The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System.

• Author: Bottero, Francoise

The two essential stages marking the "linguistic history" of the Chinese writing system govern the two parts of this book: "The Shang Formation" in which the author explains the development of the system, and "The Ch'in-Han Reformation," in which he deals with the normalization of writing or what he calls the "reaffirmation of that original formation."

One of the first intentions of this book is to correct wrong ideas about the Chinese script. Even though Peter du Ponceau as early as 1838 had presented the true nature of the Chinese writing system (A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society]), it is regrettable that his voice was not widely heard and that the myth of the "ideographic" Chinese script still persists. As Boltz shows in the first part of his book (pp. 31-126), the Chinese writing system followed the general path and basic principles that governed other archaic writing systems - mainly those of Mesopotamia and Egypt in the ancient world (with occasional reference even to the Mayan system of writing in the New World). The three systems indeed have pictographic origins,(1) but this does not exclude signs with more "abstract" origins. They commonly went through a stage called "graphic multivalence," where graphs could represent homophones (rebus writing or paronomastic writing) as well as homeosemes (parasemantic use of a graph). The use of determinatives - semantic or phonetic - was then provoked by the emergence of semantic ambiguity caused by the multivalent use of graphs.

According to Boltz (p. 17), writing is "the graphic representation of speech," and a writing system is defined as "any graphic means for the systematic representation of speech." Later (p. 19) he says that "the essential and indispensable feature that must be present for a graph or a system of graphs to qualify as writing is phonetic representation." Thus, according to this definition, all graphs that are not associated with a pronunciation are excluded from "writing." It has to be said that in Chinese the term wen-tzu means "graph" as well as "writing system," without distinction. Although in the context of a general theory of writing it is necessary to distinguish these meanings clearly, and Boltz is right to do so, for a better understanding of the development of writing it would probably be more helpful to take an evolutionist (or historical) point of view. This would include, in a broad definition of writing, the signs that are given in Boltz's representation as [-P(honetic), +S(emantic)], that is, which show an association with meaning but not with pronunciation - provided of course that they belong to a codified system, which is not the case with the Chinese neolithic signs. Indeed, if one takes into account the other archaic systems of writing, one can see that things are not as clear-cut as Boltz describes them. As he puts it, with excellent reasoning (esp. pp. 38, 44, 46), it is clear that the signs appearing independently on pottery in the Chinese neolithic era are neither proto-writing nor the ancestors of the Shang script. But in Mesopotamia, as early as 3000 or 3200 B.C., a total of fewer than one thousand signs can be found on clay tablets. This supposes a systematic choice of the signs, whose shapes were already standardized. These signs...