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Japanese
Japanese , language of uncertain origin that is spoken by more than 125 million people, most of whom live in Japan. There are also many speakers of Japanese in the Ryukyu Islands, Korea, Taiwan, parts of the United States, and Brazil. Japanese appears to be unrelated to any other language; however, ...
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Pinyin
Pinyin [Chin. pinyin zimu = phonetic alphabet], system of romanization of Chinese written characters, approved in 1958 by the government of the People's Republic of China and officially adopted by it in 1979. Its use replaces that of the more complex Wade-Giles system (1859; modifie...
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James Y. C. Yen
James Y. C. Yen , Mandarin Yen Yang-chu, 1893-1990, Chinese educator, b. Sichuan prov., China, educated at Yale (B.A., 1918) and Princeton (M.A., 1920) universities. Yen devised a simplified form of Chinese writing consisting of 1,000 characters and suitable for instructing adult illiterates. He...
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alphanumeric
alphanumeric or alphameric , the set of letters and numbers. When used in reference to computer input and output, the set usually is expanded to include the upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters (A-Z, a-z), the numeric characters (0-9), and special characters (such as the symbols $, #, a...
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Asian drama
Asian drama dramatic works produced in the East. Of the three major Asian dramas—Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese—the oldest is Sanskrit, although the dates of its origin are uncertain.
See also Sanskrit literature ; Chinese literature ; Japanese literature ; and drama, Western .
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Unicode
Unicode , set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, control characters, and the like, designed for use internationally in computers . It has been expanded to include such items as scientific, mathematical, and technical symbols, and even musical notation. The Unicode standard defines codes f...
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alphabet
alphabet [Gr. alpha-beta, like Eng. ABC], system of writing , theoretically having a one-for-one relation between character (or letter) and phoneme (see phonetics ). Few alphabets have achieved the ideal exactness. A system of writing is called a syllabary when one character represents a syllab...
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block book
block book Before and after the invention of printing from movable types in the mid-15th cent., some books were printed in Europe from engraved wooden blocks, with one block for each page. This method was developed by the 9th cent. AD in China. The practice has a richer history in the East than in ...
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mah jongg
mah jongg , four-handed game, probably of Chinese origin, popular in the United States. It is played in many variations throughout China. In 1920, Joseph P. Babcock, an American traveler in China, devised a set of rules for Western play and invented a complete terminology. He patented the game under...
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writing
writing the visible recording of language peculiar to the human species. Writing enables the transmission of ideas over vast distances of time and space and is a prerequisite of complex civilization. Where, and by whom writing was first developed remains unknown, but scholars place the beginning ...
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