Join the UAH Humanities Center for a public lecture by Ms. Jing Hu, Lecturer in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ms. Hu's discusses the legacy of the Chinese writing reform movements that occurred from the closing years of the Qing dynasty through the mid-twentieth century. Special attention is given to the major figures in the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement, who advocated changing from Classical to vernacular Chinese, Chinese character simplification, and using roman letters to phonetically write Chinese. Arguably, the rallying cry of the 19 th -century scholar Huang Zunxian 黄遵宪 (1848-1905), “my hand writes what my mouth says我手写我口” (1868) was realized through these reforms. These changes have allowed written Chinese to make the transition from a literary language written with ink brushes by scholars to today’s Chinese, in which everyday citizens type characters into their cell phones.

This lecture assumes no background in Chinese history or language, and will be accessible and interesting to general audiences.