Re: Characters, glyphs, hanzi, etc....

["Dylan W.H. Sung" <mabr12@dial.pipex.com>]

Dr. Lee, Albert Chu,


:Thanks for your professional comment on the nomenclature of Hanzi. I hope
:this clarifies the confusion. As I recall, Mr. Chu has been using "Hansii"
:instead of Hanzi all the time.

I have Albert's reply which mentioned his typo, when, it should be "Honsii". He
also explained that it is from Taiwanese Hakka, but from one of the many
differing romanisations out there.

For myself, when we talk about Chinese writing at home, we call it tongsu 唐字.
Though my roots are HK, I was born abroad, and brought up in an English speaking
environment, with my Hakka folks as an island of Chinese culture and tradition.
I never had any formal Chinese lessons, and learnt things pretty much by myself
out of books. My parents used to say

學滴唐字來, 大來唔會分人家呃, 又對自家有用, 毋使求他人.

How about adopting the term "tongsu" for our community, but using hanzi for the
wider community? It fits in with the "唐人" terminology discussed elsewhere,
which embraces most of the southern dialects.

Cheers,
Dylan.

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* Dylan W.H. Sung      mabr12@dial.pipex.com   *
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* http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/3847/  *
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