Taiwan 2001

		Language
		The Written Language The main unifying force of China's many diverse dialect groups and the link with the Classical Chinese 文言 language of the ancients has always been the written system comprising tens of thousands of ideographic characters. While speakers of different Chinese dialects may assign differing pronunciations to a given character, the meaningful content of the character is, for the most part, the same for all. This explains why a speaker of one dialect may not be able to understand what a speaker of another dialect says, but can still understand what that person writes. In theory, a well-educated Cantonese speaker and a well-educated Southern Fujianese speaker could both understand an article written by a Shanghainese speaker using Chinese characters in the virtually obsolete literary language; however, if the three people took turns reading the same article aloud, listeners would hear three completely different pronunciations. If the Shanghainese speaker wrote in the manner of contemporary speech, word usage differences among these three dialect groups might still preclude complete communication. In order to overcome this, modern written Chinese has evolved a standard modern vernacular 白話 (see section on the Written/Vernacular Split in this chapter). Thus, literate Chinese, no matter which dialect they speak natively, share the same writing system. Evolution of Chinese Writing The evolution and gradual institutionalization of the Chinese writing system can be traced back to the fifth and fourth millennium B.C. when the earliest extant ancestors of modern Chinese characters were painted or engraved on ancient clay potsherds. In comparison, the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphics and the earliest Sumerian cuneiform writings have been dated to the sixth millennium B.C. and 3100 or 3200 B.C., respectively. The potsherds were first unearthed in Banpo 半坡, Shaanxi Province, in the 1950s, and have already been partially deciphered. The numerals one through eight have been conclusively identified, and scholars believe that symbols identifying the artisan or owner of the pot were also inscribed on the pieces. Chinese characters have evolved over 6,000 years, from pictographic to abstract. Changes in the various styles were made to accommodate practical and aesthetic needs. Although most of the potsherd markings were only symbols and not true writing, they were significant in the development of Chinese writing. The later the period of the potsherds, the more the markings on them resembled the tortoise and oracle bone inscriptions soon to follow. The inscribed clay pots were almost certainly not the only materials of their time used for writing. In fact, writing on the clay pots was very limited in scope and somewhat incidental to the pots. It is extremely possible that wood, bamboo, and silk were already widely used as writing materials by this time; however, since these materials decompose relatively quickly, none have been found yet dating back to this early time period. Oracle Bone and Tortoise Shell Inscriptions During the Shang dynasty (1766-1122 B.C.), tortoise shells were used for divination. Questions about harvests, childbirth, health, hunting and war were inscribed on the bones and shells, and provide the earliest record of Chinese writing and ancient customs. Ox bones and tortoise shells inscribed with primitive Chinese characters were first discovered in 1899 in Xiaotun 小屯, Henan Province, at the site of a capital of the Shang dynasty (1766-1122 B.C.). Of the 2,000 or so different characters found on bones and tortoise shells, about 1,300 have been definitively deciphered. The bones and tortoise shells were used in making divinations for the king. For simplicity's sake, these inscribed bones and tortoise shells are now known collectively as oracle bones. Judging by the ancient inscriptions, an oracle would be consulted, for example, to predict whether or not it would rain on a certain day. The oracle would then inscribe on the bone or tortoise shell questions and possible answers, one set affirmative and the other negative. The inscribed bone or tortoise shell was then heated in a fire. The oracle would make his predictions based on the pattern of the cracks in the bone produced by the heat. The oracle inscriptions 甲骨文 were extremely limited in content, and many of the characters used were simplified since the materials used did not allow for elaborate flourishes. Characters often had several alternate forms, and could be written in reverse. Despite a certain lack of consistency, the oracle inscriptions reveal that a Chinese grammar and writing system with similarities to the modern one had already taken shape. Furthermore, a number of trends in the development of Chinese characters had emerged by the conclusion of the oracle inscription period: colored-in solids were replaced by lines; straight lines supplanted rounded ones; characters were gradually simplified, squared off, and standardized; and a set of stylized radicals (meaningful graphical classifying elements) was developed to be added to characters in order to distinguish among homophones. Bronze Inscriptions The next stage in the development of Chinese writing is represented by the inscriptions on bronzes which date back to at least the 15th century B.C. In the bronze inscriptions, meaningful pictures (radicals) began to be added onto characters borrowed purely for their sound. The addition of a radical to distinguish between two homophonous characters with different meanings is somewhat similar to having different spellings for homophones in English, such as two, to, and too. In Chinese, the addition of a radical suggests exactly which one of a series of homophones is being referred to. For example, if the intended object was a plant, the radical for "grass" or "wood" could be added. Since such characters give clues both to the meaning and pronunciation of a character, and reduced ambiguity to a minimum, they gradually came to comprise the largest category of Chinese characters. In modern Chinese, between 80 and 90 percent of all characters are phonetic ideographs. By the end of the Bronze Age, Chinese writing began its trend from monosyllabicity to polysyllabic compounds. Another notable feature of writings at the end of the Bronze Age is the increasing use of functional grammatical particles. Few such particles had been used or needed in the elliptical oracle inscription style. Types of Chinese Characters Almost a thousand years after the end of the Bronze Age, China's first lexicographer, Hsu Shen 許慎, completed his compilation of the Shuo-wen Etymological Dictionary 說文解字 in A.D. 121. In the work, Hsu Shen noted six types of Chinese characters: (1) pictographs 象形, such as 日 "sun" and 月 "moon"; (2) ideographs 指事, such as 上 "above" and 下 "below" (indicating points above and below a line); (3) compound ideographs 會意, such as 信 "believe" (made up of character components for "person" plus "speech"); (4) characters with both a phonetic and pictographic or ideographic element 形聲, such as 江 and 河 both meaning "river" (a phonetic element is added in each case to the radical indicating water); (5) characters borrowed to represent other homophones unrelated in meaning 假借, such as 而 "furthermore" or "however" (a borrowed character originally meaning "hair"); and (6) chuan-chu 轉注, which modern scholars have yet to exactly define. The pictograph category was the earliest to appear; Chinese writing, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics, originated with increasingly stylized drawings of concrete objects. It is natural that many of the characters used in this early form of Chinese writing were pictographs, along with some ideographs of more abstract notions, a more advanced phase of character development. Phonetic borrowings and phonetic ideographs were also used, to a lesser extent. The pictographic category reached a point of maturity and saturation with the oracle inscriptions; very few new pictographs appeared after this point, though simplifications and modifications in established pictographs were later made. Calligraphic Styles Before the tyrannical first emperor of the Chin dynasty 秦始皇 seized power in 221 B.C., various nation-states in China had begun to develop their own individual calligraphic styles. This ended with the unification of the written language during the Chin dynasty. The standard script of the Chin dynasty is referred to as the large seal script 大篆, suggesting its use in name chops. The Chin dynasty Prime Minister Li Szu 李斯 later developed the small seal script 小篆, based on a combination of the ancient and large seal script styles. The small seal style is characterized by thin, meticulously-rendered lines. The invention of the official script style 隸書 is attributed to the Chin dynasty prison warden Cheng Miao 程邈, but it would be more accurate to say that he simply organized and standardized a script that had already developed over a period of time. Although the official script was easier and faster to write, thereby speeding up the processing of official documents, the cursive script 草書 emerged as an even faster alternative some time later. The regular script 楷書 was developed in the second century A.D., based on the official script style. The regular script shed the wavy, thickened brush strokes of the earlier style and established a standard in the face of increasingly fanciful cursive scripts. It is the standard script used today. The invention of the running script 行書 is attributed to Liu Te-sheng 劉德昇 of the second century A.D. As the name suggests, running script is a flowing style that falls somewhere between the regular and cursive scripts. Simplified Versus Standard Characters In an effort to help alleviate widespread illiteracy in China, the Chinese communists have promoted the use of a simplified form of Chinese characters, based on a list of 515 characters issued in 1956 and 2,236 characters published in 1964. It is difficult to assess the pedagogical efficacy of the simplified characters 簡體字 in teaching, reading, and writing. However, use of the simplified characters has produced a new kind of cultural illiteracy: the inability to read materials written in standard characters 正體字. This has resulted in alienation of a people from their own literary tradition. An additional list of 200 simplified characters released in 1977 was later removed from use. People had begun inventing new simplified characters as they pleased, to the point where there was no longer a commonly observed standard. The traditional, standard forms of Chinese characters are the only ones in general use in the Taiwan area, thus providing everybody with full access to China's classics and other writings in standard script. The Written/Vernacular Split Into the second decade of the 20th century, most literate Chinese wrote in classical Chinese 文言, which was far removed from their vernacular tongue. In 1917, Hu Shih 胡適, a professor of philosophy at Peking University, led a group in launching a movement to promote a written vernacular 白話. The attempts to encourage a new vernacular literature became an important focus of the May Fourth movement 五四運動 of 1919 and went on to spark a revolution in Chinese writing. This has not meant the complete end of the classical Chinese language. Today, classical Chinese is still used for certain kinds of formal writing and survives in the spoken language in the form of proverbs, idioms, and occasional sentence patterns in much the way Latin graced learned English prior to World War II. Copyright (C) May 2001, Government Information Office.   All rights reserved.   Site design by L.F. Lee Best viewed with Netscape 4.x or IE 5.x (medium font) at 800 x 600 True Color (32 bit) resolution