Overview Chinese, as with the vast majority of other languages, may be divided between its oral and written aspects. Yet one of the striking characteristics of Chinese is the multiplicity of its spoken dialects, which may be said to constitute linguistic differences as significant as (if not more significant than) those found among the Romance language family. In the twentieth century, China viewed the lack of a universal pronunciation standard as presenting numerous problems in terms of political, economic, and cultural unification. As a result, language reformers during the Republican Period created guoyu 國語 ("national language"), basing the new dialect upon the old official language of the capital region, or guanhua 官話 ("officials' speech"). This became, with mainly superficial changes, putonghua 普通話 ("common speech") after the Communist Revolution. We now refer to this as "Mandarin," and it has gradually become the dominant spoken form of Chinese. Of course, southern dialects such as Cantonese have not disappeared, and remain commonly used not only in southern China, but also in many diaspora communities (Hong Kong, many Chinatowns in the United States). Back to Top Chinese Scripts What had unified the Chinese language for almost its entire history was its script. The earliest records of Chinese writing are oracle bone inscriptions that date from the Shang dynasty. Oracle bones were tortoise shells and ox shoulder blades inscribed with simple questions to the king's ancestors. This writing, called jiaguwen 甲骨文 ("carapace and bone script"), was not recognized as historically significant until about 1898 or 1899. In the later Shang and Zhou, the practice of casting inscriptions on bronze became increasingly popular. This "bronze script" or jinwen 金文 was often used in the commemoration of important political events or to mark gift exchange among the Zhou nobility. The Eastern Zhou saw the emergence of "large seal script" or
dazhuanwen 大篆文, which was also used mainly for bronze inscriptions and may be seen as an intermediary stage between bronze script and the scripts that the Qin would introduce shortly after the unification of empire in 221 BC. Some remarks on the characteristics of ancient script may be useful at this point. Much of ancient Chinese script tended towards pictography, or graphic faithfulness to what was being represented by the character. During the later Zhou, however, a linearization of the pictographic elements began to take place. For the sake of written efficiency, circular components of characters were changed into simple, horizontal lines, and the varying use of heavy and fine strokes was replaced by the use of uniformly fine lines. This stylization of the Chinese script at the end of the Zhou heralded the major evolutionary leap in writing that would take place during the Qin and Han dynasties. Tradition credits the Qin with the invention of two scripts: the "small seal script" (xiaozhuanwen 小篆文) and the "clerical script" (lishu 隸書). The former was the standard or official form of writing, while the latter grew out of popular forms. The small seal, in comparison to earlier scripts, is more regular and less pictographic. The clerical form would take this evolution even further, turning the remaining curved and rounded strokes of the seal script into square, angular, and linear shapes. The clerical script took its name from the low-level clerks who were the main employers of the format. Yet, because the clerical script was so much more convenient than the heavier seal forms, it gradually became more widespread, and in the Han, replaced seal script once and for all. Modern Chinese typeface traces its ancestry to the clerical script, and to the "standard script" (kaishu 楷書), which was associated with the great Eastern Jin calligrapher, Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (AD 321-379). There were also various cursive forms, or caoshu 草書 ( "grass script"). The earliest of these date to the third century BC, and were associated with the emerging clerical script. However, while cursive script followed certain orthographic norms, cursive was much more expressive and personal, much like cursive handwriting in Western languages. One form of cursive used in private correspondence is called "running script" or xingshu 行書. Chinese parents like to use the "running script" in letters, which often poses difficulties to their American-born childen, who are only familiar with the printed script. Back to Top Calligraphy While these scripts serve as means of written communicate, calligraphy is an important art in its own right. The seal, clerical, standard, and cursive scripts are all used in the calligraphic tradition of China. To this list, one should also add "wild cursive"
or kuangcao 狂草, a script in which the writing appears to have been executed freely and rapidly so that parts of the characters are exaggerated or rendered illegible. In calligraphy, how the brush is held creates different kinds of lines. For example, in seal script, the brush is kept the same distance from the paper, resulting in lines of even thickness. By contrast the narrow and wide lines in clerical script are produced by varying the distance between the brush and the paper. The varying thickness of the line, the intersection of lines, and the spacing of characters are elements that give calligraphy emotion and drama. In mastering calligraphy, the student is expected to master the tradition by imitating great calligraphers of the past. The student may copy exactly a well-known work, or execute a more free imitation which aims to capture the spirit of the master calligrapher. These copies of famous works are often important works in their own right. Back to Top Misconceptions and Challenges There is a general Western misconception that Chinese is a pictographic language and therefore more primitive, as opposed to Western languages, which are based on the combination of phonetic signs and therefore, more abstract and advanced. While a portion of Chinese writing is indeed pictographic, and while that same portion constitutes the archaic core of the language, over 90% of the total 50,000 existing characters are actually phonetic compounds. A phonetic compound is comprised of a semantic element (or "signific") and a phonetic element. The signific denotes the general class of meaning. For example, in the character
méi 梅 ( "plum") the signific mù 木, or "wood," indicates that a character with this signific has something to do with trees or wood. The phonetic mei 每 indicates approximately how the character should sound. A related misconception is that Chinese is an ideographic language, which is to say, a language that represents ideas directly, without the mediation of speech. Of course, just because Chinese is not an alphabetic language, one should not infer that it is divorced from spoken language. Again, in the example of méi梅 ( "plum"), there is quite clearly a phonetic element that determines how the character is supposed to be pronounced. Still, the complex nature of Chinese written characters have led many twentieth-century intellectuals to conclude that the romanization of the traditional script would greatly facilitate learning of the language. There are currently two major systems of romanization: pinyin and Wade-Giles. The pinyin system is now standard in mainland China and in almost all American textbooks. Academic works dealing with premodern Chinese culture will still sometimes use Wade-Giles. (This website uses pinyin to romanize Chinese characters, though some of the readings this semester will employ Wade-Giles— my apologies, in advance). Unfortunately, perceived weaknesses in the Chinese language have been used to explain all kinds of problems with Chinese history, from the absence of a modern scientific spirit and logic to the underdevelopment of social and political rights. In the drive to modernize China in the last century, much energy was expended in rectifying traditional culture, which was seen as having shackled China's progress. Yet, at the same time, the recognition of the difficulty of mastering Chinese (which few would claim to be an easy language) has also led to greater efforts in promoting universal literacy, including the adoption of "simplified characters" (jiantizi 簡體字) by the People's Republic of China. Other Chinese-speaking communities, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, continue to use the traditional script, now called "complex characters" (fantizi 繁體字). Back to Top Bibliographic Sources: Boltz, William G. The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1994. DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1984. Norman, Jerry. Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1988. Qiu, Xigui. Chinese Writing. Trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2000. Ramsey, S. Robert, The Languages of China (Princeton: Princeton University, 1987). Back to Top |
