Zhang Binglin

Zhang Binglin (December 25, 1868 – June 14, 1936), also known as Zhang Taiyan, was a Chinese philologist, textual critic, philosopher, and revolutionary.

His philological works include Wen Shi (文始 "The Origin of Writing"), the first systematic work of Chinese etymology. He also made contributions to historical Chinese phonology, proposing that "the niang (娘) and ri (日) initials [in Middle Chinese] come from the ni (泥) initial [in Old Chinese]" (known as niang ri gui ni 娘日歸泥). He developed a system of shorthands based on the seal script, called jiyin zimu (記音字母), later adopted as the basis of zhuyin. Though innovative in many ways, he was skeptical of new archaeological findings, regarding the oracle bones as forgery.

An activist as well as a scholar, he produced many political works. Because of his outspoken character, he was jailed for three years by the Qing Empire and put under house arrest for another three by Yuan Shikai.

Life

Zhang was born with the given name Xuecheng (學乘) in Yuhang (now a district in Hangzhou), Zhejiang to a scholarly family. Later he himself changed his given name to Jiang (絳) with the sobriquet Taiyan, to show his admiration for the early Qing scholar and activist Gu Yanwu. When he was 23, he began to study under the great philologist Yu Yue (1821–1907), immersing himself in the Chinese classics for seven years.

Spoke

A spoke is one of some number of rods radiating from the center of a wheel (the hub where the axle connects), connecting the hub with the round traction surface.

The term originally referred to portions of a log that had been split lengthwise into four or six sections. The radial members of a wagon wheel were made by carving a spoke (from a log) into their finished shape. A spokeshave is a tool originally developed for this purpose. Eventually, the term spoke was more commonly applied to the finished product of the wheelwright's work, than to the materials he used.

History

The spoked wheel was invented to allow the construction of lighter and swifter vehicles. The earliest known examples are in the context of the Andronovo culture, dating to ca. 2000 BC. Soon after this, horse cultures of the Caucasus region used horse-drawn spoked-wheel war chariots for the greater part of three centuries. They moved deep into the Greek peninsula where they joined with the existing Mediterranean peoples to give rise, eventually, to classical Greece after the breaking of Minoan dominance and consolidations led by pre-classical Sparta and Athens. Celtic chariots introduced an iron rim around the wheel in the 1st millennium BC. The spoked wheel was in continued use without major modification until the 1870s, when wire wheels and rubber tires were invented.

Spoke (disambiguation)

A spoke is a rod connecting the hub of a wheel with the traction surface.

Spoke or Spokes may also refer to:

See also

Spoke (album)

Spoke is the 1996 debut album of Calexico, an Americana/indie rock band from Arizona. It was initially released in Germany (Hausmusik label) under the group name Spoke.

Track listing

Personnel