Scientific Chinese Language & Computing

From Paul Wang:

China, country of contrasts by Mary A.Nourse and Delia Goetz,Harcourt,brace and Co.,New York,published in 1944

Renaissance movement to deal with the difficulty classical Chinese language is still in our memory.One of the major leader in this movement is Hu Shih who also received PhD degree from Columbia University.[if my memory serve me right,Lotfi A.Zadeh also received PhD degree from Columbia].Hu Shih wanted Chinese scholars to give up the old,stilted,classical written language which no one but a few scholars understood,and write their books in the spoken language.Novels,he pointed out,had always been written in colloquial Chinese and they were living literature.In time his idea gained support,and today newspapers,magazines,and books use this simpler language.Another idea of his was to get all China to adopt one spoken language.The Mandarin or Peking [Beijing] official dialect has been chosen and is called the national language.All these happen in less than one hundred years ago.

With the hype by computer scientists,huge sum of research money has been spent ,to find out the AI,artificial intelligence actually is a linguistic issue.

Regardless of the nice evolution and many efforts to improve Chinese language since Hu Shih era,Chinese language still has many problems with degree of difficulties to solve them.On the other hand,Chinese language is very different from that of the English language.Most users know its stronger characteristics and its weak features.

Should we be serious about the CWW research,then it is a great idea to tackle both problems at the same time!

Share

From Paul Wang:

As you are aware,my heritage is Chinese culture and language.I was ,frankly,shocked to learn the following facts about Chinese language.

1)There are two major reforms in the 20th century alone.In both reforms,some progress have been made,but far from solving fundamental problems!

2)Can you believe there is no” grammar” for Chinese language?Several books are beginning to appear,but all aim med for non Chinese speakers how to learn Chinese!Most are self styled,some of them have very little training,like myself,in linguistics.

3)Many books,some of them I find out to be hundred/hundreds years old written by European and American experts in linguistics or highly regarded literatures authors.They all frankly pointed out the ‘weakness’ of Chinese language as compared with other languages.By no means,the Chinese language is at the bottom,but not at the top for sure!

On the other side of the coin,Chinese language has many “strong” points as well.We will avoid the debate here because this issue has always been widely and intensively debated!

An important factor must be taken into consideration at this juncture in time;that is the usage of digital computer and only then,we now know what to expect or what ought to be a language which is friendly to “computer”.An important case in point is CWW.CWW is the product of research in AI and the design of the expert system.

However,my argument is that there are so many things which are fundamental to the usage of a language.I quo t few of them here simply to show the need of a major reform:

1)In US alone,there is a trend developed that many grammar school kids choose to learn Chinese over,say,German.If the trend continues,a huge demand on learning Chinese must occur.If you look at Barnes Noble or Borders language section,many publications aimed at Chinese language learning have already crowded the book displays.

2)Historical experience has taught us that majority of Chinese speaking people are against to abandon Chinese language.Then the digital library and preservations of Chinese arts etc. must be coped with.

3)Huge knowledge base is there to help us reform Chinese language and the outcome can be a real surprise in terms of efficiency,productivity and economic growth!

The conclusion is that we must get together to discuss the issues.This is,frankly,something Chinese speaking governments everywhere must do.However,some of them are so carried over by the huge scope of research in didigtal computer and neglect the most fundamental problem important to them!

Please do wake up!

We are serious in our first effort in organizing a smaller scale workshop on CWW–Chinese language and we need your help in spread the words,suggest the topics,as well as who may be a speaker or contributors?

Some of you have indeed advised many PhD theses on this or related topics and we really do need you assistance in order to get the ball rolling!

For those of you already responded,we do appreciate your sincere effort and your high ideal of glorify a wonderful “ideographical based ” language.To make it useful,functional as well as elegance!

We look forward to your help and participation!

Share

Students wish to learn Chinese usually do not have a great source to go to in order to find out precisely how many basic Strokes the Chinese language has?This book also shows the thickness at different positions within a stroke.The reason why these are important is due to the CWP,Computing With Perception and the artistic build in characteristic of Chinese language.

So far,the best reference for the above two issues can be found on pages 20 and 22 respectively from the book entitled “Get Talking Chinese“,by Dorling Kindersley.It is no clear to me who are the authors,but the back cover thanks Katharine Carruthers & Yu Bin. ISBN 978-0-7566-2902-1

Share

Scientific Chinese words, scientific Chinese language and scientific Chinese culture are at three different levels in hierarchy. Scientific Chinese words are at a fundamental level. Scientific Chinese language is at the intermediary level, and scientific Chinese culture is at a top level. Chinese words play a pivotal role in making Chinese civilization continuing without interruption in the civilization history of human being. “Scientific” in our research means that the understanding of and investigation into either Chinese words or Chinese language or Chinese culture using all modern science and technology, especially computing science and technology. Computing is a modern science and technology moving us from traditional civilization to web civilization. Chinese information processing (CIP) and Chinese character information processing (CCIP) have dominated Chinese scholars’ research in the past 60 years (Song et al, 2009). However, these are only a part of our trinity, because CIP and CCIP can only be at technical level serving the abovementioned trinity, although they are indispensible (see Section 2). This reflects a commonsense: We do not appreciate the essence of the forest, only because we are in the forest. Obviously, CIP and CCIP have no intention of extending Chinese character information and Chinese information beyond “processing” to more general layer, e.g. “computing” or the top layer, scientific. This is the critical weakness of CIP and CCIP. We select a computing perspective, because we are computing scientists. Further computing is a revolutionary paradigm that likes an engine to move the science and technology as well as society towards the more brilliant future of human being. We use the trinity formed by scientific Chinese words, scientific Chinese language, and scientific Chinese culture to re-examine, explore and develop Chinese words, Chinese language and Chinese culture to facilitate the development of scientific Chinese civilization and to promote the emergence of a new generation of scientific Chinese. The authors have Googled “Scientific Chinese Culture”, “Scientific Chinese Language”, “Scientific Chinese Words”. Either of them has no webpage googled in the Google world. We have also Googled “Computing of Chinese Culture”, “Computing of Chinese Language”, “Computing of Chinese Words”. Either of them has no webpage googled in the Google world- 120610. This is the reason why our ideas are breakthrough or innovative.

Share