Talk:Oracle bone script
rename page to Oracle Bone Script ?
This page should be named Oracle Bone Script; I can't recall any academic calling it 'oracle script'. Dragonbones 13:44, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Why is this pinyin so ugly?
In line 1 of the Oracle bone script page, "Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文; Hanyu Pinyin: jiǎgǔwén; literally "shell bone writing")", the pinyin "jiaguwen" looks very ugly on my screen, with odd spacing and an odd font. What gives? I tried replacing it but to no avail.Dragonbones 08:57, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
not the earliest confirmed writing
I would like to caution fellow editors against confusing the following: 1) signs or symbols found on early artifacts but for which there is not scholarly consensus as to whether they constitute writing. The Neolithic pottery graphs in China fall into this category. (I follow Qiu here; see also Woon) 2) isolated graphs which are close enough in appearance and in time to the writing system of the Shang, but which predate the Anyang oracle bones. There are at least one or two instances like this (see Qiu), so that it is not accurate to say that the Anyang OB are 'the earliest writing' in China. Keeping both of these in mind, we can see that despite the presence of the Neolithic graphs, we cannot safely conclude that they are the earliest 'writing'; and we can also see that the only safe conclusion on the oracle bones of Anyang is that they are the earliest 'significant corpus' of Chinese writing. I have been careful to incorporate this on the various relevant Wiki pages.Dragonbones