Timothy Michael O’neill - Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History

Timothy Michael ONeill

Ideography and Chinese Language Theory

Welten Ostasiens
Worlds of East Asia
Mondes de lExtrme-Orient

Herausgegeben von der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft Socit Suisse-Asie

Editorial Board

Wolfgang Behr

David Chiavacci

Andrea Riemenschnitter

Pierre F. Souyri

Raji C. Steineck

Laure Zhang

Nicolas Zufferey

Band 26

Diese Arbeit wurde publiziert mit Untersttzung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften (SAGW).

ISBN 978-3-11-045714-8

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-045923-4

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045722-3

ISSN 1660-9131

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

www.degruyter.com

I would like to thank Oliver Weingarten, Wolfgang Behr, David Knechtges, Zev Handel, Leroy Searle, Henry Staten, Patricia Ebrey, Anna Shields, Zhou Changzhen, Mark Pitner, Nicholas Williams, Gregory Patterson, Charles Sanft, William Boltz, Jerry Norman, Ken-ichi Takashima, Paul Kroll, David Tod Roy, Edward Shaughnessy, Jere Fleck, and three anonymous reviewers for the Swiss Asia Society. I should also take this opportunity to express my profound gratitude to Kelly Joebgen, for living with this project for so long.

Part of the research for this study was conducted during a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan and a portion of the writing was done during a Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, for which I would like to once again state my thanks. An earlier version of was previously published as Xu Shens Scholarly Agenda: A New Interpretation of the Postface of the Shuowen jiezi , Journal of the American Oriental Society 133.3 (2013): 412440.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Alfred Fraser.

Analyzing the classical Chinese word shan to regard something as good, beautiful, the Jesuit figurist Prmare wrote: what this hieroglyph shows us is , lamb, between two , words, to speak. Reading the parts of the characters across tells us that plus means that those that came before spoke of the lambthe Old Testament prophetswhile plus means that the lamb spoke agni verba , Jesus Christ speaking to us..

In terms of a historical context for Prmares figural exegesis of this hieroglyph, Chinese characters were introduced to European reading audiences in 1585 and almost immediately assimilated to millennia-old European theories about Egyptian hieroglyphic.

Hieroglyphic : a script used to write Old and Middle Egyptian from about 3200 B.C.E. to the last datable inscription of August 24th, 394 C.E., consisting of a combination of single consonant graphemes, called uniliterals (as in the writing systems for languages like Moabite, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic, vowels are not written), multi-consonant graphemes (called biliteral for two consonants and triliteral for three), and determinatives for distinguishing in writing between otherwise homophonous words (determinatives which are placed without exception at the end of the phonetically-spelled word). These determinatives, also known as classifiers, should perhaps be explained more clearly. There are two types of determinatives: phonetic (self-explanatory, in that they reinforce phonetic readingslike English 2 nd , which forces you to read the 2 as the ordinal number word rather than the cardinal number word) and lexical. A simple illustration of how lexical determinatives work should suffice: it would be as if in written English, in order to distinguish between the various words signified by the combined graphemes B-A-L-L, we added superscripts of other written English words so as to remove ambiguity (we would not actually pronounce the superscripts when reading the word out loud). For example, were one to write B-A-L-L sphere , or B-A-L-L dance , or the more colloquial B-A-L-L fun , it would readily allow the reader to determine which word was intended by B-A-L-L (homophony is relatively rare in English words, but in those of other languagese.g., Chinese or Egyptianit is quite common, which makes lexical determinatives practical and helpful in writing). This type of classifier is in all cases in and of itself an extant and pronounceable word in the particular language being written, The hieroglyphic script is lexigraphic, in that each distinct grouping of the combination of consonant graphemes and classifiers always writes a particular word (which comes from a particular spoken languagein this case, Egyptian in various historical stages).

Hieratic : an abridged form of hieroglyphic (basically like cursive handwriting) used to write Middle and Late Egyptian from about 2500 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E., at which time Demotic began to be used more frequently (last datable inscription in hieratic is 3 rd century C.E.).

Demotic : an even more calligraphically abbreviated form of hieratic used to write the Demotic stage of the Egyptian spoken language from about 700 B.C.E. to 452 C.E., the last datable inscription in Demotic.

Coptic : an alphabetic script with 31 or 32 letters (25 letters from Greek and 6 or 7 uniliterals from Demotic), invented by Roman Egyptian Christians, used to write spoken Coptic Egyptian from about the 2 nd century C.E. until the present day (it still marginally survives as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church).

As with all writing systems, any language can be more or less successfully written in any script; examples such as Hittite (an ancientand highly inflectionalIndo-European language) being written in both hieroglyphic and cuneiform, Egyptian

The first historical occurrence of script-borrowing is that of the Akkadians in the mid-third millennium B.C.E. borrowing Sumerian cuneiform to write Old Akkadian (a Semitic language linguistically unrelated to Sumerian). The Sumeriansthe first inventors of writing on earthhad an epic version of the story of the invention of writing, which ascribes this innovation to the inability of a royal messenger to remember a particularly grand oral missive recited by the king: His speech was very grand, its meaning very deep; the messengers mouth could not repeat it. The lord of Kulab patted some clay and put the words on it as on a tablet. Before that day, there had been no putting words on clay; but now, when the sun rose on that dayso it was! The lord of Kulab had put words as on a tabletso it was!

As cuneiform script, invented to write Sumerian, is structurally a combination of syllabographs and lexigraphs, the Akkadians were able to make the shift with only those few script changes needed to write the emphatic consonants and the glottal stop of Old Akkadiansounds that did not occur in spoken Sumerian (and thus were not originally part of cuneiform script); copious amounts of cuneiform bilingual dictionaries still survivebeginning around 2300 B.C.E. as word-lists, becoming canonical recensions by around 1200 B.C.E., and continuously copied out on clay tablets until the early years C.E.wherein each Sumerian word is first spelled