The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity

7. Asia's Orthographic Tradition

Chapter Seven Asia's Orthographic Tradition The inability of Chinese characters to meet modern needs has been apparent to many Chinese for almost a hundred years. -John DeFrancis Chinese Writing Understanding the issues raised in this book presents two types of linguistic challenges. On the one hand, many of us steeped in the conventions of alphabetic writing tend to overlook the impact the alphabet has had on Western culture. Literate Westerners especially, who regard alphabetic writing as though it were a part of nature, are unlikely to ponder its cognitive and social dimensions and may fail to appreciate the full import of this technology. To understand the alphabet's significance we must rethink assumptions held about writing since childhood. On the other hand, applying to the East Asian situation what linguists in the alphabetic tradition have learned about writing's role in creativity requires some knowledge of Chinese character-based systems. In this case, the challenge arises not just from naive assumptions about the nature of orthography but also from inadequate or misleading information about Asian languages and writing. Much of what we know, or think we know, about East Asian writing has been shaped by nonspecialists, who are often confused about the nature of these scripts, or by writers with a political agenda eager to manipulate the public's perception of this "unique" form of writing. This is not to deny the existence of sober-minded scholarship on East Asian orthography.l It is just that Gresham's Law applies here as in other Asia's Orthographic Tradition 169 areas: bad information (or disinformation) has tended to drive out good in forming the lay view of Chinese character-based writing. Accordingly, the present chapter's goal is to provide the reader with enough accurate information about East Asian orthography to grasp the arguments made later in this book about its impact on creativity. The effect, I hope, will not be unlike the relationship between science and fiction, where truth has stranger and more profound implications than myth. This chapter also provides a context for the case I am making on cognitive grounds against Chinese characters and the syllabic scripts derived from them. It is important to understand that the negative effects of character-based writing are not balanced by any linguistic benefits that accrue to their users. In fact, the argument that Asian orthography inhibits creativity is just one of many reasons why those who use these systems may wish to consider taking the final step toward modernization and replace them with an alphabet of letters. We begin this chapter by considering Chinese, the first East Asian language to be written and the one with which the greatest variety of myths are associated. One such myth is that Chinese writing is well suited to the language using it. This statement is true only in a trivial sense: there is a mutual dependency between the language and writing, but it is selfgenerated . Let me be more specific. As evidence of the appropriateness of this writing to the language, linguists point to the close fit between the monosyllabic structure of most Sinitic morphemes (basic units of linguistic meaning) and the fact that characters each "have" meaning; to Chinese characters' ability to discriminate the language's many hOlnonyms; and to the seven or ll10re mutually unintelligible "dialects" in China that supposedly are unified by the character script. The theoretical basis for this belief is the American structuralists' dictum that writing plays a secondary and comparatively unimportant role in language. The notion that writing, being "mere symbols of symbols," could shape the evolution of a language was incomprehensible. Were it not for this tendency to downplay the significance of writing, students of East Asian languages might have asked why Chinese morphology, in the standard language at least, is largely monosyllabic. Or why Mandarin and the Sinitic parts of Korean and Japanese tolerate so many homonyms. Or why China finds it hard to unify the "dialects" under one standard, despite the political incentive to do so. If these and other linguistic anomalies 170 Chapter 7 were traced to effects the writing system has on the language, then the close "fit" between the two would lose its positive import and be viewed instead in terms of one system (writing) influencing the other (speech). Admitting a dynamic interplay between East Asian writing and speech would also lay the groundwork for accepting alternative orthographies, whose...