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Chinese-Isolating due to writing system? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| math82 Newbie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5428 days ago 17 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 3 21 January 2011 at 4:36pm | IP Logged |
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Any thoughts on the affect a pictographic orthography has upon the language it is used to codify?
I mean is there any evidence in the evolution of Chinese (I'm including all the dialects) to suggest that it hasn't always been an isolating/analytic language? Did pictographs cause Chinese to become more isolating? And if so, is there any research looking at the cognitive affects of different kinds of writing systems. I'm sorry if this is a bit vague, but it struck me how it might be very difficult to use a kanji-type writing system with a heavily agglutinative or synthetic language, since the concept of a single "word" is really stretched in those languages. I then got to thinking which way around this cause and effect may occur; do isolating languages lend themselves to pictographs; is this why many synthetic languages (such as native american/aboriginal/inuit) don't have native writing systems? ( I'm aware Japanese is agglutinative and uses pictographs, but this is in combination with it's other syllabary system, so I wouldn't consider it to be purely pictographic.) Sorry for rambling post : ) Edited by math82 on 21 January 2011 at 4:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 3 21 January 2011 at 5:05pm | IP Logged |
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Up until the last few centuries, I'd venture that the vast majority of speakers of "Chinese languages" were illiterate. In other words, their languages' evolution was not influenced by the writing system. In general, linguistic evolution is unhindered by written systems. After all, Latin was written with a system that showed pretty accurately how words were pronounced and it didn't stop it from evolving into all the current Romance languages.
So no, pictograms did not make Chinese isolating, nor did it keep it that way. Moreover, there is nothing in pictograms that says they need to be monosyllabic. There is nothing that encourages isolating languages to be written with pictograms, because most aren't. There is also nothing that stops non-isolating languages like Japanese or Korean from using pictograms, and by extension, nothing that would prevent pictogram-written isolating languages from becoming agglutinative. Finally, let's not forget that hieroglyphs were created and used to depict non-isolating languages. Edited by Arekkusu on 21 January 2011 at 5:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 3 of 3 21 January 2011 at 10:39pm | IP Logged |
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Don't forget about cuneiform, which also started out pictographic and became stylized
ideograms just like Chinese characters. Sumerian is agglutinative and Akkadian is inflectional (and distantly related to Egyptian). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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