Pictographic Writing Systems in China and Egypt - Assignment Example

The study of history is eminently important if countries, rulers, businesses and individuals wish to avoid the pitfalls learned during earlier generations. By understanding the mechanics that went into the development of a particular invention, for instance, we can gain a better understanding of the instrument and begin to develop ways of making it better, more efficient or more environmentally friendly. By learning about the battles and outcomes of wars from long ago, we can piece together how history has worked to shape a particular culture or region. The words of Socrates have worked to shape the educations of generations of students. However, there is a key ingredient necessary in all of these inventions, past deeds and the thoughts of men who lived centuries ago. That key ingredient is the use of writing in developing their ideas and transferring them to successive generations. Writing is one of the most important inventions mankind has devised throughout history as without it, history isn’t possible. Oral traditions have long been lauded as having a certain significance in carrying forward the ideologies of a given group of people, but, as can be simply proven among even small groups, oral history is not intended to be nor can it be entirely accurate. The story changes with the teller and the facts become blurred with myth. In addition, it can only be preserved for as long as there are people around interested in learning the stories and lore enough to be able to pass it down to the next generation, and a next generation interested in sitting around to hear it. The concept of the written word offers a similar mixture of truth and lies, but introduces the opportunity for widespread propaganda within the present society as well as future generations even as it offers a means of preserving fundamental truth. Yet the written word has restrictions of its own, including the form in which the meaning is presented – alphabetically or pictorially – as well as the ability of future generations to decipher this code into meaningful sound. For many in the modern age of word processors and text editors, it is not often thought about how we make this transition from internal thought or spoken word to a pictographic form that represents meaning for those who can decipher it. Regardless of the system used, the alphabet or cuneiform, the picture has developed a sense all its own, communicating without intervention from one individual to another thousands of miles away or centuries apart in the span of time. To understand how this process works, it is necessary to focus our attention upon the development of early writing systems such as those used in Egypt and China and to compare these systems with systems that are currently in use today in order to understand that the way we communicate in written form has not really changed significantly in the millennia since man first inscribed meaning into clay. The earliest writing is believed to have developed as a necessary means of keeping business accounts. “Some time in the late fourth millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in the early cities of Mesopotamia reached a point at which it outstripped the power of memory of the governing elite. To record transactions in a dependable, permanent form became essential” (Robinson, 1995, p. 11). However, many scholars do not consider these early forms of pictographs true writing. “Writing only started when an organized system of signs or symbols was created that could be used to clearly record and fix all that the writer was thinking, feeling, and capable of expressing” (Ouaknin,1999, p. 18). Although it is not known exactly how writing evolved, with numerous valid theories proposed but none with sufficient evidence to gain superiority, the essential ingredient in making the transition from pictorial writing to a written language was the conception of the rebus principle, which brings forward the idea that a pictographic symbol, such as those used in Egyptian writing, could represent consonantal sounds. The earliest form of Egyptian writing is known as hieroglyphics, which began as a word script where each sign represented a word and dates back to the start of the third millennium (the First Dynasty) (Ouaknin, 1999, p. 26). The earliest Egyptian writing dates from approximately 3100 BC. With the realization of the rebus principle, Egyptian hieroglyphs such as the picture of an owl can represent the consonantal sound we in America associate with the letter m while a picture of a bee and a leaf could be interpreted as the word belief (Robinson, 1995, p. 12). As early as 1435, scholars were attempting to understand the Egyptian symbols, understanding that they were some form of writing. “Poggio was writing on the history of Rome in his de varietate fortunae. In it, he … stated that he had seen a number of fragments of obelisks inscribed with ‘the various shapes of animals and birds which the ancient Egyptians used for letters.’” (Pope, 1999, pp. 11-12). Very early interpretations of the hieroglyphs were not very accurate, yet investigation into their meaning began in earnest during the Renaissance, when scholars were attempting to decipher the mysteries behind the symbols and relating that to their own alphabet. “A Danish scholar, Zoega, writing just before 1800, hazarded that some hieroglyphs might be, in some measure at least, ‘phonetic signs’ … The path towards decipherment of the hieroglyphs was being prepared” (Robinson, 1995, p. 23). Although there was a lot of curiosity and investigation into the meaning of the hieroglyphs during previous generations, it wasn’t until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 that the modern world was finally able to read the many inscriptions left behind by the ancient Egyptians. The stone depicted three different languages, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on top, a cursive form of the same known now as demotic and Greek on the bottom, providing a convenient, if difficult, means of translation and therefore understanding of the ancient script. It was Thomas Young’s breakthrough in deciphering the Rosetta Stone, based partly on his knowledge of how the Chinese written language dealt with non-native speech, established the idea that the hieroglyphs were based on a mixture of phonetic spellings and non-phonetic language, but it wasn’t until Jean-Francois Champollion in 1823 that true decipherment began. The realization that the ancient Egyptian writing system was a complex mixture of semantic symbols, or logograms (symbols that stand for words and ideas), and phonetic signs that represented one or more sounds as well as the understanding that these symbols could have different meanings depending upon their context finally allowed the breakthrough that enabled the modern world to read like the Egyptians. Knowledge of the Chinese writing system, which remains a living system even today, provided a great deal of important information in deciphering the writing of the ancient Egyptians. The earliest proven Chinese writing has only been known for the past 100 years or so as it was discovered in the oracle bones. “They are records of divinations by the twelve kings of the later Shang dynasty, who ruled from about 1400 to about 1200 BC” (Robinson, 1995, p. 183). The earliest writings exist as inscriptions on tortoiseshell, bronze and stone with the use of paper and ink only coming into common use in the first century CE. However, there seems to be little resemblance between the ancient and modern forms of writing. “Of the 4500 Shang signs distinguished to date, some 1000 have been identified, and in many cases their evolution has been traced to a modern character” (Robinson, 1995, p. 184). Changes in the way the characters were made were principally due to changes in dynasties, in which different words were pronounced differently and therefore, attained different written representations. Other changes came about with the advent of new technologies, such as the discovery of paper and ink. “The characters became more flowing and less heavy. Two hundred and fourteen keys are used and determinatives, indicating the category to which the word belongs” (Ouaknin, 1999, p. 36). According to Robinson, Chinese characters have traditionally been divided into five, or perhaps six, different groups according to the principle of their composition. The first group consists of pictograms while the second group can be referred to as simple representational, such as the use of three lines to represent the number three. “In the third group, which might be called ‘compound representational’, the logic is more complex: at the level of ideas rather than the visual. A favorite example is the combination of the characters for sun and moon to form ‘bright’” (Robinson, 1995, p. 186). The fourth group engages the rebus principle and the fifth group combines a character indicating the meaning of a word with a character indicating its pronunciation. “Thus the character for female person is combined with the character with the sound value ma to create a new character meaning mother” (Robinson, 1995, p. 186). Although the overall appearance of many of these characters has changed considerably over time, the basic principles on which they have been constructed have remained unchanged. “It has remained pictographic and ideographic and never became phonetic, so it is not used for recording sounds; in fact it has no real alphabet. In Chinese, the word is a sort of irreducible atom. In most cases, it could be verb, noun or adjective. There is a character to represent each word, which consists of a single syllable” (Ouaknin, 1999, p. 36). The proportions of the characters used has changed, however. “There was a higher proportion of pictographic characters during the Shang dynasty than is now the case. Today the vast majority of characters, over 90 percent, is of the ‘semantic-phonetic’ variety” (Robinson, 1995, p. 186). Although the Chinese system is still in use today, and has indeed shaped the writing systems of many neighboring provinces, providing the entire base for the Japanese writing system, it has been recognized that the system is unwieldy and difficult for individuals to understand. The question of developing a dictionary, for instance, is fraught with difficulty in determining how best to organize the information. “The Chinese have not produced a single dictionary with entries arranged in simple alphabetical order. … Instead they have contrived a host of other schemes based on characters’ shape, rather than pronunciation or meaning” (Robinson, 1995, p. 187). In addition, the modern Chinese language is actually made up of either regional languages which are mutually unintelligible, as well as numerous true dialects. Modern written Chinese is based on the Mandarin dialect. The simple fact that we can recognize the pictures or symbols that are presented does not automatically mean we can decipher their meaning. “Chinese characters do not speak directly to the mind without the intervention of sound, despite centuries of claims to the contrary by the Chinese and many western scholars. Nor do Egyptian hieroglyphics, notwithstanding the beauty of their symbols and the fact that we can recognize people, animals, objects and the natural world depicted in them” (Robinson, 1995, p. 17). Through these studies, it can be seen that “Mesopotamian cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese characters all share the ability to transcribe either whole words or syllables, rather than basic sounds. Reading and writing using these systems involves learning a very large number of signs or characters. The twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, for instance, are far fewer than the thousand characters (based on the 214 traditional root characters) that the young Chinese student has to learn. It is certainly less than the hundreds of hieroglyphics that the young Egyptian student had to memorize” (Ouaknin, 1999, p. 19). Although the concept of alphabetic scripts such as what is used in the western world provides us with far fewer characters to memorize, leading to an earlier ability to read and write, this ease of use in the phonetically-based sound representation system of our alphabet has not led to a greater degree of literate citizens nor has it completely escaped the use of hieroglyphics in communicating meaning within the society. “We have only to look around us to see that ‘hieroglyphics’ are striking back – beside highways, at airports, on maps, in weather forecasts, on clothes labels, on computer screens and on electronic goods including the keyboard of one’s word processor” (Robinson, 1995, p. 17). Although the writing systems of the world have changed slightly in shape and form, the use of written characters to denote a mixture of phonetic and symbolic meanings remains the core principle of all writing systems in use in the world today, just as it was when it first became common in the ancient world to denote the progress of commerce. References Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. (1999). Mysteries of the Alphabet. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers. Pope, Maurice. (1999). The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script. London: Thames and Hudson. Robinson, Andrew. (1995). The Story of Writing. London: Thames and Hudson. Read More