Like Semitic writing in the West, Chinese script was fundamental to the writing systems in the East. Until relatively recently, Chinese writing was more widely in use than alphabetic writing systems, and until the 18th century more than half of the world’s books were written in Chinese, including works of speculative thought, historical writings of a kind, and novels, along with writings on government and law.
By permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University LibraryIt is not known when Chinese writing originated, but it apparently began to develop in the early 2nd millennium bc. The earliest known inscriptions, each of which contains between 10 and 60 characters incised on pieces of bone and tortoiseshell that were used for oracular divination, date from the Shang (or Yin) dynasty (18th–12th century bc), but, by then it was already a highly developed system, essentially similar to its present form. By 1400 bc the script included some 2,500 to 3,000 characters, most of which can be read to this day. Later stages in the development of Chinese writing include the guwen (“ancient figures”) found in inscriptions from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1123 bc) and the early years of the Zhou dynasty that followed. The major script of the Zhou dynasty, which ruled from 1046 to 256 bc, was the dazhuan (“great seal”), also called the Zhou wen (“Zhou script”). By the end of the Zhou dynasty the dazhuan had degenerated to some extent.
The script was fixed in its present form during the Qin period (221–207 bc). The earliest graphs were schematic pictures of what they represented; the graph for man resembled a standing figure, that for woman depicted a kneeling figure.
Because basic characters or graphs were “motivated”—that is, the graph was made to resemble the object it represented—it was once thought that Chinese writing is ideographic, representing ideas rather than the structures of a language. It is now recognized that the system represents the Chinese language by means of a logographic script. Each graph or character corresponds to one meaningful unit of the language, not directly to a unit of thought.
Although it was possible to make up simple signs to represent common objects, many words were not readily picturable. To represent such words the phonographic principle was adopted. A graph that pictured some object was borrowed to write a different word that happened to sound similar. With this invention the Chinese approached the form of writing invented by the Sumerians. However, because of the enormous number of Chinese words that sound the same, to have carried through the phonographic principle would have resulted in a writing system in which many of the words could be read in more than one way. That is, a written character would be extremely ambiguous.
The solution to the problem of character ambiguity, adopted about 213 bc (during the reign of the first Qin emperor, Shihuangdi), was to distinguish two words having the same sound and represented by the same graph by adding another graph to give a clue to the meaning of the particular word intended. Such complex graphs or characters consist of two parts, one part suggesting the sound, the other part the meaning. The system was then standardized so as to approach the ideal of one distinctive graph representing each morpheme, or unit of meaning, in the language. The limitation is that a language that has thousands of morphemes would require thousands of characters, and, as the characters are formed from simple lines in various orientations and arrangements, they came to possess great complexity.
Not only did the principle of the script change with time, so too did the form of the graphs. The earliest writing consisted of carved inscriptions. Before the beginning of the Christian Era the script came to be written with brush and ink on paper. The result was that the shapes of the graphs lost their pictorial, “motivated” quality. The brushwork allowed a great deal of scope for aesthetic considerations.
The relation between the written Chinese language and its oral form is very different from the analogous relation between written and spoken English. In Chinese many different words are expressed by the identical sound pattern—188 different words are expressed by the syllable /yi/—while each of those words is expressed by a distinctive visual pattern. A piece of written text read orally is often quite incomprehensible to a listener because of the large number of homophones. In conversation, literate Chinese speakers frequently draw characters in the air to distinguish between homophones. Written text, on the other hand, is completely unambiguous. In English, by contrast, writing is often thought of as a reflection, albeit imperfect, of speech.
To make the script easier to read, a system of transcribing Chinese into the Roman alphabet was adopted in 1958. The system was not intended to replace the logographic script but to indicate the sounds of graphs in dictionaries and to supplement graphs on such things as road signs and posters. A second reform simplified the characters by reducing the number of strokes used in writing them. Simplification, however, tends to make the characters more similar in appearance; thus they are more easily confused and the value of the reform is limited.
The Chinese traditionally divide the characters into six types (called liu shu, “six scripts”), the most common of which is xingsheng, a type of character that combines a semantic element (called a radical) with a phonetic element intended to remind the reader of the word’s pronunciation. The phonetic element is usually a contracted form of another character with the same pronunciation as that of the word intended. For example, the character for he “river” is composed of the radical shui “water” plus the phonetic ke, the meaning of which (“able”) is irrelevant; the combined shui-ke suggests the word he meaning “river.” Seventy-five percent of all Chinese characters are of this type.
The other types of characters are xiangxing, characters that were originally pictographs (these have a semantic element originally expressed by a picture; for example, the character for tian “field” represents a field by means of a square divided into quarters); zhishi, characters intended to symbolize logical or abstract terms (e.g., er “two” is indicated by two horizontal lines); huiyi, characters formed by a combination of elements thought to be logically associated (e.g., the symbols for “man” and “word” are combined to represent the word meaning “true, sincere, truth”); zhuanzhu, modifications or distortions of characters to form new characters, usually of somewhat related meaning (e.g., the character for shan “mountain” turned on its side means fou “tableland”); and jiajie, characters borrowed from (or sometimes originally mistaken for) others, usually words of different meaning but similar pronunciation (e.g., the character for zu “foot” is used for zu “to be sufficient”).
Chinese script, as mentioned above, is logographic; it differs from phonographic writing systems—whose characters or graphs represent units of sound—in using one character or graph to represent a morpheme. Chinese, like any other language, has thousands of morphemes, and, as one character is used for each morpheme, the writing system has thousands of characters. Two morphemes that sound the same would, in English, have at least some similarity of spelling; in Chinese they are represented by completely different characters. The Chinese words for “parboil” and for “leap” are pronounced identically. Yet there is no similarity in the way they are written.
The Chinese language has clearly distinguished syllables that are easily recognized in speech and hence easily represented by a sign. These syllables correspond to morphemes; each morpheme is one syllable long. In English one morpheme is often expressed by two syllables (e.g., balloon), and two morphemes may be contained in one syllable (e.g., boys). In Chinese, with a general correspondence between morpheme and syllable, each morpheme is easily represented by a sign for the corresponding syllable. Moreover, one morpheme in Chinese is more or less equivalent to a word. Unlike English, in which morphemes combine to make new words (e.g., make + past = made, can also form making, makes, and so on), Chinese is an isolating language, in which elements of meaning are strung together as a series of isolated morphemes. Similarly, the pronunciation of a syllable is relatively uninfluenced by adjacent syllables, which, therefore, remain relatively invariant. It is these invariant units of sound and meaning that are represented by distinctive logographs.
With the adoption of the brush as the tool and of ink on paper as the medium for writing, graphs became essentially arbitrary, involving simple lines and shapes. The basic stock of characters are simple graphs, some of which represent the names for objects or parts of objects, such as river, fish, man, and woman, and others of which stand for more abstract terms, such as yield, love, quarrel, prince, and the like. There are approximately 1,000 of these simple characters or graphs.
These basic (motivated) characters serve two other roles. First, they may double as loanwords. Thus, the character representing the word prince doubles for thin-sliced, law, beating the breast, avoid, and others that were difficult to depict directly. The principle for borrowing the character was that the new word be pronounced in the same or a similar way as the word represented by the character. This acrophonic principle played a similar role in the development of hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing. Indeed, it has been suggested that if this principle had been applied consistently, the Chinese would have ended up with a syllabic rather than a logographic system. However, the writing system would then have been extremely ambiguous, with one character representing a dozen or more unrelated words as a consequence of the extreme homophony of the Chinese language. The logographic principle eliminates that ambiguity by providing one character for one meaning.
The second use of the basic characters was in combination with other characters to make up complex characters. Complex characters consist of one graph representing the pronunciation of the character—that is, a graph standing for a set of similar sounding words based on the acrophonic principle combined with a second graph indicating the semantic category of the word. One part represents the sound of the syllable, the other the semantic category of the morpheme; e.g., the character for foundation is composed of the character for winnowing basket, a word that sounds, in Chinese, similar to the word foundation, together with the character for earth, a word that is semantically related to the word foundation.
The process of combining simple graphs to make complex ones is enormously prolific and has generated thousands of unique characters capable of representing the morphemes of the language. With some 40,000 graphs, the system comes close to the ideal of a fully explicit writing system that represents each distinctive unit of meaning with a distinctive unit of writing. But, of course, such a large number of graphs imposes a major obstacle to learning to read and write. The problem is intensified by the fact that neither the sound property nor the semantic property of the characters is of much help in the recognition of a character. Because of changes in pronunciation of the language, the complex signs no longer reflect the sound pattern that they originally grew out of. Similarly, the semantic relations represented by the graph are no longer so clear. Consequently, as the relations between the characters and what they represent are largely unknown to readers and writers of the language, the graphs are seen as groups of lines and angles that make up repeated visual units, just as readers of English recognize whole words without analyzing them into their constituent letters. A literate Chinese person knows perhaps 4,000 of the most important characters.
Chinese characters are arranged in dictionaries according to the radicals of which they are composed or with which they are traditionally associated. The 214 radicals are arranged in modern dictionaries according to the number of strokes used in writing them.
Most scholars now believe that neither the logographic Chinese writing system nor the alphabetic Indo-European writing system possesses any overall advantage. The Chinese writing system requires more memorization, while the Latin alphabet requires more analysis and synthesis; both appear to be relatively optimal devices for the transcription of their respective, very different, languages.
For the Chinese, a single logographic system is particularly useful because it is capable of representing very different spoken forms, just as the numerals 1, 2, and 3 are understandable across many regions though they represent different words in different languages. In this manner Chinese logographs form a common medium of communication for a vast country because they can be read by people who speak mutually incomprehensible dialects or languages. Since the communist revolution the grammar and vocabulary of modern Mandarin Chinese has served as the standard written language.