After Class - Feb 11th 2009

It was interesting in class today, we discussed the Asian history behind written word. The Chinese influenced the European culture greatly by creating some of the most powerful tools - gunpowder, comps, and more importantly PAPER! But their alphabet, a complex system of logograms numbering over 44,000 characters. But this didn't stop the Chinese, they came up one of the first printing presses. A huge feat in it self having to carve each letter individually at first into a whole block, when you wanted to write something new that means you had to re-carve a whole new board. It was a hard process until the idea of creating letter forms and holding them in cooled wax.
However, the evolution to the modern chinese is a process I think I would like to look more into. Taking Chinese, my self, for two semesters and how the characters ended up so abstract.