The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I'm not sure if it's relevant to your argument in the end, but this seems like a simplification. While I'm no expert in Chinese, I'm reminded of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which I had a passing interest in once upon a time as a student of Japanese.

That article seems to be straining to make a distinction between "lexographic" (a rare term?) and "ideographic". 

Indeed Chinese characters were not created by a society of Silent Monks.  They were not invented to represent some pure ideas out of nothing, but rather the chunks of ideas that were associated to certain words of the language spoken by their creators.  That partition of the "idea space" and the writing evolved together for millennia, resulting in the current situation.   Namely, the hanzi 人 represents the fuzzy set of ideas that are evoked by the Mandarin word rén or the Cantonese word jan4.  Which is very roughly the same set of ideas that an English speaker thinks of on reading or hearings the word "person".

But it is quite misleading to say that the hanzi "represent words, not ideas".  The hanzi 人 does not represent any specific string of sounds.   Presumably it did when people started writing the symbol that evolved into this glyph; but that word and its language have died long ago and do not matter any more.  And probably that language had tens of thousands of words that never received a written symbol. 

Each Sinitic language has settled on a different mapping of hanzi to spoken words (syllables).  But the carving of the "idea space" into lexical chunks associated with the hanzi has become practically the same for all Sinitic languages.  That is what makes written Chinese an effective means of communication between speakers of different Sinitic languages; and this use is what has stabilized that "mental geography" against the natural tendency of languages to diverge over time.  

The description by Matteo Ricci (and MANY other who have had extensive experience in China) is still quite valid:

the Chinese have a system of writing similar to the hieroglyphic signs of the Egyptians ... they do not express their concepts by writing, like most of the world, with a few alphabetic signs, but they paint as many symbols as there are words. ... each word has its own hieroglyphic character, ... there are no fewer symbols than words.

Except of course that we now know that the Egyptian hierglyphs were mostly phonetic, not ideogaphic or "lexographic".

The "mental map" whereby ideas are divided into "lexical chunks" was clearly not stabilized  in the European languages. Even the Romance languages suffered substantial and independent "redistricting" of the lexical concepts since they split off Vulgar Latin. The meaning of single word of French often overlaps partly with the meanings of several non-equivalent words of Italian, and vice-versa: "bleu" can be "blu" or "azzurro", "nipote" can be "petit-fils", "petite-fille", "neveu", or "nièce" -- and there are many,many more examples.

All the best,--stolfi