Typological characterization

The Chinese character script is one of the oldest writing systems in the world, and is the only one that has been in continuous use for more than three millennia. While the great majority of modern languages have adopted phonographic writing systems, Chinese is conspicuous as the most important language to retain a logographic writing system. Tremendous efforts have been made during the past century to simplify the traditional script, and to design and promote a phonetic writing for Chinese. In fact, nowhere in the world has there been a writing reform comparable in magnitude to the Chinese endeavours to shift from a logographic writing system to a phonographic one. Before I discuss in detail the efforts at script reform, let us consider some basic features of the traditional Chinese writing system in relation to the language it encodes.

Writing systems in the world can be differentiated along two dimensions. First is the size of the speech segments that are represented by the basic graphic units, and second is whether the graphic units encode speech sound only, or both speech sound and meaning.

Following DeFrancis (1989:54), I use the term grapheme to refer to the basic graphic unit in a script that corresponds to the smallest segment of speech represented in the writing. English graphemes are letters, whereas Chinese graphemes are characters. Writing systems differ with regard to whether it is phoneme or syllable that is represented by the grapheme.