Thomas Chan wrote:
> 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 [...]
>
> 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.
Both alternative are possible. In the first case, the script could not be
called "logographic": it would be a syllabic writing similar to the Modern
Yi script.
Of, course, much more than this basic fact has to be made clear before any
encoding project may start. In the meanwhile, Michael needs at least a rough
evaluation to find a suitable interim block in the Roadmap.
> 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"
I think that the case of Japanese is different, because of the possibility
to write words in kana. This possibility has been deployed to reduce the
number of characters to be taught in average education programmes.
> For Chinese, the figure is higher--around the 3000s.
> (Marco, do you have the figure from the Yin and Rohsenow book?)
Yes, the figures I already mentioned were in the discussion of how the
various repertoires of Chinese characters for educational and technical
purposes were defined.
If memory helps, it mentions two concentric repertoires very similar to the
Japanese ones. One of them is called "Changyong Hanzi", which is spelled
exactly as "Jouyou Kanji", I think.
I don't have the book at hand right now. As soon as I'll recover it, I will
give you all the figures. BTW, there is also a list of these repertoires and
many other interesting statistics about hanzi.
> 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?
The little I know about Nushu mostly comes from past discussions on this
list and from the Blackwell Encyclopedia. My understanding, however, is that
you may not expect high-school level from Nushu authors: as soon as women
had the possibility to attend high school, they probably started writing in
standard Chinese, and that's why the script is dying out.
> 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.)
In the case of Professor Yin Binyong, this could become a chicken-egg
argument. He is an aged man and, back in the 50's, he was one of the
researchers who provided the statistical evaluation at the base of many
things, such as simplified Hanzi, Chinese schooling programmes, and
character sets for telegraphs and computers.
So I am not sure whether this 6,359 evaluation comes from GB2312 or is the
origin of it.
The book also has a specific chapter about computer character sets.
Specifically, the author tells about the development of various GB standards
in which he was involved in them.
_ Marco
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