Phonetics in the Han scripts

One of the most prevalent myths about the Chinese (Han) writing system is that it is ideographic, with each concept represented by a different character, and each character representing a concept, not a sound.

It is thought that this misconception can be traced back to the accounts of Catholic missionaries to China during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. One of the earliest of these accounts comes from Friar Gaspar da Cruz, who wrote in 1569, “The Chinas (sic) … have a great multitude of characters, signifying each thing by a character in such sort that one only character signifies ‘Heaven’, another ‘earth’, and another ‘man’, and so forth with everything else.” This was then quoted by Juan Gonzales de Mendoza in his History of the great and mighty kingdom of China, which was translated into a number of languages and achieved bestseller status throughout Western Europe in the late 1500s. It was not until 300 years later, when the French linguist Champollion finally deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics by applying a previously untried analysis that took into account both ideographic and phonetic aspects of the writing, that scholars began to consider the possibility of a phonetic element in Chinese writing also.

It is true that some characters are entirely or almost entirely ideographic. The symbols 一, 二, 三, for example, represent the numbers one, two and three. 休, depicting a man leaning against a tree, represents the verb “to rest”.

Other characters, however, have an entirely phonetic basis, in that a symbol is ‘borrowed’ to represent another word which is unrelated in meaning but which sounds (or historically sounded) the same. For example, 來 visually resembles a sheaf of wheat, so was used for writing the word “wheat”. Historically, both this word and the word meaning “come” were pronounced [ləg], so the same character came to be used for both words, even though their meanings are unrelated. So, in the case of the word “come”, the character can be said to have a purely phonetic basis.

However, most characters (about 85% of those commonly used for writing Traditional Han) are phono-semantic compounds; they contain both an ideographic element called a determinative that gives an indication of the word’s meaning, and a phonetic element that gives an indication of its pronunciation.

For example, the character 柏 is composed of two elements: 木, which means “tree” and 白, which means “white”. However, these two elements in combination do not represent the concept “a white tree”. 木 is the determinative, indicating a connection to the concept “tree”, but 白 serves a phonetic purpose. On its own 白 (“white”) is pronounced bái or bó, so inclusion of this element indicates that the word has a similar pronunciation. When fused together, these two elements indicate that the word represented is a type of tree which sounds like bái or bó - in this case, the word is “cypress tree”, pronounced bǎi, bò, or bó.

The role of phonetic elements in Simplified Chinese characters is a little more complex. In the case of many characters, the simplification process gave the phonetic element greater prominence than it was given in the Traditional variant. However, some characters were stripped of their phonetic elements entirely, or the phonetic elements were so radically simplified as to make them unrecognizeable. In addition, some speakers of dialects other than Mandarin (on which the simplified characters are based) argue that the phonetic elements no longer represent their pronunciations, and as such are essentially meaningless to them.

This article formerly appeared on ScriptSource.