Been reading The World Encyclopedia of Calligraphy, compiled and edited by Christopher Calderhead and Holly Cohen. Calderhead also writes the introduction to the chapter on Chinese calligraphy, and he says something striking:
Calligraphy holds a central role in the development of Chinese art and culture. The tools of the Chinese painter and calligrapher are one and the same, and there is no clean line of demarcation between the two arts as exists in the West.
This is another way of pointing out that in Chinese words are pictures to a greater extent than in the West. The Latin alphabet is descended, yes, from the Phoenician abjad, and through it Egyptian hieroglyphics. By necessity it still has graphic properties. But they're mostly incidental to the sounds that the letters make, much less the meanings of the words they form. This is in large part true of the other Western alphabets like Greek and Cyrillic.
Eastern scripts are made up of somewhat more complex images that are often stylized versions of the things they depict. You have to learn thousands of them before you know the language. These markings perform, to a greater extent, an actual depiction of what they're supposed to mean.
I don't think either of these systems is necessarily better. There are advantages to both an abstract writing system and one that's more embodied. It's just interesting to realize your own way isn't the only one.
2 comments:
The fact that a person must learn thousands of characters in the Chinese language in order to become literate (also Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) might indicate that as societies the Oriental ones might make slower cultural and scientific advances. The characters seen as artforms requiring interpretation rather than having distinct literal meanings would likely make for a slower technical pace. It's something I'd have to think about for a bit longer. Can a way of expressing a language visually make a more stable society?
Western calligraphy is based on the same 26 alphabet characters we learn as children. Although those letters have gone through changes over the centuries it's far from impossible to figure out what we're seeing. Monks during the Dark Ages used calligraphy when copying religious texts and the invention of Gutenberg's printing press codified the particular letter forms we're most familiar with today. And once there was a printing press all sorts of developments came along in a hurry.
Of course it could all have been very different. Apparently, Etruscan looks a lot like Greek but linguists have an impossible time understanding what the phrases mean. The other one I've read about that can't be deciphered at all is the Harappan language. Every so often a Rosetta Stone comes in handy.
Small correction. The Vietnamese language mostly uses the Latin alphabet now. I don't know if this is the last lingering influence of the French imperial hold on it or what. Historically they used a Chinese-based system called Chữ Nôm. Anyway, it's a good question about whether the visual expression of a language can lead to more stability. Any society will likely have so many moving parts to it that it's hard to figure out what causes differences between them.
One thing that is constant in calligraphy across cultures and writing systems is that it forces the practitioner to slow down and be more deliberate in shaping the characters. I imagine that it's very meditative in that sense. The fact that monks have practiced it, thereby preserving all sorts of writings, supports this idea. The printing press has complicated the picture somewhat.
A lot of linguists believe that the Etruscan alphabet influenced the development of the Latin one we use. Both of them had roots in Greek and Phoenician. Interesting, because the Etruscan language came from somewhere else entirely, related only to a few Mediterranean island languages. Harappan comes from Southern Asia--the Indus Valley--but dates from the Bronze Age. Our trouble with it comes from the fact that it was well and truly displaced after that.
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