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你可能喜欢The fourth principle is the familiar rebus device which we first
encountered in Sumerian with the use of gi 'reed' borrowed
to represent the homophonous word gi 'reimburse.' A Chinese
example is the borrowing of a character representing
xi&ng 'elephant' to represent the
homophonous word xi&ng 'image.'
The final principle is one which combines a rebus-like symbol
with another symbol giving, generally, a semantic clue to the
meaning. One example is the addition (on the left) of the symbol
for 'person' to that (on the right) for
xi&ng 'elephant' to produce an
unambiguous character xi&ng
亻 + 象 = 像
Another example is the previously cited
character for mā 'mother' formed by
combining the character for mǎ 'horse'
(on the right) with another for 'female' (on the left):
女 + 馬 = 媽
I call this the SF principle, since it involves
joining a semantic element S-such as the symbols for 'person' and
'female' in the previous examples-to a phonetic element F-such as
the symbols for xi&ng 'elephant' and
mǎ 'horse.' I also designate as SF
characters those, to be discussed below, that are formed by joining
a phonetic element P to a semantic element S. We can think of both
of these types as MS (meaning-plus-sound) characters.
The proportions in which the foregoing principles have been
applied in the formation of Chinese characters have varied over
time. This can be seen in the following table (adapted from
DeFrancis 1984a:84) summarizing the structural classification of
977 Shang characters, 9,353 characters of a second-century
dictionary by Xu Shen, and 48,641 characters of the great imperial
Kang Xi dictionary of the eighteenth century:
Shang Dynasty
2nd century
18th century
Pictographic
& 1,500 (3%)
Simple indicative
Compound indicative
1,167 (13%)
Semantic-phonetic
7,697 (82%)
47,141 (97%)
The traditional view of Chinese characters summarized above has
been challenged in some important respects by Peter A. Boodberg, a
leading student of early Chinese writing whose views are receiving
more and more acceptance since they were propounded several decades
ago (Boodberg , 1957). His criticisms center on two main
points. The first is the failure of many people, sinologists
included, to realize the importance of SP characters because of
neglecting or minimizing the phonetic contribution of the p element
and exaggerating the semantic contribution of the the S element.
The second extends Boodberg's criticism of underestimating the
significance of the phonetic element by dealing especially with
those characters traditionally classified under the "compound
indicative principle."
The majority of these characters, Boodberg contends, are in
reality SP characters. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that
apart from "a few exceptional cases " there is simply no such thing
as a class of characters constructed on semantic principles
(). This view has recently been reiterated by another
scholar, William G. Boltz, who has also done significant work on
early Chinese writing. He asserts: "Characters were not invented by
just putting together two or more elements based on their semantic
values alone. At least of one of the components must have had a
phonetic function" (Boltz ).
Boodberg's "few exceptional cases" include chiefly single
characters of clearly pictographic origin. There are at most only a
few hundred of these, and the number has not increased for some two
millennia. These simple characters of pictographic origin, examples
of which appear in figure 17, comprise only about one percent of
the total number of Chinese characters. The remaining 99 percent,
examples of which are presented in figure 18, are compound
characters whose main component is a phonetic element.
Figure 18. Chinese Writing: A 100% Syllabic Script
Examples of Chinese characters, which always represent syllables,
showing their derivation (except for the 1% noted in Figure 17)
from two elements -- a primary phonetic element (i.e., one of the
895 syllabic elements in the "Soothill Syllabary"), and an added
semantic element (i.e., one of the 214 elements traditionally
called radicals or keys).
As an example of the need to rethink characters allegedly based
on semantic principles, Boodberg cites the case of the previously
mentioned character for m&ng
'bright.' He rejects the traditional approach which begins with a
disembodied concept supposedly represented by a character formed by
combining the symbols for "sun" and "moon."
Instead he starts by assuming definite spoken words related to
the meaning "bright." This leads him to note the existence of an
earlier form of the character for
m&ng 'bright' (Morohashi ,
5:14, 366) that I present below in juxtaposition with the later
In both cases the element 'moon' on the right-hand side of the
characters is a semantic determinative. The element on the
left-hand side of the first character is originally a picture of a
window, with a pronunciation related to
m&ng. In short, the present
character representing m&ng 'bright'
is simply a later variant with what is usually taken as a semantic
"sun"-which has caused us to overlook an earlier version with a
phonetic m&ng element that more
closely relates the character to a spoken word (Boodberg
Boodberg also cites the case of the following two
characters:
目 見
In modern transcription, the first character is
m& eye,' the second
ji&n 'see.' But the first was also
used to write the related word 'see.' Hence it represented two
related meanings and had two quite different pronunciations, which
have become modern m& 'eye' and
ji&n 'see.' In order to distinguish
the two meanings, the 'eye' character was supplemented with a
phonetic determinative, the bottom part of the second character,
whose earlier pronunciation nzien provided a better phonetic
clue than the modern pronunciation
r&n (Boodberg ).
In presenting these and other cases Boodberg stresses an aspect
of Chinese writing that we have already encountered in Sumerian.
That is the fact that many sounds are represented by more than one
symbol (recall the 23 for Sumerian du and that the same
symbol may represent several different words (recall the different
words represented by the pronunciations gub, gin,
t&m for the same symbol with the basic
meaning 'leg'). Chinese words are also often written with different
characters, and the same character may be read in several different
ways. It is a major challenge to modern scholarship to unravel the
interconnections that have grown up among Chinese characters in the
several millennia that they have been handled and mishandled by
millions of scholars with widely different backgrounds in the many
varieties of spoken and written Chinese.
Because of his emphasis on relating writing to speech, Boodberg
presents a clearer analysis of the evolution of Chinese writing
than that suggested by the conventional listing of its underlying
principles. It is summarized in even simpler terms by Boltz as a
three-stage development: (1) a pictographic stage, which in its
pure form could write only the limited part of the language that
wa (2) a multivalent stage, which included the
use of the rebus principle whereby the same symbol might stand for
unrelated homophonous words, and the use of the same character to
represent words semantically related but with different
and (3) a stage in which the ambiguity that grew up
with the multivalent use of characters was resolved by resort to
semantic and phonetic determinatives, as in the case of Near
Eastern writing (Boltz 1986). The following examples illustrate
these stages:
'elephant'
Pictographic
Determinative
(A. Semantic)
(B. Phonetic)
Note that in column A a semantic determinative, a variant of the
symbol for 'person,' is added to the phonetic base
xi&ng to distinguish the meaning
'image.' In column B a phonetic determinative, another variant of
the symbol for 'person,' is added to the semantic base
m& 'eye' to distinguish the meaning
'see.' Both types are SP characters. Note also that the three
stages should not be viewed as chronologically distinct. They
define the stage of an individual character as determined by its
It is useful now to take a closer look at the preponderant
category of characters of the determinative stage. Particularly
illuminating is a comparison of Chinese and Sumerian in their
approaches to an essentially similar problem of coping with the
ambiguity inherent in writing systems in which one word might be
written many different ways and one graph might be read many
different ways. We can schematize the Sumerian and Chinese
approaches as follows:
The Sumerian examples have already been discussed in the
preceding section. It was explained there that an ambiguous
phonetic symbol (P?) is disambiguated by adding a semantic
determinative (S), and an ambiguous semantic symbol (S?) is
disambiguated by adding a phonetic determinative (P). Chinese does
exactly the same thing, but it developed a variation that has had a
profound influence on how the characters have been viewed. That
variation is to weld the determinative, whether semantic or
phonetic, with the ambiguous element to form a tightly knit symbol
that is rigidly confined within its own square space of exactly the
same size as that for every other character, regardless of
simplicity or complexity.
With his usual perspicuity, Boodberg notes this important
difference between Chinese and Sumerian ( and Egyptian also) in the
following passage:
Egyptian and cuneiform, where the use of semantic determinatives
remained optional and the determinatives themselves detachable from
the graphs they determined, moved on apace toward phonetization. In
Chinese, the determinatives, semantic or phonetic, were welded
securely to their graphs so as to form one
diagrammatic structure became thus the dominant type
of character building. This may have been caused by a more
pronounced homophony of the Chinese vocabulary, but it must have
also been influenced by an aesthetic imperative in the Chinese
which prompted them, apparently quite early in the development of
the script, to enforce the principle of
equidimensionalism. ... of the graphs
[Boodberg ].
With respect to the two kinds of SP characters, namely those
formed by adding an S to a P or a P to an S, which kind is more
important? On this there has been considerable disagreement among
specialists in Chinese. Earlier scholars, and a few still today,
consider that the complex characters of this category were formed
chiefly by adding a phonetic determinative to a semantic base. The
popular names given to the semantic element reflect this view. It
is frequently referred to as a "radical," sometimes as a "key," the
latter being used especially in connection with its function as the
unit (comparable to our abc ... xyz) for filing
characters in a dictionary. The semantic element is considerably
less often called a "signific" or "determinative."
Noel Barnard, who has done some of the most important research
on this aspect of Chinese, is firmly of the opinion that the
phonetic element is the real core of compound characters. For the
most part semantic elements were added to phonetic elements, not
the other way around (Barnard 1978). This is the prevailing view
among most specialists today. I hold strongly to this opinion
Leaving aside the matter of priority, it should be noted that
the result of adding an S to a P is essentially the same as that of
adding a P to an S. That is to say, PS = SP. The order in which the
two elements merged is now largely of only historical interest. And
the location within a character (e.g., left side versus right side)
is also of secondary importance.
If almost all characters are of the SP variety, and if most of
these were formed by adding a semantic to a phonetic, then we need
to take a closer look at just how the combination was effected.
Part of the task is easy. It has been the tradition, as illustrated
in the Kang Xi Dictionary, to identify exactly 214 key semantic
elements. Until the PRC simplification of the 1950s, all characters
were analyzed, sometimes quite arbitrarily, as having one of these
214 keys, and they were listed in dictionaries under the
appropriate key. However, there is a good deal of artificiality and
arbitrariness in all this, as is indicated by the fact that the
first Chinese dictionary, of the second century
b.c., listed characters under 540 keys,
while the most recent PRC dictionaries
have variously classified them under 186, 191, 225, 226, and 250
What of the phonetic elements? The Chinese have in general paid
much less attention to this aspect, though some philologists have
compiled rhyming dictionaries based on the sounds of the
characters. Some scholars, including some foreign pathbreakers like
Bernhard Karlgren, have made good use of the phonetic elements in
reconstructing the pronunciation of earlier stages of Chinese. A
few have also attempted to use the phonetic elements in teaching.
Two well known examples of pedagogical use are works by Wieger
(1965) and Soothill (1942) that classify characters under 850-900
phonetics based on Mandarin pronunciations.
An extremely useful, if somewhat flawed, study was published in
1814 by the missionary-scholar Joshua Marshman, who analyzed the
characters in the eighteenth-century Kang Xi dictionary. He
excluded from consideration more than a third of the characters on
various grounds, such as their being mere stylistic variants or
lacking explanations. This left him with about 25,000 characters
that can more or less be viewed as the total unabridged lexicon of
Chinese over the past two millennia. Removing from each character
what he called its "Element," that is, the semantic element or key
under which the character was classified, he arrived at a figure of
3,867 residual components, which he called "Primitives." He
concluded that all characters, apart from the few hundred
consisting only of a single component, are formed by combining one
of the 214 elements with one of the 3,867 primitives. He referred
to the combinations thus formed as "Derivatives."
By his use of the term primitives we can conclude that
Marshman correctly assigned the primary role to this category of
components that enter into the composition of Chinese characters.
At the same time, however, he was so firmly convinced that the
primitives "convey a general idea" that he failed to appreciate the
significance of the fact (which he himself pointed out) that, for
example, 11 of the 16 derivatives (actually there are more) formed
with a primitive l& had exactly the
same pronunciation, and all but one had the same initial. Despite
his myopia regarding the precise function of the primitives, which
was of course chiefly phonetic, his work remains valuable, for it
shows that Chinese characters are not all idiosyncratic entities
like, as is frequently alleged, our numerals 1, 2, 3.
All Chinese characters, or at least all the characters one is
likely to encounter in reading a text written within
the past two millennia or so, and excluding a few of direct
pictographic origin, are actually combinations of some 200
semantics and 4,000 phonetics. These numbers are large, but they
are not open-ended, and above all they are finite enough to make
the Chinese system manageable. It works because the phonetic
elements are syllabograms that comprise a sort of syllabary .It is,
to be sure, an outsized, haphazard, inefficient, and only partially
reliable syllabary. Nevertheless it works, as is apparent from the
examples given in figure 18.
Perhaps it will help to visualize the structure of Chinese
characters if we imagine a huge "Semantic-plus-Phonetic Matrix"
composed by listing the 214 semantics on the left and the 3,867
phonetics across the top. Of course not all semantics combine with
all phonetics, so that of the over 800,000 cells contained in our
matrix, only some 25,000 would be occupied by the derivatives that
Marshman selected for study from the Kang Xi dictionary. We can
also imagine a smaller matrix based on Soothill's classification of
4,300 of the more frequently used characters (approximately the
number needed for full literacy) under 895 phonetics, combined of
course with the usual 214 semantics. We extract from the imagined
overarching matrix a few examples (from DeFrancis ) of
cells filled by derivatives that are actually formed by combining
one of the 3,867 phonetics with one of the 214 semantics. The
numbering system follows that of what might be called the "Soothill
Syllabary" of 895 phonetics that is contained within the "Marshman
Syllabary" of 3,867 phonetics.
Phonetic 264
Phonetic 282
Phonetic 391
Phonetic 597
(cān)
(yāo)
(&o: 'proud')
(cān: 'good')
(jiǎo: 'lucky')
(f&: 'help')
(&o: 'shake')
(sh&n: 'sieze')
(nǎo: 'scratch')
(bǔ: 'catch')
(āo: 'barge')
(shēn: 'beam')
(n&o: 'oar')
(f&: 'trellis')
(&o: 'stream')
(sh&n: 'leak')
(jiāo: 'sprinkle')
(pǔ: 'creek')
As can be seen by reading across the rows, in many but not all
cases the semantic element on the left provides a sort of
thesaurus-like clue to the meaning of the items on
the right. All those to the right of no. 85, for example, have
something to do with water. The phonetics noted at the top of the
chart appear to give some clues to the pronunciation of the
characters of which they form a part. Although the clues vary in
the degree to which they suggest the pronunciation of the full
characters, overall they are far more specific than the semantic
Some phonetics are more productive of derivatives than others-
from as few as two or three to as many as almost two dozen. In
figure 18 the l& phonetic (no.511)
and the zhōng phonetic (no.784) both
occur as a component in 20 characters.
Yāo (no.391) and
m& (no.453) each has 22 derivatives.
The phonetics are more likely to be evident in less frequently used
characters, as attested by the fact that they enter into an average
of 6.5 characters in the Kang Xi list of 25,000 characters but only
about 5.0 in the Soothill selection of 4,300. The lower ratio in
the latter shows the effect of attrition in more frequently used
characters, where the original structure of the graphs has often
become so distorted as not to be readily recognizable.
Some semantics also occur more frequently than others in
compound characters. The "vegetation" semantic occurs in hundreds
of characters. The "step forward " semantic occurs in 17
derivatives, all but two or three of which are quite rare.
The illustration in the matrix of the way semantics and
phonetics combine to form new characters in Chinese can be used to
expand on the important difference between Sumerian and Chinese
mentioned earlier. If Chinese combined the two elements along the
same lines as Sumerian, the two characters for
&o 'proud' and
&o 'stream' might appear as on the
left below instead of as they actually do on the right:
亻敖
&o 'proud'
氵敖
&o 'stream'
The detachability of the semantic elements for
'person' and 'water' in the characters to the left would incline us
to view these characters rather differently from those on the
right. We would surely pay as much if not more attention to the
phonetic elements like &o than to
the determinatives and would view them all as separate entities. In
counting symbols we would therefore most likely say that the
virtually unabridged historical lexicon based on the Kang Xi
dictionary has 3867 + 214 = 4081 different symbols
instead of the astronomical 25,000 that we see in the more
closely-knit derived characters. Similarly, the abridged modern
selection presented by Soothill might be said to comprise 895 + 214
= 1109 different symbols instead of the 4,300 obtained by combining
semantics and phonetics.
Another point we have to consider is this: Just how useful are
these semantic and phonetic elements? The former, it is clear, can
at best suggest only a general semantic area. Thus we know that
characters containing semantic no.85 most likely have something to
do with water, and those containing semantic no.140 with
vegetation. In fact the so-called semantic in many characters does
not provide even this limited amount of information. They often
offer no real semantic information at all and merely serve to
differentiate one character from another, as do our spelling
distinctions in hair and hare.
There is a wide range in the usefulness of the phonetic
elements. We can distinguish four degrees of correspondence between
a phonetic and the derivative of which it forms part:
1. In some cases the phonetic tells us with 100 percent accuracy
the pronunciation, even as to tone, of the full character of which
it forms part. So phonetic no.74,
hu&ng (see figure 18), indicates
exactly the pronunciation of the 14 derivatives of which it forms
part. An example is one in which it combines with the semantic key
no.142, 'insect,' to form the first part of the two-syllable word
hu&ngch&ng 'locust':
derivative
2. Some phonetics indicate the pronunciation of the derivative
character except possibly for tone. Phonetic no.255,
mǎ, is such a phonetic in 10
derivatives. One example is the character for the word
mā 'mother,' in which, as already
noted, it represents the pronunciation with complete accuracy
except for tone:
derivative
3. Some phonetics indicate only part of the sounds which
comprise the syllable represented by the derivative. Usually it is
the final, the major component of a syllable, that is represented.
Thus phonetic no. 391, yāo, enters
into 22 derivatives variously read as y&o,
yǎo, jiǎo, jiāo, qiāo, qi&o, xiǎo,
xiāo, n&o, nǎo, n&o, r&o,
r&o, shāo. One example is the character for
jiāo 'to sprinkle' composed of this
phonetic and the 'water' determinative as its key:
derivative
4. Some so-called phonetics provide no useful phonetic clue.
This is sometimes due to the mistaken analysis and classification
of characters by dictionary makers, including Soothill, but perhaps
even more, as Ramsey reminds us (personal communication, 5/26/88),
to the extensive phonological changes that have taken place during
the long stretch of time over which the series was built. Sound
changes of various kinds have obscured some of the homophony or
near-homophony that once existed.
An example of a useless phonetic appears in the character
xi& 'below.' Its actual etymology,
as mentioned earlier, goes back to a simple indicative graph
consisting of a dot or dash below a horizontal line. The modern
character is mechanically analyzed by Soothill, whose popular and
convenient work I largely follow despite some points of
disagreement, as a derivative made up by combining key no.1 'one,'
under which it is customarily classified, and phonetic no.119
bǔ 'to divine':
derivative
Clearly bǔ is
completely useless as a phonetic for
A somewhat different group of characters in this category
consists of those which some specialists in Chinese, though not
ordinary readers, might be able to identify as having useful
phonetics. A case in point is the last character,
guān 'gate,' which Soothill places
under phonetic no.635
m&n (see figure 18). Specialists
like Karlgren () may be able to correct Soothill's
misplacement of this character under the phonetic
m&n by noting that it is a
derivative made up by combining elements which include key no.169
'door' and a rare phonetic (the bottom part of the character) which
had the early pronunciation kwan:
derivative
The potential utility of phonetics in this last
group of characters is not reflected in figure 18, which is mainly
limited to examples of the first three groups of characters.
There is ample evidence that while what we might call the
"spelling" of derived characters indicated by the phonetic element
is not a completely reliable guide to pronunciation, any more than
is the case with English spelling, nevertheless it is by no means
useless or unused. Readers of Chinese frequently guess at the
pronunciation of unknown characters by referring to the phonetic
component. Writers frequently make mistakes by writing wrong
characters that have the same or similar sounds as the intended
It is pertinent, therefore, to look a bit more closely at the
issue of phoneticity that was mentioned earlier in citing Y. R.
Chao's estimate that Chinese writing is 25 percent phonetic as
against 75 percent for English. Research done on this issue
indicates that if one has memorized the pronunciation of the 895
phonetic elements singled out by Soothill, it is possible in 66
percent of the cases to guess the pronunciation of any given
character one is likely to encounter in reading a modern text.
If we apply only those phonetics like the aforementioned
hu&ng, which reflect pronunciation
with complete accuracy, we have a 25 percent chance of guessing the
pronunciation of the characters in a given text. It is probably not
coincidental that this figure is identical with Chao's estimate.
His definition of phoneticity may well have been based only on such
cases, where a phonetic precisely matches the pronunciation
of a character of which it forms part, even
including the tone.
But symbols which represent accurately the phonemes of a
syllable other than the tones are also generally useful. This is
attested by the fact that much has been published in a variety of
Chinese scripts which do not indicate tones. One such is the
Latinxua or Latinization scheme in use before World War II
(DeFrancis 1950). Since the early 1950s newspapers, poetry,
fiction, and works on linguistics, history, and politics have been
published in a Cyrillic transcription of Dungan, a dialect of
Northwestern Mandarin. This dialect is spoken by some 36,000 people
in Soviet Central Asia descended from Muslim Chinese refugees who
fled persecution at the hands of the Manchus in the nineteenth
century (Isayev ; Rimsky-Korsakoff 0-413;
Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer ). If we add the 17 percent of
phonetics of this type, represented by the phonetic
mǎ, phoneticity increases to 42
Even phonetic elements of the yāo
type are useful since they give hints about the pronunciation of
part of a syllable, usually the final part, which is the most
distinctive part of the syllable. Hence they generally permit a
good guess at the pronunciation of a character in context. If we
add the 24 percent of phonetics of this type, phoneticity increases
to the figure of 66 percent mentioned above (DeFrancis
The 66 percent figure represents a conservative estimate of the
phoneticity of Chinese characters. Scholars with specialized
knowledge of Chinese historical phonology can often derive
additional phonetic information from the previously mentioned
fourth category, which I have dismissed as providing no useful
phonetic clues. This rejection is based on my estimate of utility
for the average, linguistically unsophisticated reader of Chinese
texts. More knowledgeable readers such as the specialized scholars
Bernhard Karlgren and William S.-Y. Wang are able to discern
corespondence between phonetic elements and full characters that is
not apparent to ordinary readers. They arrive at a somewhat
different classification of characters, primarily those in my
fourth category. Those of the xi&
'below' type they consider as not belonging to the SP catergory at
all. Some others, such as guān 'gate,'
are reclassified into my third category on the basis of a more
refined phonological analysis that is made possible by a more
sophisticated understanding of the history of a character and the
sounds attached to it. The net result of all this is that their
estimate of phoneticity (as defined by my first
three categories) rises to as high as 90 percent (Karlgren 1923:4;
Apart from the multielement (SP) graphs which contain phonetics
of the varying degrees of utility described, there are also
single-element graphs which themselves comprise phonetics. (Some
also function as keys. ) Here are a few examples of characters we
have already encountered:
'elephant'
The overall distribution of the various kinds
of characters can be roughly summarized as follows:
Kind of Character
single-element characters
multielement (SP) characters
completely useful phonetic
(represents all the phonemes of the derivative)
generally useful phonetic
(represents all the segmental phonemes, but perhaps not the
contextually useful phonetic
(represents most of segmental phonemes)
'sprinkle'
useless phonetic
(represents no significant phonemes)
The utility of the first three categories of phonetic elements
becomes even more apparent if we look at the phonetics not merely
in isolated graphs but also in characters as we normally encounter
them, which is, of course, in context. Even the
minimal environment provided by two-character expressions
illustrates this point, as in the following examples consisting of
several pairs of phonetics and their derivatives:
derivatives
分方
fēnfāng
芬芳
fēnfāng
兔厲
miǎnl&
勉勵
miǎnl&
山夭
shānyāo
訕笑
shānxi&o
士原
志愿
aspiration
亡生
w&ngshēng
忘性
forgetfulness
The wider contexts in which these words are
normally encountered will enable readers to handle the disparity in
pronunciation between phonetics and derivatives, just as readers of
this book will no doubt, either consciously or unconsciously,
correct the preceding misspelled word.
Chinese spelling as represented by its phonetic elements is
erratic, inefficient, and difficult to master. But the same has
been said about English spelling. Chinese writing deserves these
opprobrious labels even more than does English, but this should not
obscure the fact that phoneticity, deficient though it has become,
far surpasses iconicity, which actually approaches zero.
Yet this fact is indeed commonly overlooked by people who
mistakenly call Chinese "pictographic" or "ideographic." These
labels are popularly attached to Chinese characters by Western
writers. The Chinese themselves are also almost universally
convinced that theirs is a unique system that they call
biǎoy& 'semantic' or
'ideographic' writing. The writing system does contain some symbols
that might, very loosely, be so labeled, but a few, or even a few
hundred, such symbols do not make a system of writing. In actual
fact, there never has been, and never can be, a full system of
writing based on the pictographic or ideographic principle.
What then of the frequent designation, especially in academic
circles, of Chinese as a logographic or morphemic system of
writing? Other writing systems, such as Sumerian, are also
described by these terms, but Chinese is usually taken as the
example par excellence of this category of scripts. I think this
too is a serious error, and the error is compounded by sinologists
because they have been unduly influenced by the previously
mentioned difference between Chinese and Sumerian in the way they
handle semantic and phonetic determinatives. In contrast to
Sumerian writing, in which the determinatives are detachable from
the graphs they determine, Chinese writing welds these elements so
tightly together that the characters, surrounded as they are by
white space in their little square cubicles, are usually viewed as
unitary symbols, or at least as the basic unit in the writing
The error here will become clearer if we invoke the concepts of
grapheme and frame (or lexeme) that were discussed in the section
"The Forest of Family Trees" in chapter 2. The grapheme, as we
recall, is the indispensable meaningless unit that corresponds to
the smallest segment of speech represented in the writing system.
The frame is the dispensable meaningful unit that corresponds to
the smallest segment of writing conventionally receiving special
status, such as being surrounded by white space and listed in
dictionaries.
In English, the grapheme is a letter or combination of letters
corresponding to one of the approximately forty smallest units of
speech, the phonemes, that are represented in the writing system.
The frame is a word, the smallest unit of writing that is
conventionally surrounded by white space and listed in
dictionaries.
It is my contention that in Chinese the syllabic element P, such
as that in the overwhelmingly preponderant SP characters, must be
viewed as the grapheme, the indispensable phonetic unit without
which the system would not work. Whole characters are frames or
lexemes, secondary units that in a reformed system of writing could
be dispensed with entirely, along with the semantic element S. The
Chinese frame is a derivative, as is true also of the English
frame. Chinese writing, consisting as it does of derived
characters, can be called logographic (or morphemic) only if
English writing is also called logographic because it too consists
of derived frames, in this case called words. But by this standard
most, if not all, systems of writing must be called logographic,
which then becomes a vacuous term utterly lacking in any power to
differentiate systems of writing .
The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of
writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I
have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic
I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first
applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units.
Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they
represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except
for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent
sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more
widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and
morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters
taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the
structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention
to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two
elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic
pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which
hints at its meaning.
The aspect of the Chinese system of writing covered by this
second sense of the term often receives little if any attention.
This applies particularly to the phonetic grapheme. Its neglect
leads to widespread errors in viewing characters as either (1)
unitary symbols with no representation of sound, or (2) compound
symbols made up by combining semantic elements with no
representation of sound, or (3) compound symbols with phonetic
elements of so little importance that they can be disregarded.
Whereas English graphemes represent phonemes, Chinese graphemes
represent syllables, or better still, accepting Boodberg's
felicitous label, "syllabic phonemes" (Boodberg ). There
are in current Chinese some 1,277 syllabic phonemes counting tones,
about 400 not counting tones. For purposes of comparison, let us
say that, in round figures, there are 40 phonemes in English and
400 toneless and 1,300 tonal syllabic phonemes in
A sampling of the characters in a dictionary with about 4,800
entries indicates that 44 percent represent free words, 45 percent
are bound morphemes, like -er in English
11 percent are meaningless symbols that represent only sounds, like
the cor and al of English coral (DeFrancis
7). On the basis of these figures Chinese characters
are at best 44 percent logographic and 89 percent morphemic. But
the Chinese writing system is 100 percent syllabic since all
characters (except that for the suffix r) represent syllables,
either as single-element graphs which themselves comprise phonetics
or as multielement graphs which include phonetics of the varying
degrees of utility noted earlier. It is a mistake to take Chinese
frames, or lexemes, as the basis for defining a writing system,
just as it would be a mistake to call English logographic because
its frames are words. Yet the superficial approach of equating
Chinese characters with the Chinese writing system is often
adopted. People fail to look below the surface of the characters to
what makes the characters work and allows new ones to be generated
as needed.
It would be quite impossible to write Chinese exclusively with
logographic or morphemic frames not further divisible into
components that minimally include a phonetic grapheme. The number
of words, in the order of hundred of thousands if not more than a
million, is much too large.
The number of morphemes is harder to estimate. If we accept the
conventional view that Chinese characters represent morphemes,
which as noted above is approximately 89 percent true, then there
are at least 25,000 morphemes in the Kang Xi dictionary. An
incomplete study based on only 4,200 characters estimates the
number of morphemes at 5,000 in modern Mandarin. The author notes
that this figure includes only "frequently used morphemes" and
should be increased to 7,000 or 8,000, which even so excludes
polysyllabic morphemes, foreign loanwords, and personal and place
names (Yin Bin-yong 1984 and personal communication, 1/8/87).
Regardless of the precise figure, it is obviously very great, much
too large for a purely morphemic script.
On the other hand, it would be a relatively simple matter to
write Mandarin Chinese with a standardized syllabary of only 1,277
signs, which could be reduced to 398 if tones were separately
indicated. Figure 19 presents such a standardized syllabary based
largely on the Soothill Syllabary (DeFrancis 1984a). The
pronunciation of the characters is indicated by the Pinyin
transcription that was adopted in 1958 as the official way of
transcribing the characters.
Figure 19. Chinese Writing: A Simple Syllabary and Simpler
A standardized syllabary of 398 signs which with four additional
marks for tones would enable Chinese to be written with full
accuracy and relative ease in a way comparable to the Japanese use
of kana symbols. The Pinyin transcription of the 398 basic syllabic
signs combines an initial consonant (shown in the left-hand column)
with a final (shown in the top row) made up of one or more vowels
and an occasional ending in n or ng. Reprinted with
permission from John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and
Fantasy. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), p.
But instead of a relatively small number of syllabic graphemes,
Chinese has, according to the Marshman study cited earlier,
something like 4,000 such basic signs. It is partially
coincidental, but not completely unrelated, that the figure
approximates the picture of maximum syllabic complexity attributed
to a sixth-century dictionary which divides all the sounds of the
language into 3,877 groups (Kennedy ). Actually this
figure is suspect, and it is unlikely that Chinese ever had this
many syllables. Boodberg makes the startling suggestion that the
number of different syllables in the still earlier phase of
Chinese, which some scholars consider to have been phonologically
the most complex, was more limited than in modern Mandarin
(Boodberg ).
Regardless of the precise number of syllables in Chinese in the
various periods of its evolution, it is clear that there have
always been many symbols for the same sound. Chinese writing never
underwent the reduction in number of symbols that characterized the
evolution of the cuneiform scripts. Indeed, the Chinese seem to
have almost a penchant for avoiding simplification and
standardization. This is seen also in the failure to make efficient
use of a syllable-telescoping technique that has some similarity
with that devised by the Sumerians.
The Chinese variation of this technique, which they call
fǎnqi& 'reverse-cutting,'
indicates the syllabic pronunciation of an unknown character C
through the intermediary of two presumably known characters A and B
by cutting off the final part of the syllable from A and removing
the initial in B. This is as if in English we indicated the
spelling of cat by telescoping cup and rat as
follows: c(up r)at.
With a stock of only about 40 A's and about 200 B's this could
have have been made into a fairly simple standardized system
capable of expressing all the syllables. But the Chinese never
standardized the system, and indeed selected characters, some of
them quite obscure, at random, as if we spelled cat
indiscriminantly as cup-rat, cowfat, coal-hat, cap-mat, and
so on. This failure resulted in the haphazard use of about 500 A's
and 1,200 B's. And sometimes the "reverse-cutting" was circular,
with C being explained by reverse-cutting A and B, and A by
reverse-cutting C and B (Kennedy 6-147).
But the shortcomings of the Chinese "reverse-cutting" device,
which not surprisingly confused Gelb (Gelb ; DeFrancis
), are not particularly relevant, since little use was
made of it. Unlike the Sumerian technique, which played an
important role in that writing system, the Chinese variation did
not form part of the writing system itself but was confined to
lexicographic use. Modern dictionaries have now abandoned this
inefficient way of indicating the pronunciation of characters in
favor of newer techniques closer to the alphabetic principle.
Traditional Chinese writing never attained even the limited
degree of simplification that marked the evolution of cuneiform
writing. Throughout its history the actual sound-to-symbol
relationship in Chinese has approximated on the syllabic level the
much-maligned situation in English on the phonemic level. In
contrast to the one-to-one relationship, where there is close
correspondence between sound and symbol, both writing systems are
characterized by a highly complex many-to-many relationship. Thus
English spells the same sound o in at least ten different
ways: so, sow, sew, oh, owe, dough, doe, beau, soak, soul.
It uses the same letter o to represent at least 8 different
sounds in so, to, on, honey, horse, woman, borough
(DeFrancis ). The situation is the same, on the syllabic
level, in Chinese. Here some syllables are represented by many
different symbols, which may be either whole characters or the
phonetic components in more complex characters of the SP type. And
some symbols have several different pronunciations.
The poor fit between sound and symbol in both English and
Chinese should not obscure the key fact that both are based on
phonetic principles, with the 40 phonemes of English being
represented by various alphabetic spellings, and the syllables of
Mandarin Chinese being represented by various syllabic spellings.
The number of different spellings for the 40 English phonemes has
been variously estimated at 600 (Zachrisson 1931:4), 1,120-1,768
(Nyikos 1988; see 298 below), and 2,000 (Alisjahbana ;
Daniels 1985:34). The ratio between syllabic spellings and syllabic
phonemes in Chinese is much smaller, but the greater complexity of
its graphic symbols makes for a system the cumbersomeness of which
considerably surpasses that of English and perhaps of all other
systems ever created.
It hasn't needed to be so. As noted earlier, it would be
possible to write Mandarin Chinese quite simply and accurately with
only 1,300 different signs. It would be possible to manage with
only 400 symbols if tones are separately indicated, or not
indicated at all. But writing with a simple phonetic script,
whether syllabic or alphabetic, would be impossible without the
adoption of a further feature that has characterized Chinese
written in an alphabetic script. This is a literary style that is
more closely based on actual speech.
Over the past hundred years there has been a long-running debate
regarding the Chinese literary style and the Chinese character
system of writing. Proponents of reform are urging a more
colloquial style of writing and the extended use of the simple
romanization system called Pinyin, not as a replacement for the
characters, but as part of a policy of digraphia, that is, the use
of two more or less equal systems of writing, each to be used in
the areas for which it is best suited, such as Pinyin for
computers, characters for historical research (DeFrancis 1984a,
1984b). The promulgation in July 1988 of rules for Pinyin
orthography, that is, rules for such things as punctuation and use
of blank space, hyphens, and closed juncture between syllables, is
expected by Chinese reformers to help create digraphic literates
who would extend the use of Pinyin from a mere tool for annotating
characters to an auxiliary system for writing the language.
However, reformers seeking to speed China's modernization by
modernizing the writing system through a policy of digraphia have
to contend not only with the natural attachment of Chinese to their
familiar script but also with chauvinistic and mindless claims for
its superiority. For years the official People's Daily has
promoted a cabal of conservative dabblers in the area of writing,
headed by a wealthy returned expatriate, as part of a campaign
attacking the reformers and extolling the traditional characters.
The intellectual level of the campaign is indicated by an item,
carried in China Daily (11/15/1984) under the headline
"Characters 'easier than ABC to read'," which retailed the
preposterous claim of an establishment psycholinguist that
"children aged 2 to 4 can easily learn 3,000 characters." China's
writing reformers and forward-looking educators, in their uphill
battle against such drivel, are beleaguered in an atmosphere of
intimidation and quackery reminiscent of the intellectual climate
in the Stalinist period that earned Soviet linguistics and
genetics, long dominated respectively by N. Y. Marr and T. D.
Lysenko, the contempt of scholars throughout the world. In contrast
to countries like Turkey (Heyd 1954; Bazin 1983), North Korea
(Blank 1981), and Viet Nam (DeFrancis 1977), where writing systems
and writing styles were reformed in a matter of a few years or a
few decades, it appears that controversy over basic problems of
writing is likely to drag on indefinitely in China.
to note briefly how
phoneticity in Japanese and Korean compares with that in
Chinese. There will naturally be differences, because, when the
Japanese and Koreans borrowed Chinese characters, their
pronunciations of the characters resulted in the so-called
Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean variations from the original. For
example, two characters pronounced
shāo and
shēng in Chinese both became
shō in Sino-Japanese.
Horodeck (1987:23) summarizes the results of studies of the
utility of the phonetics in 1,240 different Sino-Japanese readings
or pronunciations of characters as follows: " Almost 58% of these
readings can be predicted with 100% accuracy from the pronunciation
of the phonetic contained in the kanji. Another 27.7% can be
predicted with 50% or more accuracy."
In the case of Korean, a study developed for pedagogical
purposes by Alloco (1972) found that about 400 phonetics predict
with 100 percent accuracy the pronunciation of half of a small
dictionary's 2,200 characters. (This is almost twice the number in
general use today.)
The foregoing figures are, of course, not directly comparable
with mine, since the characters studied and the methodologies
employed are not identical. Nevertheless, they show incontestibly
that the phonetics in the characters borrowed by the Japanese and
Koreans also have predictive value in their writing systems.
why I do not base my analysis
on the more scholarly work of Karlgren, such as his Grammata
Serica (1940), a standard tool for the study of Chinese
characters. The Soothill material, less scholarly though it is,
is nevertheless arranged in a way that makes it relatively easy
to handle with the aim of arriving at statistical results such
as those which I have presented. To do the same with the
Karlgren material would require far more effort, perhaps by a
crew of researchers operating with a good-sized budget. I would
heartily endorse an attempt to improve on my analysis along
these lines, especially since I am convinced that such an
attempt would reveal an even greater phonetic aspect in Chinese
writing than I have been able to document.
published in China,
on which figure 19 is based, usually present 398 nontonal
syllables. It may be of interest to note how they are
constructed. If we let capital V stand for a vowel nucleus and
small v for an on-glide or off-glide, the vowel content of the
syllables can be summarized as follows:
The following table, in which bold-face V stands for any
of these vowel types, illustrates the kinds of Chinese syllables
and notes the number in each category and the percentage of
syllables ending in vowels or in consonants:
(e.g., a, ya&ia, ao, yao&iao)
56 percent
(e.g., la, lia, lao, liao)
(e.g., an, yan&ian)
44 percent
(e.g., lan, lian)
The proportion of syllables ending in consonants was probably
considerably greater in earlier stages of Chinese, when there was a
richer inventory of final consonants. The same is true today of
Cantonese and other varieties of speech subsumed under the umbrella
term "Chinese." The number and complexity of syllables in Chinese
is now and has been in the past less than in English, but greater
than in Sumerian.