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Script Reform in China
| Article
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16641 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
2,874 Words |
| Author
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Victor H. Mair
Victor H. Mair is professor of Chinese in the Department of
Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a
specialist on early vernacular texts and Sino-Indian cultural
relations. Among his publications are Tung-huang Popular
Narratives (Cambridge, 1983), Painting and Performance:
Chinese Picture Recitation and its Indian Genesis (Hawaii,
1988), and T'ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist
Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in
China (Harvard, 1989). |
Nearly everyone who has seen Chinese characters is deeply impressed by them. Even without being able to read a single graph, one is struck by their longevity, beauty, complexity, and numerousness. Indeed, all these qualities are true of the Chinese writing system and account for the strong feelings it evokes. These emotions are particularly intense for those who consider the script to be one of the primary symbols of Chinese cultural identity. There is a great fear that, without this distinctive set of graphs, Chinese civilization as such would cease to exist.
Yet, during the past century, there have been persistent and equally urgent calls for radical changes in the script--including its abolition--from other segments of society. The traditionalists strive to maintain a proud and unique heritage that goes back over three millennia. The reformers worry that, unless their country modernizes its cumbersome, out-of-date script, everything--including the script itself--will be lost in an unsuccessful race to keep up with the rest of the world. A dispassionate look at the history and nature of writing in China may help to reconcile these two contradictory attitudes.
The Chinese writing system first occurs in virtually full-blown form around 1200 B.C. in the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty. Scholars are perplexed by the suddenness with which the script appears; prior to the oracle bone inscriptions, there were only a few isolated and still undecipherable marks on pottery and occasionally on other objects. Hence the origins of the Chinese script remain a mystery. Its basic characteristics, however, do not. From its very inception as a tool for recording facts and ideas, the same fundamental principles have governed both the shape and the function of the individual graphs. In spite of widespread belief to the contrary, there seems never to have been a purely pictographic or ideographic stage of full writing in China. The earliest connected texts contain sizable proportions of sings that communicate meaning through sound (the so-called "cyclical stems and branches," the graph for "all" [xian], the graph for "come" [lai], and so forth).
John DeFrancis and others have convincingly shown that it is actually impossible to record all the nuances of speech without substantial recourse to phonetic indicators. Certainly, for at least the last twenty-five hundred years, by far the largest proportion of Chinese characters was made up of a component that conveys meaning and another component that conveys sound, though neither does so with precision alone. Since these components are gathered together in a consistently
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