (AR) is an assistive technology in such innovative computing technologies trends that can better introduce narrative content and support the impressive fusion of boundaries between real and virtual worlds, has unveils the potential on creating rich and fantasy learning environments. Benefits from the novel environment which AR can provide, lots of educational AR applications were also being notable. This study introduces a children participated design flow for developing AR game on enhancing Chinese alphabet learning. Young children from kindergarten were recruited in the design flow and practical user study. The learning performance and enjoyment were also evaluated after learning exercise. The positive outcome reveals that the children-involved design flow generated a playful interface which encourages young children in an augmented game-play environment.

Adjusting the Hand Forms through the Chinese Alphabet

The Chinese Alphabet consists of 33 letters and 4 phonetic symbols, the Chinese Alphabet has 10 combined rules, these Chinese Alphabetic passwords can be combined into 1383 kinds of hand forms. People adjust the hand forms through the Chinese Alphabet, look for the consciousness passwords through the hand forms, it is likely for us to locate the consciousness passwords in the fingers. 1383 kinds of hand forms will again present in the form of patent.

Symbolic Revolutions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Xu Bing, Jesse Coffino-Greenberg and Gregory Lee for encouraging this project and offering insights at an early stage, and Suman Gupta for his substantial contributions. Notes 1. Peter Hessler Hesler , Peter . ‘Oracle Bones’ . The New Yorker 16 and 24 Feb . 2006 : 125 . [Google Scholar], ‘Oracle Bones’ in The New Yorker, 16 and 24 Feb. 2006 observes that, according to Yin Binyong: the committee considered more than two thousand proposed writing systems. Some were derived entirely from Chinese; others used Latin or Cyrillic alphabets; a few combined fragments of Chinese characters with foreign letters. There were Chinese alphabets in Arabic. Yin remembered one system that employed numbers to convey Chinese sounds. In 1955, the committee narrowed the field to six alphabetic finalists: Latin, Cyrillic, and four completely new ‘Chinese’ systems. The idea of simplifying Chinese script, which this committee ultimately achieved, has a long history. The earliest official use of simplification was during the Taiping Tianguo, when government seals and documents adopted ‘vulgar’ characters – i.e. simplified characters with fewer strokes that were used by the common people. From the early twentieth century there were numerous scholars of different ideological persuasions who suggested that simplifying the script would lead to general educational advantages (children would be able to learn to read quicker) – e.g. Qian Xuantong in 1922 proposed the first systematic simplifying methods, and numerous others involved in the New Culture Movement. In 1935 the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China formally published the first official list of simplified characters. There were a complex series of debates and researches extending over a decade before the Committee of Chinese Character Reform in 1964 provided the full list of simplified characters – altogether 2235 characters of more than 10,000 in ordinary use. Every one of these simplified characters was finalised by experts according to popular forms widely used outside the official realm and highly stylised forms of various calligraphic norms. These simplified characters were later adopted in Chinese teaching in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan. (125) 2. When the author visited Xu Bing in his Williamsburg studio, he showed her the ink prints he had created during the Cultural Revolution. These books are over half a century old, but the clarity of the prints remains on the thin and brittle paper. 3. See ‘Oracle Bones’ by Peter Hessler, which asserts how Mao was so influenced by Stalin that he almost considered converting characters to alphabet. 4. Significantly, the first evidence of the Chinese language was discovered on oracle bones, which were interpreted by priests who believed that the script was of divine origin. 5. These experiments include a project for the blind called Brailliterate (1993) and Post-Testament (1992–1993). See Erickson, 53.

Keyboards for Inputting Japanese Language

The most commonly used Japanese alphabets are Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. The Kanji alphabet includes pictographs or ideographic characters that were adopted from the Chinese alphabet. Hiragana is used to spell words of Japanese origin, while Katakana is used to spell words of western or other foreign origin. Two methods are commonly used to input Japanese to the computer. One, the 'kana input method' that uses a keyboard having 46 Japanese iroha (or kana) letter keys. The other method is 'Roma-ji input method', where the Japanese letters are composed of English input from a standard QWERTY keyboard. Both the methods have their advantages and disadvantages. This article analyses two inventions on inputting Japanese language through a computer keyboard. One invention uses a standard English keyboard to input Japanese characters, the other invention uses a standard mobile phone key board to input the Japanese characters.

The Role of Phonological Processing in Early Reading Ability: What We Can Learn From Chinese

Research has demonstrated that there is a strong relation between children's phonological processing skills and their ability to learn to read an alphabetic orthography. It is unclear whether this relation is specific to an alphabetic orthography or whether it extends as well to logographic orthographies such as Chinese. In this study, a group of Chinese 1st graders were administered three measures of phonological processing, including phonological memory, phonological awareness, and phonological retrieval. A visual memory task was also included. Two weeks later, the children were administered 2 reading tasks. One assessed their ability to read familiar and less familiar words printed in the Chinese alphabet. The other assessed their ability to read familiar and less familiar Chinese characters. Results showed that children's performance on the visual memory task was not related to their performance on either of the reading measures. In contrast, performance on the phonological measures was related to performance on both reading tasks. These results suggest that the relation between phonological processing skills and early reading ability is not specific to reading an alphabetic orthography. This relation extends to a logographic orthography as well.

The Chinese Finger Alphabet and the Chinese Finger Syllabary

The Chinese Finger Alphabet and the Chinese Finger Syllabary