Languages In the World (19 page)

With respect to the first lesson to be learned from the discussion of the Egyptian script, the development of logograms (hanzi, that is, ‘Han character') in China is parallel to the Egyptian case in that written Chinese emerged through the rebus process and advanced through the stylization of the earliest logograms. In the days before writing in China when a person of rank or importance who had been banished was forgiven, that person would receive a ring as an invitation to return. The word
huan
²
meant ‘closed ring' as well as ‘to come back.' Still today, the logogram
– evidently the picture of a closed ring and now pronounced
hui
²
– means ‘to come back.' This symbolism could only arise because of the phonetic identity of the two words. At first, writing consisted only of ideograms, which indicated the sense, but not the sound, of the word concerned. Over time, the ideograms gave way to logograms based on the rebus, or punning, principle. At some point, a series of semantic markers was developed to sort out the amount of punning that can be done with those logograms, especially in a tone language like Chinese, and these new types of logograms were created in abundance in the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 221 CE). The well-known case of the word
ma
illustrates how semantic markers operate. The logogram for
ma
³
‘horse' is
馬
, and perhaps you can just make out the stylized image of a horse running. The logogram for
ma
¹
‘mother' is
女馬
. The basic phonetic information is indicated with the sign for ‘horse,' and the semantic marker, or
radical
, that precedes it, namely
女
, is the sign for ‘woman.' The logogram for
ma
⁴
‘scold' is
口馬
. Again, you see the sign for ‘horse,' which gives the phonetic information, and now it is preceded by the radical
口
, which is the sign for ‘mouth.'

This phonetic–semantic process can be further understood through a hypothetical example from English: the syllable pronounced [ai] could represent the word
eye
,
I
, or
aye
. Now, imagine a word-picture for an eye that looks something like
and stabilizes as a logogram. In order to disambiguate which [ai] is at stake, the logogram with no radical is to be read ‘eye.' The logogram
亻
means ‘I,' here borrowing the radical
亻
from the logogram
人
‘person,' while
口
means ‘aye,' since it contains the mouth radical. The logographic writing system in China today has several hundred semantic markers. These markers are a part of the logogram whose purpose is to disambiguate meaning.

Again, like the Egyptian case, the earliest pictograms, which developed into logograms in Chinese, were attempts to represent things, actions, or concepts by recognizable pictures. Some pictures are still recognizable today:
木
‘tree' shows the branches above and roots below;
門
‘gate, door' depicts two leaves of a door;
心
‘heart' is seen in terms of its muscles;
手
‘hand' shows a forearm with five fingers;
田
‘field' is seen from above divided into parcel;
言
‘word, to speak' shows a mouth with breath coming out; the logogram
貝
is for ‘treasure, wealth' and depicts a cowrie shell. Some of the early logograms took on abstract meanings such as
中
depicting a target with an arrow to mean ‘middle.' It is the symbol of China still today, since China was historically considered The Middle Kingdom. Over time, however, the logograms became stylized, and the visual association was broken. The logogram for ‘woman' is
女
, as we
have just seen, and derives from the picture of a woman seated cross-legged. In the case of Chinese, not all stylizations led to more simplicity. In fact, many logograms in traditional Chinese writing are very complex and require many brush strokes. In the 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered the simplification of the script in order to increase literacy. The logogram for ‘horse' in simplified script now has four brush strokes:
马
, instead of the 10 of
馬
.
⁹
We will return to the topic of literacy later on in the chapter.

The evolution of writing materials is a story in itself. The earliest Chinese writing was done on stone, metal, wood, bone, and bamboo. A revolution in writing technique occurred in the second century BCE with the invention of the bristle brush and a soft writing material made from silk waste. In the first century CE, it was discovered that a cheaper writing material composed of bark, hemp, rags, and plant fibers could be made, and this was the first paper in the world. This product was introduced in the Near East in the eighth century but did not make it to Europe until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when paper arrived in Spain and Sicily as an import. Thereafter, Europeans set up their own paper mills, and thus there was a ready supply of a smooth plane surface ideal for mass reproductions of texts and pictures, just in time for the upsurge of print capitalism in the eighteenth century. A further innovation in paper manufacturing occurred in the nineteenth century when a very inexpensive form of paper began to be made of wood pulp, which gave rise to the expression
pulp fiction
referring to the dime novels printed on this cheap paper. Today, of course, the goal of most classrooms and offices is to go paperless. Our most recent and most important writing material is electricity.

The discussion of the Egyptian script also shows how the phonological and grammatical characteristics of the languages being phoneticized affect the production and development of the writing system. Chinese is monosyllabic. It furthermore has very little inflectional morphology.
¹⁰
The example of ‘horse,' above, furthermore shows how changes in the tone of a syllable changes meaning, the syllables thus lending themselves to plentiful punning. The logographic system is one that has proved useful for transcribing a monosyllabic tone language such as Chinese. It has certainly been enduring.

Abjad used to be called consonant writing, and we have already seen an example of the earliest type of this writing in the ancient Egyptian script, which produced 24 consonant signs but no vowel signs. The term
abjad
may come from the first four letters found in all Semitic languages a-b-ğ-d, and it is an apt name for the writing system of a Semitic language such as Modern Standard Arabic, where the consonants and vowel length are indicated, leaving the reader to supply the short vowels based on what makes sense in context. The earliest manuscripts of the Qur'ān lacked vowels, as did Biblical Hebrew. In Modern Hebrew, the trend is to indicate the vowels.

The term
alphabet
comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, appropriately so, since it was the Greeks who first brought a fully alphabetic script into being. Not
only does the Greek alphabet have offshoots in the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, which have provided scripts for the whole of Europe and now parts of the rest of the world, but also it has served as the model for other scripts developed for non-European languages, both of Indo-European origin and not.

The need to have letters for vowel sounds has everything to do with the phonological structure of Indo-European languages, which have, in comparison with Semitic languages, large numbers of consonant clusters and therefore large numbers of syllabic possibilities. Words and then sentences lacking vowels are intolerably ambiguous for speakers – that is, readers – of Indo-European languages, s ths cls ndcts (‘as this clause indicates'). Around the eleventh to tenth centuries BCE, through trade in the Mediterranean, the Greeks probably first encountered the script of the Phoenicians inherited from the Egyptians and began to develop it for their own use, with the earliest extant inscriptions in Greek dating from the end of the eighth century BCE. Because Greek, an Indo-European language, and Phoenician, a Semitic language, are unrelated, the Greeks were able to easily shift the phonetic values of some of the Phoenician letters to serve as Greek vowels. On the whole, however, the order of the letters of the Greek alphabet closely follows the order of the Phoenician consonants, and the letter names are also similar.

What is interesting to consider is the direction of the writing and the letters. The first letter of the Old Phoenician script is ‘lef' or ‘ox head' stylized as α ‘alpha' in Greek. In the Roman alphabet, this first letter rotated 90 degrees to the right to become ‘A.' Semitic languages have stabilized writing in a right-to-left direction, while Western languages have stabilized writing in a left-to-right direction. However, the earliest writing did not have a set direction, and the ancient Greeks even developed a bi-directional type of writing known as
boustrophedon
, from the Greek ‘as the ox ploughs.' In other words, one line would be written right-to-left and the next left-to-right, causing the inscriber to flip the direction of the letters. This kind of writing was common on stone. From these variations in direction have come the differing orientations of the letters in the Greek and Roman alphabets.

The type of material used to write upon also affects how the script looks. The script known as Devanāgari, used to write both Indo-European and Dravidian languages in South Asia, was described as curly cued, above. The curls of the letters were developed because the script was originally written on palm leaves, and the lines of the writing needed to adapt to the challenge of writing on curves. The Germanic runes, also mentioned above, have a contrasting and markedly angular style, one avoiding all curves. Because runes were probably written on wood, their shape was determined by the need to avoid splitting the wood, which any curve or horizontal stroke might have done. Given the impermanence of wood, most runes have survived as stone inscriptions, and they are found throughout all Germanic countries. They were written in a left-to-right direction and likely predate the fourth century CE.