Seeking the Origins of the Chinese Writing System: A Sociolinguistic Perspective by Benjamin K. Tsou

Name: Seeking the Origins of the Chinese Writing System: A Sociolinguistic Perspective by Benjamin K. Tsou
Start: 2025-12-12T19:00:00+08:00
End: 2025-12-12T22:00:00+08:00
Location: Hong Kong Museum of History 香港歷史博物館

Schedule

Fri Dec 12 2025 at 07:00 pm to 10:00 pm

UTC+08:00

Location

Hong Kong Museum of History 香港歷史博物館 | Hong Kong, HK

The Hong Kong Anthropological Society in association with The Hong Kong Museum of History* presents
Seeking the Origins of the Chinese Writing System: A Sociolinguistic Perspective: An anthropological lecture by Benjamin K. Tsou
Friday, 12 December at 7:00 p.m.
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui
All are welcome! Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.
The lecture is conducted in English.
This talk will explore the development of the Chinese writing system. Chinese civilization is recognized as five thousand years old but the Chinese writing system appeared only three millennia
ago as serial symbols inscribed on oracle bones. Recently, significantly earlier dating has been suggested. This has been based on: (1) evidence of extensive urban development and hierarchical complexity, making serious record keeping essential, and (2) the encoding of matriarchy, cowry shells, and perhaps extinct elephantine mammals within the logographic radical framework of the Chinese writing system. These provide factors for comparison with languages which evolved as phonological writing systems, as this talk will explicate.
Benjamin K. Tsou is Emeritus Professor in Language Information Sciences at City University of Hong Kong. He works primarily on Chinese language and cultural changes.
For more information, please contact [email protected], www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas,
www.facebook.com/hkanthro,@HKASTalks
* The Museum makes no representations on the content of this lecture.