Logography and the classification of writing systems: a response to Unger

• 발행기관: 훈민정음학회
• 저자명: Zev Handel
• 간행물 정보: 『Scripta』Volume.7, 109~150쪽, 전체 42쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2015.10.30

영문 초록

In response to Unger (2014), I argue that Chinese does not merely lie along one end of an undifferentiated continuum of writing systems plotted according to the degree of phonological representation found in its graphs. Rather, two features of Chinese writing make it categorically distinct from even orthographically “deep” alphabetic writing systems like English: (1) the high prevalence of graphs that represent distinct meaningful linguistic units (i.e. morphemes) and (2) the use of graphic components (variously termed significs, determinatives, taxograms, classifiers, radicals) to represent the general semantic domains of those represented morphemes. These features have implications for how Chinese writing is processed in the brain, how it changes over time, and how it has been adapted for the written representation of other languages. For these reasons we should recognize that Chinese writing is distinct from phonographic systems of writing. Any dispute over which term is most appropriate for characterizing Chinese and the other writing systems of its type—logographic, morphographic, morphosyllabic, etc.—is secondary in importance to the recognition of the validity of this categorical distinction.

목차

0. Background

1. Characterizations of Chinese writing and the definition of “logographic”

2. Classification: categories and continua

3. Evidence from psycholinguistic research and other sources

4. Valid criteria for the classification of writing systems

5. Is Chinese writing morphographic?

6. Conclusion: towards a new typology

키워드

Chinese writing logogram logographic morphosyllabic classification of writing systems script borrowing radical