In How to Tame a Wild Tongue, the author’s main idea is to teach us that be who we are. At first, the author was ashamed that she did not speak good American because of her Spanish accent. However later she just let go of her shame because she was able to understand it was more important to be who you are. She even used new invented dialects. These languages were neither proper Spanish nor standard English. There are mixed with English and Spanish. Using this new language, the author embraced her culture. To the author, being Mexican is a frame of mind; it is culture which is in your soul, not the birth place or nationality.
This essay gives me a great lesson. Now though I live in America, eat American food and speak English, I should not forget my culture but more I should take pride of it. It is our culture shapes who we are.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Oracle Bone Script
According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cang Jie. Chinese scholars have devoted themselves to discovering the origin of the Chinese characters since several thousand years ago. But modern scholars Chinese character system cannot be created by only one person completely, after all it is a legend.
Until recent 100 year, the oldest Chinese characters were found in Henan Province written on oracle bones so this kind of writing is called Oracle bone script. Comparing it with the Mixtec and Aztec script, I think Oracle bone script had developed for a period to the appearance now we see. In another word, the characters on the oracle bones discovered are not what they originally were and they had changed. I think Oracle bone script might be like the Mixtec and Aztec script that contained a high proportion of visual description. However this is only my own opinion which has no scientific foundation.
Unlike the Mixtec and Aztec recordkeeping systems which are highly pictorial. Oracle bone script is a combination of logograms representing whole words, phonetic signs and semantic qualifiers.
Oracle bone script is hieroglyphic like Maya script. For example “明”, the left part of it “日” means the sun; the right part of it “月” means the moon; the whole means bright. Many Chinese characters consist of affixes. Some of those affixes indicate the pronunciations of the specific character, and some indicate the meanings of them, which act as carriers of phonetic information.
In the Pictograms of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Oracle bone script was used to representing 35 events.
Until recent 100 year, the oldest Chinese characters were found in Henan Province written on oracle bones so this kind of writing is called Oracle bone script. Comparing it with the Mixtec and Aztec script, I think Oracle bone script had developed for a period to the appearance now we see. In another word, the characters on the oracle bones discovered are not what they originally were and they had changed. I think Oracle bone script might be like the Mixtec and Aztec script that contained a high proportion of visual description. However this is only my own opinion which has no scientific foundation.
Unlike the Mixtec and Aztec recordkeeping systems which are highly pictorial. Oracle bone script is a combination of logograms representing whole words, phonetic signs and semantic qualifiers.
Oracle bone script is hieroglyphic like Maya script. For example “明”, the left part of it “日” means the sun; the right part of it “月” means the moon; the whole means bright. Many Chinese characters consist of affixes. Some of those affixes indicate the pronunciations of the specific character, and some indicate the meanings of them, which act as carriers of phonetic information.In the Pictograms of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Oracle bone script was used to representing 35 events.
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