Chinese Script Research Articles

Influence of Copper Addition in AlSi7MgCu Alloy on Microstructure Development and Tensile Strength Improvement

Commercial AlSi7Mg alloy represents the usual choice for complex geometry casting production. The market imperative to improve mechanical properties imposed the design of new chemical composition of AlSi7MgCu alloy with high content of Cu (up to 1.435 wt.%). This represents a challenge in order to achieve advanced properties. The interaction of a number of alloying (Si, Mg, Cu) and trace elements (Fe, Mn) influenced a wide range of complex reactions occurring and therefore leading to intermetallic phase precipitation. The characterization of novel chemical composition interaction and its solidification sequence was achieved by modelling an equilibrium phase diagram, simultaneously performing both thermal analysis and metallographic investigations. Copper influence was indicated in the whole solidification process starting with infiltration in modified Chinese script phase Al15(Fe,Mn,Cu)3Si2, beside common intermetallic Al5FeSi. Copper addition encourages formation of compact complex intermetallic phases Al5Cu2Mg8Si6 and Al8(Fe,Mn,Cu)Mg3Si6. Solidification ended with secondary eutectic αAl + Al2Cu + βSi. Microstructure investigation allows volume reconstruction of the microstructure and distribution of particular phases. Chemical compositions enriched in copper content and developed microstructural constituent through solidification sequence of AlSi7MgCu alloy contribute to a significant increase in mechanical properties already in an as-cast state.

Artificial intelligence and innovation in the research of ancient Chinese scripts

Artificial intelligence and innovation in the research of ancient Chinese scripts

Zev Handel: Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script

Zev Handel: Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script

Effects of Mg addition on the Al6(Fe,Mn) intermetallic compounds and the grain refinement of α-Al in Al-Fe-Mn alloys

The effects of Mg additions on the Fe-containing intermetallic compounds and the heterogeneous nucleation of α-Al were investigated in Al-1.4Fe-0.7Mn-xMg alloys using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The experimental results show that the morphology of Al6(Fe,Mn) in eutectic structure was significantly modified from needle-like to plate-like and then Chinese Script with increasing Mg concentration. The effects of Mg addition on the composition and crystal structure of Al6(Fe,Mn) were also investigated. No Mg was detected in the Al6(Fe,Mn) compounds. However, clear interfacial segregation of Mg on the surface of the Al6(Fe,Mn) particles was observed. The grains of α-Al were refined with increased Mg addition. It is also found that the Mg addition in the Al alloys resulted in change to the major naturally formed oxides from Al2O3 to MgAl2O4, and eventually changed the heterogeneous nucleation of α-Al. The direct evidence of heterogeneous nucleation of α-Al on the naturally formed MgAl2O4 particles was observed.

Development of orientation sensitivity to Chinese compound characters in 4- to 6-year- old children.

Visual-orthographic skill is crucial to beginning readers when they learn to read. Confusion of the orientation of letters or words is common for beginning readers across different writing systems, especially for Chinese script with high visual complexity. The present study aims to explore children's early development of Chinese compound characters' orientation perception and its relation to their reading development. Ninety-two preschool children aged from 4 to 6 years participated in the study. They were instructed to finish two perceptual matching tasks (inverted orientation and mirrored orientation) which were presented on a touch screen. Results showed that 4-year-old children were sensitive to the inverted Chinese compound characters. However, 6-year-old children showed sensitivity to the mirrored Chinese compound characters. Additionally, children's reading ability was significantly correlated with the sensitivity of mirrored Chinese compound characters, even after controlling children's ages and their general cognitive ability. These findings indicate that different aspects of orientation sensitivity to Chinese compound characters demonstrated different developmental trajectories. Orientation sensitivity to Chinese compound characters may be an important early predictor for later reading development.

Analyzing graphic structure of phono-semantic characters: A Vietnamese method of teaching and learning Chinese characters

From the perspective of graphological structure, this article examines Vietnamese methods of teaching and learning Chinese characters by analyzing their phonetic and semantic elements. The selected sample for the survey is taken from characters collected from Thiều Chửu’s Dictionary of Chinese Script with Sino-Vietnamese Reading—the most useful dictionary in Vietnam in nearly 100 years. The resulting statistics reveal that, out of the 14,950 characters in this dictionary, there are 931 phonetic elements in which 455 are strong ones, producing 10–20 phono-semantic characters. This article argues that analyzing the relationship between the characters and their phonetic elements read in Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation is a good method for Vietnamese people to teach and learn Chinese characters. The method of learning Chinese characters has been applied in teaching Chinese characters for more than 1000 monks and nuns at the Vietnam Buddhist Academy in Hanoi. The experimental results show that students were able to improve their vocabulary very quickly, and could apply this to learning and teaching Chinese characters.

The Chinese script, Confucian script, and Nôm script: Some reflections on writing and politics in monarchical Vietnam

“Confucian script” 儒字 (chữ Nho) has become a unique name used to refer to the “Chinese script” 漢字 (chữ Hán) in Vietnamese. The integration between Chinese script and Confucianism had progressed through monarchical centuries, motivated by Vietnam’s political tradition. Supported by rulers of the country, Chinese script overwhelmed the difference of languages, became the official writing system, and therefore held great influence on important activities of government such as administration, diplomacy, education, and employment. By looking carefully at how Vietnamese monarchs managed to manipulate the Chinese script, Nôm script, and Confucianism to serve their political purposes, we stress that it was Confucianism that served as the link tying the Chinese script with Vietnamese rulers. This link was so strong that the Chinese script remained the dominant form of writing even with the invention of the “Nôm script” 喃字 (chữ Nôm), which was a vernacular system developed to write the Vietnamese language. Furthermore, because Confucianism itself was the spiritual core of the Chinese monarchical structure, Vietnamese rulers learned from the Chinese model by way of the Chinese script when building their own independent state. Confucianism was viewed as the core of Chinese culture.

Microstructure evolution of semi-solid Mg2Si/A356 composites during remelting process

The semi-solid processed Mg2Si/A356 composites were fabricated using a sloping plate, and the phase and morphology evolution of the semi-solid Mg2Si/A356 slurry during the remelting process was investigated. Results indicate that compared to as-cast microstructure, the size of primary α-Al phase and Mg2Si phase of semi-solid microstructure fabricated by using a sloping plate decreases and the morphology of α-Al phase becomes fine and globular. With increasing the reheating temperature and prolonging the holding time, the primary α-Al phase spheroidizes, the liquid fraction in semi-solid microstructure increases, and the Chinese script Mg2Si phase embedded in the primary α-Al phase cannot be observed. The Chinese script Mg2Si phase is distributed in the secondary α-Al phase and becomes smaller. The net-shaped eutectic phase also becomes finer after reheating. The optimum remelting parameters suitable for thixoforming in this study are remelting at 580 °C for 30 min.

Modelling Chinese as a pluricentric language

ABSTRACT Chinese is a highly complex language with internal variation unprecedented in most other languages. Yet, that does not mean Chinese is unique in the sense that it cannot be compared to other languages and new concepts need to be introduced for the description of it. This paper is dedicated to the question of how to apply the notion of pluricentricity to the Chinese language whilst at the same time keeping Chinese comparable to other pluricentric languages. Attempts have been made to see Chinese through a pluricentric lens, yet they have not incorporated the entirety of Chinese with its various Fāngyán or have introduced concepts that distort the discussion on Chinese from its linguistic reality. To ensure comparability across pluricentric languages, this paper acknowledges that the term Chinese is an umbrella term that does not refer to any single Fāngyán but that encompasses all of them. Hence, instead of Chinese, Fāngyán are used as a point of departure for the application of pluricentricity. This paper proposes an inclusive framework of Chinese pluricentricity comprising 15 standard varieties: two Cantonese, three Hokkien and five Mandarin varieties as well as two varieties of the Chinese script and three varieties of Mandarin phonetisation systems.

Exploring the relationships between Nôm characters by comparing forms, sounds, and meanings

This article identifies and distinguishes Nôm characters by comparing their forms, sounds, and meanings. In this light, the relationships between Nôm characters can be classified into eight specific cases. This article provides examples, in-depth analysis, and a discussion of issues related to each specific case. The corpus this article draws on includes the Nôm characters in Quốc Âm Thi Tập (National language poetry collection) by Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442) and Truyện Kiều (The tale of Kieu) by Nguyễn Du (1766–1820). The research results of this article can carry implications for the identification of Nôm characters, the studies of authors and their works, phonetics research, as well as the investigation into other scripts adapted from the Chinese script.

Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, written by Handel, Zev

Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, written by Handel, Zev

The basic grammatological unit in Vietnam’s Nom script and its relationship with those in Chinese script

The basic grammatological unit (grapheme) is a universal one for all writing systems. Chữ 𡨸 is such a basic unit in Nom script. When analyzing chữ 𡨸, the basic unit of a derivative script such as Nom script, the researcher thinks that apart from attention paid to the relations to language units recorded by it, as basic units of the source writing system such as wen (文) and zi (字) in Chinese script, it is necessary for the researcher to attach importance to the corresponding relations right in this derivative writing system. The expression of chữ 𡨸 in the corresponding internal relations also needs to be taken into consideration as a documentary fact for the study of graphemes in writing systems renovated from the hieroglyphs of Chinese script in particular, as well as in grammatology in general.

Experimenting with the National Language: Use of Manchu in Bannermen Poetry and Songs in the Nineteenth Century

It is commonly assumed that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most members of the Eight Banners were no longer fluent in their native Manchu language. The Qing court certainly feared at this time that the bannermen had lost touch with their Manchu identity and become acculturated to the ways of their Chinese neighbors. This article will show, however, that late Qing bannermen were not only still using Manchu in their literary production during this period, but were also creating hybrid texts that mixed Manchu and Chinese scripts and literary forms, leading to the emergence of a body of language that made use of their native language in innovative ways heretofore not attempted. Through analyzing various examples of such compositions, including poems and songs, this paper explores how their authors developed new genres and styles that expressed ambivalent feelings concerning their social role and cultural identities.

Chinese cursive character detection method

Chinese is a widely used language in the world. Chinese cursive script is one of the most distinctive calligraphy art and traditional cultures of China. However, for its connected writing, there is a lack of research on text recognition for cursive images. Here, the authors construct a small cursive image dataset named as Chinese Cursive and there are 523 images in this dataset. It contains continuous strokes text, recognises difficulty etc. Each cursive character is corresponded to a label. The authors proposed a cursive detection method named as SE-seglink for the dataset. The SE-seglink further enhances the image feature extraction. Compared to the existing methods, the SE-seglink performs better in recognising cursive scripts and improves the precision of text detection in cursive images. After multiple sets of comparative experiments, the effectiveness of the SE-seglink method was evaluated by the experiment on the benchmark image dataset ICDAR2015.

Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, written by Zev Handel

Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, written by Zev Handel

‘Good hard fuck’ made in China: a case study of Chinese semi-professionally produced gay porn

ABSTRACT In recent years, a series of locally produced gay porn films under the brand name ‘Chitu’ has gained popularity among gay men in China. As all pornography, gay and straight, is still illegal in China, this phenomenon has notable cultural and political significance. Building on my nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese gay communities and subsequent textual analysis, this article attempts to use Chitu (arguably the first gay porn series in China) as a case study to investigate the representation of gay sexualities in China alongside an exploration of the perception of this representation. I unpack the production and perception of Chitu in relation to the notion of sexual citizenship and argue that the presence of Chitu celebrates a particular Chinese cosmopolitan gay sexual script.

Effect of Rapid Quenching on the Solidification Microstructure, Tensile Properties and Fracture of Secondary Hypereutectic Al-18%Si-2%Cu Alloy

In this work, the effect of rapid quenching from the partially liquid and solid condition is studied on the as-cast microstructure, tensile properties and fracture features of a secondary hypereutectic Al-18%Si-2%Cu alloy. For comparison purposes, the same ingots of 50 mm in diameter and 300 mm in height were also fabricated using conventional chill casting. The microstructure of the samples was subjected to detailed characterisation using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) analyses. The tensile properties and fracture were also evaluated. A significant grain refinement of the eutectic constituents (α (Al) + Si), as well as primary silicon and intermetallics accompanying coarse plate and Chinese script with a well-dispersed morphology transition for the intermetallics, was observed in the alloy subjected to the rapid quenching. The connection between primary and eutectic silicon was shown metallographically, confirming the fact that primary silicon served as a nuclei site for eutectic silicon. The microstructure refinement, together with a favourable morphology transition, resulted in greatly enhanced tensile properties and the more ductile fracture behaviour of the studied alloy.

SVM and HMM Classifier Combination Based Approach for Online Handwritten Indic Character Recognition

Background: The growing use of smart hand-held devices in the daily lives of the people urges for the requirement of online handwritten text recognition. Online handwritten text recognition refers to the identification of the handwritten text at the very moment it is written on a digitizing tablet using some pen-like stylus. Several techniques are available for online handwritten text recognition in English, Arabic, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. However, limited research is available for Indic scripts. Objective: This article presents a novel approach for online handwritten numeral and character (simple and compound) recognition of three popular Indic scripts - Devanagari, Bengali and Tamil. Methods: The proposed work employs the Zone wise Slopes of Dominant Points (ZSDP) method for feature extraction from the individual characters. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) classifiers are used for recognition process. Recognition efficiency is improved by combining the probabilistic outcomes of the SVM and HMM classifiers using Dempster-Shafer theory. The system is trained using separate as well as combined dataset of numerals, simple and compound characters. Results: The performance of the present system is evaluated using large self-generated datasets as well as public datasets. Results obtained from the present work demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms the existing works in this regard. Conclusion: This work will be helpful to carry out researches on online recognition of handwritten character in other Indic scripts as well as recognition of isolated words in various Indic scripts including the scripts used in the present work.

Development of Cerium-Reinforced Specialty Aluminum Alloy with Application of X-ray and Neutron Diffraction

The growing demand for increased power output and efficiency of automobiles has led to the recent effort of improving the high-temperature properties of the currently used powertrain alloys. Research into the effects of rare earth additions, such as cerium (Ce), to aluminum (Al) alloys has been gaining momentum due its high-temperature stability associated with its unique Ce-bearing intermetallics. In this study, scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and neutron diffraction analyses were performed to characterize the microstructure of an Al–6%Ce, Al–16%Ce and an Al–8%Ce–10%Mg alloy. It was observed that the microstructure of the two binary alloys was occupied primarily with fine interconnected Al–Ce eutectic. Additionally, blocky primary Al11Ce3 precipitates were observed in the Al–16%Ce alloy. The large difference in coefficients of thermal expansion between Ce and Al is presumed to be one of the factors leading to the observed extensive microcracking of the primary Al11Ce3 precipitates in the Al–16%Ce alloy and consequently reducing the alloys’ ductility. This reduction in ductility has large implications in terms of usability of the alloy for the targeted powertrain applications. The microstructure of the Al–8%Ce–10%Mg alloy was characterized for the first time and largely consisted of Chinese script or blocky Al11Ce3 precipitates surrounded by a Mg-rich Al matrix. It was found that in addition to solid solution strengthening, the Mg addition may be a factor in altering the fine interconnected Al–Ce eutectic to the coarser Chinese script morphology. This Chinese script morphology is one of the factors restricting dislocations and contributing to the increased strength of the Al–8%Ce–10%Mg alloy at high temperatures, therefore making the alloy suitable for the most demanding engine applications.

Improving the DBLSTM for on-line Arabic handwriting recognition

Various applications involved in the computer recognition of pen-input handwritten words, such as the online form filling, text editing, note taking, and so on. Therefore, a great deal of research work tries to improve the recognition rate of those online words recognition systems resulting in several effective methods. Relevant results related to Latin and Chinese scripts have been achieved. However, the Arabic script has been neglected so far, which stimulated us to propose a new online Arabic handwriting recognition system based on DBLSTM that relies on three techniques that were applied in order to enhance its performance. First, the dropout was applied, in different positions, to prevent overfitting. Then, ReLU and Maxout units were added, in different ways, to overcome the vanishing gradient problem. These proposed systems were tested on a large database ADAB to prove its performance against difficult conditions such as the variety of writers, the large vocabulary and the diversity of style. According to the experimental results and compared to the baseline system, the best tested architecture gives a reduction of 10.99% in label error rate.