The Myth

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The Myth of Chinese Characters
CHINESE STUDIES THROUGH LECTURES
The Myth of Chinese Characters
Dr. Zheng-sheng Zhang Department of Linguistics
Oriental Languages SDSU
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The Myth

• In Chinese script
• Characters?meanings
• In other writing systems
• Letters ?sounds?meanings

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That is to say

• Chinese characters are
• either pictographs
• or ideographs

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Why the Myth?

• Chinese writing did start with
• Pictographs/ideographs
• There are still examples of both

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A More Systematic Look

• Are all characters picto/ideographs?
• What other types are there?
• What is the MOST common type?

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Type 1 Pictographs (??)
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Type 2 Simple Indicative (??)

• ? ? ?
• ? ? ?
• ? ?

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Type 3 Compound Indicative (??)

• ? ? ?
• ? ? ?
• ? ? ?
• ? ? ?

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But how to represent 10,000?
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The Rebus principle!

• I can see you

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Chinese Rebus Phonetic Loans (??)

• ? wàn scorpion
• wàn 10000
• ? scorpion /10000

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Chinese Rebus Phonetic Loans

• ? lái wheat
• lái come
• ? wheat/come

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Type 4Signific-Phonetic Compound (??)

• Step 1 phonetic loan (? , ? )
• Step 2 add signific to differentiate homophones
• Ex. ? wàn name of a river (water signific
  added)
• Ex. ? lái name of a mount (mountain signific
  added)
• Original meanings of ? and ? irrelevant

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Types of characters summary

• Wholly Meaning-Based 3 types
• Pictographs (?????)
• Simple indicative (???)
• Complex indicative (?,?)
• Partially Sound-Based 1 type
• Signific-phonetic compounds (???)

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What is the most common type?
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In Signific-Phonetic compounds, which part is
more important?
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• The mutilation test
• ?? qingtíng dragonfly
• delete phonetic ???
• delete signific ??? Qingtíng
• ?? guma fathers sister
• delete phonetic ???
• delete signific ??? guma
• ?? bèijing background
• delete phonetic ???
• delete signific ??? beijing

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So What do Significs Do?

• Revealing material culture and beliefs
• ? (peddle has shell radical shell was once
  currency)
• ? (thin has sickness radical to be thin is
  sick)
• Differentiating homophones????(lái)
• Though important for other reasons, not really
  necessary for representing speech

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More Evidence of the Greater importance of
Phonetics

• Modern day rebusing (phonetic loans)
• Rebusing easy way out of a closed system (cant
  add characters easily)

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Rebusing (I) Homophone errors (??/??)

• Ex ?/?/? de ?/? zài
• Easy to make, hard to catch
• Why do they arise? Desire for WYWWYS
• Can you tell homophones apart in speech?

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Rebusing (II) Popular Characters (??)

• A possible hand-written version for a common dish
  
• ????? chives fried with eggs

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Rebusing (III) Dialect words (Cantonese)

• There are words without characters
• borrow existing characters for sound only
• ?? (side-path) where
• ?? (but-home) now
• ?? (same-bury) and
• Or with minimal addition ??????

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Rebusing (IV) Foreign Words

• borrow existing characters for sound only
• ?? (Bashì bus)
• ?? (Madá motor)
• ?? (Bùshí Bush)
• Some with minimal addition
• ????? Jiasha ?Kasaya monks robe

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Why Phonetic Preference Simple Economy

• Fewer symbols needed for phonetic system
• How many characters needed to represent Mandarin
  sounds 1100
• Fewer than non-phonetic systems

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If Chinese characters are mostly phonetic, why
are some phonetic not consistently pronounced
Discrepancies results of sound changes
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If characters are phonetic, why are theremore
than 1100?

• Existence of non-phonetic characters
• Multiple graphs for same character ?, ?
• Phonetic representation not one-to-one
• same sound, more than one phonetic
• jing ?, ?, ?, ?, ?
• same phonetic more than one sounds
• ? qing (?) jing (?) qian (?)

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How Phonetic is Ingloti Spelling?

• Why English can be written as Ingloti
• ing more accurate than eng
• ghoti can be used to write fish (Bernard Shaw)
• Same sound, different letter(s)
• imeat, meet, mete
• ff, ph, gh
• Same letter, different sounds
• cat, cake, caught
• cake city

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How does this help us?

• Pay more attention to sound clues
• Use sound clues to guess pronunciation
• Use sound clues to help character recall
• Use sound clues to ease dictionary lookup
• Beware of homophones with same sound clue
  ?????????????

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For more information

• DeFrancis. 1984. The Chinese Language Fact and
  Fantasy. Honolulu U. of Hawaii Press.
• DeFrancis. 1989. Visible Speech The Diverse
  Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu U. of
  Hawaii Press.
• Unger. 2004. Ideogram Chinese Characters and the
  Myth of Disembodied Meaning. Honolulu U. of
  Hawaii Press.
• Zhang, ZS. www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/chinese/
• aspect/Chinesefiles.html