The world's major writing systems have tended to simplify over time, with a notable exception: New research shows that the Chinese writing system has become increasingly complex over the course of its ...

At this very moment, the words you are reading are entering your mind at the speed of thought. Below your awareness, strings of letters are retrieving words and meanings as effortlessly as oxygen ...

Reading of alphabetic writing systems, such as English, has been extensively studied and most theories and models of reading are based on findings from these studies. This practice raises a practical ...

When I was a university student in Beijing in the early ’90s, I stumbled upon an academic article by Zhao Liming, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Chinese language department, about a little-known ...

Andrew Robinson is the author of Lost Languages (2002) and other books on scripts and decipherment. He is based in London. How the world’s largest language family spread — and why others go extinct ...

The late, great sinologist Simon Leys once pointed out a peculiar paradox. China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains—far less than in Europe ...

BEIJING (AP) — Chen Yulu never thought her home province of Hunan had any culture that she would be proud of, much less become an ambassador of. But these days, the 23-year-old is a self-proclaimed ...