Chinese script and the diversity

of writing systems*

GEOFFREY SAMPSON

Abstract

DeFrancis (1989) claims that all writing systems are similar in being
phonetically based. Chinese script, commonly cited as an exception, is
according to DeFrancis essentially a syllabic phonographic system. The
present article argues that this claim confuses diachrony with synchrony.
It may be correct that the creation of a script always involves phonetic
considerations, but subsequent evolution of script and spoken language can
remove the phonetic basis of a writing system. It is difficult to agree that
modern Chinese writing is essentially phonetically based; and it is certain
that phonetic motivation is not a necessary feature for a script.

1. Introduction

John DeFrancis (1989) has argued at length that all writing systems used
now or in the past are essentially similar in being based on a phonetic
principle; and, in particular, that the Chinese script does not represent a
fundamentally different type of system from scripts generally recognized
as phonetically based. DeFrancis's argument has been widely reviewed
and discussed not only by Sinologists but by many commentators on the
comparative study of scripts and on the psychology of literacy, and to
date the clear consensus is that DeFrancis has successfully made his case
for the universality of a phonetic principle in writing systems: see for
instance Krippes (1990), Wrenn (1990), Daniels (1991: 838), Tzeng
(1991), Burling (1992: 423), Carello et al. (1992: 212), Coulmas (1992:
254), Coe (1992: 31, 292), Liberman (1992: 168-169), Mattingly (1992:
18). King (1991), while disagreeing with DeFrancis on certain specific
issues, accepts that "it would be unsurprising if DeF[rancis]'s thesis
proved to be correct."
DeFrancis constructs his argument largely by taking issue with various

Linguistics 32 (1994), 117-132 0024-3949/94/0031-0117

© Walter
Brought to you de Gruyter
by | Universität Osnabrück
Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
118 Geoffrey Sampson

points made in Sampson (1985).11 am puzzled to know why DeFrancis

attacks my exposition so vigorously, since it seems that on the issues that
concern him most deeply DeFrancis and I are explicitly arguing on the
same side. Both DeFrancis and I have independently taken pains to rebut
the idea, which continues to be put forward periodically by various
writers, that Chinese script is a primitive or intrinsically inferior vehicle
for intellectual communication by comparison with alphabetic European
writing (see e.g. DeFrancis 1989: 221, 244-245; Sampson 1985: 160-165;
Sampson 1991). And both of us have stressed that "Chinese characters
represent words (or better morphemes) not ideas," as DeFrancis put it
(1984: 145): compare Sampson (1985: 149). Nevertheless, I believe that
there are real and linguistically interesting typological differences between
scripts which DeFrancis blurs, and that the consensus identified in the
previous paragraph is misguided.
Sampson (1985: 32) drew a (by no means original) set of distinctions
among scripts or script-like systems, between what I called SEMASIO
GRAPHIC and GLOTTOGRAPHIC systems (the former relating visible marks
to meaning directly without reference to any specific spoken language,
the latter using visible marks to represent forms of a spoken language),
and, among glottographic systems, between LOGOGRAPHIC and PHONO-
GRAPHIC systems (the former representing a spoken language by assigning
distinctive visible marks to linguistic elements of Andre Martinet's "first
articulation" [Martinet 1949], that is, morphemes or words, the latter
achieving the same goal by assigning marks to elements of the "second
articulation," for example phonemes, syllables). These are ideal types,
and it is likely that actual, complex writing systems will commonly display
at least some characteristics of more than one type. Nevertheless I believe
that many scripts can appropriately be viewed as predominantly exempli-
fying one rather than another type, and I do believe that modern Chinese
script is a fairly good example of logographic writing, whereas the written
forms of many European languages are fairly good examples of phono-
graphic writing (though written English is too mixed to be described
confidently as clearly phonographic or clearly logographic).
DeFrancis, by contrast, argues as follows:
i. There is no such thing as semasiographic writing — the examples
often quoted of direct visual representation of ideas, such as the American
Indian pictorial messages discussed for example by Gelb (1963: chapter
2), are primitive, limited affairs which do not deserve even to be regarded
as forerunners of full-scale writing systems. Any full-scale script capable
(as a spoken language is capable) of expressing whatever can be thought
must necessarily do so by representing the elements of a particular spoken
language; "... all forms of partial writing [by which DeFrancis refers to

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
 Chinese script 119

semasiographic writing], other than ... specifically speech-related exam-

ples, ... do not properly belong in a discussion of writing at all"
(DeFrancis 1989: 57).
ii. A fortiori, Chinese script is not semasiographic.
iii. Any script which represents a spoken language does so chiefly by
symbolizing phonetic units of that language, in other words there is no
such thing as logographic writing; "the heart of all writing systems is its
[sic] phonetic base" (DeFrancis 1989: 56).
iv. A fortiori, Chinese script is not logographic. It is essentially a
syllabic phonographic script, though one of a rather elaborate, irregular
kind: "Chinese and other so-called logo-syllabic scripts are not a separate
type but a subcategory of syllabic" (DeFrancis 1989: 253).
To my mind, (i) is largely a matter of definition; (ii) is true; (iii) is
false; (iv) unavoidably involves an element of subjective judgment, but if
it cannot definitively be regarded as false it is at least a surprising way
to think about Chinese writing.

2. Semasiography

It is indisputable that there exist systems of communication by visible

marks which are independent of any particular spoken language. One
example is the road sign system, which, for instance, uses the contrast
between circular and triangular shape to distinguish command from
warning, and displays a red and black car side by side to signal "No
overtaking." Some of these signs (such as the one just cited) are partly
iconic, others (e.g. the white horizontal bar on a red disc for "No entry")
are wholly arbitrary, but almost all of them are entirely independent of
spoken language. It makes no sense to ask whether the first sign cited
should be read as "No overtaking" or as "Overtaking is forbidden," or
whether it should be read as an English or as a German phrase.
I agree with DeFrancis that no semasiographic script ever used in
practice has approached the degree of generality and flexibility possessed
by all spoken languages. Each such system has been limited to expressing
messages relating to some narrow, limited domain, such as traffic disci-
pline. Whether this makes semasiography so different from glottography
that the word "writing" is inapplicable to the former, or whether rather
one should call existing semasiographic systems "writing" of an unusual,
limited type, is purely a question of how one chooses to use the word
"writing" and as such, surely, is not worth many moments' discussion.2
In Sampson (1985: 30-32) I speculated about whether there might
ever be a semasiographic system comparable in expressive power to a

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
120 Geoffrey Sampson

spoken language. I gave reasons for thinking that in practice this is

unlikely to happen, but argued that "logically speaking such an outcome
seems not absolutely excluded." DeFrancis is unwilling to admit that a
"full" system of semasiography could be even a logical possibility.3 He
believes that those examples which do occur are necessarily limited to
expressing very simple ideas — concepts that would be expressed in
speech by a word or short phrase rather than a multiword sentence.
DeFrancis's argument to this effect turns on examination of an example
quoted in Sampson (1985: 28-29) of purported complex semasiography,
the "Yukaghir love letter." I had taken this example from a well-known
book on writing, Diringer (n.d.: 35), and I retailed Diringer's explanation
of it without trying to check this. DeFrancis has done the discipline a
considerable service by investigating the history of the example in detail,
and it turns out to be something rather different from what Diringer and
I described, and arguably not an example of "communication" at all.
If I had known the facts about the Yukaghir love letter which
DeFrancis has brought to light, I would probably not have used it in my
book.4 However, loss of this particular example does not establish the
generalization that semasiography can never be used for logically complex
messages. Sampson (1985: 31-32) illustrated a second example, a set of
instructions distributed with a Ford Escort car in 1982, in the form of
two rows of six stylized pictures expressing a message that is admittedly
less complex than that allegedly expressed by the Yukaghir example but
is still fairly complex, requiring several clauses to express in English. (I
suggested the translation 'When starting from cold, turn on the ignition
without touching the gas-pedal; if the engine is warm, press the gas-pedal
halfway down as you turn the ignition key'.) In this case, I know the
provenance at first hand, and the document remains in my possession (I
should be happy to show it to enquirers).5 Whether it would be possible
in principle to develop this kind of writing into a full-scale script, capable
of expressing everything that can be expressed in speech, remains to my
mind an open question.

3. Chinese writing is not semasiographic

In the seventeenth century it was supposed by a number of European

philosophers (cf. Knowlson 1975: 25) that Chinese script was a real
example of the kind of full semasiographic system discussed as a hypothet-
ical possibility in the preceding section. One still sees this concept
expressed by misinformed writers today. It is quite wrong: Chinese script
was created as a means of representing visually a particular spoken

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
 Chinese script 121

language, the Chinese language as it existed at the period when the script
was developed. No one familiar with the language and script could
doubt this.
In Sampson (1985:149) I list various considerations which demonstrate
the point, such as the fact that (as with any other natural language) the
morphemes of spoken Chinese are often polysemous and have ranges of
meaning which are arbitrary and idiosyncratic, and these meaning-ranges
will normally be common both to a spoken morpheme and to the written
graph (or "character") which represents that morpheme. Occasionally, it
is true, a single polysemous spoken word will have alternative graphs for
separate subsections of its meaning-range, rather as the single spoken
English etymon /metl/ has alternative spellings metal and mettle for
separate subsenses — and, as in the English case, the alternative writings
are perceived as distinct vocabulary items. For instance guö meaning
'fruit' and hence also 'result' has distinct graphs for the 'fruit' sense and
the 'result' sense. But even in such cases the alternative Chinese graphs
will between them cover the identical meaning-range that is covered by
the single spoken Chinese word; we do not find meaning-boundaries
between written Chinese graphs and meaning-boundaries between spoken
Chinese words overlapping and cutting across one another, as one finds
with meaning-boundaries between Chinese words and meaning-
boundaries between words of English or another spoken language.
There is, admittedly, a special consideration in the case of written
Chinese which might seem to put its glottographic status in doubt. Once
a spoken language has acquired a written form, the two linguistic systems
may evolve independently so that the relationship between written and
spoken languages becomes increasingly remote. With Chinese this hap-
pened in a way for which I know no parallel: during much of recent
history, before the reforms in written usage associated with the May
Fourth Movement initiated in 1919, the standard written language of
China (wen yan, or literary Chinese) was a language which when read
aloud in contemporary pronunciation could not be understood by a
hearer, irrespective of how learned he might be, because the spoken
equivalent of a written text did not contain sufficient information to
determine the identities of the morphemes of which the text was com-
posed. There were two reasons for this. Sound changes during the long
period since the creation of the script had removed many phonological
contrasts and thus introduced an extremely high incidence of homophony
among morphemes;6 and developments in literary usage had created
many possibilities of meaningfully combining morphemes in writing in
ways that would never have occurred in spoken Chinese at any period
of its history, thus reducing the chance of determining the intended

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
122 Geoffrey Sampson

morpheme among a set of homophone candidates by reference to its

morphemic environment.7 Therefore literary Chinese not merely did only
function but COULD only function as a written and read language, not as
a spoken and heard language.8 This might seem to bring literary Chinese
within the definition of semasiography. But any literary Chinese text has
a perfectly specific spoken form, composed of morphemes many of which
occur in modern spoken Chinese and all of which are etymologically
identifiable with morphemes that have occurred in spoken Chinese at
some historical period: there is a well-defined way of reading a literary
Chinese text aloud (morphemes which are obsolete in spoken Chinese
are given the pronunciations that result by applying subsequent sound-
laws to the pronunciations the morphemes had when they were current
in speech), even if this activity achieves no communicative purpose. The
situation is very different from a case such as the Ford starting instruc-
tions, where one has to invent some form of words to express orally the
message of the text, and independent readers could reasonably select
different spoken word-sequences to express the "written" message.
Chinese script is glottographic.

4. Is Chinese writing logographic?

People with limited awareness of linguistic concepts sometimes talk as if

the statement that a script represents a spoken language necessarily
implies that the units of the script must represent phonetic units, such as
consonants, vowels, or syllables: that is, they overlook the logical possi-
bility that a script might be logographic. But linguists know that any
natural language has units at many levels, and in particular that all
human languages exhibit a "double articulation" into units carrying
meaning, on the one hand, and phonological units whose function is to
serve as perceptually distinctive building blocks out of which meaningful
units can be assembled, on the other. This feature is universal in human
language: it applies as much to languages having no written form as to
languages which have scripts.9 It is at least logically possible, therefore,
that a glottographic script might assign distinctive symbols to elements
of the first rather than of the second articulation. DeFrancis accepts, I
think, that this is a logical possibility, but he does not believe it is a
practical possibility or that Chinese writing should be regarded as such
a script.
Consideration of the status of Chinese script in this respect is compli-
cated by an unusual property of Chinese as a spoken language. In
European languages there is commonly little regular relationship between

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
 Chinese script 123

the position of boundaries of units of the two articulations. The spoken

English word analysed, for instance, comprises two morphemes, one of
which is realized by two complete syllables and part of a third, while the
other is realized by just the final consonant of the third syllable. In
Chinese, by contrast, phonological syllable-boundaries (which are always
clearly marked — Chinese phonology lacks "interludes" [Hockett 1955:
52] such as the /t/ of English butter, which belong equally to the preceding
and the following syllable) almost always coincide with morpheme bound-
aries: each morpheme is represented by exactly one spoken syllable.
(There are marginal exceptions, such as, in modern Mandarin, the nomi-
nal suffixes -z, -r, and, in all varieties of Chinese, a set of disyllabic
morphemes for unusual flora and fauna, the classic example being shanhu
'coral' mentioned by DeFrancis [1989: 259]; but these cases are few
enough not to be significant in the present context.)
Because, broadly, each Chinese morpheme is realized as a syllable, one
might suppose that for this particular language there could be no distinc-
tion between a syllabic phonographic script and a morpheme-based logo-
graphic script. Conceptually, however, there is a clear distinction, because
of the high incidence of homophony in Chinese already mentioned. The
great majority of phonologically possible Chinese syllables each represent
several etymologically distinct morphemes with unrelated meanings. (The
standard dictionary of modern Chinese Xiandai Hanyu Cidian [1981] lists
on the order of 10,000 morphemes, and about 1280 distinct isolation-
form syllables, giving an average of about eight morphemes per syllable.)
Suppose English were written in a script whose graphic units corres-
ponded to word-sized units of the spoken language: there would be a
clear conceptual distinction between a script which used a given graph
for all occurrences of words pronounced /SAH/ irrespective of meaning,
and a script which assigned unrelated graphs to /SAn/ 'male child' and
/SAH/ 'star which our planet orbits'. If English had numerous homophones
and if one of these two alternative principles were adopted consistently
in each case, we would call the script phonographic if homophones were
written alike, and logographic if each etymologically distinct word had
its own written form graphically unrelated to the written forms of its
homophones.
The case of Chinese script is certainly not as clearcut as either of these
two hypothetical cases.
Chinese graphs come close to standing in a one-to-one relationship
with morphemes, so that etymologically distinct morphemes will normally
have distinct graphs. There is a significant incidence of distinct mor-
phemes sharing a common graph — in some cases the morphemes written
alike are homophones (e.g. bie Other' and bie 'don't'), in other cases

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
124 Geoffrey Sampson

they have distinct (but usually similar) pronunciations (e.g. qi 'wonderful'

and fi 'odd number'); and sometimes it is impossible to know whether
alternative senses associated with a particular graph/pronunciation pair-
ing represent polysemous evolution of meaning within a single etymon,
or represent historically unrelated homophones. But even when a single
graph clearly stands for two or more homophonous morphemes, the set
of morphemes written with that graph will virtually always be a minority
of the total set of morphemes sharing that pronunciation. If one were to
consider Chinese graphs as atomic units lacking internal structure, the
script would rather clearly be basically logographic, though with occa-
sional ambiguous assignments of graphs to alternative morphemes which
are phonetically identical or related.10
However, most Chinese graphs are not simple forms but contain
internal complexity, and the nature of this complexity is such that a
graph often includes a more or less precise clue to its pronunciation. This
feature of the script may be (and is, by DeFrancis) used to argue that it
is fundamentally a syllabic phonographic script with logographic
accretions.
The internal structure of Chinese graphs is best explained historically.
On the order of a thousand morphemes are represented by simple graphs
which originated as pictures corresponding to their meanings (though at
an early date the iconic quality of the graphs was lost through stylization
of their shapes). A morpheme X having no simple graph was written by
borrowing the graph for some morpheme Υ that already had a written
form and that was pronounced similarly to X (though, commonly, X
and Υ were not pronounced identically); and usually a distinguishing
element was added to differentiate the written form of X from that of Y,
in the shape of a simple graph for a morpheme related in meaning to X
("hand" for verbs of action, "water" for words connected with liquids,
etc.). There appears to have been a very early stage at which the system
of borrowing graphs by reference to similarity of pronunciation had not
yet come into play, but only through that principle did Chinese script
become a full-scale writing system capable of representing everything in
the spoken language. Thus the bulk of all graphs in the system which
emerged are compounds containing two parts, a PHONETIC and a SIGNIFIC,
and of the two the phonetic component is unquestionably more impor-
tant: there are on the order of 1400 different graphs used as phonetics
within phonetic/signific compounds (some of the 1400 are themselves
phonetic/signific compound graphs), but only about 200 graphs used as
signifies, and in the early history of the script there seems to have been
some flexibility in the use of signifies — they might be omitted, or a

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
 Chinese script 125

single morpheme might be written with alternative signifies — whereas a

morpheme was only rarely represented by alternative phonetics.
I shall use the term "compound graph" for a Chinese graph that can
be analysed into phonetic and signific. (There are also graphs which
might be called compound because they combine two simple graphs to
represent a word whose sense is connected with the senses of both
components, but for present purposes graphs of this sort are not interes-
tingly different from simple graphs, and my use of the term "compound
graph" will exclude them.)
It might, then, be reasonable to describe the Chinese script during an
early phase of its history as fundamentally phonographic, although pho-
netically imprecise (a phonetic element was associated not with a fixed
syllabic pronunciation but with a range of related pronunciations), and
having important logographic features (the use of signifies, and the fact
that a morpheme lacking a simple graph was written not with the graph
for ANY similar-sounding morpheme but with that of one particular
conventionally fixed near-homophone).11 To this extent I accept
DeFrancis's view of the nature of Chinese script. However, since Saussure
it has been accepted among linguists that the structure of a linguistic
system at a given time is a separate issue from the question of how the
system evolved historically. The evolution of Chinese script and spoken
language over some three millennia has brought about changed relation-
ships between script and speech, which make the script now more logo-
graphic and less phonographic than before.
Thus, sound-changes have in many cases caused syllables which used
to be phonetically similar to diverge in pronunciation. The morphemes
for 'two', 'grease' were pronounced in Middle Chinese nzi-, ni- respec-
tively, so it was reasonable for 'grease' to be written as a compound
graph combining 'two' as phonetic with 'flesh' as signific; but, through
the operation of regular sound laws, the modern Mandarin pronuncia-
tions have become respectively er, ni, making the rationale of the 'grease'
graph quite opaque. Furthermore, the massive loss of phonemic contrasts
which has been a marked feature of the history of Chinese phonology
means that a given absolute degree of difference between the pronuncia-
tion of two syllables constitutes a much larger relative difference, in the
context of the impoverished modern phonological system, than it did in
the richer phonological systems of Middle or Old Chinese; this again
reduces the perceived phonetic homogeneity of a family of morphemes
written with the same phonetic element. It often happens that a morpheme
X is written with a compound graph in which the element that is histori-
cally the phonetic seems quite inappropriate with respect to its modern
Mandarin pronunciation, although there are several graphs standing for

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
126 Geoffrey Sampson

words that are perfect homophones of X which are used as phonetics in

other compound graphs. (For instance, di 'place' is written with the
phonetic y& 'also' and the 'earth' signific, but there are at least two simple
graphs pronounced di and used as phonetics in other compound graphs.)
Sometimes a morpheme which remains current is written with a com-
pound graph, the phonetic element of which when written independently
stands for an obsolete morpheme, so that the phonetic element plays no
part in the average reader's understanding of the compound graph (for
instance, chä 'insert' is written with the phonetic cha 'pestle' and the
'hand' signific, but cha 'pestle' is thoroughly obsolete).
These factors relate to developments in the spoken language; but
developments in the written forms have also tended to change the nature
of the script/spoken-language relationship in the same direction. The
written representations of morphemes have become more fixed: a minority
of morphemes do still have recognized alternative graphs, but there is no
general freedom to omit or vary signific elements (where variant forms
exist, commonly the difference between the alternatives is limited to
different spatial arrangements of the same phonetic and signific elements).
The shape of a graph used as a phonetic element in a compound graph
has sometimes diverged from the shape used when it occurs as an indepen-
dent graph, so that the historical identity of the two is no longer recogniz-
able. (Thus/^wg 'envelope' was originally written with a compound graph
containing the phonetic element feng 'gracefulness', but within the 'enve-
lope' graph this element was given an extra stroke changing it into the
graph guT 'sceptre'; the graph for cha 'inspect' began as a compound
containing the phonetic element qie 'moreover' — the phonetic relation-
ship between these syllables is not very close,12 but this relationship is in
any case irrelevant to the modern reader since a slight alteration in the
writing of the phonetic element within the "inspect" graph has made it
appear to derive from dan 'dawn' rather than qi$ 'moreover'.)
The net effect of such developments is that modern Chinese script, as
a writing system for modern spoken Mandarin Chinese, is one in which
many graphs contain recognizable clues to the pronunciation of the
morphemes they represent but many others contain no such clues, and
where there are such clues they are often very vague. From a knowledge
of the pronunciation of a morpheme and the information that its graph
is a phonetic/signific compound, it would only rarely be possible to
predict the identity of the phonetic (one would more often be able to
predict the identity of the signific from the meaning of the morpheme).
From the point of view of a present-day Chinese-speaker learning to read
and write, the phonetic element of a compound graph is often just an
arbitrary part of the graph's overall shape to be learned, and its historical

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
 Chinese script 127

role as phonetic is as opaque and irrelevant to his task as is the derivation

from Greek ana and luein to an English-speaker learning to use the
word analyse.
Whether one regards such a system as essentially logographic with
elements of a phonographic principle, essentially phonographic with ele-
ments of a logographic principle, or as too mixed to assign to either
category, must depend on a subjective judgment as to how close and
regular the relationship between pronunciations and written forms needs
to be before one treats that relationship as the central organizing principle
of a script. I tried to give readers of Sampson (1985: 157-158) an
impression of the situation by discussing the analysis often graphs chosen
at random, and I used this discussion to support my own judgment
(shared with many other commentators) that modern Chinese script is
essentially logographic though with limited phonographic features.
DeFrancis makes the opposite judgment, and supports it with numerical
statistics (DeFrancis 1989: 99-113). But DeFrancis reaches very high
figures for the degree of phoneticity of Chinese graphs by counting a
graph as phonetically motivated if there is any resemblance at all between
the pronunciation of the graph and that of its phonetic element, and
even (in the case of the highest figure quoted, on p. 113) by counting all
graphs that were historically phonetic/signific compounds as phonetically
motivated irrespective of whether sound-changes have destroyed that
motivation. While in general I favour the use of precise numerical meth-
ods rather than impressionistic approaches in linguistics where possible
(cf. Sampson 1992), I am not persuaded that the question of how far
Chinese script is phonetically motivated for its present-day users is one
that can be addressed statistically: it is not clear what we ought to count.
We have no accepted measure, for instance, of phonetic distance between
linguistic forms that would allow us to specify how appropriate on
average the phonetic element of a compound graph is to the graph's
current pronunciation.13
I continue, then, to regard modern Chinese writing as essentially logo-
graphic; although subjective judgments cannot ultimately be disputed, it
is surprising to me that someone would make the opposite judgment
about the script as it now exists.14 However, the script was certainly more
phonographic at earlier stages of its history. There would be nothing
surprising in a judgment that Chinese script at the period when it first
developed into a full writing system capable of representing the whole
spoken vocabulary was an essentially phonographic system (though many
would prefer to classify it as too naked to assign to either type, and, as
DeFrancis rightly points out [1989: 99ff.], the facts as well as their
appropriate interpretation are quite debatable in this area). Part of

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
128 Geoffrey Sampson

DeFrancis's thesis may be a diachronic claim, that full-scale writing

systems capable of expressing everything expressible in speech must
always develop through heavy use of a phonographic principle, whether
or not their phonographic status is compromised by subsequent evolution.
This is a conjecture which seems likely to be true: it is hard to imagine
a script with separate symbols for all the thousands of elements in the
lexicon of a natural language being created without any exploitation of
phonetic similarities for the task of generating the symbols. It can be no
more than a conjecture; to date too few writing systems have been created
independently in the history of mankind to test it adequately, and the
cultural integration of the world means that future independent creations
are now unlikely.

5. Can a script be less phonographic than Chinese writing is?

DeFrancis uses his interpretation of the Chinese writing system as an

essentially phonographic system in order to support the more general
thesis that no script can be logographic. But even if one accepted
DeFrancis's interpretation of Chinese script, the more general point
would not follow.
There is in fact another example of writing which is much more clearly
logographic than Chinese writing: namely the use of Chinese graphs to
write Japanese words. Japanese uses a mixed script in which grammatical
suffixes and particles are written phonographically while stems of lexical
items are written with Chinese graphs. Many modern Japanese lexical
items are Chinese loanwords, and in these cases the function of the
phonetic element within the Chinese graph (if it is a compound graph)
remains what it is with respect to the Chinese language — except that
the Japanization of morpheme pronunciations introduces a further layer
of distortion into the relationship between graphs and their spoken forms.
But Japanese also retains a stock of native lexical items, which are written
with graphs for Chinese words having the same or similar meanings.
Since Japanese and Chinese are genetically unrelated, this means that the
synchronic relationship between the pronunciation of a native Japanese
stem and the phonetic element within the Chinese graph used to write it,
if this is a compound graph, is totally random.
The very complex Japanese writing system contains more than the
writing of native Japanese lexical stems, but this is an important subpart
of the writing system as a whole. In the 1946 codification of officially
sanctioned current graph-uses, graphs used for native stems accounted
for 1,116 out of a total of 3,122 morphemes written with Chinese graphs.

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
 Chinese script 129

This establishes that a method of writing which does not exploit phonetic
relationships is possible, whatever one's view of the status of modern
Chinese script.

6. Conclusion

I conclude that the diversity of the world's writing systems, viewed as

synchronic systems, is greater than several recent writers have supposed,
even though practical considerations may lead to somewhat less diversity
than is hypothetically possible, and scripts may be less diverse with
respect to their historical origins than with respect to their current
functioning.

Received 29 September 1993 University of Sussex

Revised version received
9 December 1993

Notes

Correspondence address: School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of

Sussex, Palmer, Brighton BN19QH, England.
I would prefer to cite the 1987 edition of this book as its standard version, since the
original 1985 edition (together with all American printings) contained a number of
errors due to the fact that I was not shown complete proofs before publication. But I
believe none of the errors corrected in the 1987 edition, which were concentrated in
chapters 5 and 6, are relevant to DeFrancis's disagreements with me.
DeFrancis urges (1989: 57) that a discussion of semasiography is as out of place in a
survey of writing systems as would be an introductory section on "Oxcarts of the
world" in a history of the motor car, suggesting that it is self-evident that these two
things have nothing to do with one another. But, although the ox-cart in particular was
not a direct forerunner of the car, vehicles drawn by animals certainly were: one could
not hope to understand the early evolution of motor-car design without knowing about
the structure of horse-drawn carriages from which cars were developed. Such questions
about relevance must be settled empirically rather than aprioristically.
In discussing my views, DeFrancis is selective hi his use of quotation. He describes
semasiography (DeFrancis 1989: 34-35) as "writing that Sampson would have us
believe might be capable of evolving into *a full-fledged semasiographic language
rivalling English, French, and German in expressive potential' (Sampson 1985: 32)."
What I wrote at the place cited was "Doubtless it is hardly likely to lead to the
evolution of a fully-fledged semasiographic language rivalling [etc.]...".
As DeFrancis points out, Diringer eliminated the questionable material from the third
(1968) edition of his book.
Since the matter has become unexpectedly contentious, I should add that the document
does include some writing of the ordinary kind. The whole message is headed "TO

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
130 Geoffrey Sampson

START," and the two rows of pictures are respectively captioned "COLD" and
"WARM" (in ten languages in each case). But these fragments of glottographic script
add up to far less than is conveyed semasiographically.
6. This point follows straightforwardly from the standard account of the history of
Chinese phonology, as represented in Karlgren (1957); and, with respect to the differ-
ences between modern pronunciations and those of the Middle Chinese (Karlgren's
"Ancient Chinese") of ca A.D. 600, this account is solidly based on several different
categories of evidence. With respect to the reconstruction of the Old Chinese or
"Archaic Chinese" pronunciations of ca 1000 B.C. the evidence is less solid, and there
is a risk of circularity hi relying on the standard reconstructions in connexion with a
discussion of the nature of Chinese script, since the forms of the written graphs are a
chief category of evidence used in reconstructing Old Chinese pronunciations. But the
point above about relative lack of homophony in earlier forms of spoken Chinese
requires only acceptance of the Middle Chinese reconstructions.
7. This second point is harder to establish irrefutably, since we inevitably have little direct
evidence of linguistic patterns in the speech of learned Chinese at early periods. But
consider for instance the gu wen Old style' literary movement initiated by Han Yu ca
A.D. 800: this represented a revolt against a prevailing literary style that seems to have
been perceived as artificial because it lacked the organic quality of writing which
followed spoken norms.
8. Modern spoken Chinese uses a smaller stock of morphemes than literary Chinese, its
vocabulary has developed in such a way that it uses a longer sequence of morphemes
to express a given proposition, and it is less flexible than literary Chinese with respect
to permissible ways of combining morphemes: these factors between them explain why
spoken Chinese is comprehensible while literary Chinese read aloud is not.
9. My use of the term "double articulation" leads DeFrancis (1989: 253ff.) into a discus-
sion of Andre Martinet's individual theories about linguistic structure. But the concept
is, so far as I know, shared by linguists of all theoretical persuasions. I used Martinet's
term in Sampson (1985) not to imply allegiance to one individual's theories but because
it is the classic label for an uncontroversial idea. An American term for the same idea
is "duality of patterning" (Hockett 1973: 106).
10. Chinese dictionaries give long lists of subsenses for many graphs, without making any
differentiation between cases where alternative subsenses are polysemous extensions of
single etymological senses, and cases where historically unrelated homophonous ety-
mons have been assigned the same graph. The distinction between polysemy and
homophony is not a clear one in the Chinese philological tradition, because the written
graph is felt to be the essence of a morpheme — if two homophones are written with
the same graph then they are regarded as the same word. In English, ear of corn is
popularly taken to be a meaning-extension of ear as organ of hearing; experts can use
comparison with other Germanic languages to go behind the spelling and establish that
the two senses are in fact a case of accidental homophony, but comparable evidence is
almost entirely lacking for Chinese. One strategy available to someone wishing to
interpret Chinese writing as predominantly phonographic might be to argue that more
of the subsenses listed for individual graphs are accidental homophones and fewer are
cases of polysemy than is commonly recognized (so that graphs would not be in a one-
to-one but hi a one-to-many relationship with morphemes). However, although this
may well be true, it would not do much to establish that the present-day synchronic
functioning of the system is phonographic, since typically when a graph has a long list
of subsenses hi a large dictionary most of these are obsolete. And I would add that hi
any case unanswerable questions about the prehistory of etymons 3000 years or more

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
 Chinese script 131

ago must surely be irrelevant to judgments about the synchronic properties of a linguis-
tic system: if Chinese speakers in the historical period have regarded the various senses
associated with a single graph as subsenses of the same morpheme, then that fact alone
perhaps requires us to say that (provided there is no pronunciation difference as in the
'wonderful'/'odd number' case above) they ARE subsenses of one morpheme.
11. The reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology is too uncertain, I believe, for us to
determine whether the phonetic selected for a target morpheme was commonly predict-
able in terms of some measure of least phonetic distance from a morpheme already
having a written form.
12. The spellings ch, q both represent aspirated affricates, respectively retroflex and
alveolopalatal.
13. Robbins Burling has pointed out to me that any method for quantifying the degree to
which a script is phonographic would need to give separate figures from writer's and
from reader's points of view. Suppose the phonemes of a spoken language were in a
one-to-many relationship with the letters of an alphabet, in such a way that the spelling
of any word was a perfect predictor of its pronunciation, but the choice among alterna-
tive letters to represent a given phoneme had to be learned for each word individually.
Such a script would be 100% phonographic for the reader, but only somewhat phono-
graphic for the writer. Intuitively it seems true that Chinese script is more phonographic
for reader than for writer; and it may be that scholarly discussions of script-types have
tended to give undue emphasis to writer's rather than reader's point of view. Even from
the reader's viewpoint, though, I would judge Chinese script to be "not very
phonographic."
14. I shall not attempt to claim that the essentially logographic status of Chinese script can
be demonstrated from experimental psychological evidence, such as that of Sasanuma
and Fujimura (1972); DeFrancis argues (1989: 240) that the extant evidence is in fact
inconclusive, and I am not qualified to challenge that.

References

Bright, William (ed.) (1992). International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 4 vols. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Burling, Robbins (1992). Patterns of Language: Structure, Variation, Change. San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Carello, Claudia; et al. (1992). Can theories of word recognition remain stubbornly nonpho-
nological? In Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning, Ram Frost and
Leonard Katz (eds.). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Coe, Michael (1992). Breaking the Maya Code. London: Thames and Hudson.
Coulmas, Florian (1992). Writing systems. In International Encyclopedia of Linguistics,
William Bright (ed.), vol. 4,253-257. New York: Oxford University Press.
Daniels, Peter (1991). Review of Wayne Senner, The Origins of Writing. Language 67,
835-842.
DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press.
— (1989). Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press.
Diringer, David (n.d.) The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind. London: Hutchinson.
(Published 1948).

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM
132 Geoffrey Sampson

Frost, Ram; and Katz, Leonard (eds.) (1992). Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and
Meaning. Advances in Psychology 94. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Gelb, Ignace (1963). A Study of Writing, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hockett, Charles (1955). A Manual of Phonology. Memoir 11 of the Internationaljournal of
American Linguistics. Baltimore, MD: Waverly.
— (1973). Man's Place in Nature. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Karlgren, Bernhard (1957). Grammata Serica Recensa. Bulletin no. 29. Stockholm: Museum
of Far Eastern Antiquities.
King, Brian (1991). Review of John DeFrancis, Visible Speech. Language 67, 377-379.
Knowlson, James (1975). Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600-1800.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Krippes, Karl (1990). Review of John DeFrancis, Visible Speech. General Linguistics 30,
126-129.
Liberman, Alvin (1992). The relation of speech to reading and writing. In Orthography,
Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning, Ram Frost and Leonard Katz (eds.). Amsterdam:
North-Holland.
Martinet, Andre (1949). La double articulation linguistique. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique
de Copenhague 5, 30-37.
Mattingly, Ignatius (1992). Linguistic awareness and orthographic form. In Orthography,
Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning, Ram Frost and Leonard Katz (eds.). Amsterdam:
North-Holland.
Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). Writing Systems. London: Hutchinson. (Second edition 1987.)
— (1991). Review of Reading the Past, C. B. F. Walker et al. (eds.). Times Literary
Supplement, 6 September, 27.
— (1992). Statistical linguistics. In International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, William Bright
(ed.), vol. 4, 74-76. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sasanuma, Sumiko; and Fujimura, Osamu (1972). An analysis of writing errors in Japanese
aphasic patients: Kanji vs. Kana words. Cortex 8,265-282.
Tzeng, Ovid (1991). Review of John DeFrancis, Visible Speech. Contemporary Psychology
36, 982.
Wrenn, James (1990). Review of John DeFrancis, Visible Speech. Journal of Asian Studies
49, 102-103.
Xiandai(l9$l). XiandaiHanyu Cidian. Peking: Shangwu Yinshuguan.

Brought to you by | Universität Osnabrück

Authenticated
Download Date | 5/27/15 12:21 AM