He believed that what he called "the alphabet of the phonetic hieroglyphs" existed in Egypt "at a far distant time," that it was first "a necessary part" of the hieroglyphic script, and that later it was also used to transcribe "the proper names of peoples, countries, cities, rulers, and individual foreigners who had to be commemorated in historic texts or monumental inscriptions" These insights won by Champollion are supported by the succinct description of the Egyptian system of writing made by a recent authority: "The system of hieroglyphic writing has two basic features: first, representable objects are portrayed as pictures ideograms , and second, the picture signs are given the phonetic value of the word for the represented objects phonograms.
At the same time, these signs are also written to designate homonyms, similar-sounding words" Brunner The same authority also stresses that "hieroglyphs were from the very beginning phonetic symbols. Egyptian writing was a complete script; that is, it could unequivocally fix any word, including all derivatives and all grammatical forms" Brunner Champollion, however, overemphasized the use of "phonetic hieroglyphs" in transcribing foreign names in his account this seems to be their only use , and he also obscured the significance of his own discovery by calling the Egyptian symbols "ideograms" and the writing "ideographic.
The Essence of Writing This misconception involves the precise nature of writing -- not Egyptian or Chinese writing but all forms of writing. The problem is not so complex as we make it out when we let ourselves get bogged down in consideration of detailed differences among the great varieties of writing. It becomes quite simple if we limit consideration of the written forms, be they signs or symbols or characters or pictures or whatnot, to the principles involved in the two basic aspects of form and function.
As to form, there is nearly unanimous agreement that writing started with pictures. As to function, there is less agreement. Did an Indian or Egyptian or Chinese picture of the sun convey an idea directly, or did it evoke a spoken word and through this intermediary convey the meaning?
Gelb insists on viewing the question in terms of two stages in the development of writing. In the first stage, in which he places what he calls "forerunners of writing" , the symbols are clearly pictographic in form, though he prefers to call them "descriptive" or "representational. Gelb is not very clear, except in a negative sense of how they did not function in systems such as those of the North American Indians.
In these systems the symbols did not represent specific sounds. Indeed, Indian pictographs were not even formalized or conventionalized and never transcended a sort of ad hoc quality in that they most often dealt with specific situations, were aimed at specific persons, and lacked generality or continuity in time.
Another is a come-up-and-see-me-sometime invitation from an Ojibwa girl to her lover Gelb Both require elaborate interpretation to be understood by anyone but the immediate persons involved. For the latter the symbols apparently comprised a sort of prearranged code. As noted by Mallery, the author of the most exhaustive studies available of the pictographs of American Indians, "comparatively few of their picture signs have become merely conventional.
By far the larger part of them are merely mnemonic records" The meager information contained in the Amerindian pictographic symbols stands in contrast to the great amount of knowledge about the economic, social, religious, and other aspects of Sumerian, Egyptian, and Shang societies that can be obtained by reading their voluminous written records.
In the second stage, the pictographic form may be carried over from the first but the wholly new principle of using them to represent sounds makes its appearance, at first haltingly, then increasingly, until it eventually becomes the dominant feature.
At this point, "full systems of writing" come into being Gelb One must insist on this clear dividing line between the two stages of writing. If we look only at the surface similarity in the depiction of objects in various forms of writing, we shall overlook the significance of the use of a particular picture or sign as a purely phonetic symbol. To lump together the writing of the American Indians and the early Chinese and Egyptians because of some similarity in graphic forms is to fall victim to the kind of befuddled thinking that is indicated by calling all of them pictographic or ideographic.
This point is of such overriding importance that we must pursue it a bit further by viewing Chinese writing in terms of the two-stage approach. Suppose we illustrate the matter by taking up once again the character for "wheat. We have no record of such a stage, although some evidence of pre-Shang writing is beginning to emerge Aylmer ; Cheung , but since elsewhere attempts at writing started with the drawing of pictures, we assume the same for Chinese.
Whether the pictures were vocalized -- that is, represented concepts that were expressed orally in one definite way -- is a matter of disagreement. In any case there would be no indication of their having a specific phonetic value. By the time we come to Shang writing we are already well into stage 2: real writing.
It is not a completely new stage, however, as there are overlaps in certain areas. The chief overlap is in the form of the symbols. These are identical in the two stages, or perhaps those in the second stage are somewhat more stylized, a matter of no particular importance. There may be overlap also for the first function, that of representing, either directly or indirectly, the concept "wheat. The rebus idea can be illustrated in English by the use of the four following pictographs depicting a human eye, a tin can, a seascape, and a female sheep or ewe: Taken together these pictographs make no sense as meaning-symbols but do make sense as sound-symbols: eye can sea ewe.
The rebus idea seems obvious to us since we use it in children's games, but it actually constitutes a stupendous invention, an act of intellectual creation of the highest order -- a quantum leap forward beyond the stage of vague and imprecise pictures to a higher stage that leads into the ability to represent all the subtleties and precision expressible in spoken language.
Writing is now directly, clearly, firmly related to language: to speech. If there was ever any question whether a symbol had a sound attached to it, this now receives a positive answer. In the earliest form known to us, the character for "wheat" was borrowed to represent the word "come" precisely because both were pronounced in the same way. In human history it seems that the idea of using a pictograph in the new function of representing sound may have occurred only three times: once in Mesopotamia, perhaps by the Sumerians, once in China, apparently by the Chinese themselves, and once in Central America, by the Mayas.
Conceivably it was invented only once, but there is no evidence that the Chinese or the Mayas acquired the idea from elsewhere. The idea that was independently conceived by these three peoples was taken over, as were at times even the symbols themselves, though often in a highly modified form, by others who made adaptations to fit a host of totally different languages.
One of the major adaptations, generally attributed to the Greeks, was the narrowing of sound representation from syllabic representation to phonemic representation Gelb ; Trager , after an earlier stage of mixed pictographic and syllabic writing Chadwick The precise form in which the words in these languages are represented is a matter of quite secondary importance.
With regard to the principle, it matters little whether the symbol is an elaborately detailed picture, a slightly stylized drawing, or a drastically abbreviated symbol of essentially abstract form. What is crucial is to recognize that the diverse forms perform the same function in representing sound. To see that writing has the form of pictures and to conclude that it is pictographic is correct in only one sense -- that of the form, but not the function, of the symbols.
This change in function has been the essential development marking the emergence of all true systems of writing, including Chinese. Sinological Contribution to the Myth The fact that some Chinese pictographs have not undergone a change in form parallel to the change in function has tended to obscure the significance of the change that did take place.
As a result, the phonetic aspect of Chinese writing is minimized by many people, even specialists in the field. Both scholars are aware that there is a phonetic aspect in Chinese writing. Yet their attention is so narrowly focused on the nonphonetic aspect that their otherwise useful contributions to learning especially Creel's informative and readable The Birth of China are unfortunately diminished.
Their discussions of Chinese writing are confused and contradictory -- at one time seeming to say one thing, at another something else, but coming down ultimately to a conclusion, that is completely untenable. Creel says: That Chinese writing was pictographic in origin does not admit of question. History has no precedent for a situation in which a single if occasionally disrupted political entity has so long held together huge solid blocs of people with mutually unintelligible forms of speech in which a linguistic difference has not been compounded by profound extralinguistic differences.
The 50 million or so Cantonese comprise one such bloc. Yet the linguistic difference that separates a Cantonese speaker from his compatriot in Peking is not exacerbated, as it is in Canada, by religious differences that further separate French Catholics from English Protestants.
It is not aggravated, as it is in Belgium, by economic differences that further separate French- speaking Walloons from Netherlandic-speaking Flemings. It is not reinforced, as in the case of Spanish and French, by a political boundary that separates the two languages. It is not marked by an accumulation of differences, by a complex of extralinguistic forces, that in the cases just cited have contributed to the desire for political as well as linguistic separation.
Although centrifugal forces have existed, and still exist, among the Chinese, their linguistic differences have never possessed the disruptive power they have had in many other areas of the world. Official Chinese Classification The problem of nomenclature for this unique situation exists more in English than it does in Chinese. This fundamental distinction is lost when all such distinctive Chinese terms are equally rendered as "dialect," as is usually done by both Chinese and Western writers on the subject.
Not all writers are as careful as Bodman to note this term's wide range of meanings by pointing out that "Chinese usage commonly has 'dialect' in a loose as well as in a more precise sense.
Loosely used, it refers to regional speech which should properly be called 'language,' such as Mandarin, Wu, Hakka, etc. Stricter usage refers to Mandarin dialects, the Peking dialect, etc. The term "dialect" can then be reserved for its usual function of designating mutually intelligible subvarieties of the regionalects.
But far more important than the particular terminology adopted is a firm understanding of the factual basis for grouping the idiolects of Chinese into distinct categories distinguished by the criterion of intelligibility. Since the number of speakers is now estimated to have increased to about a billion people, if we use the same linguistic divisions with other commonly used designations added in parentheses and the same proportion of speakers for each of the regional forms of speech, the present situation can be summarized as in Table 1.
Even the number of such regional forms of speech and their specific designations are the subject of disagreement among specialists in the field. Such disagreement does not, however, seriously affect the general picture of the linguistic situation of China. Putonghua It is clear that among the eight regionalects the one designated as "Northern" is by far the most important numerically. This term can be considered as more or less equivalent to the more commonly used expression Putonghua "Common Speech".
The latter term, however, actually comprises a dual aspect in that it includes a narrow and wide meaning. In its narrow sense the term refers to the official norm that in its essentially Pekingese form is being promoted as Modern Standard Chinese.
In its wider meaning the term stands in contrast to other regionalects as an all-inclusive designation that embraces the various local varieties of Mandarin referred to by such terms as Peking dialect, Nanking dialect, Sichuan dialect, and so on. The million or so people belonging to the Putonghua linguistic community comprise by far the largest group of people in the world who speak the same language. The English-speaking community, even if one includes people in India and other countries who have learned English as a second language, is probably less than half as large.
Page 59 Native speakers of Putonghua occur as a solid bloc in the huge area that extends from Manchuria through north and central China to the southwestern provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan and the northwestern provinces of Gansu and Ningxia. They are also to be found scattered throughout other parts of China. In the same period smaller numbers of speakers of Mandarin migrated to the United States and other countries in the wake of earlier migrants who came chiefly from the southeastern coastal areas.
In addition to all these native Putonghua speakers there are indeterminate millions of regionalect speakers, not to mention speakers of other languages such as those of the national minorities in China, who have also acquired command of the standard language. Within the Putonghua speech community there are some relatively minor differencesminor compared to those among the regionalectswhich like those in the English-speaking community are not great enough to cause any serious problem of communication.
Nevertheless they are not insignificant. In the case of Mandarin as spoken in Taiwan, perhaps the most prominent difference, apart from what may be considered as inevitable sociolinguistic changes in a divided language, is in the pronunciation of the series of retroflex initials.
The native speakers of Mandarin who took over Taiwan after comprised only 2 or 3 million people as against the 5 or 6 million inhabitants already there. Most of the latter are native speakers of what is variously called Taiwanese or Fukienese or Min, spoken in the adjacent mainland province of Fujian or Fukien , from which their ancestors migrated some three centuries ago. Guoyu was imposed on this non-Mandarin majority as the only language of education.
In the process some changes took place under the influence of the local forms of speech. The merger of the initials zh, ch, sh, with z, c, s is the most prominent of these changes. The same development seems to be under way in Mainland China, but at a slower pace.
Differences of this sort are noted by linguists through the device of isoglosses: lines on maps that show boundaries in the use of specific featureswords, pronunciations, and so on. Bundles of isoglosses are used to delimit boundaries between dialects or other linguistic groups.
The latter group includes part of Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan. Northern Mandarin accounts for the rest. Because the boundaries of these areas are not clearly defined, dialect differences are frequently treated in unsystematic or sporadic fashion. Often a few scattered examples are used to illustrate a situation which would doubtless appear quite complex if treated in detail. An important distinction within Mandarin is that between "sharp" and "round" sounds Chao as in the case of the word for "west," which in the Nanking dialect sounds a little like English she, and that for ''sparse," which is a little like English he.
In the attempts that have been made to create phonetic systems of writing, the question as to whether or not to take account of this distinction has been a frequent subject of debate. Forrest mentions a number of other differences within Mandarin. A general feature of the Yangzi River region is the confusion of initial l and n. The merger of final n and ng also occurs in Southern Mandarin but is not confined to that area, being found even in Hubei.
Tonal differences are widespread. In Hankou, words in the Peking high level tone have a rising inflection. Here initial f corresponds to Pekingese sh and the tones are reversed. Apart from the widespread differences in pronunciation there are also differences in vocabulary.
This usage is felt to be somewhat bookish by speakers of Northern Mandarin, but it has nevertheless been chosen to be the official Putonghua usage in this construction. The extent of these differences is often minimized for various reasons, including the tendency to make comparisons between regionalects on the basis chiefly of the speech of educated speakers.
These differences range from forms used only by uneducated speakers up to rather strange local variants of language forms used only in the sophisticated milieu of literary discussions among intellectuals. If differences between Chinese dialects were to be described in detail, it would have to be done for each of the socially and educationally conditioned variants separately. Differences in Chinese speech are most pronounced at the lower social level. Paul Serruys, a Western linguist with extensive experience as a missionary among peasants, stresses this point in the following passage : Examining the Standard Language as opposed to dialectal speech, the difference is much more than a difference in pronunciation.
The masses of the people do not know any characters, nor any kind of Standard Language, since such a language requires a certain amount of reading and some contact with wider circles of culture than the immediate local unit of the village or the country area where the ordinary illiterate spends his life.
From this viewpoint, it is clear that in the vast regions where so-called Mandarin dialects are spoken the differences of the speech which exist among the masses are considerably more marked, not only in sound, but in vocabulary and structure, than is usually admitted.
In the dialects that do not belong in the wide groups of Mandarin dialects, the case is even more severe. To learn the Standard Language is for a great number of illiterates not merely to acquire a new set of phonetic habits, but also to learn a new language, and this in the degree as the vocabulary and grammar of their dialect are different from the modern standard norms. We may expect he will adopt docilely and quickly the slogan language of Communist organizations to the extent such as is necessary for his own good.
But these elements represent only a thin layer of his linguistic equipment. When his language is seen in the deeper levels, his family, his tools, his work in the fields, daily life and in the village, differences in vocabulary become very striking, to the point of mutual unintelligibility from region to region.
These comments by Serruys reveal the need to abandon the widespread myth that regional forms of speech are largely identical except for pronunciation. The subject is marked by a voluminous technical literature, some of which has been ably summarized by Egerod Here it must suffice to take a few miscellaneous examples as illustrations. The Wu regionalect with its approximately 85 million speakers is a distant second to Putonghua. It is spoken in Zhejiang and Jiangsu, which includes the city of Shanghai, China's largest.
One of its outstanding characteristics, said to have been derived from earlier historical forms now lost in Putonghua, is the retention of voiced initials. Whereas Peking has only an aspirated-unaspirated contrast, Shanghai adds a voiced contrast.
Hence it has one set of initials that can be represented by b, p, p', in which b is voiced, p unvoiced and unaspirated, and p' unvoiced and aspirated. In contrast to the twenty-one initial consonants of Putonghua, Wu boasts twenty-seven in the Suzhou dialect and thirty- five in that of Yongkang. Its dialects have six to eight tones compared to only four in Putonghua. In some dialects near Shanghai singular personal pronouns have two forms approaching nominative and accusative in usage, in contrast to the invariant forms in Common Speech.
The Yue regionalect, also called Cantonese from the main city in which it is spoken, is marked by a richer inventory of final consonants. In addition to the two in Putonghua, it has the finals p, t, k, m. The number of tones varies between six and nine depending on the dialect and analytical approach.
In contrast to the modifier-modified order typical of Putonghua, there are many examples in Yue dialects of the order modified-modifier. There is a prefix a used with relationship terms and terms of address that does not exist in Standard Chinese. Expressions meaning "more" and "less" used to qualify the extent of an action are placed after the verb in Cantonese, before the verb in Pekingese. Moreover, Y. Chao notes that the best-known divergence of Yue, and Wu also, from Mandarin is their use of the word order direct object indirect object in place of Standard Chinese indirect object-direct objectthat is, "give water me" instead of "give me water.
Vocabulary differences fall in between these extremes. This frequently made summary of the differences is misleading, however, since its comparative ranking obscures the fact that all the areas are marked by substantial differencesalmost total at the phonological level, enormous at the lexical level, and still quite extensive at the grammatical level. In an interesting study comparing the Taiwanese form of the Min regionalect and Mandarin, Robert Cheng finds that 30 percent of the vocabulary as a whole is different apart from the overall difference in pronunciation , a figure that rises to 50 percent in the case of function words adverbs, prepositions, demonstratives, measures, question words, conjunctions, particles.
With respect to grammar, Serruys considers claims of uniformity to be true "only if one considers the Chinese language on a very broad historical and comparative scale. According to a recent estimate Xu , the differences among the regionalects taken as a whole amount, very roughly, to 20 percent in grammar, 40 percent in vocabulary, and 80 percent in pronunciation. This could be done for the regionalects already discussed and also for the other regionalectsnamely Xiang, spoken only in Hunan; Hakka, spoken side by side with other regionalects chiefly in Guangdong and Guangxi; Gan, spoken chiefly in Jiangxi; Southern Min, spoken in southern Fujian for example in Amoy , Taiwan, Hainan Island, and other areas; and Northern Min, spoken in northeastern Fujian.
As in the case of Putonghua, each of the seven other regionalects can be further subdivided into various dialects, each with its own distinctive features. Some of these dialects show such a degree of difference that they are sometimes treated as regionalects rather than as true dialects. The analogy presented earlier of varieties of speech stretching over a continuum that defies clear-cut divisions applies with special force to the linguistic situation in the southeast coastal area.
Apart from disagreement among specialists concerning the precise number of regionalects and their classification, there has also been a lack of agreement regarding their history. Bodman pays tribute to Karlgren's seminal contribution to this linguistic research but notes the new points of view that have received more general acceptance. Karlgren in making his reconstruction of seventh-century Ancient Chinese proceeded on the misconception that his primary sources, such as the dictionary Qie Yun, represented a homogeneous dialect, which he identified as that of the capital city of Chang' an in Shaanxi, and was the prototype from which most forms of contemporary Chinese are descended.
An opinion more generally held today is that Karlgren's reconstruction is a somewhat artificial "overall system" based on many dialects. Disparities existed then as they do today, and though the various forms currently in existence share a common ancestor, this archetype is not to be found in a single dialect as recent as the seventh century. Non-Chinese Languages To round out the picture of "Chinese"that is, of the eight regionalects each with its own multitude of dialectsit may be useful to place these diverse forms of speech in their wider linguistic context.
The conglomerate known as "Chinese" is one of a more distantly related group of languages known collectively as Sino-Tibetan. The precise relationship of the languages that exist in this linguistically complex area is, however, by no means settled.
There is considerable disagreement among specialists regarding the problem of classification, a subject that is under constant reexamination. In China itself, besides the languages belonging to the large Sino-Tibetan family, there are others belonging to other language families.
Chief among these are Mongolian and Uighur, which belong to the geographically widespread Altaic family of languages. The non-Chinese languages are spoken by fifty-four national minorities with a total population of some 50 or 60 million.
Apart from its already noted membership in the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, Chinese does not appear to have any affinity with any other language.
This point needs to be stressed to counteract the myth of the supposed affinity of Chinese with the languages of the neighboring countries of Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam. The fact of the matter is that, so far as we know, it has no genetic connection whatsoever with these three languages.
This statement relates to the original state of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese when they first came in contact with Chinese some 1, to 2, years ago. Over the centuries, however, these languages did borrow huge amounts of vocabulary from Chinese. In their origins Korean and Japanese are generally believed to be distantly related to the large group of Altaic languages that include Mongolian, Manchu, and the Turkic languages of central and western Asia.
These are all agglutinative languages marked by the piling up of suffixes to root words. As for Vietnamese, most specialists think it belongs to still another completely different language family that includes Khmer Cambodian. Its tonal feature is believed to be indigenous in origin and to have been reinforced later by extensive borrowing of Chinese lexical items.
In short, these three languages are basically no more related to Chinese than is English. When Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam first came in contact with China, they had no writing, whereas China had a highly developed system of writing that was already some two thousand years old. China also had sophisticated schools of philosophy, a centralized state with a literate bureaucracy, an appealing religion with a vast body of dogma, a rich literature especially strong in historiography.
They began by borrowing the writing system itself. They progressed from writing in Chinese to adapting the characters to their own languages. They engaged in large-scale borrowing of concepts and the words to express them. As already noted in "The Singlish Affair," the character was borrowed to express the concept "country, nation, state," and its pronunciation was adapted to the local way of speaking.
This procedure is similar to the English borrowing of French words with pronunciation modified to suit the English tongue. Such borrowings, however important from a cultural point of view, do not basically alter the nature of the borrowing languages. English remains a Germanic language despite its extensive borrowing from French. Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese retain their original essence despite their extensive borrowing from Chinese. Speakers of these four languages can no more understand each other's speech than can an Englishman and a Frenchman carry on a conversation unless one has learned the other's language.
Nor can Asians read each other's writing any more than can an Englishman and a Frenchman merely because they have some written words like "nation" in common. The popular notion that Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese are offshoots of Chinese is one of those myths that, as usual, owes much of its currency to confusing speech with writing and misunderstanding the nature of the writing systems based on Chinese characters. The nonrelationship of Chinese to these languages, the relationship it does have with some other languages, and its division into regionalects and dialects are summarized in Table 2.
Think of "Sino-Tibetan" as being on the same level as Indo-European, which includes the major languages of India and Europe, "Chinese" as being on the level of the Germanic or Romance groups within the Indo-European family, the "regionalects" as being on the level of English, Dutch, and German within the Germanic group or French, Spanish, and Italian within the Romance group, and the "dialects'' as being on the level of the British, American, and Australian dialects of English or the Neapolitan, Roman, and Tuscan dialects of Italian.
It must be remembered that if these parallels are to be seasoned with a large pinch of salt, we must pour a whole shaker-full over the uncritical practice of designating as "dialects" such divergent forms of speech as those of Peking, Shanghai, and Canton.
At the very least it is necessary to emulate those who if they use the term at all are careful to explain its nuances of meaning. Page 67 For the geographic distribution of the linguistic units located in China, see map on page Peter H. The marks on paper that are usually recognized as peculiar to the writing systems developed in China, Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam have been given a variety of names, some neutral and noncommittal, others explicit but more controversial.
Designations such as graphs, characters, signs, or symbols apply equally well to all kinds of writings. More specialized is the term "Chinese characters. Moreover, and more important, the Japanese writing system is not confined to Chinese characters but includes also the indigenous phonetic symbols called kana.
Korean writing has also used a mixture of Chinese characters and purely phonetic symbols. As for Vietnamese, the indigenous Nom characters look like Chinese characters but were never used outside of Viet Nam and are unintelligible to readers of Chinese without special study. Apart from the possible need at times to be more specific by taking these differences into account, the term "Chinese characters'' is usually clear enough to serve as an overall designation for the basic symbols used in all four countries.
A recently coined synonym for "Chinese characters" is "sinographs" Rogers Its chief virtue lies in using one word in place of two. Both terms, of course, emphasize the Chinese origins of the symbols. Other aspects of the characters are emphasized in other designations. Their meaning is supposed to be readily discernible even when the symbols are conventionalized or stylized in form.
Specialists, however, apply the designation only to the earliest characters in China. Other widely used terms are "ideographs" and "ideograms. They have therefore advanced the designation "logograph"that is, a graph that represents a word from the Greek logos: "word". Synonymous with the logographic concept DuPonceau ; Boodberg is the expression "lexigraphic" referring to words in the lexicon or vocabulary DuPonceau xiv.
The key point of disagreement leading to these terms is whether a character conveys meaning directly or through the intermediary of the word.
Here much of the disagreement centers on a controversial question: What constitutes a word? For some, a word in Chinese is a syllable in speech and a character in writing. For others, syllable and character represent at most not a word but rather a morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning. By this definition a word may in fact include more than one syllable and be represented by more than one character.
Still other designations are advanced by students of the subject who contend that most Chinese characters, actually 90 percent according to the frequently cited estimate by Karlgren , contain phonetic elements that should also be taken into account along with the semantic elements that are universally recognized as a distinctive feature of Chinese characters.
Such terms as "phonetic compounds" Karlgren , "phonograms" Karlgren , "phonetic complexes" Wieger , "phonetic indicators" Gelb , and "phonic indicators" Yau stress the phonetic aspect in this large group of characters. The belief that both the semantic and phonetic aspects should be taken into account in the naming of Chinese characters has led to terms like "phonosemantic" Pelliot ; Cohen and "ideophonographic" Bunakov ; Cohen A similar approach has led Krykov to designate one class of characters as "phonoideograms" Chinese writing has been classified as "logo-syllabic" by Gelb and as "word-syllabic" by Bloomfield and Gelb , though these authors appear to apply their terms to the characters as a whole and not to the component elements.
The terms suggested by Pelliot, Bunakov, Cohen, and Krykov tie in a semantic element with a phonetic element without specifying the nature of either, though Cohen adds a bit more detail to the phonetic aspect by further references to "syllabograms," "syllabo- phonograms," and "syllabic phonograms" , 53, The terms advanced by Gelb and Bloomfield are the most precise, particularly if their scope is refined, since they relate Chinese characters both to words and to syllables.
As the foregoing confusion of names amply demonstrates, there are wide differences of opinion when it comes to describing Chinese characters. A long hard look at these characters is needed if we are to make our way through this terminological maze and reach clear conclusions about the nature of Chinese writing.
Page 74 5 From Pictographs to What? Chinese characters constitute a system of writing so obviously different in appearance from Western scripts as to arouse wonderment about their precise nature and, as it were, their modus operandi.
Everyone knows, at least in a general way, that Chinese characters originated as pictographs, that for several millennia they have been used to record the history and culture of a great civilization, and that they have come down today in forms which though highly stylized are clearly related to their origins.
But just how are the Chinese characters constructed? How does the writing system work? Structure of Chinese Characters Chinese characters are constructed from basic units called "strokes"that is, marks made with a single continuous motion of the pen. There are three general categories of strokes: dots, lines, and hooks. These can be illustrated as follows: The strokes included in these three categories can be more specifically described in terms of their contour, their initial or terminal characteristics, the direction in which they are written, and other features.
Depending on the degree of refinement desired, from one to several dozen basic strokes might be identified, although Chinese roughly distinguish only some half dozen. These strokes are the building units of Chinese characters but in themselves have no particular significance, any more than do the three strokes in the letter R or the four strokes in the letter E. Characters are said to contain such-and-such a number of strokes.
In fact, they are sometimes arranged in dictionaries according to their number of strokes. Learners first practice basic strokes and then combine them to form characters. Apart from writing each stroke correctly, students must learn to write them in the proper sequence, bearing in mind such general rules as "top before bottom" and "left before right.
The examples below show the sequence of strokes and also the direction in which each stroke in a character is written. Page 76 Students must also learn to vary the size of the strokes so that the total effect will be one of pleasing balance among the elements.
This balance is conditioned by the requirement that all characters, regardless of their simplicity or complexity, should be written so that they take up the same amount of square spaceas in the case of the one-stroke character for "one" and the sixty-four-stroke character for "verbose" cited above. Paper ruled into squares of an inch or so on each side is used for practice by beginning students of writing. Teachers usually start their students off with characters that are simple because they are made up of only a few strokes and interesting because they are easily related to their pictographic origins.
In the following examples the top character is the early pictographic version of the second millennium B. The pictographic form represents a walking man.
The pictographic form is a stick drawing of a man with outstretched arms. The pictographic form is already as stylized as the modern version. The pictographic form clearly represents mountain peaks. The pictographic form represents a carpenter's square. The pictographic form is an already stylized drawing of a tree. The traditional form, as noted above, has recently been further simplified.
Simple characters such as these occur as independent characters and also as component elements in compound or multielement characters. In writing the components of compound characters the same rules of sequence apply as in the case of basic strokesfor example, "top before bottom" and "left before right.
About 64 percent of the characters in the edition of Xinhua Zidian have a left-right structure and 23 percent a top-bottom structure Chen Here are some examples of multielement characters: The third character is made up of two reduplications of the same element.
The previously cited complex character of sixty-four strokes is made up of four reduplications of the sixteen-stroke character. Independent characters when used as partial components in compound characters sometimes occur in different positions in these more complex graphs.
Thus in the fifth and sixth characters the component elements and appear in reverse order vertically. The component element occurs to the left of in the first character and above it in the fourth. When the same element occurs in different positions the basically identical strokes are modified in some way, as in length or thickness of stroke, though the latter goes by the board when beautiful brushwritten characters are replaced by those written with an ordinary ballpoint pen.
The modifications are made so that the relative proportions of the individual strokes enable the whole character to fit into the required square space. This extremely diverse modification of the basically identical strokes and their possible location in quite diverse positions within the imaginary square constitutes one of the main reasons why simple mechanical composition of characters from basic strokes, as might be envisaged by adapting them to typewriters, has proved to be impossible.
The attempts made in this direction, apart from being impractical, have resulted in distorted shapes that are aesthetically unacceptable. Page 78 Aesthetics plays an exceedingly important role in Chinese writing, more so than in any other system of writing. Calligraphy has been elevated to an artform. In scrolls displayed as wall hangings, the characters are often executed in such a way that they resemble graphic designs rather than easily recognizable symbols see Figure 3.
The calligraphic style is one of a wide variety of styles, somewhat analogous to the type fonts and individual writing in alphabetic scripts, that are conditioned by the instrument used in writing, the degree of deliberateness in executing the strokes, and individual idiosyncrasies of different writers. Such changes complicate the task of analyzing the structure of Chinese characters from the point of view of their origin and subsequent evolution.
Principles of Formation That Chinese characters originated from pictographs is a matter of unanimous agreement. In this respect Chinese writing is not in the least distinctive. It is the general if not quite unanimous opinion among specialists on this subject that all writing originated in the drawing of pictures Gelb , though one scholar traces some Sumerian cuneiform symbols to tokens of various shapes and markings used for accounting purposes from the ninth millennium B.
At that time Chinese civilization had already reached a high level of sophistication. Chinese writing had also evolved into a complex system far removed from the various forms of picture writing that Gelb insists on classifying not as true writing but as "forerunners of writing.
The principles governing the formation of Chinese characters have particular significance in the case of compound charactersthose which are not simple pictographs but complex graphs composed, as we have seen, of recurrent partials. This is by far the largest category of Chinese characters. A clear understanding of the principles of formation is therefore crucial to an understanding of the Chinese system of writing.
In Chinese tradition there are said to be six such principles. Four of the six 1, 2, 3, and 5 are based on the composition of the characters; two 4 and 6 are based on their use Wieger Principle 6 involves a tiny group of "derived characters" about which there is so much disagreement Chao that I am simply omitting it from this brief discussion. Although the names of these principles have been variously translated, I shall rely on my own designations in explaining them.
First is the "pictographic principle. The Shang forms and , as is readily apparent, had already evolved from simple pictures into stylized figures. The meaning of these figures when seen in isolation might be guessed at but could be known with assurance only by being learned.
This is certainly true of the even more stylized forms and in use today. Other examples of pictographic characters are the seven simple characters we discussed in the preceding section. Second is the "simple indicative principle. Third is the "compound indicative principle. Fourth is the "phonetic loan principle. Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called "ideographs," continue to bedevil Chinese studies.
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