The mainland of Europe never produced an alphabet of its own. Our own
alphabet has its roots pictographs, Our letter A comes from the Semitic aleph,
meaning "ox," and originally was a rough depiction of an ox's head. B comes
from the Semitic bah, meaning "house." But the people of the Near East, unlike
those of the Far East, made an important leap in thought of almost incalculable
benefit to us. They began to use their pictographs to represent sounds rather than
things. The Egyptian symbol for the word re began to stand not just for sun but
for any syllable pronounced "ray."
To appreciate the wonderfully simplifying beauty of this system you have only
to look at the problems that bedevil the Chinese and Japanese languages. There
are two ways of rendering speech into writing. One is with an alphabet, such as
we have, or a pictographicideographic system, such as the Chinese use.
Chinese writing is immensely complicated. The basic unit of the Chinese written
word is the radical. The radical for earth is
All words in Chinese are formed
from these and 212 other radicals. Radicals can stand alone or be combined to
form other words. Eye and water make teardrop. Mouth and bird make song.
Two women means quarrel and three women means gossip.
Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely
complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters, of which about 4,000 are in
common use. Chinese typewriters are enormous and most trained typists cannot
manage more than about ten words a minute. But even the most complex
Chinese typewriter can only manage a fraction of the characters available. If a
standard Western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese
ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide—about
the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed together.
Dictionaries, too, are something of a nightmare. Without an alphabet, how do
you sensibly arrange the words? The answer is that in most dictionaries the
language is divided into 214 arbitrary clusters based on their radicals, but even
then you must hunt randomly through each section until you stumble across the
spelling you seek.The consequences of not having an alphabet are enormous.
There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no palindromes, no
anagrams, no Morse code. In the age of telegraphy, to get around this last
problem, the Chinese devised a system in which each word in the language was
assigned a number. Person, for instance, was 0086. This process was equally
cumbersome, but it did have the advantage that an American or Frenchman who
didn't know a word of Chinese could translate any telegram from China simply
by looking in a book. To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan
where the writing system is also ideographic, there is no logical system for
organizing documents. Filing systems often exist only in people's heads. If the
secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.
However,Chinese writing possession great advantage over other languages: It
can be read everywhere. inese is not really a language at all, but more a family
of loosely related dialects. A person from Fukien can no more understand the
speech of the people of Shanghai than a Londoner can understand what people
are saying in Warsaw or Stockholm. In some places one dialect is spoken over a
very wide area, but in other parts of the country, particularly in the deep south,
the dialects can change every two or three miles. Yet although the person from
Fukien couldn't talk to anyone from Canton, he could read their newspapers
because the written language is the same everywhere. The ideographs are
pronounced differently in different areas but read the same—rather in the way
that 1, 2, 3 means the same to us as it does to a French person even though we
see it as "one, two, three" while they see it as "un, deux, trois."
An equally useful advantage of written Chinese is that people can read the
literature of 2,500 years ago as easily as yesterday's newspapers, even though
the spoken language has changed beyond recognition. If Confucius were to come
back to life today, no one apart from scholars would understand what he was
saying, but if he scribbled a message people could read it as easily as they could
a shopping list.
Even more complicated is Japanese, which is a blend of three systems: a
pictographic system of 7,000 characters called kanji and two separate syllabic
alphabets each consisting of 48 characters. One of these alphabets, katakana
(sometimes shortened to kana), is used to render words and names (such as
Dunkin' Donuts and Egg McMuffin) that the ancient devisers of kanji failed toforesee. Since many of the kanji characters have several pronunciations and
meanings—the word ka alone has 214 separate meanings—a second syllabic
alphabet was devised. Called hiragana and written as small symbols above the
main text, it tells the reader which of the many possible interpretations of the
kanji characters is intended.
All this is so immensely complicated that until the mid-1980s, most Japanese
had to learn English or some other Western language in order to use a personal
computer. The Japanese have now managed to get around the pictograph
problem by using a keyboard employing katakana syllables which are converted
on the screen into kanji characters, rather as if we were to write twenty percent
by striking three keys—"20," "per," and "cent"—and then seeing on the screen
one symbol: -20%. - Despite this advance, the Japanese still suffer two
considerable problems. First, they have no tradition of keyboard writing, so that
typing is a bewildering new skill to many of them, and, second, each computer
must be immensely more powerful than a Western model just to deal with the
fact that it takes 7,000 symbols to write Japanese (against a hundred or so for
most Western languages) and that whereas Western letters can be represented on
computer screens by as few as 35 dots of light, Japanese characters can require
up to 576 dots to be clearly distinguishable.
It is a disarming reflection of their determination and ingenuity that they have
become such a technological powerhouse with such a patently inefficient system
of orthography.