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).
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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.
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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
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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).
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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).
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