that's uh squaring the circle we'll get to that maybe and china learns to write um i have a few things here just about chinese traditions as to what what the invention of writing in china was all about and maybe the earliest record just says that they cast bronze vessels and and you've seen bronze vessels in the art institute for instance and you might know the earliest bronze vessels in china have these animal mask ornamentation on them the mythology about that is that they pictured the different kinds of of animals that were threatened were threatening human civilization and that was a way of teaching people if they were going into wild areas to be able to recognize the kinds of animals that would be a threat to their to their safety in terms of of writing you can see that this is a kind of pictograph picturing animals would would give rise to the idea that you can actually depict this you can communicate something about the animals other probably the most famous legend about the beginnings of writing is not writing per se but you know the e jing the classic of changes that has the 64 hexagrams that are made up of um well they didn't leave this is one of the things at the university you know we have computers in every room well we don't have computers but we have these these fancy av racks and things but trying to find chalk is always a problem but you've seen these kinds of symbols this is supposed to be the the legend about how these symbols were were invented and the the person in china the sage king who invented all sorts of uh uh institutions of civilization marriage for instance uh supposed to have been uh invented by this guy baushi or fushi and it says that he looked up and saw the stars in the sky and the kinds of patterns they had looked down at the the topography of the ground he looked at his own body he looked at other things in the world and from that he invented this kind of writing as a as a kind of distillation of these natural signs in the world so it's if this is writing then that uh describes the invention of writing if it's not quite writing yet then we still need another step then we have the first dictionary in china that was submitted to court in 100 a.d certainly they didn't use a.d in china but this was in the eastern han dynasty and in the post face to this dictionary it's a dictionary that includes about 9 600 chinese characters and categorized under 540 different radicals or significance but there's a postface that gives a kind of theoretical overview of the chinese script and it begins by talking about the invention of writing and so you can see that it starts with the same guy baushi or palshi or fushi inventing the the hexagrams and then it goes on to talk about a guy named sangjia who was the secretary of the yellow emperor so the yellow emperor the chinese regard themselves as descendants of the yellow emperor a person who's supposed to have ruled china back about 3000 bc it's interesting that this name tangjia the inventor of writing is the term that is now used for the input methods of chinese characters on computers so there are different kinds of input methods but the standard one is known as the tangjia input system but he saw the tracks of birds and beasts and knowing that their diverse patterns could be differentiated he for the first time created writing with a brush and inscribing with a stylus scratcher with a knife scratching characters so looking at the the tracks of birds and beasts in fact one of our uh one of our presses in the states that was the first to really pioneer putting uh doing typesetting chinese typesetting with a computer is called bird track press and he he actually has on his title page uh every title page this this passage from the first dictionary of china so he it says that he made up two different kinds of characters one type of character that is a one that is um a a direct depiction of the thing or the event and then he made up zuh and it's the word that means to give birth to to uh to nurture but in this context it means complex characters characters that combine different elements to to give another meaning and let me go through and just look at the different types he then divided these these two major ideas one and indeed the the chinese word for character today is simply combination of this ones that is pictographs if you will idiographs perhaps and complex characters but he divided it up into six different types so here as you read through this there's pictographs there's on there are things that depict the shape that point to something there are pictographs there are things they're characters that represent the sound there are characters that bring two different meanings together there are also two other categories one of which is not really well understood but it's it's turning the and commenting on something and then finally there's borrowed characters borrowed characters are pretty much straight rebus characters so if you were to write a letter dear john and instead of writing deer as d-e-a-r simply putting a picture of a deer in there it's the same kind of idea that has been used in china since the the earliest times um pictures of characters uh pick pointing out something the the examples that he gives are shang and shah and shang was originally just written like this a line that is above the the sort of horizon sha was just written like this nowadays shang is written like this and sha like this but in the earliest times there was just a dot above the horizon or below the horizon so that dot points to something or the the first character on the on the left over here is the word for your wrist and it's a picture of a hand with a dot here on the wrist indicating that it's a hand but it's a special part of the hand or the second character is actually a pictograph of a knife with a dot on the edge of the knife and that's the word for blade it's the character for blade or the uh the third one there is a a man it's the word for armpits um uh you know we could go through each one of these um the sixth one there in the middle is is a word for the body the the torso and you can see that there's a a circle indicated about the midpoint of the body now this works for some things but you can see already for the body that it might indicate some confusion does that represent the body or does it mean the belly for instance well in some respects it doesn't make a whole lot of difference whether it's the body or the belly it's the same part of the body but you can imagine that for other purposes we'd want to know is it the body that you're talking about or is it the belly um the second category of characters are these pictographs lots of people think that chinese characters are pictographic though if let's see if i can get the if you were to look at this particular character would you know that that is a sheep probably not you might you certainly wouldn't know that that's an elephant although if you looked at the earliest form of the character so this one here you can probably make out that that's a kind of animal that has horns that go up and point down um the the elephant you know with the with the trunk coming out is fairly recognizable um the rabbit there in the in a bronze inscription from the earliest time is sort of understandable these are all pictographs now of course as the language evolved they grew away from their pictographic origins but that doesn't mean that they're not pictographs so they um they do represent these different things so the moon mountains you can see you know here this is an arrow a door as long as as you follow the development of the script it's easy enough everyone's agreed that those are pictographs now i threw all of these things on here this is the third category according to this earliest dictionary in china and it is the category that combines a a root so a significant something that indicates the the the part of the world or the uh the kind of category that we're talking about together with a sound because you can imagine that you can you can draw a picture of a tree yeah this is this is a tree but if you wanted to differentiate between an oak tree for instance and a willow but maybe maybe you could do that with certain ways certainly the the the mulberry tree for instance was was it has its own character because they represented the mulberries hanging all over the tree but for most trees you can imagine the difference between a pine tree and an oak tree would be very hard to represent and the way that they got around this problem was to combine the word for tree so all the trees are made up with that element and then adding to it the sound of that tree so you can imagine writing with this character and putting beside it oak or something like that the word in chinese that is the word for oak or the word that is the word for pine so this is the way um many of these characters were created and if i had time i'd go go through each one of these but you know what i i think i don't have time so i'm gonna go on to the next category which is combined meanings and we could have we we could have fun guessing at what what all of these are who wants to try the very first one right here anyone know what that is water no it's a good guess but no one of the things you have to know is that from a very early time chinese flipped characters on on a sort of uh vertical axis things that would if if we had plenty of space you might write this way horizontally but because chinese was written from top to bottom they tended to flip these things this part of this sleeping hey there you go this is a bed this part of it this is a man on the bed but this is a man on the bed with water coming off of him and it is it's thought that that water probably represents sweat so someone who has a fever that's the word for sick sickness um how about this one so this this guy over here is in fact a guy a person seen in profile so this is actually two people seen in profile you can imagine two people in profile meaning all sorts of different things in this case it means to follow okay this is the standard word for the verb to follow and these it's the verbs you can imagine that the nouns are usually fairly easy to depict how do you how do you depict a verb running you might be able to do it by showing somebody running but follow you need to put two things together this one is kind of the opposite of follow but but it actually um this is this is the the word if you want to go to beijing and you want to tell them that you know how to write the original form of the the bay in beijing the the that means north but it's back to back or it ends up being the word for back because it's two guys who are back to back so it doesn't mean you could imagine that it would mean to go in opposite directions but in fact it here just means back to back and then because chinese always built their houses facing south so that they would get the sun in all day then back became north because that's that's the direction that was to the back one last fun with games here anyone want to guess at this one this guy on the right is that hand remember i showed you a picture of wrist because it was a dot on this part of the hand that's a hand taking an ear and it means to take to take by the ear probably because in ancient warfare you you showed your your trophies the indians took the scalp in ancient china they took an ear they cut an ear off for whatever reason you can imagine a hand grabbing something as being to take how about this one see this is why i had problems putting this talk together because i tell you i could talk about each one of these yeah no in fact it doesn't have that sense at all um and so you know whether it does in the earliest the earliest materials but even there i think it doesn't have that sense so just why it was that the ear you know a lot of this the the earliest record we have of the language that's that reflects is kind of self-reflective about the principles behind the writing is 1300 years removed from the earliest forms of writing so the people who were creating these things didn't leave us any any rationale for why they came up with this so some of it is a guessing game i mean most most of these characters i think we have a pretty good understanding of how they came about these these are basic characters so you know they they appear everywhere um and and in that case no it doesn't seem to be violent um how about this one here huh within the door but this actually is a special a special sense of within the door notice that there are two hands but they're pushing this is to open open the door um yeah so um you know some of these are are understandable now um there the university of chicago was implicated very early on in one of the the more celebrated debates about the chinese language at least in the western world the person who established our program in chinese studies at the university was a professor named hurley creel uh he lives on at the university in the form of me uh he was just talking at lunch that people say when when you have one of these titles so i am the hurley g creel professor of ancient china on campus um you know there are other people who have endowed professorships that might be you know you can imagine the lehman brothers professor of finance um i know someone who's the burlington northern professor of of chinese civilization it used to be that endowed chairs were named after famous professors who passed away in my case i actually get both sides of that because hurley creel was a very famous professor of ancient chinese things he also when he died left all of his money to the university and with the proviso that it be for the support of the study of ancient china and so the university took all of his money and then took my position off of their books and put it on to the endowed fund and made me the hurley creel professor anyways in 1936 hurley creel uh published an article in the journal tongbao where he argued the chinese characters are idiographic and he was looking at the kinds of characters that we just looked at pushing a door open taking taking an ear as being to take the next year a professor at the university of california at berkeley named peter budberg wrote an article published in the harvard journal of asiatic studies in which he launched the scathing attack on hurley creel and said you don't understand how language works languages are not idiographic they can't possibly be language is secondary language is the speech that we that we do so if you go to the linguistics department they will tell you um that they are only interested in the way people speak that that's language and writing systems are secondary and that writing systems are only intended to represent speech this person william g boltz the origin and early development of the chinese writing system was a student of boodbergs and he wrote a book about 20 years ago in which he reprised this debate and he says that in the process of the origin and development of the writing system there's no provision for characters to be formed as combinations of two or more constituent elements none of which has a phonetic role what he's suggesting is that all of these characters all of these sort of complex characters are like that word for oak tree that i said if you can imagine a tree with something else added to it representing the sound okay whether whether you would write it out as oak or use another word in chinese that would would represent that and then he says nowhere else in chinese writing system or in any other natural writing system that i know of is there a type of graph that stands for word on the basis of a combination of elements so he's leaving open the possibility that there were pictographs originally that then by convention came to represent a word but only through the sound but he says that there would never be a kind of word that would combine two different meanings so one of the words the chinese people always point to is the word for brightness and in chinese script it's a combination of the sun and the moon so the sun and the moon i mean you could think of all sorts of other meanings that the sun and the moon might give but brightness makes sense and all of this after all is conventional so you know why why do we write guest g-u-e-s-t instead of with some other combination of letters you know eventually or why do we write knight night as opposed to nite you know i i think i know why we do but i would post it that speech must exist before the word is offended right i mean that apostolate the speech must exist before the word but can the word ever exist before the speech yeah that's that's a good question to what if to what extent does the way we write something affect the way we say something there's no question at all that speech exists before writing okay has there ever been a case where a word existed before the spoken word um i don't know if if we can imagine a word that exists before the spoken word isn't something okay i someone just asked me at lunch i told him chinese is really simple it's a very easy language um and he couldn't believe it and he said well uh is it inflected for um singular plural nope um past tense future tense nope nope um gender nope everything is the same gender he she it no in spoken chinese he she it is all the same word but in the 1920s in china people were feeling a little bit disadvantaged because of that and so they created new words for she and it so that he or simply the the third person pronoun was always written this way and this is the the component that means person person probably gendered probably a male but not necessarily but in order to specify that we want this not to be he but she they came up with a new side component that is a woman female significant and when you write it that way then it means specifically she they also had a word for it and then someone said christian missionaries actually uh came up with a new word said oh well we can make this pronounced exactly the same you'd never you'd never be able to know by the pronunciation component um these are those last two carat categories that i'm not going to spend time with here and boltz was particularly exercised about the idea of an idiograph as i say pictograph is something that he can he can understand but an ideograph he really doesn't like it and he says that all the way back in the 1840s one of the first dissertations on the chinese language on chinese writings already dispelled this notion of ideographs that it it entered into our western conception because in the 17th century there was a a strange uh i think he was german athanasius kercher who who was fascinated with egyptian hieroglyphs and he introduced the word ideograph and kercher was actually also interested in chinese i'm going to just skip through some of these next things um one of our professors is actually giving a talk right at the same time han saucy talking about oral literature but here is uh where where he he has done something this is from a book that athanasius kircher published in 16 i don't know 1670 or so what he was also interested in the chinese writing system if you ask egyptologists they'll tell you that he made a complete mess of hieroglyphics he also made a complete mess of chinese characters but he's the one who introduced the idea of ideographs and so here is the the 1930s ideography debate and then you see that peter budberg who had a a rather vicious streak in him somebody pull your ear when you were in his class wrote the final the final contribution to the debate of that period called ideography or iconology iconology um that uh this is this is completely unscientific bill sure starts somewhere and then it just grows yeah it's it has grown by the the principle that they talk about taking a a root of a word and adding a sound to it so in the oracle bone inscriptions of 1200 bc there are about 1500 characters or so that can be differentiated and about 50 of those are pictographic in fact trying to find to understand the the phonetic component they're only about 20 percent or so that that have a readily identifiable phonetic component though they they already were using this principle to make to make words have the chinese never thought of creating an alternative phonetic yeah they've thought about it a lot um and they don't want no um chinese characters work perfectly well for them um there was concern in the 1980s that that computerization would not be compatible with chinese characters it has proven to be perfectly compatible you know all of this is very easy to do on computers china has used its writing system for 3 000 years by 1750 they say there were more books in chinese than in all the other languages of the world combined they've produced a wonderful civilization based on this writing system it has served it has served them very or the other well offers advantages for communication or literature or whatever sure i first of all i'm not a linguist really i'm i'm a dilettante who jumps between various fields um i think that some language different languages have different advantages and different disadvantages i think that chinese the chinese script allows people to um to write in ways and express themselves in ways that aren't necessarily available to people using a an alphabetic language alphabetic languages allow us to do all sorts of things that chinese can't do um one of the things that that we can do is uh is is to uh represent sounds a little bit closer to what the sound actually does sound like whereas you know but we don't do a very good job of that either if if your stomach if your stomach rumbles right you're hungry what's it say in english but it doesn't sound like that the chinese have a special term for your stomach the noise that your stomach makes when it's hungry and it says that your stomach goes partially because they have to write it with characters that exist in the chinese language they can't just make up sounds for which they don't have characters so that's it that's a disadvantage but in some ways it's an advantage too i don't know um but i i was i was responding to this question about the invention of new words by the next stage of the language roughly from a thousand to 800 bc that which we know primarily by inscriptions on bronze vessels so if you go to the art institute you'll see that they have a number of bronze vessels there with inscriptions on the inside of them and that language only about so by then they're more like 2500 to 2700 different characters that are known and now we go from something like 60 percent pictographs down to more like 40 35 to 40 percent pictographs and the interesting thing is that most of the newly invented characters are invented on this phonetic principle by 100 a.d with that dictionary that i was talking about there are 95 9 600 characters in that dictionary and most people would say something like 90 of the characters in that dictionary are actually phonetic compounds they represent the the word by the phonetic the most complete dictionary today has about 55 000 characters in it most of these characters i mean these are complete dictionaries if a word has ever appeared anywhere then it gets entered into the dictionary 99 of those characters are phonetic compounds for instance this character anyone know what this aluminum this is the the radical for metal anything having to do with metallurgy is entered under this signific and then when aluminum was invented how do you how do you translate aluminum into chinese and this is pronounced liu and so it was added to the metal to to make aluminum so just just that character itself you could have if you wanted and sometimes well the japanese have have usually just borrowed the sounds so television in japanese is tele-bee you know and lots of lots and lots of foreign foreign concepts and foreign items are just represented phonetically but in chinese they actually have made new characters almost all the characters are made on this basis one semantic component and one phonetic component and i'm going to jump all the way see how much i have here for you guys actually i tell you a little secret i actually i knew this was way too much for an hour talk here but on monday i'm going to go over to the oriental institute and talk to the uh the ancient near easterners and they want me to bring all of this material together here's here's a here's an interesting case this is for chinese about writing phonetically you might have heard that in mainland china they now use simplified characters so in the 1950s they started they thought you know if we're ever going to teach all of these people to learn to read and write chinese characters are too difficult so let's simplify them um and so this is there's two simplifications one that was done in the 1950s this is a character and do i have it here now somewhere somewhere later in my materials i have this but the this the bottom character here is the uh the traditional form for precious and it combines jade and the what was the word for money in original times under a roof so it has the treasure or precious or something like that when it was simplified in the 1950s they got rid of there there's also a phonetic component in this character on the left here this is pronounced bowel and this portion of the character is a kind of pot but it's pronounced foe which was close in pronunciation to this character and so they added that to it to represent the sound but in the 1950s when they simplified this character they they took just the one most precious thing from it which is the jade and put jade under a roof and it doesn't have any phonetic component at all which is not to say this wasn't originally a a complex character that combined semantic and phonetic elements but when they simplified it they got rid of the phonetic element on the other hand on the top is this is the traditional character for liquor for alcohol and it was originally a pictograph on on the right of a vase into which you would put water and put put wine and on the left is the water signific anything fluid anything having to do with fluids in 1981 they tried they tried to simplify this character and they said one of the easiest graphs in chinese that everyone knows is this thing on the right which is just the number nine everybody knows how to write to ten you know you go out into the the countryside everybody knows how to write their name and how to write one to ten so everyone will know how to write this character and it just so happens that it's a perfect homophone for the word for liquor they're both pronounced joe in the third tone it's a perfect way to write it nobody liked the simplification they got rid of this they you know if you're going to write like that you may as well just write in romanization um and by doing that they lost the original semantic context of this component on the right um look how many things i've got i could talk all day whoops now there so this is the the thing that that component on the right of joe was originally representing it's a pretty good drawing of this kind of vase that was used for um uh liquor now i wish i knew where yeah this is this is where i want to square the circle for you and i have one minute uh that guy right in the top of the the first line is a circle um it has a pronunciation in chinese is ding and probably it was in origin a nail head like a thumbtack you can see about a thousand years after the character was created it was written in this way that reflects the nail it comes to mean it's part of a an extended word family that has meanings of to be secure to make firm it also what's this character anyone know this guy this is a cauldron which was round chinese cauldrons were always not always but usually round and they're three-legged things three-legged things are always secure right four-legged chairs tend to wobble but a three-legged chair is secure the cauldron came to be a symbol of government so that this character actually was also used here for to be upright so two feet under this character this this gave the character both its semantic sense that something is secure that you're secure on your feet but also provided the pronunciation that this was pronounced ting originally and the the nail the nail head was pronounced kiang this was pronounced king all of these different words in chinese were pronounced king but i want to just get real quickly to this or this one what's that a person but it's a person because the the graph for person doesn't have this it accentuates the head and in fact there's a word also originally pronounced king that represents the crown of the head so the top of the head this comes to mean also anything big important high it's the word for heaven ten and as the word for heaven written like this you can see here that in origin this character was a circle on top and then it was hard cutting into turtle shell to make circles so they tended to make squares and then they said simplifying the language the script has been simplified at each step along the way why should we make a square we can just draw a single line and in fact this round head on this guy ended up just being a stroke across there and everyone thinks in chinese that heaven is written this way and they don't know what that top line means it was there both to represent the head originally but it was forgotten very early on and also the pronunciation of the character if we had another hour or two i'd i'd love to talk more about this word family and all of these characters but you guys have other other talks to go off to and i've got to go home and cook dinner tonight so anyways it's been a delight to be here chinese great fun you