7 articles tagged with "History"
What Is an Honorific? An honorific is a grammatical or lexical device that encodes the speaker's social relationship to a referent โ addressee, subject, bystander, or topic โ directly into the form...
A Classification Technology, Not a Learning Aid The 214 Kangxi radicals are an indexing system. Codified in the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716 to organize 47,035 characters, they solved a hard problem: ...
The Algorithm That Decides When You Forget You open your flashcard app. A card appears. You answer. The app decides when to show it again tomorrow, next week, in three months. That scheduling deci...
Not One Chinese Four Most guides explain on'yomi as "the Chinese reading" and kun'yomi as "the Japanese reading." That framing is not wrong, but it obscures the real structure. On'yomi is not a si...
The Oldest Classification System for Any Writing System and Why It's Wrong In 100 CE, the Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen ่จฑๆ completed the Shuowen Jiezi ่ชฌๆ่งฃๅญ, analyzing 9,353 characters under a sixcat...
An Indexing Algorithm That Has Survived 310 Years In 100 CE, Xu Shen faced an indexing problem: how to organize 9,353 logographic characters for retrieval with no alphabetical order. His Shuowen Ji...
3,200 Years of Continuous Deployment The kanji you study today descend from inscriptions carved into turtle shells during the late Shang dynasty. That lineage from Anyang divination pits to the po...
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