Asia's Orthographic Dilemma

Contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments

1. History and Structure of Writing in East Asia
   • Chinese
     • Spoken Chinese
     • Development of writing in the West
     • Development of writing in China
     • Chinese language and Chinese writing
     • Chinese writing reform
   • Japanese
     • Chinese characters and Japanese language
     • Development of writing in Japan
     • Prewar Japanese writing reform
     • Japan's postwar writing reforms
   • Korean
     • Relationship of Chinese characters to Korean
     • Development of writing in Korea
     • Dynamics of Korean writing reform
     • Writing reform in the Koreas
   • Vietnamese
     • Vietnamese language and Sino-Vietnamese
     • Vietnam's character writing system
     • Writing reform and the Vietnamese alphabet
     • Why romanization succeeded in Vietnam
     • China's legacy and the unfinished reform
2. Critique of Chinese Character-Based Writing
   • Representation
     • Chinese characters as pictograms
     • Chinese characters as ideograms
     • Chinese characters as logograms
     • Chinese characters representing morphemes
     • Chinese characters as a syllabary
     • Chinese characters as part of the morpheme
   • Learning and Literacy
     • Some preliminary considerations
     • Effects of inventory size on literacy
     • Hidden structure as a mitigating factor
     • Alleged superiority of Chinese characters for learning
     • Chinese characters and literacy
   • Reading
     • How phonetic scripts are read
     • The direct access model of English reading
     • The role of sound in reading Chinese
     • The right brain–left brain dichotomy
     • The nonuniqueness of Chinese writing
   • Appropriateness to East Asian Languages sample chapter
     • "Monosyllabic" Chinese
     • Morphemes vs. words
     • The homonym problem
     • Transitivity across languages
     • Unification of Chinese "dialects"
     • Chinese characters and the lexicon
3. Forces for Change
   • The Chimera of Reform
     • The five paradoxes of character limitation
     • Character limitation in Japan
     • Character limitation in the Koreas
     • The futility of character "simplification"
     • Japan's simplified characters
     • Evolution and reform
   • Language, Speech, and Writing
     • The relationship between language and writing
     • The difference between writing and speech
     • The discontinuity between Chinese characters and units of speech
     • The relationship between written and spoken discourse
     • The problem with Chinese character-based discourse
     • The effects of Chinese writing on language
     • How East Asian languages may influence writing
   • Computing with Chinese Characters
     • Overview of Chinese character-based computing
     • Computer storage and output
     • Nonphonetic input of character text
     • Phonetic character conversion
   • Chinese Characters and East Asian Culture
     • East Asia's linguistic culture
     • Some aspects of the psycholinguistic culture
     • Change and Chinese character culture

• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index