At 9:59 AM -0700 6/8/01, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>John Cowan responded:
>
>> > Like the
>> > United States today, China has long been a cosmopolitan
>> > mixture of many peoples, and many of the conquering minorities
>>
>> Eh? Do you mean the Mongols and Manchu specifically?
>
>Not so much, although I suppose many of them "sinified"
>over the centuries. I was thinking even further back,
>to the warring states period and such, when it is less
>clear just exactly who is Han and who is not.
Well, to be precise, during the Warring States period, none of them
were Han. In any case, Han China included numerous minorities. You
can't pin these terms down as ethnic labels.
What we started out with was my assertion that "hanzi" "hanja"
"kanji" refer to Han characters, because that's when brush writing
became common practice, and the brush-written forms became the
accepted standard. This is in contrast with earlier forms of
characters scratched on oracle bones, cast in bronze, carved on
seals, or written with implements other than brushes on materials
other than silk and paper, such as bamboo. Other usages of the word
Han do not affect this.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter about the origins. We have a choice
of terms for Han characters, including at least Han, Chinese, CJK,
and CJKV. None of these terms is entirely accurate, but to my mind
Chinese is the least accurate, and Han is easiest to define
accurately. In other contexts, of course, such as writing systems for
whole languages, it is proper to identify Chinese writing, Korean
writing, and Japanese writing, none of which consists only of Han
characters.
--Edward Cherlin Generalist "A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it." Alice in Wonderland
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