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ОглавлениеAn Overview of the Chinese Writing System
Most people equate the Chinese writing system with Chinese characters. Characters are certainly the most prominent feature of written Chinese, but the Chinese writing system actually consists of a whole lot more. In addition to simplified characters, traditional characters, and unofficial but often encountered alternate characters, the Chinese writing system also includes the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet (as in X光 “X-ray,” B型肝炎 “Hepatitis B,” 卡拉OK “Karaoke,” and e世代 “digital generation”); the Pinyin romanization system (for computer entry or to indicate the pronunciations of rare characters); the Arabic numbers plus the Chinese symbol 〇; mathematical symbols such as +–× ÷ = and %; the Chinese currency sign ¥; the reduplication sign 々; punctuation; use of smaller characters for humility; and spacing conventions. Of course, as an educated reader and writer of English, you already know some of the preceding, so not everything will be new for you.
Chinese characters are variously termed “ideograms,” “ideographs,” “logographs,” or “graphs.” In this book, we shall simply call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters.” It’s important to keep in mind that, as is true of all languages, in Chinese speech is primary, the standard Chinese writing system of today essentially being a set of written symbols for recording Chinese speech; Chinese characters certainly do not, as claimed by some, constitute a “language-independent system of logical symbols.” It’s best to think of a Chinese character as standing for a meaningful syllable of a spoken word, a little as if in English we had one symbol for “auto,” another for “bio,” and yet another for “graph,” so that we could then put them together in different combinations like “autograph,” “biography,” and “autobiographer.”
ORIGIN OF THE CHARACTERS
Until quite recently, Chinese children were taught in school that the Chinese characters were the invention of one man, Cang Jie, an official in the court of the Yellow Emperor around 2600 BCE. According to one version of this legend, Cang Jie got the idea for characters from the tracks which he saw birds and other animals make in the ground. However, scholars today agree that Chinese characters are not the invention of any one person but are rather the cumulative product of many individuals over a long period of time. The characters are quite clearly pictographic in origin. The prototypes for the characters are simple drawings of animals and other natural objects which can be found etched on fragments of ancient pottery dating back to before 2000 BCE. Recently, there have been reports of thousands of pictorial symbols dating back even earlier that have been found carved on cliff faces in northwest China.
The earliest examples of fully developed Chinese writing we have today are the so-called 甲骨文 Jiăgŭwén or oracle bone inscriptions, dating from the late Shang Dynasty (ca. 1300 BCE). To divine the future for the Shang rulers, priests would hold ox collar bones and tortoise shells over a fire until they developed cracks and then interpret the meanings of the cracks, making predictions about weather, religion, politics, and war. The interpretations and predictions would then be recorded on the bones and shells in a few lines of text written in the characters of the day (see the photos on this page and page 15). Over 100,000 pieces of Jiăgŭwén are extant, containing over 3,000 different characters, roughly half of which can be read today.
The story of the discovery of the Jiăgŭwén is a colorful chapter in the history of Chinese paleography. The oracle bones, which had been discovered in the vicinity of Anyang, Henan, had for some time been regarded as “dragon bones” and had been sold and ground up for Chinese medicine in pharmacies in the Beijing area. In 1899, a scholar by the name of Wang Yirong, who was taking the dragon bones for malaria, examined the characters on the bones and started researching them with his friend Liu E. They concluded that the inscriptions on the bones were older than any other characters known at the time. Wang died the next year, but Liu published a book on his and Wang’s collection of bones in 1903, which made their discovery known to the world.
Both the forms of the characters and the total number of characters multiplied greatly during the succeeding Zhou Dynasty (11th century to 221 BCE), differing widely from place to place. The characters from this period, most extant specimens of which are inscribed on various kinds of bronze vessels, are collectively known as 大篆 Dàzhuàn or Great Seal Script.
In 221 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, unified the country and made mandatory throughout all of China the use of the Qin script. This script, known as 小篆 Xiăozhuàn or Small Seal Script, is ancestral to all later forms of Chinese writing and is still sometimes used today for ornamental purposes and in the making of seals. At about the same time as the official Xiăozhuàn script, there developed among the common people a much simplified form of Xiăozhuàn called 隶书 (隸書) Lìshū or Clerical Script, which was characterized by a straightening out of round strokes and a generally much less pictographic appearance. By the latter part of the Han Dynasty (ca. 200 CE), Lìshū had been further simplified into 楷书 (楷書) Kăishū or Standard Script, which has served ever since as the standard for both printed and carefully handwritten characters.
The table below summarizes the development of two characters from their Jiăgŭwén to their Kăishū forms (but keep in mind that it is of necessity somewhat simplified, and in actual practice there was not a neat and easily dissected progression—two or more types of characters typically coexisted in different locales for decades or even centuries):
STRUCTURE OF THE CHARACTERS
Every Chinese character is made up of from one to twenty or more separate strokes. The basic strokes are eight in number: diăn (丶), héng (一), shù (丨), piĕ (丿), nà (), tí (), gōu (亅), and zhé (). Some of the basic strokes have several variants, and there are also compound strokes consisting of combinations of the basic strokes. Don’t worry, you’ll learn all these strokes as you learn Chinese characters made up of them. In case you’re curious, the characters with the fewest strokes in the language are 一 yī “one” and 乙 yĭ “second of the ten Celestial Stems,” each of which is composed of only one stroke; while the most complex commonly written character is 鬱 yù “melancholy,” which consists of 29 strokes (in the simplified character system it has been simplified to 郁). Less common, fortunately for us, is 齉 nàng, an onomatopoeic word meaning “nasal twang” that has all of 36 strokes, whether in the traditional or the simplified character system!
According to Chinese tradition, the characters are divided based upon their structure into six types called 六书 (六書) Liùshū “Six Categories of Writing.” This system of categorization was first employed in a well-known Chinese etymological dictionary known as the 说文解字 (說文解字) Shuōwén Jiĕzì that was completed by a man named Xu Shen in 121 CE. The different categories of characters are as follows:
1. 象形字 Xiàngxíngzì “Pictographs.” These are more or less stylized drawings of objects in the real world such as elements of the universe, topographical features, flora, fauna, parts of the human body, tools, and architectural structures. Although in the development of the Chinese script, pictographs were the earliest type of character, they now make up only a small fraction of characters. Thus, it’s incorrect to consider modern Chinese writing as being primarily pictographic, or to refer to all characters as “pictographs.” Some examples of pictographs still in common use today are:
2. 指事字 Zhĭshìzì “Simple Ideographs.” Rather than being pictures of objects, like the pictographs, these are symbolic representations of abstract concepts such as number and position. The proportion of simple ideographs in written Chinese is even smaller than that of pictographs. Examples:
3. 会意字 (會意字) Huìyìzì “Compound Ideographs.” While simple ideographs are composed of a unified whole and are complete in themselves, compound ideographs rely for their meaning on the combination or interaction of the meanings of two or more separate parts, each of which can occur as an independent character. This category of characters, while more important than the simple ideographs, also accounts for only a small fraction of characters. Examples:
4. 假借字 Jiăjièzì “Borrowed Characters.” Although pictographs and ideographs could be devised for some words in the language, there were many other words which did not readily lend themselves to either of these two means of written representation. Frequently, when the Chinese ancients wanted to write something for which they knew no character, they would borrow another character which had the same or a similar sound. For example, in ancient China there were two different words both pronounced somewhat like English “lug”: one was the name for growing grain, which was written with the pictograph 來, and the other was the verb “to come,” which as yet had no character. Someone came up with the then novel idea of writing “to come” with the borrowed character 來 “grain.” Though the original meaning “grain” and the borrowed meaning “to come” coexisted for a period of time, eventually, in this particular case, “to come” won out, with the result that in modern Chinese that is the only possible meaning of the character. After phonetic-semantic compounds (see below), the borrowed characters constitute the second-largest category of characters. They also played an important role in the simplification of characters in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, along with the phonetic-semantic compounds, they help make the case that even in ancient times, Chinese characters were largely phonetic in nature. But though the context would often clarify the meaning of borrowed characters, sometimes there were ambiguities. The problem of avoiding ambiguities when borrowing characters for their sound gave rise to the next category of characters, which today accounts for the great majority of characters in the language.
5. 形声字 (形聲字) Xíngshēngzì “Phonetic-Semantic Compounds.” In trying to solve the problem of avoiding ambiguities, the ancient Chinese hit upon the idea of combining the sound-borrowing principle of the Jiăjièzì with the semantic principle of the first three categories of characters to create compound characters, one part of which— called the phonetic, often on the right side of a character—would indicate the sound; and the other part of which— called the semantic, often on the left side of a character—would indicate the meaning.
Take the common Chinese noun pronounced mā, meaning “mom” or “mother.” At some point in the past when this word did not yet have a character associated with it, some Chinese writer who wanted to write this word borrowed the character 馬 mă “horse” to represent the sound of mā (the two words are pronounced identically except for tone) but made a crucially important addition: he or she added to the left of 馬 the character 女 nǚ “woman” to indicate to the reader, first, that a word different from 馬 was meant; and, second, that the word had something to do with “woman.” And so was created the character 媽 mā “mom, mother.” Similarly, consider 螞 mă “ant,” which is made up of the same phonetic element plus the semantic element 虫 chóng “insect”; or the question particle 嗎 ma, composed of the same phonetic plus the semantic 口 kŏu “mouth,” which indicates that this is a word often used in speech.
Here are examples of several groups of phonetic-semantic compounds:
In the above examples, which were carefully chosen to illustrate the principle of Xíngshēngzì, there are fairly close correlations between the sound of the phonetic and the sound of the compound. Unfortunately, due to sound change and interdialectal borrowing over the course of many centuries, plus the fact that the “fit” for some phonetics was never exact to begin with but only approximate, many of the correlations have become obscured, so that the phonetic information contained in phonetic-semantic compounds today is often inexact.
The phonetics of Chinese characters are a little like different vowel and consonant combinations in English. In English, we have many regular sound-to-writing correspondences, like the combination “-ill” that is pronounced the same way in all words ending in “-ill,” for example, “pill,” “kill,” and “hill.” But we also have some irregular correspondences like “-ove” which can have several different pronunciations, for example, “shove,” “cove,” and “prove.” Chinese phonetics are typically like the irregular English correspondences, with one phonetic often representing two or three common pronunciations.
In groups of different characters sharing the same phonetic, the final is the most likely to be similar, the initial is the next most likely to be similar, and the tone is the least likely to be similar. Even when the initials or finals of different characters in a phonetic series are different, they are often still phonetically related, that is, they may all be labial sounds made with the lips like [b p f]; or they may all be sounds made with the velum in the back of the mouth like [g k h]; or they may all end in the same consonant like [-eng -ing].
As for the semantics in phonetic-semantic compounds, they can provide only a hint as to the meaning of the character, for example, “related to water” or “made of metal” or “type of fish.” Sometimes the semantic seems illogical, but that may be due to changes in culture and society since the system of semantics was first devised; for example, 枕 zhĕn “pillow” is written with the semantic 木 mù “wood,” but that is because formerly Chinese pillows were indeed made of wood. The semantic element of a Chinese character is in English more commonly referred to as the radical of the character, because Chinese dictionaries have traditionally been organized based on a sequence of 214 radicals, arranged in a set order from those with the least number of strokes to those with the most strokes. The radical of a character usually corresponds to its semantic, though there are some exceptions. While the system of phonetics and the system of semantics (or radicals) of Chinese characters are inexact and involve many inconsistencies, they can still be quite useful for guessing the pronunciations and meanings of unfamiliar characters, or for learning and remembering new ones. Native Chinese readers make use of them in their reading, and we’ll be exploiting them to their fullest potential in this book.
6. 转注 (轉注) Zhuănzhù “Mutually Explanatory Characters.” The sixth category of characters mentioned in the Shuōwén Jiĕzì is termed 转注 (轉注) Zhuănzhù. These involve pairs of words that are phonetically and semantically similar, where one word in each pair already had a character associated with it but the other did not. Subsequently, a character was created for the word without a character by modifying the existing character for the other word in the pair. Most Zhuănzhù characters are no longer in use, but one commonly cited example is the pair 老 lăo “old” and 考 kăo “deceased father.” Since the Zhuănzhù make up the smallest category in the Liùshū and since not even specialists are in agreement as to their exact nature, we shall not discuss this category in more detail here.
CURSIVE SCRIPT
In addition to the types of characters discussed above, which are the Kăishū standard printed or carefully handwritten forms of characters, there also exist cursive forms of characters. In the same way that when writing English by hand we normally connect letters (i.e., we don’t usually print little but instead write the word with connected strokes as little), Chinese writers also usually connect many of the strokes of characters when writing by hand.
Depending on a number of factors such as the formality of the occasion, the educational level of the writer and person written to, the personal preferences of the writer, and how much of a hurry the writer happens to be in, there will be wide variation in the degree of cursiveness of any particular piece of handwriting. Handwritten Chinese containing a moderate degree of cursiveness is quite common and is known as 连笔字 (連筆字) Liánbĭzì “Connected Characters” or 行书 (行書) Xíngshū “Running Script.” We’ll be introducing a small amount of slightly cursive handwriting later in this course. A more extreme degree of cursiveness is termed 草书 (草書) Căoshū “Grass Script” and is, fortunately for the foreign learner of the language, much less common than it used to be. Actually, it’s often difficult to determine exactly at what point Xíngshū ends and Căoshū begins. There is a well-known Chinese proverb that says 草书三天不认主 (草書三天不認主) Căoshū sāntiān bú rèn zhŭ “After three days, something written in Căoshū will not be recognizable even by the writer.” There is an even more divergent type of cursive script known as 狂草 Kuángcăo or “Crazy Grass” but, not to worry, we won’t be dealing with anything like that in this course!
Here are some examples of characters written in Xíngshū and Căoshū:
SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS
So as to increase literacy, the government of the People’s Republic of China began promoting the use of so-called 简 体字 (簡體字) jiăntĭzì or “simplified characters” by means of two official lists it promulgated in 1955 and 1964. By the term “simplified” was meant primarily a reduction in the number of strokes of characters, especially of high-frequency characters composed of a higher than average number of strokes. Actually, the history of character simplification in China is a long one, most of the characters on the two lists having been used informally for centuries, much as we in English have long used abbreviations like “nite” for “night” or “thru” for “through” in informal writing. In Chinese, the main difference from before is that, in mainland China and Singapore, the simplified characters have now been standardized and given official status.
There is no doubt that simplified characters, having a reduced number of strokes, can be handwritten more quickly than the traditional characters (though in the past most adult writers did their rapid writing in Xíngshū, which is even faster). However, precisely because of the reduction in strokes, the number of points of contrast among characters has been reduced, resulting in an increased number of similar-looking characters. Take the two expressions shèyŏu “has established” and méiyou “does not have.” Written in traditional characters (設有, 沒有), the distinction is clear; but written in simplified characters (设有, 没有), they are easily confused, especially when handwritten rapidly. Other examples of such simplified character look-alikes include 活话 (cf. traditional 活話), 向问 (cf. traditional 向問), and 刷剧 (cf. traditional 刷劇). It could be argued that character simplification has made writing easier, but has in some instances actually made reading harder (not to mention that most readers must now become familiar with two sets of characters).
Roughly half of the three thousand or so characters necessary for literacy in Chinese has been affected by the simplification process. Of the 288 characters introduced in Basic Written Chinese, a total of 197 are the same in their simplified and traditional forms, with only 91 being different—and a number of those involve very small differences that are hardly noticeable. Learning the distinctions between the simplified characters and the traditional characters is not as burdensome a task as it may at first seem, since in many cases the simplification of one character component—for example, that of the so-called “speech radical” from 言 to 讠—has affected dozens of characters that contain it.
The main methods by which characters were simplified include:
1. Simplified characters already in popular use were given official status. Examples:
2. Simpler forms that were originally the standard form of the character but which had later been replaced by more complex forms were reinstituted. Examples:
3. Simpler characters were borrowed to write more complex characters with the same pronunciation, according to the Jiăjiè principle of borrowed characters. While this occasionally creates ambiguities, the context usually makes the meaning clear. Examples:
4. Cursive forms of characters were regularized into Kăishū style. Examples:
5. Parts of characters were used to substitute for whole characters. Examples:
6. The redundant parts of characters were deleted or simplified. Examples:
7. Wide characters were made narrower, and long characters were made shorter. Examples:
8. New characters were constructed based on the Xíngshēng principle of phonetic-semantic compounds. Examples:
9. Common character components were replaced by simpler components. For example, the common but complex component 雚 was replaced by the much simpler component 又. Examples:
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CHINESE WRITING SYSTEM
In the PRC today, all mass media publications such as newspapers and magazines are printed exclusively in simplified characters. So are school textbooks from kindergarten through high school. Scholarly works and university textbooks, especially those dealing with ancient literature and history, are sometimes still printed in traditional characters. Street signs and handwritten materials, such as notes and letters, typically contain a mixture of some simplified and some traditional characters, depending on the age, educational level, and personal preference of the writer. In addition to the official simplified characters, there are also several hundred unofficial simplified characters commonly used in handwritten notes or on signs.
Interestingly, in recent years—even though the government discourages this—it has become fashionable in some parts of China to use traditional characters on the signs of hotels, restaurants, and shops. Professional people often have some traditional characters on their name cards. The reasons for this partial return of traditional characters include that they are considered more formal, more aesthetically pleasing, and more chic, since they are associated with the affluent Chinese societies of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Traditional characters are probably also considered more eye-catching, precisely since they differ from what is normally written. While educated mainland Chinese readers can read most texts printed in traditional characters, they often cannot write traditional characters.
In Taiwan the situation is more or less reversed. With few exceptions, only the traditional characters appear in print. However, as in pre-1949 China, many simplified characters are used in informal handwriting such as in notes, personal letters, and signs. In recent years, with the increased contact between Taiwan and mainland China through the exchange of letters, e-mails, television programming, and personal visits, many people in Taiwan have become familiar with the relatively few simplified characters that are post-1949 innovations. However, while educated Taiwanese typically can recognize most simplified characters, they may not be able to write them.
As for the other Chinese language-using societies, traditional characters are official and widely used in Hong Kong and Macao, but one increasingly sees simplified characters there also, in part due to the influence of the large numbers of visitors from the mainland. In Singapore, simplified characters are official, though it’s not uncommon to see traditional characters on store signs. In Malaysian Chinese communities, both simplified and traditional characters are in common use, as is the case in overseas Chinese communities in the rest of the world.
What we have, then, is a single language with multiple written standards—a rather common situation among the major languages of the world, and in essence not so very different from the different spellings and usages prevalent in the various English-speaking countries. The bottom line for you, as a learner of Chinese, is that if you wish to become proficient in reading all kinds of Chinese written today (even just Chinese written in mainland China), you’ll eventually need to be able to read both simplified and traditional characters. With time and practice, this is all very doable, and the materials you have in your hands right now are designed to help you do that as efficiently and easily as possible, since every lesson is presented first in simplified characters and then again in traditional characters (of course, you can also choose to study only one type of characters). Now, as regards writing, since most educated Chinese can recognize both forms of characters and since computer conversion of simplified to traditional or vice versa is easily accomplished, there is really no need for most learners to learn how to write both forms of characters. You’ll probably wish to learn how to write the type of characters used in the region where you plan to live or travel most frequently.
Finally, there is the question of the format of the characters. Traditionally, Chinese characters were written from top to bottom, right to left. Since the 1950s, it has become increasingly common to write Chinese according to the Western format, that is, horizontally, from left to right. This is now the standard format in the PRC, though in recent years the vertical style seems to have been making a limited comeback for writings on literary or cultural topics. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, the traditional vertical format is still common, though scientific and technical writings, informal handwritten notes and letters, and the subtitles of movies and television programs are now usually in horizontal style. The option of horizontal or vertical formats—and a third, rarer format with characters written horizontally but from right to left—adds a stylistic variety and versatility to Chinese that is absent from English and most other languages. Since both horizontal and vertical formats are commonly encountered everywhere that Chinese is used, this textbook includes texts in both formats.
What does the future hold in store for the Chinese writing system? That is not so easy to predict. There is no question that, if written as it is spoken, Chinese could be written in Pinyin. It’s possible that, someday, Pinyin might replace the characters, something that a number of Chinese intellectuals and political leaders have in the past advocated. The widespread use of computers for processing Chinese characters, for which most people input Pinyin and select the characters they want from their monitor screen, has already had a noticeable effect on the ability of native Chinese to handwrite characters from memory, as have newer communications technologies like e-mail and text messaging. Not only people’s ability to write characters has been affected, but also the content of the Chinese they write, which includes many neologisms, simplifications, and abbreviations, and reflects frequent mixing of characters with Pinyin and Roman letters.
On the other hand, Chinese society is, like our own, very conservative and the characters have been an intrinsic part of Chinese culture for thousands of years. Though characters have the disadvantages of being hard to learn and at times cumbersome to work with, they do have certain advantages, including flexibility of format (think of book titles), efficient use of space (one page of English in United Nations documents typically translates to about 3/5 of a page of Chinese), and the fact that one can skim or scan for a specific word or phrase faster in Chinese than in alphabetic languages (since characters tend to stand out more). It must also be acknowledged that the Chinese writing system has stood the test of time and proven to be eminently successful, since it is used today by more people than any other written language in history. The reality is that Chinese characters will be around for the forseeable future, so the only realistic approach for the non-native who wishes to learn Chinese reading and writing is to buckle down and learn them. Indeed, due to simplifications and standardization in the language, better reference tools, and improvements in technology, textbooks, and teaching methods, written Chinese is today easier to learn than ever before. In the next section, we’ll take up some practical suggestions for ways to help you learn it better.
