Chinese.

• Author: Kroll, Paul W.
• Position: British Museum's Reading the Past series - Review

Chinese. By OLIVER MOORE. Reading the Past. London: BRITISH MUSEUM PRESS, 2000. Pp. 80, illus., figs. [pounds sterling]8.99 (paper).

After issuing small volumes on cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, Greek inscriptions, Etruscan, runes, Maya glyphs, and even mathematics and measurement, the British Museum's "Reading the Past" series has now looked east to bring out a book on Chinese. The series is aimed at the interested general reader, not the specialist nor necessarily the student. Such readers will be well served by the volume at hand. For it is pleasant to report that, within the limitations of space and sophistication dictated by the series, Olivcr Moore has produced an excellent survey of the history and uses of Chinese writing.

Two very brief introductory chapters provide some basic facts about "Languages in China" and "The Chinese Writing System," the latter including a welcome subsection on "Multivalence," an important feature of Chinese writing rarely discussed in books for the general public. This gives a hint that the author intends to do something other than purvey the standard myths about Chinese writing that still command widespread belief. Indeed, he does not shy away from defining Chinese correctly as a logographic script and explaining exactly what that implies. His eschewal of the usual but misleading term "radical" for one of the constituent elements of most Chinese graphs, in favor of the more accurate "determinative," is another positive sign that one notices immediately. The only misstep in these first pages is the statement that Mandarin represents a "standardized form of northern speech ... and its status as an official language received its first great impetus with the establishment of Yanjing (modern Beijing), as a northern seat of government during the tenth century A.D." (p. 9); as South Coblin has recently demonstrated, for most of its history Mandarin was more connected with and influenced by the spoken language of the Nanking area than with that of Peking.

The bulk of the book is taken up by the three following chapters, "Early Evidence in Divination Texts," "Developments during the Bronze Age," and "Writing in a Unified Empire." The first two of these might now be considered the best short introduction in English to how...