Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 November 2

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November 2

Development of Chinese characters from holistic to compositional

From Hockett and Ascher (1964) "The Human Revolution", on the development of Chinese characters: "The earliest characters were holistically different from one another to the eye-any visual resemblances between constituent parts of different characters were unsystematic and accidental. But as the system developed, and a larger and larger number of characters had to be devised, it became impossible to keep on inventing completely different new shapes; instead, new characters came to be built by putting together pieces drawn from old ones." No source is given for this claim. Is it accurate, and has a similar development occurred in other writing systems? 169.228.146.217 (talk) 15:40, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

I would think so. Many seemingly complex characters are made up of other characters for meaning and a phonetic aid. I think the process works, because in psychology, there is a phenomenon known as chunking. Once chunked, it becomes easier to remember. For Chinese characters, chunking and phonetics really help in remembering characters. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 16:25, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't think so. The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (here, if the link works for other people), p. 52, dates this change (from pictographic to ideographic characters) to the unification of China c. the Qin dynasty, and attributes it to the need to save time, not to create new characters. Henry^Flower 17:00, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Well that's just wrong. Even Oracle script contains ideographic characters. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 11:36, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

There are two separate issues. First, the question of when and why characters and character elements changed from recognizable or semi-recognizable little drawings to conventionalized arrangements of calligraphic strokes (as addressed by Henry Flower). Second, the fact that characters created early in the development of Chinese writing were of diverse types (traditionally there is a classification into six categories), but the vast majority of new characters that have been added since the Chinese writing system was initially developed belong to just one of those six types, the "phono-semantic compound" (as addressed by 140.254.70.33)... AnonMoos (talk) 00:31, 3 November 2017 (UTC)