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From pictograms to pinyin -
Chinese writing
UNESCO Courier, by Rinnie
Tang-Laoec, Pierre Colombel
The Chinese still use a form
of writing that originated
well over 3,000 years ago
A very old tradition
has it that writing consists
of more or less figurative
signs which represent beings
and objects or evoke natural
phenomena.
A popular legend
tells how Fu-Hsi, who
introduced laws to China and
is regarded as the mythical
inventor of Chinese writing,
drew inspiration from the
claw marks left by birds in
the snow.
A more sophisticated
version of the same
legend is to be found in a
text dating from the T'ang
dynasty (618-907) in which
the author recounts that Fu-Hsi
had four eyes so that he
could watch the earth and
sky simultaneously.
Observation of the Kui
constellation in the sky and
of the marks of birds and
tortoises on the earth
inspired him to develop
writing.
From the early days of
Chinese writing,
different types of signs
appeared and went on to
evolve and
become the "keys" to the
system. The basic
elements which lie at
the origin of this
script are iconic. The
most ancient known forms
are human figures
painted or engraved on
rock faces, for instance
in the rock art sites in
the Yinshan Mountains of
inner Mongolia. With the
passage of time, these
simple pictograms
gradually became more
stylized. From them
developed ideograms,
which are combinations
of two or three
pictographic signs
depicting actions, basic
ideas and more complex
notions. The notion of
light, for example, is a
combination of signs
depicting the sun and
the moon. |
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In modern writing,
characters developed out
of these pictograms are
few and far between, but
they constitute the
"radicals" or "keys"
forming the basis for
the classification of
characters in
dictionaries which was
to remain in use until
the creation in the
1950s of the pinyin
system for the phonetic
transcription of Chinese
characters into the
Roman alphabet.
The appearance of a
Chinese script enabling
texts to be written
dates back to the
transitional period
between the Hsia
(twenty-second to
eighteenth centuries
B.C.) and Shang
(eighteenth to eleventh
centuries B.C.)
dynasties. This was the
time when a hierarchy
became established in
Chinese society and the
power of the state was
solidly based.
Natural selection
Archaeological
discoveries have so
far enabled an inventory
to be compiled of some
4,000 characters
engraved on more than
10,000 pieces of
material - tortoise
shells and flat bones
that were used both for
divinatory purposes and
also to record events or
draw up inventories.
These ancient characters
retrace the genesis and
evolution of Chinese
writing. More than a
thousand of them have so
far been identified.
They are in a sense
"stenographic drawings"
which are schematized
and obey a strict rule:
a word and its
expression correspond to
each character.
In the Shang period,
this type of writing,
which was the outcome of
a long period during
which the characters had
changed, was already in
current use, but not all
the characters created
in this way were in fact
retained. Some which
were difficult to
communicate, had little
significance or were
hard to memorize, were
destined to disappear.
Others on the contrary
which more effectively
evoked specific concepts
and were more widely
accessible, became the
first elements of a
script used by a people
who shared the same
cultural background.
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Chinese writing thus
consisted originally of
simple, stylized forms
(pictograms) or
combinations of
pictograms which evoked
an action or a concept.
It might be said that,
at its birth, this
writing was created
independently of the
language and that the
equivalence which exists
today with the spoken
word is the outcome of a
long process of natural
evolution.
RINNIE TANG-LOAEC, of
France, was formerly an
ethnologist at the Musee
de l'Homme in Paris. She
is co-author (with Leo
Landsman) of Le
mouvement qui apaise, a
book about Chinese
boxing (Epi, Paris,
1984).
PIERRE COLOMBEL, a
French specialist in
cave paintings with his
country's National
Centre for Scientific
Research (CNRS), is
attached to the Musee de
l'Homme in Paris.
COPYRIGHT UNESCO & Gale Group |
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