On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> Michael Everson wrote:
> > 600 characters it is then.
>
> If Nüshu is actually logographic, think that this may be too early a
> conclusion.
> If the figure is based on a single person's sample, it could only reflect
> the vocabulary of that lady or, even worse, the vocabulary of the topics
> that she was dealing with in the sample texts.
If that were the case, 600 is low, as it could mean there is almost a
1-to-1 correspondence between a syllable and Nushu character when
not taking tone into account (c.f. the 400 or so extant syllables in the
Mandarin spoken in Beijing, when not counting tones), implying that
most/all homophonous words are written with the same Nushu character, and
that tonal distinctions are omitted in the orthography--neither of which
is the case in the logographic Chinese model.
Alternatively, the 600 could simply represent what is written in the
extant corpus (Marco's point above), and those Nushu writers do only write
on a limited range of formulaic topics. Chiang 1995 (which I do not have
at the moment) did in fact provide an analysis of the phonology of the
language/dialect written down by Nushu and comparison to its characters.
> If it is not possible to do more investigation on Nüshu, I would suggest to
> reserve a bigger area (>= 2000 entries), because that is the minimal number
> that I would expect from a logographic script.
Somewhere around 2000 is the bare minimum expected for a high school
education, e.g., the 1945 "Jouyou Kanji" of Japanese and its slightly
lower predecessor "Touyou Kanji", and something similar in the Korean of
South Korea. For Chinese, the figure is higher--around the 3000s.
(Marco, do you have the figure from the Yin and Rohsenow book?)
Cheng (2000: 109-110) gives various figures for frequently used
characters, from the early 1928 study by CHEN Heqin's "Yutiwen Yingyong
Zihui" (Practical Lexicon for Colloquial Style) for 4261, and ranging from
2000 to over 7000 for the other works in his list of "practical lexicons
and pedagogically oriented frequency books". The number 4000 or
thereabouts shows up quite often--he cites newspapers in Taipei, Hong
Kong, and Singapore (110) as using about 4000; 4501 in the corpus of the
novel _Honglou Meng_ (110); and about 4000-8000 in each of the dynastic
histories (which are written on a range of topics). Norman (1988: 73)
provides similar figures and conclusions, 3000-4000 for ordinary literacy.
The question is perhaps how "literate" are these Nushu writers in relation
to the benchmark of mainstream Chinese, and what is the variety of
writing. Maybe also a "unification" of all the forms in use by all the
writers involved?
> I have a book that has a nice chapter about the frequency of Chinese
> character (*). From evaluations made on a modern corpus, they obtained this
> statistical progression:
[snip]
> - the first 2400 cover the 99%,
> - the first 4000 cover the 99.9%,
> - 6359 practically covers 100% of all modern text.
> But we know that Unicode, as well as any CJK character set, has much more
> than 7000 characters.
Not to detract from your point, but I believe the 6359 figure represents
the GB2312 character set, which represents the ceiling for the number of
characters in the study. (Even then, GB2312 is a pruned repetoire that
is that meant only for everyday mainstream use, not literature, technical
fields, dialects, etc.)
This discussion reminds me that I have a scan of the illustration
from the Nushu entry in Florian Coulmas' _Blackwell Encyclopedia of
Writing Systems_ (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) lying around
from a while ago:
http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/misc/nushu.jpg
(Its accompanied by a transliteration in Han characters, simplified
spelling.) Coulmas in fact says very little about Nushu, but provides two
references.
References
Cheng, Chin-Chuan. 2000. "Frequently-Used Chinese Characters and
Language Cognition". Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 30, no. 1
(Spring 2000); 107-118.
Chiang, William. 1995. _"We Two Know the Script; We Have Become Good
Friends"_. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (This is a
revision of his Ph.D. dissertation.)
Norman, Jerry. 1988. _Chinese_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:19 EDT
