Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgments -- Figures and Tables -- o -- 1 Introduction 1 -- 2 Chinese Writing 28 -- 3 Korean 62 -- 4 Vietnamese 124 -- 5 Japanese 166 -- 6 Comparative Analysis 212 -- 7 Other Languages: Zhuang, Khitan, Jurchen 234 -- 8 Beyond the Sinographosphere: Sumerian and Akkadian 281 -- 9 Conclusion: Script Adaptation, Linguistic Typology, and Cognitive Universals 309 -- Appendix: English Sinography Exercise 313 -- Sinogram Indexes 330 -- Back Matter -- Bibliography of Works Cited -- Subject Index.

In the more than 3,000 years since its invention, the Chinese script has been adapted many times to write languages other than Chinese, including Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Zhuang. In Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script , Zev Handel provides a comprehensive analysis of how the structural features of these languages constrained and motivated methods of script adaptation. This comparative study reveals the universal principles at work in the borrowing of logographic scripts. By analyzing and explaining these principles, Handel advances our understanding of how early writing systems have functioned and spread, providing a new framework that can be applied to the history of scripts beyond East Asia, such as Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform.