Fundamental Properties (FP) of languages: (4)
Why Has Chinese Survived as an Ideographic Language with Meaningful Characters and Pictorial Writing?
There are several reasons for Chinese to continue its heritage as one of the oldest civilizations and a unique language:
1 Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world. The earliest Chinese characters can be traced back to its Jiahu site in Henan province with 16 distinct symbols identified on turtle shells, dating from 6600 BCE, long before the Oracle bones characters used during the Shang Dynasty around 1600-1046 BCE.
2 Chinese, like other languages, took a long time to develop and evolve from primitive indexes, registers, icons, symbols, and proto-writing scripts to its present form.
3 Human languages always change and develop over time; phonetic languages based on the sound system tend to change more frequently than ideographic languages (such as Chinese) that have recorded their written forms in various ways.
4 The Chinese ideographic language was less influenced by other languages due to the geographical barriers of the Himalayas (see Himalayas Hypothesis) and was isolated from the rest of the world.
5 Chinese ideographic language possesses deep, meaningful, and intuitive characteristics that go beyond the application of simple phonetic rules, unlike phonetic languages.
6 The Chinese language has rich semantics with multiple meanings for each basic character. If you acquire and master about 1500-3000 basic characters, you can easily communicate with others in daily life. Reading and writing become possible with knowledge of more words or phrases. One character can often be extended to countless meanings in different contexts and combinations. This is why many historical Chinese cultures and events were recorded in various mediums such as turtle shells, animal bones, clay pots, bamboo strips, and stone tablets.
7 However, since 1958, China has adopted “Hanyu Pinyin,” known as the “Chinese phonetic alphabet” system, to help Chinese people at home and phonetic language speakers around the world learn the Chinese language.
(To be continued)