Chinese Characters across Asia: Continuity and transformation in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese

By Mahlon Meyer
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

Chinese, like the other earliest inventions of writing, emerged in complex societies, where people needed to use symbols for writing. The script started as pictures, but quickly evolved to incorporate other mechanisms capable of indicating abstract concepts and grammatical structures. When Classical (or ancient) Chinese script spread, literate people in other cultures not only mastered it, but they then used it to represent their own distinct spoken languages in written form.

Zev Handel

All this is nothing new, according to Zev Handel, chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington (UW). Scholars have understood these historical developments for centuries.

But what he has found, and relates in a forthcoming book, Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese script came to write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (UW Press), is that the process by which other East Asian peoples adapted Chinese script to represent their own spoken languages was not unique. When the three other earliest forms of writing spread—namely that created by Sumerians (cuneiform), Egyptians (hieroglyphs), and Mesoamericans (hieroglyphs)—they were adapted in the same ways by other language speakers to represent their own spoken languages—and then developed into distinct writing systems that evolved away from those original scripts.

A lecture to explore the spread of Chinese script

However, all those original written languages are extinct, except Chinese.

Thus, Chinese and its relation—almost as parent to child—to other East Asian writing is the most accessible and perhaps most fruitful to study.

In a talk given on April 3 at the UW, Handel will explore the riddle of how Chinese script spread and populated the minds and tongues of people in areas now known as Japan, Vietnam, and Korea.

“For a long time, Chinese characters were the only writing system in that area. Two-thousand years ago, across East Asia, there was no other writing,” Handel told the Northwest Asian Weekly. “But because people speaking non-Chinese languages learned to read and write Classical Chinese in order to communicate in writing, they also started to figure out how to make changes to the Chinese script so they could represent their own spoken languages in writing.”

No need for background in any East Asian language

This topic may seem complicated, but there will be no need to have even a rudimentary grasp of any of the languages of East Asia, including Chinese, to attend and understand the talk.

The evening promises a fun-filled lecture full of mind-bending histories and even games the audience will be invited to enjoy.

For instance, one exercise Handel does in his classes he will share with everyone in the audience of all ages and backgrounds.

The game asks you to pretend you are an English speaker. But, unlike in reality, you are asked to imagine you can only speak English. You have no writing system. The alphabet is a ghost that hasn’t even been invented or even imagined.

What do you do?

Some scribe from China happens to come to town and teaches you a set of Chinese characters.

Even if you don’t know Chinese, you pick these dozen characters up easily.

So let’s say you have, for instance, the character for “horse.” This is written like 馬 or 马 (old style vs. modernized style).

And let’s say you have the character for “rice.” This is written like 米 (in both old and modernized forms).

Now, suddenly someone says you have to use these characters to write the word for “Mommy,” in English.

Remember, you don’t have any alphabet. You only have these new symbols.

You know—because your Chinese tutor has taught you—that in Chinese, they mean “horse” and “rice.”

But you’re desperate to get a note to your brother that he’s got to go get your mother.

So what do you do?

In desperation, perhaps, you remember that the pronunciations of the characters sound like “mah” (for horse) and “mee” (for rice).

So you write down those characters.

For a moment, your brother shakes his head, because he also learned that in Chinese they literally mean “horse” and “rice.”

But then you maybe look at him plaintively and say them again and again and point outside the room in the direction of your home.

“Mah-mee.”

And finally he gets it.

You have just transmogrified the characters from their original meaning into carriers of sound only, symbols of sounds that belong entirely to your own spoken language.

A new way of writing is born for English at that moment.

马米 no longer means “horse” and “rice.” 马米 now represents the sound “mah-mee,” and as an English speaker, you can now understand it means—“mommy.”

And so you start using Chinese characters to represent other English sounds as well.

And eventually you even start writing them shorthand.

A miracle of adaptation

In one way or another, this is how other East Asian languages developed their written form.

A Japanese speaker started by speaking his own language. But without writing. Then Classical Chinese writing came and was taught as its own writing system complete with its own pronunciation.

Then, through a miracle of ingenuity, the pronunciation of many of these characters were matched up with the pronunciation of spoken Japanese words—and used to create a second, new written language, a shadow language.

It consisted of the same characters. But while a Chinese literatus, trained only in Classical Chinese, could read the characters—he could not make sense of the meaning.

With the exception of words that could be easily written based on meaning correspondence, such as “moon” or “walk,” much of the new writing was now a sound map of an alien tongue.

“There are early texts written in Chinese characters, that at first glance, if you look at them, you might say, ‘Oh, Chinese characters, this is Chinese.’ But if you try to read it as someone who knows Chinese, either modern or Classical, it’s nonsense. And the reason it’s nonsense is because it’s a Japanese poem made up of Japanese words in Japanese grammatical sequence and you don’t realize that unless you know Japanese and know how the characters are functioning—not in their original usage, to write Chinese, but in their adapted usage, to represent Japanese,” said Handel.

A language taught rather than transmitted

To some of us, this might be a shock. For those of us who learned about the origins of Chinese characters as pictures and can still see in our mind’s eye those ancient pictures of a horse, like a cave drawing, slowly transforming into the modern character for horse, this might be an outrage.

Didn’t Chinese characters spread invisibly or silently like paintings so that people in other cultures instantly saw them for what they were—and adopted them?

No, says Handel. The spread of Chinese literacy was always accompanied by the spread of teaching it as a functioning system of writing with distinct pronunciations. It was the pronunciation that was, for the most part, the key to adaptation.

For one thing, when you look at modern Chinese, which is not that different from the script used 1,500 or 2,000 years ago, when it was spreading to other cultures, it is virtually impossible to derive meaning from most of the characters, as if they were unambiguous symbols.

“There’s no way that the original pictorial quality of the characters in their modern form can evoke an idea,” said Handel. “They simply have to be arbitrarily learned as representing particular meaningful elements of the spoken language.”

So the spread of Chinese script happened in the same way Americans now study Chinese—the only difference being that in that ancient time, Chinese was the only script available.

People in East Asia thousands of years ago “when they became literate, were taught to read Chinese, and they weren’t taught to read Chinese in some weird abstract silent way. They were taught to read Chinese by reading the characters out loud,” said Handel. “They memorized just the way you’ve memorized Chinese characters. When you were learning Chinese, you memorized Chinese characters with the pronunciation and the translation into English and that’s the way these people did too when they were learning Chinese.”

Chinese advantage but not superiority

Handel is quick to point out that this doesn’t in any way imply any superiority on the part of the Chinese script. However, the fact that the early Chinese were the first in the area to have a written language gave them some advantages.

“I think there’s no doubt that as the first culture in the region that developed writing, which is an incredibly powerful and important tool, as the first polity in the region that developed writing, this gave China an enormous advantage politically, culturally, and created a vehicle for the spread of Chinese culture and ideas beyond its borders and was the foundation for the development of writing in those other places,” said Handel. “So that’s absolutely true, but I don’t think that says anything about an inherent superiority about Chinese culture or Chinese values.”

Chinese from the distance

Still, one comes away with a certain feeling of loneliness as these other cultures adopted Chinese writing to express themselves. The power and the intricacy of the Chinese written language appears far off, at first, as it must have done to the ancient Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese scholar who was learning it. And then, even after having gained a mastery to use it to communicate—across East Asia—the haunting task of using the newly acquired mastery to undertake the long pilgrimage of using these foreign symbols to convey meaning in one’s own language became the work of many generations.

In his book, Handel discusses the long, many-centuries process by which Korea was infused with Chinese writing during the Han Dynasty, when military outposts were placed there, and how it ultimately broke off and developed its own writing system.

Something of this romance and fascination—and perhaps mystery—comes across in Handel’s own journey to acquire Chinese, which he describes in his preface, almost as if it were a love story.

“My personal relationship with Chinese characters began in 1985, my sophomore year of college, when I enrolled in a first-year Chinese language course. I already knew about the existence of Chinese characters, of course, but had only the vaguest notions about them. They were something I saw on the signs and menus of Chinese restaurants in the Boston suburb where I spent my childhood. I had a dim awareness that they represented entire words rather than functioning like letters of the alphabet,” he wrote.

It reads, perhaps, a little bit like a preface by Lu Xun, “Cheering from the sidelines,” in which the Chinese writer comes to a realization about something far off, and slowly coming into focus—in his case, his own changing role from a helpless observer to a spiritual whistleblower.

Magic demonstrations

Nevertheless, the examples Handel gives are curious and delightful.

For instance, he shows how written Chinese was co-opted to represent Japanese poetry and how his students used Chinese characters with Mandarin pronunciations to write English sentences—by mostly matching the pronunciation of a list of characters with the English sounds. (A demonstration, including the audience, will be given at the talk.)

The lecture, “Chinese Characters across Asia: Continuity and Transformation in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese,” will be held April 3, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at Kane Hall 210 on the UW campus. A reception will follow.

The lecture is sponsored by the Washin Kai 和心会, also known as Friends of Classical Japanese at UW, with support from the Seattle Chinese Post (Xi Hua Bao) Innovation Fund in Asian Languages, Literatures And Cultures.

For more details, and to register, go to https://events.uw.edu/event/WKS24/summary.

Mahlon can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.