Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [82]
The Egyptian scribe, zaRaw, represented from the earliest documented times the acme of ambition. This is amply confirmed by the kinds of texts that were copied in the scribal schools:
Behold there is no profession which is not governed;
It is only the learned man who rules himself.29
Set to work and become a scribe, for then thou shalt be a leader of men.
The profession of scribe is a princely profession; his writing materials and his rolls of books bring pleasantness and riches.30
In the Satire on Trades, the scribe boasts:
I have never seen a sculptor sent on an embassy,
nor a bronze-founder leading a mission.
This complacency generated an extreme conservatism that may ultimately have been Egypt’s undoing. Literacy in Egyptian remained the preserve of a small and highly educated caste long after the demise of the last independent Egyptian state, in fact until the Christians adapted the Greek alphabet for the language: this step was taken fully a thousand years after the rest of the Mediterranean, including the Assyrians and Babylonians, had adopted alphabetic writing.
But as if to show that there is no natural term to the life of a pictographic system in an alphabetic age, the Chinese system has survived even the turmoil of the twentieth century. It has persisted, essentially unchanged despite some simplification in penmanship, since Shi Huang Di’s imposed standardisation in the third century BC of a system that was already over a millennium old. This system established a particular stylised picture, or a combination of phonetic pun plus determiner, in a notional square box, for each word or root in the language. Once established, it was less phonetically based than the Egyptian system, and so its practical use was even less affected by the phonetic changes in the language that have come about over the following two and a half millennia. Scholarly Chinese will have watched with amused unconcern the modifications, truncations and additions conceived by foreigners to produce the Japanese kana—two sets of forty-eight simplified outlines chosen to represent the full set of Japanese syllables—and the Korean han-gŭl—a true phonetic alphabet, but designed to harmonise on the page with Chinese characters. Each was an original solution to the poor match between Chinese characters and their own polysyllabic, agglutinative and non-tonal languages—but this must have seemed no problem for Chinese itself.
In fact, in the last two and a half millennia the Chinese have become aware of a number of alphabetic scripts, conceived quite independently of their characters. The Buddhists brought the Siddha version of the Brahmi alphabet from India, and the Muslims who converted many of the Western peoples brought variants of the Aramaic scripts and Arabic. The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan even commissioned an alphabetic script for his empire, to be used officially for all its literate languages, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic and Persian. Called ‘Phagspa, it was based on the Tibetan version of Brahmi, and promulgated in 1269. It was a version of the Tibetan script converted to be written vertically (though unlike Chinese characters in columns from left to right), and in deference to Chinese taste in rather a squared-off form. However, it never caught on, and was discontinued, along with the Mongolian dynasty, just a century later.
The great advantage of the Chinese system is its masterly representation of the highest common factor of structure and meaning shared by all the Chinese dialects, many of which are not mutually comprehensible. All the modern dialects, and wényán as well, are built on a common set of meaningful syllables, which may be pronounced and strung together in different orders in the various dialects, but are still recognisable in graphic form. By and large, every one of these syllables is represented in writing by a single character, and so the meaning of a written Chinese text will be relatively clear to any literate speaker of any dialect. No alphabetic script, based perforce on the sounds of a