Talk:Cursive script (East Asia)/Archive 1

Archive 1

origins of cursive script etc.

Most sources on this are cursory, traditional accounts which have not taken into consideration the fairly recent scholarship on bamboo and wood materials from the Warring States onward, leading to much confusion about the time of emergence and influences upon clerical, semi-cursive, cursive and standard scripts. I've found Qiu Xigui's book, Chinese Writing, to be an extremely valuable source for straightening out all the misunderstandings, and highly recommend it to you. I am going through the various script styles' main pages as well as the summaries in East Asian calligraphy and Chinese writing and adding clarifying notes, as well as Qiu as a reference. See pp.113 to p.149 on the origin of these script types.Dragonbones 09:40, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Image requested

An image of a phrase written in "grass script" versus "normal" Chinese script, and phrases in other East Asian cursive scripts, would be valuable here. --Quuxplusone 04:25, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

There are some good examples in East Asian calligraphy.

Are these cursive scripts to be viewed as calligraphy or shorthand?

Title says it all. How are they classified? Gun Powder Ma 22:50, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Definitely calligraphy. The cursiveness is studied and practised for asthetic value, not just (and often not at all) for efficiency. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:55, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

translation possible

Please note that fr:Écriture cursive chinoise has examples and discussions of -caoshu.svg pictures (referenced on [1]) that might be usefully translated. Micheletb (talk) 18:16, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Naming

I have read on the web that "grass" style is not named for grass, but for another meaning of "草", which is rough or wild. I put this in to the page shodo, but I would like to check this with other Wikipedians. If it's true, then it should be noted here. If it isn't true, then I'll remove it from shodo. Please let me know. Also, I wonder if there should be some integration between this page, Chinese calligraphy, calligraphy, and the shodo pages. What does everyone think? --DannyWilde 05:47, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

No answer to my question, so I'll answer it myself. According to the reference quoted on the main page, sou does indeed mean "rough". --DannyWilde 06:46, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

I also disagree with the translation of the Chinese character 草 to "grass" in this context. It is true that one of the meaning of the word is grass. But the grass has nothing to do with the usage here. 草 is used in other contexts to mean draft, unrefined e.g. 草稿 or hasty, careless, sloppy, slovenly e.g. 草率. The latter meaning fits the description of this script much better than "grass". The term "Grass script" is typical Chinglish. Kowloonese 23:17, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I remember from al '80s book called "Chinese is easy": "is called grass script because it resembles blades of grass". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.225.212.147 (talk) 09:56, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

I too disagree with the translation as "grass"; IMO that's an old translation still perpetuated by coffee-table books on Chinese, IMO. And since we should provide evidential references when possible on Wiki, I provide the following interpretation of 草 by the highly esteemed scholar 裘錫圭 Qiú Xīguī: "In antiquity, the character cǎo 'grass' was also used in the sense of 'coarse, rough; simple and crude.' It would appear that cǎo in the term cǎoshū 'grass script' was used in this same sense." (Chinese Writing, p.130; full ref. below). The translators of this book, Mattos & Norman, are both famous professors of Chinese. Throughout the rest of the work, they avoid the term 'grass' and use the term 'cursive' instead. I believe Qiu was involved. Other academic works I've seen also use 'cursive' as the standard translation. So how do we change the page title without breaking all the links to it? Note also that there are similar problems with some of the other script names, but to avoid multiposting I direct you to the Talk: East Asian calligraphy for the more general discussion.

裘錫圭 Qiú Xīguī (2000). Chinese Writing. Translation of 文字學概論 by the late Gilbert L. Mattos (Chairman, Dept. of Asian Studies, Seton Hall University) and Jerry Norman (Professor Emeritus, Asian Languages & Literature Dept., Univ. of Washington). Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.Dragonbones 08:40, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I have removed the 草率书 exaplanation from the lede. This seems to be an idiosyncratic backformation, using 草率, a word that incorporates 草 but has a similar meaning to the character on its own in this context.

草, whether by itself or in compound words, commonly means "rough, quick or sloppy". For example, we say "草草了结" or "草草了事", "quickly and sloppily finish the job / resolve the matter"

I have added a little bit of explanation. It is not true to say that "grass script" is a literal translation - it is a mis-translation because it applies the wrong meaning of 草. The character has two meanings, one is "grass" and the other is "rough, quick or sloppy". Though the second is more esoteric, neither is more "literal" than the other since they are both common meanings and the second meaning is not a metaphor of narrow application. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:53, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

草 means 潦草 (scrawled/scribbled) here. 草书 is "scrawled script" or "scribbled script". --Yejianfei (talk) 11:37, 18 November 2016 (UTC)