Study on character recognition of Naxi Dongba hieroglyphs

Naxi Dongba hieroglyphs of China are the only living hieroglyphs world widely which still in use.There are thousands of manuscripts written in Dongba hieroglyphs scattering in different counties for history reason.For culture protection and inheritance,those manuscripts are in urgent need to be recognized and organized quickly.This paper focuses on the recognition of Naxi Dongba hieroglyphs by using coarse grid method to extract features and using support vector machine to classify.The designed Experiment shows that the method performs better than the commonly used clustering method in recognition accuracy in recognition of Naxi Dongba hieroglyphs.This method also provides some experience for recognition of other hieroglyphs.

古埃及“象形文字”的译名问题

我国学界习惯于把古埃及文字称为古埃及“象形文字”。该名称系从英语中的hieroglyphic一词翻译而来。该词源于希腊语hieroglyphilagrammata ,本意为“神圣的雕刻文字”。由于当时国人对古埃及文字的认识比较肤浅 ,从而望文生义盲目套用我国文字学界“象形”之说 ,将该词翻译为“象形文字” ,这种提法在我国各类工具书中广为流布。本文认为 ,把hieroglyphic一词译为“象形文字” ,其实是一种误译 ,并指出了具体原因所在。鉴于古埃及人把文字称为“神的言语” ,因此作者建议把hieroglyphic一词译为“圣书文字”。这样既符合古埃及人的传统 ,又恰合该词的本意。