Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [114]
The advent of Sanskrit, known as fànwén, ‘Brahman writing’, in China, bongo, ‘Brahman talk’, in Japan, had only a small effect on the character-based system of writing in use in East Asia, since this had already been well established in China for over a millennium: rather, Chinese characters are often used (though only phonetically) to represent Sanskrit itself in the Buddhist practice of these countries.
One effect it did have was on Chinese phonetics. Chinese scholars of the Tang period (seventh to eighth centuries), knowing the Sanskrit alphabetic tradition could identify the initial consonants of characters, called them zìmŭ, ‘word mothers’, apparently after the Sanskrit term mātkā, ‘maternal’, which is also a letter of the alphabet. These were used to systematise the traditional practice for indicating pronunciation in dictionaries: Chinese dictionaries have always done this by what is called fànqiě, linking a character with two others, one with the same initial consonant, and the other with the same tone and rhyme. Putting this into a systematic chart was a very modest step in linguistic understanding, since no further analysis of the rhyme part (for example, into vowels and consonants) was undertaken.41
There is also an interesting curiosity in one of the other writing systems used in this vast area of Asia.* Japan owes the order of symbols in its syllabary, the so-called kana, or go-jū-on, ‘fifty sounds’, to the order of letters in Indian alphabets. The order of Sanskrit letters is conventionally
This is not an arbitrary order like our ABCD… † Rather it appeals to various purely phonetic properties of the sounds represented. So, for example, all the consonants are placed in an order where tongue contact gradually advances from the back to the front of the mouth cavity. And the nasal consonants (m, n, etc.) always come immediately after the other consonants formed at the same place of articulation. The strange order of the vowels is partly conditioned by the fact that most instances of e and o in Sanskrit actually derive from the diphthongs ai and au, and so are well classified next to their long equivalents āi and āu.
Now the Japanese kana represent syllables, rather than individual consonants. Their pronunciation has definitely changed over the last millennium, but using the most ancient pronunciation reconstructible, we can state the conventional order as:
Immediately we note that the arbitrary order of the vowels (a i u e o) is precisely as in Sanskrit, although this has no motivation in Japanese grammar. Furthermore, although there are many fewer consonants in Japanese than in Sanskrit, they occur in almost exactly the same order as in the Sanskrit alphabet. In fact, there is only one apparent exception, s, which occurs where c or should be, not at the end like the Sanskrit sibilants. In fact there is reason to believe that the pronunciation of this phoneme was actually [š] (English ‘sh’) or [ts], when the conventional order was set up, which means it would be closest to Sanskrit c (English ‘ch’, [tš]).
This thoroughgoing intellectual borrowing at the root of the writing system demonstrates that not just the sound of the Buddhist chants but also elements of the traditional analysis of the language had spread to Japan with Sanskrit.
Another example of Sanskrit intellectual influence on the technology of writing is the Tibetan script, which we first see in use in the eighth century AD, derived directly from the Siddha script. The earliest-known use of it is on a stone pillar at Žol near Lhasa, dated to 764.42
It is not quite clear if Tibet owes its literacy to Buddhism, or to attempts to modernise administration. The era of the first surviving inscriptions is precisely the time when Buddhism first came to Tibet, with the monk Śāntarakita. But there is no mention of Buddhism on the Žol pillar inscription, which is a record of a royal minister’s achievements.43
Whatever the motivation, it is clear that the Tibetan alphabet was inspired by an Indian model, and one that was used