CHNS 3354 Chinese Language and Culture
Homework I
Chinese Language and Culture
Study guide and discussion questions for Chapter I of Norman
Introduction
1. What are the two forms of written Chinese in Chinese history?
2. When was Chinese text first recorded on bone and shell?
3. According to Norman, when did written literary language differ from the spoken
vernacular?
4. What is special with the Song Dynasty in regard to the language development?
5. Why do we say Chinese is monosyllabic?
6. Do polysyllabic words appear in Classical Chinese?
7. Please give an example to illustrate that Chinese is a tonal language and tones are
phonemic.
8. What do we mean when we say Chinese is an isolating or analytic language?
9. What is the widespread syntactic feature shared by Chinese and many languages in
Asia?
10. What are the typological traits of a language that you are familiar with?
11. What typological feature that distinguishes Modern Chinese from the rest of the tonal
language in East Asia?
12. What is the evidence that China held cultural pre-eminence in East Asia as far as the
language is concerned?
14. What role do loanwords play in the Chinese language in both ancient and Modern
Chinese?
Homework II
Chinese Language and Culture
Study guide and discussion questions for Chapter III of Norman
The Chinese Script
15. When did the Chinese script appear as a fully developed writing system?
16. Why do we say the Chinese writing system is morphemic?
17. What is one of the most frequent devices for Chinese character formation?
18. What are the major sources of the written script in the Shang Dynasty? And the
Zhou Dynasty?
19. Why does the script become simpler as it gets matured?
20. What are the two forms used widely in the Han Dynasty?
21. What are the two forms of the script used in the Tang Dynasty?
22. Approximately how many characters one needs to know in order to read Chinese
newspaper?
23. What is the influence of Chinese characters on Vietnamese?
24. In what Dynasties did Chinese scripts change in a large scale?
25. In what years did the Chinese government promulgated simplified characters to
the country?
Homework III
Study guide and discussion questions for Part I of DeFrancis
Rethinking “the Chinese Language”
1. What are the clarifications DeFrancis made on the term ‘Chinese”?
2.Why do we say Chinese writing is the oldest?
3.How many initial consonant phonemes are there in Chinese?
4.How many simple vowels does Chinese have?
5.How many tones does Mandarin Chinese have?
6.What are the criterion for Chinese nouns and verbs?
7.What are the two features of nouns in Chinese according to DeFrancis?
8.Why are some of Chinese adjectives also called stative verbs?
9.Does the tense or aspect characterize Chinese? How is it conveyed in Chinese?
10. Are borrowed words translated into Chinese by meaning or phonetics?
11.What is DeFrancis comment on Chinese word order?
12.According to DeFrancis, what aspect of Chinese is difficult to learn?
13.What is the terminological dilemma for Chinese language?
Homework IV
Chinese Language and Culture
Study guide and discussion questions for Part II (chapters 4-7) of DeFrancis
Rethinking Chinese Characters
1. Please define the term “pictographs”, “ideographs”, “logographs”, “phonetic
compounds” and “phonosemantic”.
2. What is the stroke order of writing characters?
3. What are the six principles of Chinese character formation?
4. What dynasty witnessed dramatic increase of Chinese characters?
5. Why does DeFrancis think that morhosyllabic is the most appropriate term to
Chinese characters?
6. How to use a Chinese dictionary?
7. Why did the radical scheme win over phonetic scheme in the past?
8. Make comment on the statement on p. 99
“Ideally, in phonetic representation, except for morphophonemic spellings, there should
be one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol. Since in every language there
are far more syllables than phonemes, syllabic representation must inevitably require
more symbols than phonemic representation.”
9. One scheme of formation of Chinese characters is to add________ to a common
______________in order to distinguish the meaning.
10. What is the main feature of the script in general? What is the secondary feature of
the script?
11. What does the term Morphosyllabic mean?
12. Why is the phonetic aspect considered more important than the semantic?
Homework V, DeFrancis Part III
1. Please evaluate three myths that DeFrancis discussed about (the ideographic myth, the
universality myth, the emulatability myth, the monosyllabic myth, the indispensability
myth and the successfulness myth). Your discussion should include 1) what it is, 2) how
it becomes a myth, 3) why it does not truly reflect the nature of Chinese language.