Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script

by Zev Handel

In the more than 3,000 years since its invention, the Chinese script has been adapted many times to write languages other than Chinese, including Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Zhuang. In The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script , Zev Handel provides a comprehensive analysis of how the structural features of these languages constrained and motivated methods of script adaptation. This comparative study reveals the universal principles at work in the borrowing of logographic scripts. By analyzing and explaining these principles, Handel advances our understanding of how early writing systems have functioned and spread, providing a new framework that can be applied to the history of scripts beyond East Asia, such as Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform.

Genres: Nonfiction, Linguistics

384 pages, Hardcover

Published April 11, 2019

Reviews

[Manish Goregaokar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like writing systems; a lot of my interest in language stems from an interest in writing systems. In particular I'm fascinated by the complexities of the Chinese script. I'm reasonably familiar with how it works for Chinese itself but till now I've only had a cursory understanding of this for other languages. This book was a fascinating, structured exploration of how the Chinese script has been borrowed in the past, going through a lot of the historical evolution of the writing system as it got borrowed for Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Zhuang, Khitan, and Jurchen.