Statements like these say to me you think DeFrancis is biased against Chinese characetrs, rather than giving his honest opinion as a linguist about their inferiority.
First of all, unlike you, DeFrancis never says anything about “inferiority” or “superiority” of scripts; it’s not the point anyway (at least in that chapter). Second of all, you are again confusing what you think with what other people think, in this case, what I think.
Don’t be ridiculous. DeFrancis clearly thinks Chinese characters are inferior to alphabetic scripts.
I think you’re confused about what I think. I will admit reading that last sentence of yours confused me a bit though!
Rather than continuing this back and forth, I’d be interested in seeing some quotes to back up what you are saying (not that I’m doubting you). I read his book a while ago and didn’t get the perception that he was presenting Chinese writing as inferior. But I’d be very open to page #'s and quotes to see what gave each of you your impression (for or against this notion).
i’d ask you to read it again. the entire book is really an attempt to prove that Chinese characters are inferior to more perfectly phonetic systems of writing, in many respects.
Here is the link to the chapter I was referring to again; it is on the previous page of this post, too. I read that chapter and commented on it. No more. No less. DeFrancis makes no judgement about such things as “superiority” or “inferiority” of scripts there (whatever that’s supposed to be 
), nor does such judgement matter to the discussion of that chapter or really to any discussion.
If you have evidence from which to rationally argue this point, feel free to show us the beef.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]
If you have evidence from which to rationally argue this point, feel free to show us the beef.[/quote]
umm, are we talking about the same book?
z:
inferior
-
Low or lower in order, degree, or rank: Captain is an inferior rank to major.
-
a. Low or lower in quality, value, or estimation: inferior craft; felt inferior to his older sibling.
b. Second-rate; poor: an inferior translation.
i was using the word in sense # 2.
The whole book argues that Chinese characters are not as efficient a form of writing as alphabetic script, ie they are inferior for that purpose. Perhaps you are getting confused with sense # 1.
You are right though, he does not say that explicitly in this chapter. that doesn’t change the fact that you discounted his opinion as a linguist on the basis that he favors the script he grew up with
I’m going to have to re-read that book sometime, because I certainly never read it as critical of characters…
I second that. But again, I haven’t read it in a few years and I was going through it at a pretty fast pace when I did.
Without some specific passages from Defrancis showing where you Defrancis makes his opinion known (either directly or indirectly) about the Chinese writing systems inferiority to alphabetic scripts, I’m inclined not to agree with that statement.
And I may reread Defrancis and some point in time, but certainly not just to find evidence to support an opinion that isn’t even my own.
- I don’t recall ever discounting the author’s opinion (perhaps the reference was to someone else, which is fine), and
- you still haven’t provided any quotes to support your assertions.
So, up to this point, you’re not convincing me. Again, if he really argues this ‘inferiority’, that would be a very interesting thing! I’m very eager to see the beef, page numbers and quotes – anything but repeated vague assertions.
Which is the point you completely missed in your self defense induced rage against the attack on “your” characters. No where did he say that a language cannot have ideographic components. Actually:
Theres a different between an ideographic character and an ideographic language. Existance of ideographic characters is NOT the Ideographic Myth. I think you need to slow down when you read.
ok, i’ll dig it out of the box. my impression is that he argues that a more perfectly phonetic system would be a better tool for transcribing chinese, ie superior. back in a few days
[quote=“Dragonbones”]
- I don’t recall ever discounting the author’s opinion (perhaps the reference was to someone else, which is fine), [/quote]
yeah, talking to z.
The way you phrase it this time, in a rational, utilitarian tone, carries a very different flavor than “characters are inferior”, which some might interpret as cultural arrogance on his part. People are sensitive to such things, labels of inferior and superior, and if you use these carelessly, or misuse them intentionally, you’ll get a negative reaction. From your statement:
" the entire book is really an attempt to prove that Chinese characters are inferior"
you’ll set off warning bells in people’s heads about Eastern vs. Western superiority. I assume this was not your intent. I know DeFrancis’s work well enough to know it was not his.
I tentatively assume you have erred in interpreting the overall purpose and flavor of his book, but will keep an open mind until you provide the repeatedly requested evidence to the contrary.
(The little devil on my left shoulder wants me to say that some might expect this kind of reaction only from a with a major on his or her shoulder against , but i refuse to give in to such temptations. The little angel on my right shoulder, being far more generous, tells me I should assume that you read the book upside-down during kinky and weren’t really paying attention to what DeFrancis actually wrote.)
(just kidding, my friend. looking forward to your response 
)
[quote=“Dragonbones”]
(just kidding, my friend. looking forward to your response 
)[/quote]
Well if turns out i had to pull the book out of the box just to prove the patently obvious there is going to be hell to pay
i thought i was being rational enough to begin with I certainly did not mean to imply DeFrancis was a rabid bigot or something anyway i will stand by my use of the word inferior. my usage of English is not constrained by others’ petty sensitivities
however in the spirit of understanding I will from now on refer to Chinese characters as “chicken scratches.” can you tell how much i love them?
Which is the point you completely missed in your self defense induced rage against the attack on “your” characters. No where did he say that a language cannot have ideographic components. Actually:
Theres a different between an ideographic character and an ideographic language. Existance of ideographic characters is NOT the Ideographic Myth. I think you need to slow down when you read.[/quote]
And you missed my point that Chinese characters (and indeed all scripts to some extent) are used more ideographically than DeFrancis acknowledges, in particular in well versed readers. There is also NO theoretical reason why it cannot be, but DeFrancis argues it and provides no actual reason either. My criticism of DeFrancis is his going overboard when he tries to debunk the “ideographic” myth because he conflates the origin of a script (along with its outer form) with its possible uses, and the conflation arises from his experience in the development and form of a script he is familiar with. The point is, if I were to go overboard, I can write a paper called “The Phonetic Myth.” But I won’t because I recognize the fallacy in making such divisions that automatically categorizes various scripts as aberrant as much as the myth itself does.
It’s subtle. Please read it carefully. Read the apples and oranges analogy again, too.
[quote=“zeugmite”]And you missed my point that Chinese characters (and indeed all scripts to some extent) are used more ideographically than DeFrancis acknowledges, in particular in well versed readers. There is also NO theoretical reason why it cannot be, but DeFrancis argues it and provides no actual reason either. My criticism of DeFrancis is his going overboard when he tries to debunk the “ideographic” myth because he conflates the origin of a script (along with its outer form) with its possible uses, and the conflation arises from his experience in the development and form of a script he is familiar with. The point is, if I were to go overboard, I can write a paper called “The Phonetic Myth.” But I won’t because I recognize the fallacy in making such divisions that automatically categorizes various scripts as aberrant as much as the myth itself does.
It’s subtle. Please read it carefully. Read the apples and oranges analogy again, too.[/quote]
I see no such conflation, he specifically states that the origin and the use are separate and analyses the usuages for the first path to his conclusion. Would you have the same problems if he was born in China and his first language was Mandarin?
I totally agree that DeFrancis (and most CSL professors) goes way overboard on the “phonetic-ness” of Mandarin, or actually I should say of modern Mandarin in use today. Whether a character originally had a valid phonetic component is absolutely irrelevant to whether or not it can considered a “phonetic” one now. This leads to the (off topic) question of if it’s not ideographic, and not phonetic NOW, then what is it?? But this, of course, is due to a difference in definition of phonetic, between linguistic and common usage.
While he doesn’t prove it’s impossible, he does give a good argument. To be a complete language AND completely phonetically free one must create ideographs not only able to represent any and all possible situations, but also directly represent abstract actions and ideas (which by definition are abstract and therefore not representable in a concrete form). While it might be arguable that this is possible (IMO it’s not), the sheer number of ideographs required would be mind-boggling, beyond the capability of the human mind I believe De Francis puts it. I guess including a study on the maximum number of symbols the human mind can memorize would prove it.
So his point amounts to debunking that any language approaches a “100% ideographic complete language”, and in fact the closest are far from the 100% mark. IMO I’d put it down in the 30-50% range, although a number really means nothing…
Go ahead and make a study on the Phonetic Myth, it most definitately would NOT be fallacious to try, and you might be able to prove it, ie. numerals (and therefore making the myth fallacious). But even if no language reaches 100%, many reach VERY close (ie. Spanish, like 99%), which means the phonetic moniker much more closely describes a language than ideographic. But this last paragraph isn’t what DeFrancis said. Or did he? I haven’t had to chance yet to read the whole book.
I’d like to hear a well-reasoned argument with examples, rather than just assertions, of this point. Hopefully you’ll be using “used …ideographically” with the same definition of ideographic that scholars agree upon, i.e., that the char’s represent meaning and not sounds; that they directly convey meaning to the eye, like an up arrow. DF fully admits that Chinese has some of these simple indicatives, but correctly points out that they constitute less than 1% of the entire corpus, versus the 97% which are semantic-phonetic (SP) in origin.
Freakin’ Amazing’s point of a diff between an ideographic character and an ideographic language, and "Existance of ideographic characters is NOT the Ideographic Myth. " is important. The Myth is that Chinese is fundamentally directly indicative of meaning, a ludicrous idea which DeFrancis, as his main point, does a fine job of debunking.
Another of his main points in Fact and Fantasy is that the first introduction to Chinese that many foreigners get, on cocktail napkins, is a few of these simple indicatives and some basic pictographs, and they walk away with a gross misunderstanding of the language.
FA: "I totally agree that DeFrancis (and most CSL professors) goes way overboard on the “phonetic-ness” of Mandarin, or actually I should say of modern Mandarin in use today. Whether a character originally had a valid phonetic component is absolutely irrelevant to whether or not it can considered a “phonetic” one now. "
He drives home at length the main point of his writings, that Chinese writing has a HUGE phonetic basis in origin, but he’s the first to admit that this SP origin does not necessarily mean that modern readers can always make good use of that embedded phonetic information, and cites evidence that the functional level is only around 25% (e.g., his citation in Visible Speech p.51 of Chao’s 1976 research). He does discuss the use of semantic determinatives for disambiguating homonyms, and also discusses the difference between components being phonetic in origin, and phonetic in function (i.e., many of the phonetics have lost that function over time, being obsolete). So he’s already fully aware that many characters are simply memorized as having their particular phonetic reading and the associated meaning. It’s this threeway link of graph, sound and meaning which all full writing systems share in common. The ideographic myth is one of a two-way link, of graph to meaning, and linguists agree that no full language could be based upon this.
Now, if anyone can demonstrate actual evidence (rather then continued repetition) supporting assertions that there is more simple-indicative structure than DF acknowledges, or that the functional phonetic efficiency of the languages is actually lower than this 25%, I’m all ears.
It’s certainly not his main point, in either this book or Visible Speech (VS).
FA is perfectly correct, as usual: "So his point amounts to debunking that any language approaches a “100% ideographic complete language”.
His main points are emphatically and repeatedly that Chinese is not an ideographic language, but like all fully developed writing systems, it relies heavily on phonetic information, and that this fact is both contradicted by the Ideographic Myth and underemphasized by scholars, even now. Furthermore, to use words like “inferior” and “superior” without discussing rational criteria for ranking seems, to me, like cultural arrogance. When DF does engage in comparisons, he discusses relative efficiency in terms of communicating phonetic info, or cumbersomeness for word processing, but such comparisons should not be reduced to single words like that, which are easily misunderstood by others.
In VS, pp.267-8, he talks about ranking various writing systems based on different criteria, such as phonetic efficiency (and therefore ease of use in WP), but also points out that you could rank languages in other ways, such as their ability to serve specific languages, aesthetic preferences, global standards of communication, and so on. He points out familiarity and emotional attachment as possible considerations too, and in each different analyses, comes up with different rankings. It is NOT the case that Chinese comes up low on all of these, so it is not at all reasonable to make an all-encompassing description of his opinion as being that characters are inferior. He clearly states “all writing systems are on an equal footing as far as their ability to convey any and all thought is concerned. From this point of view, there are no primitive or inferior systems of writing. Alphabetic systems are not necessarily superior to syllabic systems.” VS, pp.268-9.
TG is completely correct here. DF merely tries, as a linguist, to achieve a more correct analysis of what the language is or is not, vis-a-vis phonetic and non-phonetic aspects, both of which he acknowledges. When he gets into analyses of phonetic efficiency of a language, giving Finnish, Spanish, German and Russian high marks, and English and Chinese low marks, he’s merely pointing out the degree of fit of symbols to sounds. The ideographic myth would give Chinese a fit of zero here, and DeFrancis cites Chao’s analysis that it is actually much higher, at 25 percent (VS p.51). DF focuses on the fact that around 97% of char’s are in the semantic-phonetic category (SP), and points out that most are phonetic elements (I’d add chiefly loans) with semantic disambiguators added rather than vv. He states that Barnard and most other specialists agree with this, and I certainly do as well. The more I study paleography and etymology, the more this opinion is reinforced.
Actually he sometimes does, but only in a purely analytical sense, regarding phonetic efficiency, or the ease with which languages can mesh with technology like word processing, and of course no cultural supremacy is ever intended. He also refers to the aesthetic supremacy of Chinese, clearly a personal opinion rather than part of his scholarly analysis.
No, that’s a gross mischaracterization. The entire book is really an attempt to dispel various myths about Chinese, chief among them that the characters are ideographic, i.e., convey meaning directly to the mind without going through learned associations which rely fundamentally on the spoken language, and without phonetic information.
No, the “whole book” is no such thing. It is not aimed at any such primary thesis. His analysis of them as less phonetically efficient, just as English is less phonetically efficient than Finnish, is a mere side note, and a perfectly valid linguistic observation. Yes, he refers to Chinese as relatively unsuitable for word processing, being difficult to input and unwieldy for cataloguing when compared to alphabetic languages and romanization. But in neither of these books does this approach more than a mere side note.
DF does argue that IF the Chinese world went completely baihua in both media broadcasts and writing, then it would be possible, and more efficient, to write in a more efficient phonetic form. He gives examples of such phonetically efficient alternatives like a reduced set of characters with one per spoken syllable, pinyin, etc., and argues that the latter is more suitable for cataloguing, computer processing, and so on, but he envisions this as a tool used alongside hanzi, in what he calls a digraphic system.
z: “he conflates the origin of a script (along with its outer form) with its possible uses”
FA is perfectly correct in pointing out that there is no such conflation. DF’s analyses of origins and modern usage are clearly distinguished and extremely lucid.
That is not a good argument. Yes, completely random characters would be difficult to commit to memory, but all that is required to lower encoding and decoding complexity is some organization (i.e. structure) in the script. That structure, however, need not be a phonetic one at all. I think this is patently obvious. That was my point and that’s the fallacy in DeFrancis’ argument.
Well that was my other point that he is making the mistake that some other form of structure in the script (talking in general now, not just Chinese) is aberrational, in the sense that, by only measuring “phonetic” efficiency, he assumes the primacy of sound-expressing purpose of written languages. My point was, this is a terribly bad mindset to be in if the scientific investigation was to look at the actual purposes of written languages, whatever they may turn out to be. You should go in with a blank slate and assume whatever you discover is just the way it is, then do characterizations.
[quote]z: “he conflates the origin of a script (along with its outer form) with its possible uses”
FA: I see no such conflation, he specifically states that the origin and the use are separate and analyses the usuages for the first path to his conclusion. Would you have the same problems if he was born in China and his first language was Mandarin? [/quote]
Finally, he does conflate the two. In one sense, FA acknowledged that in his subsequent paragraph; but that’s just the most glaring conflation; he conflates the two in more subtle ways, too. Let me explain. While DeFrancis explicitly talks about “form” and “function,” he is talking about something else. His “form” and “function” refer to the structural form of a certain modern character and the “function” of that character at its creation. When I say he conflates the origin and form with the use of a character, I am talking about him conflating the apparent functional form of a character via fossilization of its function at the time of its creation, with the subsequent development and use of a character. This is why DeFrancis completely misses the uses of characters in purely-semantic word creation (i.e. Chinese words coined first on paper), in semantic cross-borrowing between dialects, in Japanese semantic borrowing, in semantic activation in speed reading, and a host of other non-phonetic but fully legitimate uses. I would also like to point out that this applies to alphabetic languages as well (in particular, coining compounds or root-compounds first on paper), which further validates the extent of DeFrancis’ conflation that he did not even see this in his own written language.
I would have a problem with it whatever DF’s origin was, but of course, it would make less sense to say he was influenced by his native language if his native language was Mandarin. The truth is, the native language of a person does influence one’s thinking about the purpose of writing to such an extent that there is a “phonetic myth” out there that people are transcribing sounds (or spelling sounds) when they write in English, when it is not the case, either.
Of course there are phonetic aspects in modern usage of the Chinese written language. However, that doesn’t make DeFrancis’ argument for it any more valid because his arguments on that point are flawed. His extension of that point to all written languages is even more flawed, and even though there may yet be other evidence for both the actuality and the necessity of phonetic primacy in all written languages (debateable), DeFrancis provides little reason (and inspires little confidence in the way he makes assumptions) for one to believe that thesis. It’s like, he had an idea for a result that may be true, but then wrote a completely fallacious proof for it.
Well I received this book today “Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning” and read through it (well skimmed through it actually).
I thought it was a load of drivel.
If Unger was simply trying to prove that when Chinese, Japanese etc. read characters that something to do with language goes on in the brain, he could have dome that in one or two chapters.
I got the feeling that I was being led on a long, slow and painful trek that would eventually lead to the need for an alphabetic system.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I never got that far.
Comparing Gregg Chorthand to Kanji: This started out as interesting, but eventually became extrememly boring. So I skipped to the conclusion of the chapter where he talks about the dying out of shorthand with the increase of computers. Then makes the comment;
“more and more Japanese are foresaking pen and paper and doing their writing on Japanese word-processors, mostly using romanized input. The same phenomenon is taking place in China. Surely the time has come to give up the culturally exclusive views of kanji (or hanzi) and their alleged effects on the minds of Japanese and Chinese.”
If you drop off the little tacked on “and their alleged effects on the minds of Japanese and Chinese.” I think his message is clear.
He did this a little too often in the book for my liking. It seemed like a veiled pro-alphabet argument to me.
p47 he quotes Nitobe Inazo ‘“The blind man can be better educated then his more fortunate brethren who are endowed with good sight; for the former by acquiring the forty-seven letters of the I-ro-ha syllabry, through the Braille system, can read history, geography or anything written in that system; whereas he who has eyesight cannot read the daily newspaper unless he has mastered at least 2000 characters.” More eloquent testimony to the fact that language remains the same no matter how it is written would be hard to imagine. And this fact is the starting point for any serious investigation of how Japanese (or any other kind of) reading works.’
Again, drop off the tacked on “and blah blah blah…” and his message is very evident.
On pp55, 56 he gives a view of what characters “approximately look like” and then provides two examples of what look like kindergarten scrawls. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt that this was a loose shot at humor, it is far from academic, and if anything re-inforces the myth that characters are just a bunch of scrambled squiggly lines, which a scholar with a chip on his shoulder about myths would surely not want to perpetuate.
p 11 he blames the the fall in buying of books in Japan (and hence reading) on “a load [that] was becoming heavy for a rapidly growing segment of the population.”
The first thing that sprang to my mind was the affect that movies, computer games (easy entertainment), as well as the proliferation of many different types of entertainmet, all have on people’s reading.
I remember when I was growing up that parents and educators were lementing the lack of reading going on.
He had all kinds of analogies that I couldn’t see going anywhere and not really sure if he was actually making a valid point or just padding out the book.
Wish I had saved my money and my time.
DeFrancis’ book is on the way… I hope this one is better 
(any bold or highlights are mine)