Script and Language

Unlike alphabetic scripts, the logographic character of the Chinese script makes it nearly impossible to use it for other languages. Koreans and Japanese, whose languages are agglutinating (constructing words of many syllables as semantic carriers), used in former times Chinese characters to write in Chinese (the hanmun resp. kanbun 漢文 texts). Yet because the Chinese language is isolating, the logographic script is not able to reflect these grammatical suffixes at the end of words to express, for instance, tempus, modus, or singular/plural). If speakers of non-Chinese languages write in their native language instead of in Chinese, appropriate alphabets had to be developed (hangeul 한글, resp. kana かな/カナ/仮名) to express suffixes and grammatical particles. The same is true for the Khitans (using a para-Mongolian language), Jurchens (using a Tangutan language) and Tanguts (using a language related to Tibetan) that had adopted the Chinese script as a model for their own script, but developed scripts of their own to write in their native languages (see Khitan script, Jurchen script and Tangut script).

The only exception is the use of the Chinese script for Vietnamese, a likewise isolating and highly monosyllabic language. Yet as a language with a different grammar (for example, adjunct after the core noun instead of before it, like in Chinese) and a different lexicon, the use of genuine Chinese characters was limited. Vietnamese scholars therefore invented new characters (chữ nôm 𡨸喃) to write in Vietnamese language. Exactly this procedure shows that the largest part of the Chinese characters is perceived as representing a certain sound, and not only a semantic "idea". Even for Chinese topolects like Cantonese or Taiwanese, new characters were invented to represent a lot of particles phonetically different from standard Chinese, like 佮 hap8, kap7 "and" in Taiwanese (Southern Min), or the possessive particle ge3 嘅 in Cantonese.

It is not correct to say that one character has only one pronunciation or exactly one sound. There are lots of characters with different pronuncations that also indicate different meanings. The largest part of polyphonic characters (duoyinzi 多音字) only change the tone pitch, but there are also a lot of characters having several very different pronunciations, like

Figure 1. Example of a polyphonic character in a dictionary

Example for a character with four different pronunciations: 說 1) shuō, 2) shuì, 3) yuè, and 4) (very rare) tuō. The word 說2士 is annotated with the cipher 2, indicating that it is pronounced shuìshì, not shuōshì, as regularly expected (note also the word 說4咷 tuōtáo). From Hanyu da cidian 漢語大辭典.

This is not a phenomenon of modern Chinese, but can be observed, for instance, in ancient commentaries on Han-period 漢 (206 BCE-220 CE) texts, for instance, Ao, yin wu lao fan 媼，音烏老反 "媼 is pronounced ʔ-ɑu" (commentary of Wen Ying 文穎 in Hanshu 漢書 1, for this traditional method of indicating sound, see the fanqie system 反切).

In lexica， the more-often used pronunciation is listed first. The character 說, for instance, is virtually always read shuō in modern Chinese (with the meaning of "to speak; to explain"), while the pronunciations yuè (as a loan character for 悅 "happy") and shuì (with the meaning of "to persuade", e.g. in Taiwan shuìfú 説服, in mainland China shuōfú) are used very rarely, shuì the least often, and therefore standing in the third position in lexica, and not alphabetically in the first position. If separated phonetically, the respective words appear in two places in a dictionary, if not separated phonetically (like in a dictionary whose entries are arranged graphically), the respective words have to be marked as to which pronunciation is correct.

While most characters or written words are quite unambigous even if standing alone and not bound into a context, this is not the case for spoken words. The phonetic treasure of Mandarin Chinese is relatively small compared to other languages, and many words therefore can have severeal meanings if not written or if the context is missing. These words are called homophones (tongyinci 同音詞), like:

Even terms of the same word group can easily be confounded, like:

Yet the semantic context is so helpful that each word is certainly understood in spoken language. The argument that abolishing the Chinese script would lead to chaos in conversation is simply nonsense—otherwise Chinese people would not be able to converse with each other. Yet a higher level of language use makes it necessary to use more complicated words which require certain character (semantic) combinations and certain specialized characters that do not belong to the everyday lexicon. Chinese academicians often write down the terms they are using or describe the characters of the word they make use of. Even the characters of personal names are often described or written with the finger on the palm of a hand to make clear which character is meant (e.g. the family name Zhāng 章, and not Zhāng 張).

For this reason, a specialized vocabulary was developed for the description of characters. Radicals (bushou 部首) and graphic elements are given terms to make description easier, like:

One function of dictionaries is to inform the reader which character is the correct one (for example, all following words containing the syllable shì are written with a different character:

Although the phonetic range of Chinese is not very broad (everythings sounds like "ching, chang, chong") the possible combinations of two characters to a new word are countless, like:

all including the word shi 市 "market, to marketize".