Visible Speech: The diverse oneness of writing systems By John DeFrancis (review)

REVIEWS377 Haas, Mary R. 1955. Thai vocabulary. Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies. Lewis, Paul. 1986. Lahu-English-Thai dictionary. Bangkok: Darnsuthe Press. Matisoff, James A. 1972. Lahu nominalizations, relativizations, and genitivization. Syntax and semantics, ed. by John Kimball, vol. I. 237-57. New York: Seminar Press. ------. 1973; reprinted 1982. The grammar of Lahu. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 75.) Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. ------. 1985. God and the Sino-Tibetan copula, with some good news concerning selected Tibeto-Burman rhymes. Journal of Asian and African Studies 29. 1-81. East Asian Institute[Received 11 September 1990.] University of Copenhagen Njalsgade 80 DK-2300 Copenhagen S Denmark Visible Speech: The diverse oneness of writing systems. By John DeFrancis. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. Pp. xiv, 305. $27.50. Reviewed by Brian King, University ofBritish Columbia A belief in the primacy of the spoken word has pervaded Western thought since the time of Aristotle. More recently. Leonard Bloomfield's pronouncement that 'Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by visible marks' (1933:21) helped entrench this belief in modern linguistics. This may explain why the study of writing systems has seldom attracted the attention of linguists. However, the literature on writing systems is replete with comments which contradict the basic assumption that writing is based on speech. Chinese characters, in particular, have been cited as an example of a writing system that can be processed semantically without an intermediate phonetic stage. DeFrancis, a leading scholar of Chinese, takes a firm stand on this issue in Visible speech (VS). His thesis is that all writing is visible speech, and it is a misunderstanding of the Chinese writing system that underlies much of the misunderstanding of writing in general. This book continues many of the arguments made in his 1984 book The Chinese language: Fact andfantasy, where he concludes (145) that 'Chinese characters represent words (or better morphemes) not ideas, and they represent them phonetically, for the most part, as do all real writing systems despite their diverse techniques and differing effectiveness in accomplishing the task.' VS is divided into three parts, the first of which, 'Writing in communicative context, (1-64), attempts to place writing within a broadly construed notion of human communication. All types offull communication are based on spoken language. Full systems consist of writing, sign language, and touch language, while partial systems contain peripheral and limited forms of communication. Writing itself may also be subjected to the same dichotomy. Pictographs in particular, DeF is quick to point out, are a form of partial writing consisting of 'dead-end symbols' (58). The full/partial dichotomy is central to the author's thesis, and it is one that he continues to emphasize, with the aid of numerous examples, throughout 378LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) Part I and the book as a whole. The picture that emerges from his discussion of the nature of 'real writing' in this section necessitates a major readjustment in previous classifications of writing systems that have been made by a number of specialists. Although there are differences in terminology, other scholars have committed what are, for DeF, two serious errors. First, they have allowed pictographs, ideograms, and semasiographic systems to figure in their definitions of writing. Second, almost without exception, they are guilty of either ignoring completely or undervaluing the role of the phonetic aspect in Chinese writing. This has led to the belief mentioned above—that Chinese characters are processed semantically without undergoing an intermediary stage of phonetic recoding. Under this new scheme, DeF is left with syllabic, consonantal, and alphabetic systems. Within these categories there are those scripts which are 'pure' and those which are based on a combination of 'meaning-plus-sound'. Thus, Japanese kana is a pure syllabic script, while Chinese is a meaning-plussound script. Modern Arabic is a pure consonantal system, as opposed to Ancient Egyptian, which was a meaning-plus-sound consonantal script. Among alphabetic systems, Finnish is pure, whereas English is a meaning-plus-sound phonemic script (56). Part II, 'Full writing systems' (65-208), is a detailed discussion of DeF's new classification scheme and ajustification for including the...