An online game developed by Taiwan’s top research institute, Academia Sinica, was unveiled yesterday to help players learn more about Chinese characters and appreciate the beauty of the Chinese language.
The game, dubbed Chinese Scrabble and crafted by researchers from the Institute of Linguistics and the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, allows players to tell, via a thinning method, how a Chinese character is made up with radicals.
The game is the latest result of a collaboration between the two institutes since 2002 on a language archive project, which has now entered its second phase.
The game was only one part of a digital archives exhibition titled “Language in Space and Time,” that was opened at Academia Sinica.
The exhibition features five themes, including digitalized archives of oral languages used by Aborigines and their ancestors who speak Austronesian-languages.
Also on display are digital reproductions and grammatical annotations of words carved on excavated oracle bones, bronzes and bamboo, or imprinted on silk documents. The displays also include other ancient Chinese texts passed down through the millennia.
Digitized recordings and transcriptions of Taiwan’s Min and Hakka languages and an archive of the sounds of modern Chinese are also on display.
Addressing the opening of the exhibition, Sun Tien-hsin (孫天心), director of the Institute of History and Philology, said: “In the past, linguistic records could only be preserved in written form on shells and bones, bronze, bamboo, stone, paper, silk, and so on. Now we can not only use digitization methods to reproduce such records and annotate them but can also use multimedia to record and further analyze the oral language.”
At the exhibition, visitors can also choose to make their own electronic New Year’s greeting cards using oracle bones or bronze inscription characters.
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