In 2013, Zev Handel criticized the PRC’s mid-twentieth-century simplifications of Chinese characters because they failed to acknowledge “that a well-functioning logographic script has cognitive advantages over purely phonographic scripts” (2013, 22). John DeFrancis and I had earlier (1995) argued that a graphic unit in a given context should be described as phonographic or logographic only to the extent that its graphic form does or does not include visible clues to the sound(s) it represents in that context. Handel (2013, 23fn2) chided us for this; I responded (2014) by citing studies of reading showing that the brain processes all kinds of writing in roughly the same way despite differences in appearance. Such studies imply that one cannot classify graphic units—let alone entire writing systems—as absolutely logographic or absolutely phonographic. In a surrejoinder, Handel (2015) was slightly conciliatory but ended by insisting that some writing systems were “largely logographic” or “largely phonographic”: “there are real-world correlates of this distinction and they do indeed justify the classification of writing systems as phonographic or logographic according to the traditional definitions of those terms” (Handel 2015, 146, emphasis original). He maintained this stance in his later book Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script (Handel 2019).
Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese is a less rigorous, pared-down recasting of Sinography. “My goal in writing this book,” writes Handel, “has been to tell the story of the global history of Chinese characters: to explain how they function and how they have been adapted, in a way that is approachable yet not overly simplified” (x). Handel does this in eight chapters supplemented by maps, illustrations, “notes…on the sound values of letters that may be confusing for readers familiar with English” (xvii), a short list of “Chinese Dynasties and Modern Historical Periods” (xxiii), a “Glossary of Linguistic and Technical Terms” that recapitulates the definitions used throughout (201–205), and a “Character Locator,” an index-like list of English glosses on words written with characters and their romanizations (233–37).
Chapter 1 explains what is wrong with claims such as “Chinese characters represent ideas” and “every word is written with a different Chinese character” (4). Handel warns, “Some of these ideas are half-true at best, and others are completely false” (ibid.). Nevertheless, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), whom Handel introduces in this chapter (1–3, 7, 13–14, 27), believed that Chinese characters are ideograms that transcend differences among languages. Handel uses Ricci (how could such a smart man be so wrong?) to add continuity to his narrative. He brings him back in chapters 2 (65–66), 7 (189), and 8 (194, 196–98), in which the reader finally learns that, in the words of the chapter’s title, “Universal Writing [is] The Impossible Dream.”
Chapter 1 is also where Handel separates all scripts into three types (15–22): alphabetic, syllabic, and morphography. Handel suggests, “Because writing represents speech, we can classify scripts according to the relationships between their graphs and elements of spoken language” (15). But precisely because writing represents speech and the phonologies and lexicons of languages change over time, their relationships with the salient elements of a language’s writing system also change. The mnemonic features of a graphic unit—whether a string of letters or a Chinese character—that once made it highly phonographic may be eroded or lost; a graphic unit once emblematic of a single morpheme may become little more than a syllabogram if the original function or meaning of the morpheme fades or becomes irrelevant. For example, in Běidà (Beijing University, 北大), a common shortening of Běijīng dàxué (北京大学), it is obvious that 北 and 大 do not actually signify “north” and “big.” Furthermore, the written form of dàxué (university, 大学) was borrowed whole from Meiji-period Japanese, in which the Japanese word daigaku was used to translate the English university. It is not a compound of morphemes for “big” and “study.” Daigaku was part of the Sino-Japanese name of the centuries-old imperial academy for bureaucrats, daigakuryō (大學寮), the final ryō 寮 (now just “dormitory” in Japanese) was simply dropped. Incidentally, liáo (small house, 寮) is now most often seen in the Chinese word Liáoguó (Laos, 寮国), where it is clearly just a syllabogram.
Chapter 2 discusses the historical development of Chinese writing, which argues that Chinese writing is mainly morphographic, meaning most characters correspond to morphemes—units of language that carry both sound and meaning. For over two thousand years, writes Handel, most Chinese morphemes have been just one syllable long, so each character is tied to a one-syllable pronunciation as well as a meaning. Although a few hundred of the most common characters began as simple pictographs, the vast majority are built as compound graphs that combine both semantic and phonetic elements.
In chapter 3, “Classical Chinese: A Written Language for East Asia,” Handel emphasizes that the graphic shapes of Chinese characters have been much more resistant to change over time than other features of literary (Handel prefers the term “classical”) Chinese (68–71). He illustrates this “stability of written forms” (70) by contrasting Mandarin and Cantonese versions of a literary Chinese sentence with the French, Spanish, and Italian versions of a Latin sentence. This sets up chapter 4, in which he argues that graphic stability worked with the morphographic nature of the Chinese writing system to limit the ways in which non-Chinese could make use of Chinese characters for writing their own languages: they could (1) treat them as phonograms or syllabograms (based on how they heard them read aloud); (2) gloss them in their own language (provided they understood literary Chinese well enough); or (3) invent novel characters (based on Chinese graphic models).
From this perspective, it is not only unnecessary to describe Chinese characters as morphographs distinct from other kinds of writing, but it is actually misleading. The Roman alphabet has been adapted for writing languages as different from each other (and Latin) as Bahasa Indonesia, Hungarian, and Basque. The salient graphic units in their scripts are letter sequences; the extent to which a particular instance of a letter sequence functions “morphographically” rather than phonographically depends on the sound(s) it represents in that instance and the current phonology of the language. Chinese characters are no different. Despite the prestige of literary Chinese and its “graphic stability,” the meanings of its morphemes could change over time, as one can see by comparing, for instance, Korean kongbu (study), Mandarin gōngfū (spare time), Japanese kufū (device, artifice), and Japanese kōfu (laborer)—all written 工夫. Whatever meanings those characters carried in literary Chinese, they evidently became little more than syllabograms by the time these words came into existence. Likewise, sound changes can make graphic units significantly more “morphographic” in scripts that Handel does not classify as morphographic. One can see this, for instance, in English spellings such as “through,” “bough,” “borough,” “enough,” “cough,” and “hiccough,” which today are just barely phonographic.
The following chapters describe how the three options for innovation were historically exploited in Korea and Japan (by “linear adaptation,” chapter 5), and in Vietnam and the Zhuang communities of southern China (by “composite adaptation,” chapter 6). Linear adaptation refers to the glossing and reordering of characters to facilitate reading in the second language, while composite adaptation refers to creation of new characters on the model of Chinese phonetic/signific compounds for words of the second language. Chapter 7 surveys the present-day results of these “adaptations” in all these places. (Of course, characters are not like bacteria that adapt themselves to new environments. Speakers of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese found ways to use characters or made up new ones that Chinese speakers could hardly have imagined.) In writing about the Zhuang, who speak a Tai-Kadai language, Handel briefly acknowledges that not all peoples on the Chinese periphery developed Chinese-looking characters as they did (183). But the fact that neither Tibetans nor Mongols, who had acquired literacy through contact with users of Indic or West Asian scripts, bothered devising Chinese-like characters shows that the prestige of literary Chinese had limits.
Incidentally, speakers of Tangut, a Tibeto-Burman language that flourished from the eleventh through sixteenth centuries, also developed their own Chinese-style characters, which Handel does not mention. The book contains some other oversights. For instance, after telling the reader that not every Chinese morpheme is monosyllabic, Handel immediately contradicts himself: “Because Chinese writing is morphographic, each Chinese character represents a morpheme” (22). But, as Handel certainly knows, Chinese has words like húdié (butterfly, 蝴蝶), the characters of which are syllabograms contrived solely for the purpose of writing the word húdié (Kennedy 1964, 274–322). John DeFrancis discussed other words of the same kind (DeFrancis 1984, 180–84). Yet neither author is cited in the book.
In sum, Handel has written an approachable but flawed explanation of how Chinese characters “function and how they have been adapted” in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. He says little about how literacy brought their cultures into the Chinese orbit. Yet, it was not just the mode of literacy that sinified those cultures but, more importantly, the knowledge, new ideas, technologies, and artistic accomplishments that literacy made accessible to them. The deep imprint of Chinese civilization can still be seen in these cultures, even though Koreans now use hangul almost exclusively, Japanese have been using two syllabaries for more than a thousand years, Vietnamese use their own romanized script, and the role of literary Chinese in all three cultures (and in China) has greatly declined. It may be convenient for explanatory purposes to say that Chinese characters are “morphographs,” but one is left wondering, how significantly different have the histories of the Sino-Xenic cultures been from those of those cultures that acquired literacy through contact with Greece, Rome, the Islamic caliphates, or various states of India?