is your heart a sponge or a fist?

Anyang / Oracle Bones Script      [source: the first writing: script invention...stephen houston]

• From roughly 1200 BC

  • No clear precursors have been discovered

  • 1200 BC = era of the Shang Dynasty

    • Wu Ding: first of 9 Shang Dynasty kings

      • Inscriptions may have originated from his reign according to mentions of him in several oracle bone fragments

• Writing system was fully formed upon discovery in Anyang; full writing system capable of recording connected discourse

• Discovered at Anyang site in northern China

• Preserved in bronze vessels and bones used for pyromantic divinations

  • Divination via cracking heated animal bones

    • Typically turtle shells or bovine scapulas

• Divination inscriptions:

  • Stating questions for divination

    • 'Week without disaster?' Questions frequent and common

    • Asking for lucky birthdays for children yet to born was also common

  • Demonstrate flexibility of the script as the opening format for oracle bone inscriptions was formulaic, while the questions/outcomes asked and recorded were not

• Estimate roughly 3000-5000 unique characters

  • System for naming 60 days of the calendar cycle

  • Fully developed system of numerics

  • The writing itself has a sense of refinement and regularity that suggests a system of standardization

• The question was not recorded until after the divination ritual was completed

  • The inscription was not part of the divination process itself

• The script was painstakingly difficult to carve into oracle bones

  • Straight lines easier to make than curves

• Some inscriptions were inlaid with black ink or vermillion, calligraphy with brushes was written with the same materials

• Carvers were accomplished people

• Bronze inscriptions

  • Not comparable to oracle bone inscriptions in length or number

  • Innovation of Wu Ding era reign

  • Line quality more fluent

    • Bronze casts were made of clay models that had the writing produced into them, a much softer/easier to manipulate medium that made writing less difficult

• Left hand component of Lady Hao name = kneeling woman, also the left hand component in the character for lucky

  • Early rebus principle?

    • Use of the rebus principle contributed significantly to the expansion and success of the Chinese language/writing system (source: Language Files)

• Iconicity of the script diminished sharply after the Anyang period

• Possibly meant for display, recording of divination ritual purpose is still ambiguous/unknown

Writing Systems                 [source; language files page 600]

• Chinese writing system is a combination of sound and meaning based representations

• Phonographic: systems that rely mostly on representation of sound

  • Alphabetic, syllabic, or phonemic writing systems

• Morphographic: (logographic) relationship between a written grapheme and a particular morpheme, primarily the meaning of that morpheme

  • Symbols themselves may not tell reader anything about pronunciation

  • Often have more graphemes than phonographic writing systems

• Written Chinese is highly morphographic

• Pictograms: pictures drawn to express an idea

  • Morphographic writing systems originally based on stylized symbols from pictograms in the distant past, though as these systems develop, morphographs come to represent sound as well as meaning in large proportions

• Rebus Principle: borrowing a symbol only for the phonemic value it provides

  • Combining phonetic and semantic components this way to create new characters to represent ideas was extremely productive in the development of chinese

    • 90% of Chinese characters today based on this practice

• Chinese can be evaluated on a continuum where purley sound based and purely meaning based are opposite extremes on either end

Writing in China       [source: a history of writing // albertine guar // page 80]

• Chinese script only undergone fairly minor remodeling in its 4000 years of existence

• Disadvantage: number of signs necessary

  • Average person uses 2-4k to suffice

• Advantage of not depending exclusively/primarily on the spoken word

  • Can be read without regard to or knowledge of the spoken language

    • This makes it ideal means of communication in an empire where people speak many different dialects

• Written language need not follow development or change in spoken lang

  • Do not need to know ancient pronunciation of words to read ancient texts

• However many homonymous or monosyllabic words in chinese sometimes make it necessary to refer to written characters for clarity

• For example fú (浮) means to float, but other words share identical pronunciation

  • 伏 (to bend over)

  • 孚 (to believe in)

  • 扶 (to help)

  • 服 (dress)

  • 福 (happiness)

  • 符 (symbol)

• In many modern chinese characters, the original pictograph is still clearly recognizable

• Chinese tradition explanations for origin of writing;

  • Legendary or semi-divine beings who were inventors

  • Dao de jing of laotze and supplement to the yi jing (ancient books of soothsaying) refer to knotted cords which were used for information storage

  • Staffs of office; insignia rank and position worn as belt ornaments

• Script Sign 6 Groups

  • Pictures of objects (xiang xing): 600 sign that still form the most basic elements of chinese script

  • Symbolic pictures (zhi shi): representations of abstract words by signs borrowed from other words related to them in meaning, representations of gestures, of crafts by their tools, and metaphors

    • Not many fall in this category

    • Half moon for evening

  • Symbolic compounds (hui yi): two or four fold repetition of the same sign / ideographic combination of components which make up a concept

    • Character for child twice for twins

    • Tree + hand characters = to collect

  • (zhuan zhu) signs arisen from deflections, inversions, and rotations of other signs

    • Child upside down = childbirth

      • Relatively rare

  • Sound indicating signs (zie shang): most important group!!

    • Developed under han dynasty and consist of two elements

      • Element indicating meaning

      • Element indicating phonetic pronunciation

  • Borrowings: (jia je): similar zie shang, often ambiguous

• Internal structure of chinese script remained unaltered, appearance of script signs has changed considerably

  • Change in writing material often changed writing implements

• Most scripts move towards reduction in # of signs, chinese took opposite course

  • Shang period = 2,500 characters

  • 100 AD = 9,000 characters

  • 500 AD = 18,000 characters

  • 1000 AD = 27,000 characters

• Now about 50,000 characters

  • Organized around 214 radicals

    • Radicals indicate overall sphere of meaning and the complement to it proved the phonetic element

• Influence of Chinese writing system

  • Can hardly be overestimated

  • Spread to non-chinese people

    • Korea

    • Vietnam

    • Japan

  • Unopposed since none of these countries possessed indigenous writing

  • Even though chinese writing was structurally unsuited for many languages was not too great of an obstacle

Chinese Character to bear

The Chinese character to bear (忍) [rĕn] is written with literally with radicals as knife (刃) over heart (心). Knife (刃) [rèn] provides the phonetic component and partial meaning, while heart (心) [xīn] contributes meaning exclusively. Here it becomes obvious how advantageous the use of the Rebus principle was in order to expand the number of signs in the Chinese writing system. The meaning and pronunciation of  to bear (忍) [rĕn] can be easily gleaned from the character.

Characters that were created using the rebus principle make up the largest and most important category of script signs in the Chinese written language. Considered phono-semantic compounds, radical-phonetic characters, or xíng shēng, these script signs must contain two separate elements; one indicating meaning, and another indicating sound. This category of characters can also be credited with the unprecedented expansion of the Chinese written index, which defies general written language trends that favor reduction in number of script signs. The numerical prevalence of this character type, which makes up about 90% of Mandarin vocabulary, has resulted in a writing system that can be organized relatively efficiently around 214 radicals. These radicals, over time, have evolved to do the phono-semantic work required to strike the balance between accuracy to the mouth and what is intelligible to the mind. For example, the Chinese character for to bear is written 忍 (rĕn) with the radicals written literally as blade (刃) over heart (心). Knife, pronounced rèn provides the phonetic component––tone notwithstanding––and partial meaning, while heart, pronounced xīn contributes to meaning exclusively. Here, it is clear that Chinese characters founded upon the rebus principle, while highly morphographic overall, are especially efficient in communicating the spoken word completely, and can navigate the graphic dimensions of writing to manifest meaning in ways that phonetic alphabets cannot.

What is writing?      [writing: the nature, development… // carl h frederiksen]

• Four perspectives on writing

  • A cognitive activity

    • Construct meanings and express them in writing

  • A particular form of language and language use

  • A communicative process

  • Contextualized purposive activity

Chinese System of Writing      [source: a handbook of asian scripts // hosking] page 42

• Objects of everyday life form mainly nouns

• In verbs two signs combine to denote action

  • Often employs the sign for ‘hand’

• Left hand element generally stands for the idea suggested

• Right is phonetic element

• Composite characters: determinative + phonetic

• Cursive script existed for all varieties in the developments of Chinese

The Origins of Writing                            [the story of writing // andrew robinson] page 11

• Writing began with accountancy

  • Demands of an expanding economy

    • complexity of trade/administration outstripped the ability of memory

• The rebus principle was essential to the development of full writing

• Changes are made to a borrowed script when the new language has sounds that the language the script is taken from does not contain

• Full writing: system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey any and all thought

  • All writing systems use symbols to represent sounds

  • All writing systems use a mixture of semantic and phonetic signs

    • What differs between systems is the proportion of phonetic to semantic signs

      • English proportion is high

      • Chinese proportion is low
        

• Writing and reading are inextricably bound to speech

  • Scripts that employ words involve both sounds and signs

Visible and Invisible Speech  + Sound and Spelling + Conveying Meaning in Writing          

 [the story of writing // andrew robinson] page 37

• Writing can be broken down into its constituent symbols

  • Speech can be broken down into syllables, vowels, and consonants, but these categories are artificial and never entirely free from overlap/ambiguity

• All writing must strike a compromise between accuracy to the mouth and what is intelligible to the mind

• Phoneme has no existence independent of one particular language

  • Written like /a/ or /e/ as in sat and set, /p/ and /b/ as in pat and bat.

• English alphabet letters are phonograms

  • Phonograms are generally without meaning

    • Meaning is extrapolated from their infinite combinations into words

• Signs also communicate graphically

  • Alphabets tend to ignore graphic dimension

    • Different styles of letters (i.e. typeface) can convey some meaning, however

  • Chinese symbols have a level of graphic recognizability, but that does not communicate meaning entirely. Only a few 100 or so characters have meaning that can be extracted from graphic appearance exclusively.

    • The highly pictographic 田 for ‘rice field/paddy’ could be easily mistaken by a foreigner for ‘window.

Limits of Pictographic Systems

fig. 1     👱💟🐈

It is fairly easy to extrapolate the man loves cats from the symbols in figure one, which often leads people to believe that pictographs are capable of expressing more complex ideas, or that they could be developed into a fully intelligible writing system. However, purely pictographic systems, upon examination, struggle to convey more nuanced ideas like the man used to love cats, or the man loves cats but would never want to own one. Clarity begins to be lost––for example, if one were to use the 🚫symbol to express never in the latter, what would distinguish the conditionality of this symbol? First, 🚫is unclear, meaning it could express a range of things, including no, not, stop, or never, and beyond that, how would would one determine if this vague concept of no meant only right now, or forever? Sets of pictographs can only become full writing systems capable of complex expression once they are transformed into rebuses, meaning the symbols have concrete phonetic and semantic elements. The Chinese writing system, for example, operates through thousands of signs in which radicals communicate both pronunciation and meaning at the same time.