is the unique nature of the Chinese language/script, which is fundamentally different from Roman-based scripts such as English. While English is a phoneme-based alphabetical language, Chinese is an ideogram-based script language. (A more elaborate discussion of the nature of Chinese script is provided in the next section.) Translated into computer terms, each English letter takes up one byte of space in the ASCII system whereas each Chinese character occupies two. Therefore, in localizing the computer technology for the Chinese context, the specific changes in the design of the computer to accommodate such differences add yet another interesting facet to the study. (In fact, the complexities of this script with regard to both its nature and history defy easy characterization and warrant a separate section with a more elaborate and in-depth discussion. This, however, is certainly not meant to undermine the significance of the other factors that have contributed to the intriguing nature of the China case.)
The Mystery of the Chinese Script
Although the nature of Chinese script (and the mystery surrounding it), as discussed in the preceding section, is only one of the five factors that make China’s writing technology development an intriguing case, it deserves special treatment here for three distinct reasons. First, every writing technology in the history of China has been a direct outcome of the development of the Chinese language, the various stages of which demanded and dictated corresponding writing technologies that could accommodate the changing nature of the Chinese script. Second, the unique, complex nature of this script has had direct bearings and, in most cases, shaping influences on how the writing technologies were conceived and developed. Third, the Chinese language has undergone a long history of evolution (over 4,000 years) and many significant changes in the course of its development. Understanding this history is critical to a better understanding of writing technology development.
A meaningful starting point of discussion of the Chinese script, then, is its origin. Due to the long, pre-record history of the Chinese civilization, it is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint an exact historical point when Chinese script originated. This difficulty has been acknowledged by many researchers and is reflected in the differing periods they have designated for the origin of Chinese script (see, for example, Boltz, 1999; Cheung, 1983; “Chinese Language,” 1997; Jian, 1979; Lattimore, 1946; Rodzinski, 1984). Various stories have been told about the origin of Chinese script, with many ancient ones pointing to a man named Cangjie:
Cangjie, according to one legend, saw a divine being whose face had unusual features which looked like a picture of writings. In imitation of his image, Cangjie created the earliest written characters. After that, certain ancient accounts go on to say, millet rained from heaven and the spirits howled every night to lament the leakage of the divine secret of writing. Another story says that Cangjie saw the footprints of birds and beasts, which inspired him to create written characters. (“Chinese language,” 1997)
The truthfulness of the stories is certainly questionable. More likely, Cangjie only sorted out the characters already invented by the people (“Chinese language”; Xia et al., 1979, p. 312). A recent discovery of some ancient tombs in Yanghe, Shandong Province, has unearthed a dozen pottery vessels dating back to a late period of the Dawenkou culture of about 4,500 years ago. Each of these pottery vessels bears a character, and these characters “are found to be stylized pictures of some physical objects” and are therefore called pictographs (“Chinese language,” 1997). These pictographs are already quite close in style and structure to the oracle bone inscriptions of the sixteenth century BCE but predated the latter by about 1000 years (“Chinese language,” 1997).
Similar discoveries have been made in the last few decades, with some unearthed, character-bearing pottery vessels dating back to as early as the period between 4800–4200 BCE (Cheung, 1983, p. 324–25). Of course, these characters are less than regular enough to form a systematic script, the first of which is usually considered to be the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, around the sixteenth century BCE.
As mentioned earlier, unlike that of many European languages, Chinese script is not an alphabetic script , but a script of ideograms. According to Feibo Du (1998) and “Chinese language” (1997), the formation of Chinese characters follows three principles: hieroglyphics (the drawing of pictographs), associative compounds, and pictophonetics.
Hieroglyphics, probably the earliest method of forming Chinese characters, refers to the method of forming a character according to the actual form of the object the character refers to. For example, the character for the sun was written as
Though easy to understand, pictographs have a serious drawback: they cannot express abstract ideas. To make up for such a drawback, associative compounds were developed to form characters that combine two or more pictographic characters, each with a meaning of its own, to express abstract ideas. For example, the sun
Neither pictographs nor associative compounds, however, indicate how the characters should be pronounced. Hence, the method pictophonetics was developed. Pictophonetics combines two elements: meaning and sound, in forming characters. For example, the character for “papa,” combines the element fu for the meaning (father) and the element ba for the sound.
The significance of these three methods of creating script is that they represent some of the most common measures of developing a systematic script for the ancient Chinese language. Researchers often use them as evaluation criteria for determining whether a particular historical period possessed a systematic script. Of course, later versions of Chinese script, especially that of the current Chinese language, contain characters that do not fall into any of the three categories. This is why some researchers (e.g., Jian, 1979) have argued that modern Chinese script should contain six essential features (more details later in the book). Nevertheless, they are valuable tools for our examination of the development of writing and writing technologies, especially in the early stages of Chinese history.
The Mystery of the Dominant Chinese Ideologies
A crucial aspect to an in-depth comprehension of the Chinese culture is the understanding of its dominant ideologies, for the development of any writing technology is inevitably shaped by the ideologies of a particular culture. In the history of Chinese thought, there have existed many different ideologies, but my discussion will focus on the three most dominant ones: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, because these three have exerted the most influence on the Chinese culture, not only across all geographical regions but also across most historical periods. Other ideologies, such as Legalism, Marxism-Leninism, and Maoism, are more or less regional or ephemeral; discussion of these ideologies will, therefore, be done only when they apply to my discussion of the development of a particular writing technology in subsequent chapters.
Confucianism
Confucianism, probably the most influential ideology
