Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler
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in English not just for ‘knife’, but also for ‘niffy’, ‘nephew’ and ‘enough’. Nevertheless, the characteristic style is prefigured in illustrations made by artists before the advent of writing, suggesting that the system was set up on an indigenous basis.28
The usual assumption is that the inspiration came from Mesopotamia, where writing had developed out of accounting tallies, using similar principles of phonetics, a few hundred years before. There were ancient trade routes along the Wadi Araba which connected the Nile valley with the Red Sea, and for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.
However it was, the system was immediately standardised in an Egyptian style of illustration. Although cursive forms of the hieroglyphs were developed for daily uses, a rigid pictorial exactitude was kept up for monumental inscriptions. This was maintained despite the fact that the materials used by the Egyptians, paint on walls or ink on papyrus laid on with a brush, would have permitted total freedom of style. The practice of fluid, stylish calligraphy never began in Egypt. In their steadfast approach, Egyptian scribes were very different from the masters of such systems as Chinese characters or Mayan glyphs.
Furthermore, although new hieroglyphs were added from time to time, the basic principle of the script, the punning use of the consonants in words pictured, clarified by the use of more pictures to determine the range of meaning and sound, did not change. We find experimental uses of the hieroglyphs to found an alphabet at quarry sites in the Sinai peninsula; and ultimately radically new uses were made of a small set of the symbols by their trading partners, the Phoenicians, to found their alphabet, the apparent progenitor of all the alphabets in the world today. But while some of these foreigners were taking perverse inspiration from them, the Egyptians themselves never modified the hieroglyphic system to write their own language.
This resistance to script reform, a trait shared by the Chinese, really shows no more than that these cultures had already—both very early by regional and global standards—achieved a stable incorporation of writing into their way of life. Asking for a replacement of the writing system in such a literate administration was no more practicable than the various attempts to introduce spelling reform into modern English. It could only become feasible if the systems of education and administration were so severely disrupted that the succession was broken, and a new start could be made. This never happened in Egypt until the country was taken over by cultures with rival administrative traditions, Persian, Greek and Roman. Then the use of Egyptian in administration was undermined, and replaced by Aramaic and Greek. But even so, it was only when Christianity provided a whole new use for literacy that Egyptian could make the leap to writing in a ready-made, alphabetic script. In China, the change to alphabetic writing has never happened at all, despite the 1905 abolition of the imperial examination system, which had indeed been the central educational and administrative institution, and despite all the radical speculation about the future of the character system in the first half of the twentieth century, which had even included the People’s Republic’s authorisation of a new system for romanisation, Pinyin (used throughout this book).
The Egyptian scribe, zaRaw, represented from the earliest documented times the acme of ambition. This is amply confirmed by the kinds of texts that were copied in the scribal schools:
Behold there is no profession which is not governed; It is only the learned man who rules himself.29
Set to work and become a scribe, for then thou shalt be a leader of men. The profession of scribe is a princely profession; his writing materials and his rolls of books bring pleasantness and riches.30
In the Satire on Trades, the scribe boasts:
I have never seen a sculptor sent on an embassy, nor a bronze-founder leading a mission.
This complacency generated an extreme conservatism that may ultimately have been Egypt’s undoing. Literacy in Egyptian remained the preserve of a small and highly educated caste long after the demise of the last independent Egyptian state, in fact until the Christians adapted the Greek alphabet for the language: this step was taken fully a thousand years after the rest of the Mediterranean, including the Assyrians and Babylonians, had adopted alphabetic writing.
But as if to show that there is no natural term to the life of a pictographic system in an alphabetic age, the Chinese system has survived even the turmoil of the twentieth century. It has persisted, essentially unchanged despite some simplification in penmanship, since Shi Huang Di’s imposed standardisation in the third century BC of a system that was already over a millennium old. This system established a particular stylised picture, or a combination of phonetic pun plus determiner, in a notional square box, for each word or root in the language. Once established, it was less phonetically based than the Egyptian system, and so its practical use was even less affected by the phonetic changes in the language that have come about over the following two and a half millennia. Scholarly Chinese will have watched with amused unconcern the modifications, truncations and additions conceived by foreigners to produce the Japanese kana—two sets of forty-eight simplified outlines chosen to represent the full set of Japanese syllables—and the Korean han-gŭl—a true phonetic alphabet, but designed to harmonise on the page with Chinese characters. Each was an original solution to the poor match between Chinese characters and their own polysyllabic, agglutinative and nontonal languages—but this must have seemed no problem for Chinese itself.
In fact, in the last two and a half millennia the Chinese have become aware of a number of alphabetic scripts, conceived quite independently of their characters. The Buddhists brought the Siddha version of the Brahmi alphabet from India, and the Muslims who converted many of the Western peoples brought variants of the Aramaic scripts and Arabic. The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan even commissioned an alphabetic script for his empire, to be used officially for all its literate languages, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic and Persian. Called ‘Phagspa, it was based on the Tibetan version of Brahmi, and promulgated in 1269. It was a version of the Tibetan script converted to be written vertically (though unlike Chinese characters in columns from left to right), and in deference to Chinese taste in rather a squared-off form. However, it never caught on, and was discontinued, along with the Mongolian dynasty, just a century later.
The great advantage of the Chinese system is its masterly representation of the highest common factor of structure and meaning shared by all the Chinese dialects, many of which are not mutually comprehensible. All the modern dialects, and wényán as well, are built on a common set of meaningful syllables, which may be pronounced and strung together in different orders in the various dialects, but are still recognisable in graphic form. By and large, every one of these syllables is represented in writing by a single character, and so the meaning of a written Chinese text will be relatively clear to any literate speaker of any dialect. No alphabetic script, based perforce on the sounds of a language, could now be so conveniently neutral in terms of all the different Chinese dialects, unless perhaps it were designed on historical principles with a knowledge of all varieties of Chinese. Such a tour de force would have to be a miracle of subtlety and ambiguity. And so the traditional characters survive.
Despite the difficulty of learning the system, in China mere literacy did not remain the elite accomplishment it always was in Egypt. Different levels would have been attained according to the wealth and opportunities of the family, but poor families continued to throw out the occasional intellectual star. Literacy skills were still prized in China, but at a higher functional level. So the status of the scribe in Egypt corresponds in Chinese society more with that of graduates of the higher levels of the imperial competitive examinations. These were held by and large every third year from AD 622 to 1905.
The only possible Chinese adoption from foreigners in respect of writing concerns not writing itself, but the analysis of pronunciation. The traditional fănqiè system classifies a character’s pronunciation in respect of its initial consonant and its rhyme plus tone, but