CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Foreword

e noncommittal phrase information processing covers a lot of ground, from generating

mailing lists and tabulating stock exchange transactions to editing and typesetting Lady

Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, the meditations of Lao Zi, or the poems of Han Shan. ere is a

lot of information in the world, and it is stored, handled, and processed in a lot of dier-

ent ways.

e oldest human writing systems known—including Sumerian, early Egyptian, Chinese,

and early Mayan—seem to have sprung up independently. ey thrived in dierent plac-

es, serving unrelated languages, and they look thoroughly dierent from one another, but

they all have something in common: they all employ large numbers of signs for meanings,

supplemented with signs for sounds. e only such script that has survived in common

use to the present day is Han Chinese. All the other scripts now in general use for writing

natural human languages are essentially conned to the writing of sounds. ey are all

syllabic, consonantal, or alphabetic.

Here in the West, we oen speak of Chinese as if it were a single language. Once upon a

time, perhaps it was—but for thousands of years things have been more complicated than

that. ere are now more than a dozen Chinese languages, each with several dialects,

spoken in China and by people of Chinese origin living elsewhere in the world. e most

successful member of the group ...