The Chinese Writing System in Asia

An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Yu Li

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138907317
• eBook ISBN: 9781000699067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Chinese Writing System in Asia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective integrates a diverse range of disciplinary approaches in examining how the Chinese script represents and actively shapes personal and social identities in and beyond Asia. It is an ideal read for students and scholars interested in a broad and culturally rich introduction to research on the Chinese writing system. It can also serve as the main text of an undergraduate course on the subject.

Key features of this volume include:

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• Insights from studies of the Chinese writing system in linguistics, script reform and technology, gender, identity, literature, and the visual arts;

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• Examples embedded in inquiries of the cultural history and contemporary society of Asia;

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• Rigorous yet accessible discussions of complex concepts and phenomena that assume no prior knowledge of Asian languages or linguistics;

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• Supplementary multimedia materials and resources, including instructional support, available online.

PART I
Linguistic preliminaries

1 Foundational concepts

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING how a writing system works is to understand how its symbols systematically represent the units of the language it writes. This is often an intricate matter that involves linguistic concepts of which we may not be intuitively aware. It is therefore necessary to familiarize ourselves with these concepts first, so that we will be able to discuss the working mechanisms of writing systems with more clarity and efficiency. In what follows, we will start with defining and distinguishing between a pair of terms that provide the disciplinary setting in which we will discuss the other terms: phonetics and phonology. From there we will look at three analogous pairs of concepts: phoneme and allophone, morpheme and allomorph, and grapheme and allograph.

Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics and phonology are both branches of linguistics that study the sounds of human languages. They are different yet closely related. Phonetics deals with speech sounds as concrete physical entities, and it is primarily interested in their articulatory and acoustic aspects, for example: How are speech sounds made? What are the gestures and movements involved? What are the articulatory features that distinguish one speech sound from another? What are the physical properties that differentiate them from each other? How are speech sounds represented, analyzed, and read on a computer? As you see, phonetics treats speech sounds as concrete and physical elements that have stable inherent qualities. However, it is important to understand that speech sounds do not function as isolated entities in fulfilling their linguistic roles. They interact with each other, often causing phonetic – that is, articulatory and acoustic – changes, and they tend to behave in ways that form predictable patterns. This is where phonology comes in.

Phonology is primarily concerned with the patterns in which speech sounds behave as members of a linguistic system. In investigating the regularities and patterns in sound distribution, phonology views speech sounds as abstract linguistic units. Such abstraction is necessary, because – for example – a given speech sound may pattern differently with other sounds in different languages, so that the same phonetic entity may have a different phonological status in a different language. One example is the consonants /θ/ and /s/ in English vs. French. θ is an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol we use to represent the final sound in the English word myth, and s is the IPA symbol for the final sound in miss.¹ In English phonology, /θ/ and /s/ are regarded as two distinctive sound categories, because changing from one to the other would change the meaning of the word (i.e., from “myth” to “miss,” or vice versa). In other words, /θ/ and /s/ contrast with each other (i.e., they are used to differentiate word meaning) in the English phonology. In French, however, the [θ] sound is normally not used, so no two words are different from each other solely on the basis of [θ] vs. [s]. If a speaker for some reason substitutes [θ] for a [s] in a French word, the result may sound odd to a native French person, but it would not be interpreted as a different word. Thus, in the subconscious mind of the French speaker, [θ] and [s] are two possible physical realizations of the same sound category: they are phonetically different, but phonologically the same. By contrast, /θ/ and /s/ are phonologically distinctive in English. This example tells us that in order to be able to describe the distribution of speech sounds in different languages, we would not only want to talk about them as concrete entities in the physical world (i.e., phonetics), but would also need to understand at an abstract level how they relate to one another in a particular language (i.e., phonology).

THE STORY BEYOND

Speaking with a French accent

English distinguishes [θ] (myth) vs. [s] (miss), or their voiced counterparts [ð] (breathe) vs. [z] (breeze) phonologically, while French does not normally use [θ] or [ð]. In fact, the sounds [θ] and [ð] are rare in human languages, while [s] and [z] are very common. Someone speaking English with a French accent would tend to substitute [s] for [θ] and [z] for [ð]. For example, thank you very much for these would become something like sank you very much for zese. I think of you all the time would sound like I sink of you all ze time.

Emes and Allos

Speech sounds may have different relationships in the same language as well. Take English as an example: some sounds contrast with each other while others complement each other. What do we mean by “contrast” or “complement” in this context? When speech sounds can occur in exactly the same phonological environment, and switching from one to another creates differences in meaning, we say that they contrast with each other, or that they are in contrastive distribution. For instance, the initial consonants of the English words mac /mæk/, tack /tæk/, and lack /læk/ are /m/, /t/, and /l/, respectively. They can all occur at the beginning of a word and in front of the vowel /æ/. In fact, they constitute the only differences in the words given, and changing from one to another alters the meaning of the word. In this case, these three sounds are contrasting with one another, and we say that they belong to distinctive phonological categories, or phonemes, in English. Phonemes are abstract sound categories in the speaker’s mind that contrast with each other in a given language. Phone here means “speech sound.” It comes from the Greek word phōnḗ ‘sound, voice.’ The English suffix -eme indicates a significant contrastive unit in linguistics at the level the stem of the word suggests. In this case, a phon-eme is a smallest contrastive sound unit. We will soon learn about morph-eme and graph-eme.

A phoneme may sound different depending on the context, and the concrete phonetic realizations of a phoneme are called allophones of this phoneme. Allo- means “other.” Its origin is the Greek form állos ‘other.’ In linguistics, allo- is used to indicate non-contrastive, alternative forms of -emes. Besides allo-phones, we will also learn about allo-morphs and allo-graphs in this chapter. As an example for understanding the concept of allophones, think about how the phoneme /t/ in English may be pronounced differently based on the context. When it occurs at the beginning of a word, most speakers pronounce it as an aspirated consonant [t^h], as in tack [t^hæk]. Aspiration refers to the strong puff of air that accompanies the production of the consonant, and it is marked as a raised h ([^h]) in IPA. When /t/ occurs after the sound [s] in the same word, by contrast, most English speakers use the unaspirated version of the sound, [t], as in stack [stæk]. If you place your hand close in front of your mouth when saying tack and stack, you should be able to feel a stronger puff of air in tack. Thus, [t^h] and [t] are phonetically different sounds. In fact, native speakers of English are fully able to hear the difference between them.

Allophones are context-dependent, so that the phonological environments in which they occur do not overlap with each other. In other words, they are in complementary distribution. In the example of tack and stack, [t^h] is always at the beginning of a word and never occurs right after [s] in the same word, while [t] always occurs immediately after [s] and never at the beginning of a word. Thus, as allophones of the same phoneme /t/ in English, [t^h] and [t] complement each other in distribution. For this reason, an allophone is also a predictable phonetic realization of a phoneme as determined by the phonological context: at the beginning of a word, the English /t/ is always [t^h], while immediately after [s] within a word, it is always [t].

Companion website

Exercise 1.1 Phonemes or allophones

Now that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I LINGUISTIC PRELIMINARIES
• PART II WRITING CHINESE
• PART III BORROWING THE CHINESE WRITING SYSTEM
• PART IV REFORMING THE CHINESE SCRIPT
• PART V IDENTITY AND GENDER IN WRITING CHINESE
• PART VI CHINESE CHARACTERS IN ART AND LITERATURE
• References
• Index