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How Does Script Want to be Read? Siegen Chou, Eugene Shen, and the Horizontalization of Chinese

A discussion by Thomas S. Mullaney of the psychological implications of re-orienting Chinese script and the work of Chinese PhD students at Stanford University.

When:
March 12, 2013 4:15pm to 6:00pm
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Thomas S. Mullaney
Stanford

Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, increasing numbers of foreign neologisms began to appear in Chinese texts. These parenthetical terms from French, German, English, and other languages, alongside chemical and mathematical equations, were written horizontally, creating a mismatch of sorts with the vertically aligned Chinese writing of the day. A radical solution ultimately prevailed on the mainland: to horizontalize Chinese. Examining the early horizontalization of Chinese script, this talk focuses on the work of overseas Chinese PhD students in Stanford University who helped pioneer the subfield of "Chinese reading psychology," propelled by concerns over whether the reorientation of Chinese might not sacrifice something critical to the way that Chinese script demands to be read.