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The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1984 Publisher's page for this title Contents  Preface  Introduction: The Singlish Affair 1. Rethinking "The Chinese Language" o On Defining "Chinese" and "Language" o ...

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The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis

Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1984 Publisher's page for this title

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Contents Preface Introduction: The Singlish Affair Rethinking "The Chinese Language" o On Defining "Chinese" and "Language" o A Sketch of Spoken Chinese o Idiolects, Dialects, Regionalects, and Languages Rethinking Chinese Characters o What's in a Name? o From Pictographs to What? o How Do Chinese Characters Represent Sound? o How Do Chinese Characters Convey? Demythifying Chinese Characters o The Ideographic Myth sample chapter o The Universality Myth o The Emulatability Myth o The Monosyllabic Myth o The Indispensability Myth o The Successfulness Myth Chinese Language Reform o Speech Reform o Writing Reform Notes Glossary Suggested Reading References Index errata (not found in published edition) Copyright © 2010 拼音/Pinyin.info | XHTML

Chapter 3: Demythifying Chinese Characters

The Ideographic Myth

The concept of ideographic writing is a most seductive notion. There is great appeal in the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech. And it seems so plausible. Surely ideas immediately pop into our minds when we see a road sign, a death's head label on a bottle of medicine, a number on a clock. Aren't Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren't they an ideographic system of writing? From The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis, © 1984 by the University of Hawai`i Press. Used by permission of the University of Hawai`i Press.

The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing, as I have attempted to show in the preceding pages. Here I would go further: There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing. How then did this concept originate, and why has it received such currency among specialists and the public at large?

Origin of the Myth

The concept of Chinese writings as a means of conveying ideas without regard to speech took hold as part of the chinoiserie fad among Western intellectuals that was stimulated by the generally highly laudatory writings of Catholic missionaries from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The first Western account of the fascinatingly different/Chinese writing was the comment made by the Portuguese Dominican Friar Gaspar da Cruz in 1569: A revised version of this chapter appears in Difficult Characters.

The Chinas [Chinese] have no fixed letters in their writing, for all that they write is by characters, and they compose words of these, whereby they have a great multitude of characters, signifying each thing by a character in such sort that one only character signifies "Heaven," another "earth," and another "man," and so forth with everything else. [Boxer 1953:161-162] Cruz's remarks about Chinese were given wider currency when they were repeated by Juan Gonzales de Mendoza in a book that went through thirty editions in the principal European languages before the end of the century. A more authoritative description of Chinese writing was advanced by the renowned Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). His original manuscript, written in Italian, was not published until 1942, but it was used by a fellow missionary, Nicola Trigault, as the basis for a "liberal version" in Latin that was published in 1615 and went through ten editions in various European languages in the next few decades (Ricci 1942: CLXXVI-CLXXVII). From this Latin version of Ricci's observations, European readers learned that the Chinese have a system of writing "similar to the hieroglyphic signs of the Egyptians" and that they "do not express their concepts by writing, like most of the world, with a few alphabetic signs, but they paint as many symbols as there are words." Readers also learned that "each word has its own hieroglyphic character," that "there are no fewer symbols than words," and that "the great number of characters is in accord with the great number of things," though thanks to combining them the characters "do not exceed seventy to eighty thousand" (Trigault 1615:25-29, 144). The Popularity among European scholars of these early works on things Chinese is matched by the huge eighteenth-century collection of missionary reports and essays entitled Mémoires concernant l'histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, &c des Chinois, par les missionaries de Pekin. Here the discussion of Chinese characters was introduced in an article signed "Ko, Jés." He was one of a number of Chinese converts who spent some time in France and provided information to the missionaries. In his discussion of the characters the author presented the view that

they are composed of symbols and images, and that these symbols and images, not having any sound, can be read in all languages, and form a sort of intellectual painting, a metaphysical and ideal algebra, which conveys thoughts by analogy, by relation, by convention, and so on. [Mémoires 1776:24] This view was taken up and expanded on by the well-known Father J. J. M. Amiot in a longer article in which he described characters as images and symbols which speak to the mind through the eyes -- images for palpable things, symbols for mental ones. Images and symbols which are not tied to any sound and can be read in all languages. ... I would be quite inclined to define Chinese characters as the pictorial algebra of the sciences and the arts. In truth, a well-turned sentence is as much stripped of all intermediaries as is the most rigorously bare algebraic demonstration. [Mémoires 1776:282-285] It is a curious fact, however, that while the notion that Chinese writing conveys ideas without regard to sound was widely held, no special name appears to have been coined for it. Westerners had made the acquaintance of Chinese in the sixteenth century. Friar Gaspar da Cruz, as noted above, referred to the Chinese symbols as "characters," and the Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignani, who visited Macao in 1577, referred to Chinese characters as "that innumberable multitude of exceedingly intricate ciphers which pass for writing" among the Chinese (Bartoli 1663:147). It seems that for the next 250 years and more Chinese writing was referred to simply by such noncommittal terms as "characters" and "symbols." It was not acquaintance with Chinese but decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing following Napoleon's conquests in North Africa that led to the coining of several expressions related to the ideographic idea. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English term "ideographic" was first used in 1822 to describe Egyptian writing. The French term "idéographique" was first used in the same year (Robert 1977:957). This was the very year that the French scholar Champollion announced his success in deciphering the Egyptian script. It turns out that the English term represents a direct transliteration of the French expression coined by Champollion in a celebrated letter announcing his discovery (Champollion 1822; Anonymous 1822). Decipherment of this script had long been impeded by the notion that it was symbolic of ideas, particularly mystical or spiritual ones. It was not just the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone, with its bilingual text in three scripts (Hieroglyphic Egyptian, Demotic Egyptian, and Greek) that made this possible. As Gordon (1968:24) stresses: "The decipherment of Hieroglyphic Egyptian required the replacement of the deep-seated notion of symbolism by the correct view that the main (though not the only) feature of the script is phonetic." Champollion's success in deciphering the Egyptian script was due to his recognition of its phonetic aspect. 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" (1822:41-42). 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 1974:854). 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 1974:853-855). 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." Moreover, referring to the use of the symbols to write words foreign to the language, he added (1822:4): "The Chinese, who also use an ideographic script, have exactly the same provision, created for the same reason." It is ironic that the scholar who demonstrated the falsity of the old belief in Egyptian as symbolic and nonphonetic should have helped to popularize terms that powerfully reinforced the popular misconception of both the Egyptian and Chinese systems of writing.

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"(1963:59), the symbols are clearly pictographic in form, though he prefers to call them "descriptive" or "representational." Just how did they function in conveying meaning? 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. A typical example of Indian pictography, one in which it comprises more than the usual isolated symbol or two, is a message passed on by an Indian agent from a Cheyenne father to his son informing him of the transmission of $53. Another is a come-up-and-see-me-sometime invitation from an Ojibwa girl to her lover (Gelb 1963:31-32). 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" (1886:15-16). 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 1963:60). 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 can summarize its form and function in the two stages as follows:  Stage 1: Protowriting

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Form: Pictograph of wheat: Function: To represent the idea "wheat" Stage 2: Real Writing

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Form: Pictograph of wheat: or Function: 1. To represent the word ləg ("wheat")

2. To represent the word ləg ("come") Stage 1, the era of protowriting akin to that of the American Indians, is assumed but not attested. We have no record of such a stage, although some evidence of pre-Shang writing is beginning to emerge (Aylmer 1981:6; Cheung 1983), 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 second function is, however, completely new in that it introduces the rebus use of the pictograph meaning "wheat" to represent another word with the same sound but with a totally different meaning. 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 1963; Trager 1974), after an earlier stage of mixed pictographic and syllabic writing (Chadwick 1967). 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. We can put it this way: QUESTION: When is a pictograph not a pictograph? ANSWER: When it represents a sound. The use of the pictograph for "wheat" to represent the homophonous word ləg ("come") transformed the function of the symbol from pictographic depiction of an object to syllabic representation of a sound. 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. Creel in the United States and Margouliès in France are leading exponents of a view that has been taken over, in even more simplistic form, by the public at large. 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 (1936:91-93) says: That Chinese writing was pictographic in origin does not admit of question. On the other hand, Chinese is not, and was not three thousand years ago, a pictographic language in the sense that it consisted of writing by means of pictures all or most of which would be readily understood by the uninstructed. ... The Chinese early abandoned the method of writing by means of readily recognizable pictures and diagrams. ... It was in part because the Chinese gave up pictoral [sic] writing that they were able to develop a practicable pictographic and ideographic script, with comparatively little help from the phonetic principle. To draw elaborate pictures of whole animals, for instance (as is done on some of the Shang bones), is too slow a process. The course taken in many parts of the world was to conventionalize the picture, reduce it to a simple and easily executed form, and then use it to represent homophonous words or parts of words. The course the Chinese have chosen has also ...