Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script.

• Author: Kornicki, Peter

Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script. By ZEV HANDEL. Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, vol. 1. Leiden: BRILL, 2019. Pp. xiv + 369. $59.

After I had agreed to review this book, I discovered that the author had written a largely favorable review of my own recent book, Languages. Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia (2018), on H-Asia, and I only realized how closely related the two books are when I received my copy of his book. In an ideal world we would both have had a chance to read each other's books before proceeding to publication--I, at least, would have benefited considerably--for both books consider the phenomenon of the spread of the Chinese script in East Asia and its use for writing the vernaculars. They are, it is true, very different in their approach and their intended audiences, but readers of this review have been warned.

The Chinese script was, of course, the first to be developed in East Asia, and Handel, whose main interests lie in historical phonology and in the writing systems used in East Asia, reminds readers that, like the other three scripts invented ex nihilo, Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs, it is logographic in conception. Unlike the others, the Chinese script is still in vigorous health. For most societies in East Asia, it was both the first script they encountered and the first time that they were confronted with the idea of writing. Most of them adopted the Chinese script and, over the course of the last two millennia, adapted it to inscribe their own vernaculars, even though their languages were typologically very different from Chinese. The history of Sinography, therefore, forms a convenient laboratory for examining the consequences of the use of logographic scripts like Chinese to write other languages and to consider the question how far "typological differences between the languages affect that process and to what degree... they constrain the possible outcomes" (p. 2). These are crucially important questions for the study of Sinography in East Asia, but they are also of theoretical importance at a global level.

In order to address them, Handel presents three hypotheses in the introduction. The first is that phonetic and semantic adaptation are the two basic mechanisms at work when a logographic script is borrowed to write another language; the second that the linguistic typology of the second language determines...