The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

...But Jorge is the one resting part of his argument on the idea that Chinese people are illiterate and just communicate in pictures .

 

Sorry, but I cannot continue this futile discussion.  You keep attributing to me absurd statements that I never made, like the one above.  And they are getting worse each time.

But let me try one last time to clarify what seems to be a major source of your confusion.  

A character like Z or 水 on a piece of paper has physical existence, and its identification as the "Z" character or the "水" character is essentially an objective fact.  Its meaning, in contrast, does not have physical existence: it exists only in the minds of people, and can be different for each person, and change with time, context, etc.  

Thus the claim that "the meaning of a Chinese character is a word" is not just wrong, but nonsensical: because there is no such thing as "the" meaning of the character 水.  

Back in 300 BCE, that character may have meant a word to the "Divine Farmer", in his spoken language.  But, by the time of the "dictation", that language had been lost for more than a thousand years, and no one knew what that word could have been.  Not even people who spoke languages that descended from it.   

And yet 水 continued to have meaningS to this day, not only to speakers of all Sinitic languages but also to speakers of Japanese, and to scholars reading old Korean and Vietnamese books.  Maybe to some of those people the meaning of 水 is a word -- but it will be a different word to different people, and none of those words is "THE" meaning of  水.  But to other people the meaning of 水 is not a word but the concept of water; and it so happens that, for most people who know that character, it indeed means the concept of water -- either directly, or indirectly through a word that means water to them.

So what would 水 have meant to a hypothetical Cantonese-speaking Dictator in 1400?  If to him 水 meant a word, it must have been the Cantonese syllable, that, in spoken Cantonese, evokes the concept of "water"  (Today it would be seoi2, but of course it would be something else by then.)  And water is what, in that scenario, the Author would have thought of when he heard that spoken syllable.  Or years later, when he read the phonetic transcription of that syllable in his notes.

Maybe the Dictator knew also the reading of 水 in Old (1400 CE)  Mandarin, and/or in some conventional "Classical" spoken language.  But, in that case, for him the meaning of 水 would not be one of those words, but the concept of water.  

But it does not matter.  The existence of those other readings, and whether the Dictator knew them or not, would have been entirely irrelevant to the "dictation scenario" or its likelihood.  When the Dictator saw 水 on the book, he would still have said the CANTONESE syllable for water.

(By the way, it seems possible that even in 300 BCE 水 may not have meant a word, but several words with different inflections, or several synonyms.  That is, even to the "Divine Farmer" the meaning of 水 may have been not a word but  the general concept of water.  AFAIK, there is no evidence that could rule out this possibility.)

(And that was probably the case much earlier, when the characters were invented for use on the oracle bones: as in Sumer and other places, writing must have been ideographic at first, with symbols denoting a few notable concepts rather than sounds.  The evolution must have been gradual from that to "lexographic" writing -- where symbols represent spoken words, and are strung out more or less according to the syntax of the spoken language to record sentences.)

All the best, in spite of everything --stolfi