{"id":3954,"date":"2012-05-12T15:34:04","date_gmt":"2012-05-12T20:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3954"},"modified":"2012-05-12T15:58:05","modified_gmt":"2012-05-12T20:58:05","slug":"the-worlds-oldest-in-use-writing-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3954","title":{"rendered":"\"The world's oldest in-use writing system\"?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest post by Gene Buckley.]<\/p>\n

I was catching up on my stack of New York Times magazines, and I came across a mini-article in their \"One-Page Magazine\" feature from January 15. I couldn't find it on their website, but here's the entire content:<\/p>\n

\nHow do you write that in Mandarin?
\nby Mireille Silcoff
\nChinese characters comprise the world's oldest in-use writing system, but Chinese kids are forgetting how to get it on paper. The new term tibiwangzi<\/em> (\"take pen, forget characters\") encapsulates the issue: nobody takes pen anymore. They type or text, often using Romanization. The China Youth Daily Social Survey Center says 4 percent of respondents are \"already living without handwriting.\"\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A fuller treatment of this subject may be found in an article entitled \"In information era, handwriting growing obsolete in China\"<\/a> that appeared in the April 16, 2010 People's Daily<\/em>.
\n
\nThe main point is certainly consistent with the character amnesia<\/a> that Victor Mair has written about before; but I was struck by the claim in the first clause. It's not necessarily false, but it's not obviously true either. In fact, I would say a strong competitor for that title is the (Semitic) alphabet. (In what follows, I use alphabet<\/em> somewhat broadly for a system in which symbols stand for single sounds, which are just consonants in the typical Semitic variety; some prefer the more specific term abjad<\/em><\/a>.) How might one evaluate the claim?<\/p>\n

1. Chinese writing is attested from around 1250 in the oracle bone inscriptions<\/a> (all dates here are BCE, and approximate). But the near-certain origin of the alphabet, in Proto-Sinaitic<\/a> and Proto-Canaanite writing, is no later than 1700. (We won't count the much older Egyptian system that inspired this alphabet.)<\/p>\n

2. Chinese writing has always represented the same language, or at least the ancestor of the same language, although (pre-) Old Chinese is very different indeed from modern Mandarin. But the early alphabetic scripts represent a Northwest Semitic language, which would be the ancestor of languages like Hebrew and Aramaic, or very closely related to their common ancestor. (We can't really say that the oracle bone inscriptions encode a dialect that is precisely the ancestor of Middle Chinese, anyway.) But this criterion will exclude Arabic, since it's not part of the Northwest branch of the family; its ancestor was not written until much later than Chinese.<\/p>\n

3. Though the claim simply says \"in use\", one might narrow this to a language with a large continuous community of native speakers. That would disqualify Hebrew, but the alphabet did remain in vigorous continuous use for Hebrew despite a lack of native speakers. Since Aramaic<\/a> has continued to be spoken in pockets of the Middle East, however, this language would still qualify for continuous native speakers.<\/p>\n

5. If we want to emphasize the visual sameness of the system, note that Chinese writing was standardized around 220, but the various local Semitic alphabets are established by around 900, and the Aramaic letters used to write Hebrew take their essential current form by 500 or so.<\/p>\n

4. Chinese characters, from their beginnings, are structurally the same as the modern characters, most importantly in the existence of composite characters with a semantic and phonetic element (such as \u6d17 x\u01d0<\/em> \"wash\", xi\u01cen<\/em> \"a surname\" with the phonetic \u5148 xi\u0101n<\/em> plus the water semantic or radical). But the actual characters with this structure are often quite different, in both appearance and composition (choice of components). For the alphabet, the basic structure \u2013 one symbol represents one sound \u2013 is in place in 1700, even if the appearance changes and some specific characters are dropped or added in later versions.<\/p>\n

The main argument one could make against the structure of the later Hebrew or Aramaic alphabet being the \"same\" as Proto-Canaanite, comparable to the structural sameness of the oracle bone inscriptions and modern Chinese writing, is the representation of vowels. In the second millennium, as far as we know, the symbols only represent consonants, and all vowels are unrepresented. From the early first millennium, most of the implementations of the alphabet, including Hebrew, begin to indicate more and more vowels by means of secondary uses for consonantal letters, e.g. y<\/em> for \/i\/. Since these letters retained their consonantal values, however, it's not clear that these secondary uses constitute a basic change in the system to match that of the Greek alphabet, with dedicated vowel letters.<\/p>\n

Floating around the claim about Chinese, I think, is a view of the language, nicely phrased by Bob Ramsey, \"as if it were one unchanging, monolithic entity across space and time\". This applies to the written form as well. If one converts an Old Chinese inscription into modern equivalent characters (not always easy to do), then a modern speaker can \"read\" it with modern pronunciations. This gives the false impression that it's exactly the same writing system. A similarly cursory comparison of modern Hebrew with Proto-Canaanite could also efface some of the differences, but the fact that the alphabet represents sounds alone will make it harder to ignore the changes that have occurred over the centuries.<\/p>\n

The advantage of Chinese for this purpose is that the syllabic components to the complex characters can be \"read\" in modern Mandarin instead of Old Chinese, without attending to the massive changes in pronunciation that occurred between the two. For example, the words represented by those characters \u6d17 and \u5148 have been reconstructed by Baxter and Sagart as *s<\/em>\u02e4<\/em>\u0259r\u0294<\/em> and *s<\/em>\u02e4<\/em>\u0259r<\/em> for Old Chinese (a language that didn't even have tones yet). If we overlook these differences in the linguistic content of the symbols for Chinese, then we probably should do the same for the alphabet, and in that case the apparent greater antiquity of the Chinese writing system has less to do with its actual history than the way people look at the language and the script.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This is a guest post by Gene Buckley.] I was catching up on my stack of New York Times magazines, and I came across a mini-article in their \"One-Page Magazine\" feature from January 15. I couldn't find it on their website, but here's the entire content: How do you write that in Mandarin? by Mireille […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-systems"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}