Writing has two mommies
A nice discussion of Chinese characters by Zhang Jinghe (thanks to Pinyin News). It does, however, state baldly a piece of linguistic dogma that is simply wrong, to wit:
Basically, language consists of words we orally utter…Scripts are for writing down languages, be they Egyptian with Hieroglyphs, cuneiform in
Mesopotamia, Mayan with glyphs in South America, Arabic (using Arabic letters), Russian (using
Cyrillic letters), English (using Roman letters), French (using Roman letters), German (using
Roman letters), Italian (using Roman letters), Spanish (using Roman letters), as well as
Chinese oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, stone inscriptions, seal script, clerkly script,
standard script, running script, grassy script, complicated characters (basically
“kǎishū”), or simplified characters — all are symbols for writing
down languages. The “mothers” of these symbols are various languages. Without
languages, these symbols are just pictures and shapes.
Well, no. I don’t disagree that spoken language comes first developmentally and (almost certainly) historically, nor that it’s profoundly complex and important.
But, to use his metaphor, scripts actually have two mothers (the title of the post is a parody of a controversial children’s book). The idea of writing has completely parasitic upon spoken language breaks down if you look at mathematics, calendars, and (most notably) the historical origins of writing. Furthermore, like bees flying, human beings are not constrained by these simplistic ideas about what writing is, be they children first learning to write or adults using scripts.
You can see this in current Chinese internet usage, most notably the character 囧, which is pronounced jiong3 in Mandarin and is rarely used in its original meaning (a kind of window, or a bright light), but serves nicely as an emoticon for “shock” (see nice discussion here, and another one here.).
Were I a traditional linguist, I’d probably respond that these examples don’t account for the bulk of our language use. I don’t disagree. But I think that if you want to understand how writing systems evolved, how children learn to write, or how native speakers of a language use the writing systems available to them, the belief that writing is simply “Visible Speech” won’t cut it.