Which has the longest language history, China or the West?

Hi xiaophil, user21377 and aprilwhite

I just remember, I have a book titled "符号，初文与字母---汉字树" (2000, 饶宗颐), which I bought a few months ago here in China. I'd completely forgotton about this, and of course, it's still unread, hehe. An English translation of the title should be "Signs, original characters, and letters --- Chinese character tree", or something like that.

This book is just amazing in some ways. The Chinese author shows us a lot of ancient signs, pictograms and letters found not only in China but also in the world, and make a comparison of them. Furthermore, this books shows you a comparison table of Sumerian characters and Chinese ancient signs found in that famous Banpo site (半坡遗迹).

The Chinese author doesn't advocate the theory of "characters transferred from Mesopotamia to China" because some ancient signs found in China date back several thousand years, and they are much more than oracle bone scripts, and some are even older than Sumerian characters. He says ancient China had no need to borrow foreign characters, hehe.

Hi changye

I am going to make one final short essay regarding this topic and it will focus on oral languages.  I don't want to reveal too much as then there won't be a reason to write it.

But you are right.  I am treating oral and written languages differently, and I would argue that is legitimate.  One reason is simply because they are easier to compare this way.  Another has to do with how this topic started in my head.  That Chinese expert said something like, "No modern language is as old as Chinese.  Even Chinese primary students can read a Tang poem."  Obviously, Tang poetry is written, so I focused on that aspect of language. 

Just to add a little more.  I feel that if a written language cannot in general be understood by someone unfamiliar with that written language's system when spoken out loud, then they are not the same language.  They may be related, but since they are not both mutually intelligible to those who are unfamiliar with one but not the other, how can they be the same language?  I know people, possibly you, will disagree, but this is the way I look at it.  Possibly because this is the way languages were, as far as I know, perceived in the West. Written Latin is similar to Spoken Latin; written English is similar to spoken English and so on.  Therefore, I disagree with the Chinese expert when he says Tang poetry is the same language.  It is no different than Westerners learning Latin, i.e. we wouldn't call Latin the same language as the one we use at home.  This doesn't mean that Tang poetry doesn't share heritage with modern Mandarin, though.  They are clearly part of the same historical lineage.

Anyway, I wish I could have told all this in my essay(s), but since the purpose was also to write Chinese, perhaps it was a bit much to get everything correct and clear.

Hi xiaophil

Spoken forms and written forms in a language are two sides of the same coin, even if they are very different in some ways from each other. In any languages, written and spoken forms are, more or less, different. More importantly, there has been no language that only has a written form, although there have been a lot of languages that don't have written forms/characters.

Unfortunately, almost all the historical records are, of course, recorded in written languages. Even Chinese 白话小说 (novels written in colloquial Chinese, appeared about a thousand years ago) don't exactly represent actual spoken Chinese in those days. In short, you have no choice but to discuss this kind of issue mainly based on written languages, but not based on spoken ones.

Hi aprilwhite

an ancient capital of China was Xi'an which is far enough into the west of China to make us believe that Sumer and China might have had contact through trade

Actually, oracle bone scripts and its possible direct predecessors are mainly found in Henan province (河南省), about 500 kilometers east of Xi'an (西安). Of course, this doesn't negate a possibility of transfer of characters from Mesopotamia to China in ancient times.

Thanks for the link. I'll try to read it later, although it's a little too long for me!!!

aprilwhite

Okay, interesting article.  Thanks.

Hi.

Sumerian may or may not be a language isolate because we only have the Sumerian writing and we can't know with any certainty how the words were pronounced.  We have the same problem with Ancient Egyptian: their writing only provided the consonent sounds and linguists had to guess as to how the words were actually pronounced.

The following link includes a comparison between ancient Sumerian and Chinese writing:

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html

It would seem that by shear coincidence, both Sumerian and Chinese writing featured words with phonetic and semantic parts, that is you know (vaguely) what a word means by how it is written but you also know (vaguely) how to pronounce it by how it is written: in other words, both ancient Sumerian and Chinese had a phonetic part and a radical, to use the terms we use today to describe Chinese.  Maybe this is a natural way to write, the next logical step beyond simply drawing pictures. 

I've seen it argued (either in this or in another article on pinyin.info or somewhere else) that written language developed because people needed to communicate but they didn't have the same spoken language so they started drawing pictures.  So maybe it wasn't completely a coincidence that Sumer and China developed similar writing systems: an ancient capital of China was Xi'an which is far enough into the west of China to make us believe that Sumer and China might have had contact through trade, probably indirectly through Turkish traders.

It's long since I gave up the idea of becoming able to write all the simplified Chinese characters that I can read. Actually, I can only write a limited number of simplified characters, but thanks to computers/word processors, this doesn't cause me any inconvenience.

Hey, I know.  No problem.  I'm just thinking out loud so maybe someone else will reply.  Actually, you just inspired my newest post.

phil

I did not mean to say what you are doing is wrong, I just find statements in the media about how many characters are needed misleading. By all means go for it. its the "write" thing to do :-)

RJ

Sort of, but I need to practice handwriting.  My primary method is just freely writing and then when I come to a character I don't know, I look it up and then write it.  In this way, hopefully next time I can remember it.  But of course I often forget how to write the character over and over.  My problem is that I can recognize the characters, I can even talk about what characters compose a word, but I can't write many of them on demand.  I might try to compose a quizing system using these characters.  3000 is a lot though.  Might not be able to go through with it.

But if I were just trying to build vocabulary, I would definitely agree with you.

xiaophil

I find this kind of statement almost meaningless because its not characters you need to know, its words.

changye

Strange.  It so happens that I read today that to be fully literate in Chinese you only need to know around 4000 characters.  If you are curious, here are the 3000 most common characters used in Chinese:

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

I figure if I knew how to write 2000, I would be in great shape, for a 老外 at least.

Hi user21377

You don't have to learn 10,000 Chinese characters in order to read archaeological writings in Chinese. Maybe even very educated native speakers only know about 6,000 characters or so. Actually knowing about 3,000 or 4,000 characters would be enough to read newspapers, magazines and academic papers in Chinese.

That said, I have to admit there is one difficulty about reading archaeological articles in Chinese, that is to say, you'll find rarely-used characters often appear in place/people names. Names are linguistic "fossils", as you know. Actually, one of the most difficult parts for me in reading Chinese is how to read names.

Lastly, here are links to some articles about neolithic signs in China.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_signs_in_China

http://it.21cn.com/discovery/lskg/2005/11/25/2375985.shtml

http://www.7xpc.com/ysbl/shoucang/200712/3025.html

Great links and ideas guys.  This is more interesting than I hoped for. 

By the way, my second part should be up shortly if you would like to take a look.

I made a spelling mistake above; it's not 'phoenicans', it's 'phoenicians'                        Oh !  I also agree about ancient chinese art. Particularly the Shang bronzes .... they are superb !

 It will be a good few years before I can tackle archaeological writings in mandarin, though......think I'll have to have mastered about 10000 characters before I can do that. Maybe in 20 years time...... provided my memory holds out, and I'm still breathing. Haha.

Changye

I agree. If we just use a bit of common sense we can surmise that if hieroglyphics are descended from cunieform, then they would look something like cunieform. In fact they appear utterly different....hieroglyphics seem to have a lot more in common with the chinese writing system !  [Now THERE'S a thought......  :-) ]

For example, the script which the greeks adapted from the phoenican 'alphabet' (the phoenicians did not have letters for vowels...only consonants) is not identical to that of the phoenicans, but it has obvious similarities. And the roman alphabet, which we are reading and writing right now, itself evolved from the greek alphabet; there are many common letters....the following greek letters are clearly distinguishable as forerunners of the roman alphabet: α(a),β(B),γ(g),δ(d),ε(e),ι(i),κ(k),ο(o),ς(s),τ(t),υ(u).

Archaeologist have also found symbols on the pottery of the Gerzean culture in Egypt which resemble hieroglyphics. The pottery dates from circa 4000BC.

If you are really interested in writing systems, you might like to take a look at "The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process" by Stephen D Houston (editor). In this book there is an essay by Bruce G Trigger called "Writing Systems: a case study in cultural evolution" which is of particular interest in the China/Egypt/Sumer debate. It's a bit heavy-going, though.

Good Luck!

Here is an excerpt from the article rjberki showed above.

Mesopotamia is different from Egypt, where writing seems to appear suddenly ..... Egypt provides yet no indication of any antecedents to writing, it was logical to assume that phonetic writing leap-frogged from Mesopotamnia to Egypt about 3100 B.C.

I heard before a similar claim about the origin of oracle bone scripts (甲骨文) in China. Some people (probably not Chinese) believe that ancient Chinese people invented 甲骨文 inspired by cuneiform characters in Mesopotamia because no direct antecedent of 甲骨文 has been found in China. Honestly, I don't like this kind of "easiest answer". It's just like a "seeds of life came from space" theory!

Hi rjberk

Thanks for the link. I'm now reading the article!

http://www.archaeology.org/9903/newsbriefs/egypt.html

Changye

I dont know if this is a follow up but it does have more details.

Hi user21377

I've just finished reading the article Write Stuff (it's a witty title!) you introduced above, and I found it very interesting. Do you happen to know any follow-up stories on this issue? Is that still one of those unproven theories? I'm very interested in this find in Egypt. I feel the newly-found Egypcian inscriptions and 昌乐刻骨文 might go the same way in archaeological societies, regardless which way things go, hehe. 

As you know, China boasts a long history, brilliant historical records and relics. I have several books that show a lot of photos of archaeological finds in China, and I must say they are just mesmerizing, even after discounting some exaggerations due to Chinese nationalism. Maybe to become able to read latest Chinese archaeological news in Mandarin should be a good motivation for you to keep learning Chinese!

Hi Xiaophil and Changye,

It's a bit of a passing interest, I'm afraid. I was interested in Archaeology and Ancient History as a boy, and since then have kept dipping into it from time to time. I have a reasonable grasp of the chronology and can read learned articles (in English) without much trouble, but that's about it.

There's a lot controversy in the field, and ideas and dates keep changing, so I'm not sure whether there will ever be a definite answer to the issue of the world's oldest language or writing system; 5000 years can destroy a lot of evidence, and we clearly only know a tiny fraction of the whole picture. One point of contention in the recent Sumer/Egypt debate is the sudden appearance of a fully developed writing system in Egypt, like Athene from the head of Zeus. The proponents of Sumer hold that this is because of Sumerian influence on Egypt; but I'm not so sure. I'm pretty sure that it's not due to the influence of Atlantean survivors, or little green men from planet Zog, though. I think that it's important not to subscribe to the 'Argument from Silence' i.e. we should not reach a conclusion simply because there is a lack of evidence to the contrary. A lot of experts are grinding a lot of axes.

I found a pretty good website with a good overview of the development of writing over several pages, and with links to follow. It's written, thankfully, in plain English.  Will definitely keep my eye on this space.

http://whyfiles.org/079writing/index.html

Cheers,

Graham

Hey user21377

Thanks for the reading material.  I might have to read it Monday, but I am looking forward to it.  It seems you have more than a passing interest in this subject.  Am I right?

Hi user21377

and challenge the widely held belief that Sumerians were the first people to write.

How exciting it is! Looks like you need to keep up with the latest news in order to know about the oldest things in the world. I'll look into this a little more later. Thanks for the intriguing information!

Early oracle-bone scripts have not been identified as a true form of writing

"Regrettably" enough, I have to admit your claim.  The newly-found bone inscriptions are more symbols than characters as of now. And probably there is a slim chance of deciphering those bone inscriptions, as you said.

Having said that, I still hope (or wish?) that someday decipherable predeccesors of 安阳甲骨文 (Oracle bone scripts found in Anyang) will be unearthed somewhere in China. As you know, China is very big, hehe.

Actually, 安阳甲骨文 are relatively well-organized characters even at the very early stage of development. So it's highly possible there were less-developed direct predeccesors of them used before about 1,300 BC.

P/S. I should have used the term "刻骨文" instead of "甲骨文" for this find, because tortoise shells (龟甲) are not used for the bone inscriptions found in 昌乐.

xiaophil,

No, I don't mean the beautiful cave art. Please see:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/178/4063/817

For the Neolithic period, of interest are the Vinca signs, and the Tartaria tablets, which, though not developed writing systems, are generally accepted to be fairly sophisticated use of symbols.

If you are looking for the earliest examples of writing systems:

The earliest hieroglyphics were discovered by German archaeologist Gunter Dreyer on clay tablets in southern Egypt in 1998, and record linen and oil deliveries and also taxes paid. From the tomb of King Scorpion I, they are dated to between 3300 BC and 3200 BC and challenge the widely held belief that Sumerians were the first people to write. Hieroglyphics were replaced for everyday use by cursive writing from about 700 BC onwards.

user2137

你说的有道理，这样的写字制度的通信功率有可能有限，不过好像这些提子（‘提子’这个词合适吗？）与汉字的过程可有能有关，与此相反，好像欧洲的 旧石器时代的洞穴壁画与任何字母表没什么关系。

反正，我同意那个民族主义的部分，我有时觉得有点烦，不过我认为真无目的的，现在最重要。

You have a point.  Their power to communication could have been limited.  However, it does seem at least very possible that these inscriptions are part of the development process of characters, while the paleolithic cave paintings in Europe (this is what you were refering to, right?) seem to me quite disconnected to any kind of alphabet.

Anyway, I agree with the nationalism part.  I do find it a little annoying sometimes, but I figure it really is meaningless.  Right now is what is really important.

changye

谢谢你的研究！

Early oracle-bone scripts have not been identified as a true form of writing, just as symbols. They seem to be on a par with inscriptions found in paleolithic europe with regard to their power to convey information. At any rate, there is little chance of deciphering early oracle-bone inscriptions, or determining what language they express.

The earliest recognisable examples of written chinese date from the Shang dynasty (1500 - 950BC).

There seems to be an element of nationalism, or, dare I say it, racialism, in the claims made by some chinese scientists for the antiquity of their culture. One example being the discredited attempt to discern chinese facial features in the 700000 year-old remnants of Peking Man skulls.

Chinese oracle bone scripts (甲骨文), found in Anyang (安阳), Henan (河南省) about one hundred years ago, dates back about 3,300 years. And recently much older bone scripts were found in Changle (昌乐) in Shandong (山东省). This archaeological find has been named "昌乐甲骨文" .

Many Chinese scholars claim that these scripts date back more than 4,000 years, although it's still not the accepted theory. If this claim proves to be true, "昌乐甲骨文" might be a little older than Linear A, but still much newer than Sumerian cuneiform scripts (苏美尔文字/锲形文字).

What is very interesting for me is that Changele (昌乐) is only 400 kilometers away from Anyang (安阳), and I think it's highly possible that 昌乐甲骨文 was one of the direct predecessors of oracle bone scripts found in Anyang. I look forward to further archaeological discoveries in China.

4,500 yr old archaeological discovery rewrites earliest Chinese characters dating
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/4500-yr-old-archaeological-discovery-rewrites-earliest-chinese-characters-dating_100111464.html

Chinese inscriptions 1000 years older than other previously found?
http://www.stonepages.com/news/archives/003136.html

山东昌乐神秘甲骨文解谜 比安阳甲骨文更
http://www.findart.com.cn/b7059b111b1f1460c52aa79402786f6f358b6fbe9cc9cf98a79e016b5754c4f1-2-showorder.html

If we are talking about the oldest continuous language, Greek is a good candidate.  Classical scholars with no understanding of modern greek are able to make sense of modern greek to the extent that, say, a layman in England might today make sense of Middle English.  The language of classical Greece extends way back into the Mycenaean period, as evidenced in the linear B script, at present dated to about 1500BC, and the spoken form of the language obviously dates back further. The archaic mycenaean form of greek itself developed from a subdivision of a subdivision of Indo-European.  You can literally go back thousands of years BC, but of course, precise dates and forms of language are impossible to fix.

As for the modern greek writing system, it differs exceedingly little from that of ancient greece, which is traced to a borrowing of phoenecian script around 800 BC.  If you can read modern greek, you can read and vocalise ( but not necessarily understand ) ancient greek texts. You might have some initial difficulty with the tone-marks, though ( yes, ancient greek was a tonal language like chinese ).  It would be interesting to hear the opinion of any greek member.....how much ancient greek can an educated modern greek person understand ? It's absolutely clear that modern greek script differs from ancient greek script far less than modern Traditional ( !?!! ) chinese script over the same period.

By the way, when are we getting a greekpod.com ?

changye

我就知道你忍不住参加这个会话!哈哈!

谢谢你的知识.

Hi mariatansd

More than four thousand different oracle bone scripts (甲骨文) have been found so far, and about a third of them have been deciphered by linguists. Therefore knowing only twenty 甲骨文 can't make you an expert of oracle bone scripts, unfortunately. Haha, I know you're just kidding.

As for small seal scripts (小篆), most of them are still somewhat difficult for modern Chinese people to read without learning them boforehand. Maybe clerical scripts (隶书) are the oldest Chinese characters modern people can easily read, provided you know traditional characters (繁体字).

mariatansd

谢谢你把甲骨的情况很清楚，不过因为我汉语能力有限，所以最后的部分我没看懂。

这个句子：不过争论谁是最早的都没有意义，偏偏中国专家比较喜欢争谁是最早的

都没意思 = "boring"、"meritless"、还是"futile"?

我的字典注明"偏偏"包含三个意思，所这三个之内，我不太清楚哪一个正确。

反正，这个论文借口用汉语表示复杂观念，肯定不会解决这次讨论。

hey mariatansd

不过争论谁是最早的都没有意义，偏偏中国专家比较喜欢争谁是最早的，呵呵

顶！不过吹牛皮也好玩啊！

甲骨文算是汉字的始祖，被视为中国最早的定型文字，不过现在的人很难看懂写的是什么，据说认识二十个字以上的被称为专家，真正比较规范的应该是秦始皇统一文字的小篆，跟现在差别不算很大，只是写法字形上有些区别，不过争论谁是最早的都没有意义，偏偏中国专家比较喜欢争谁是最早的，呵呵

sydcarten

Good points, but I have a response... but not now.  Haha

The written language may have had some abrupt changes, but I think the spoken language has evolved more organically, and I don't think non-chinese languages have had a great influence on its evolution

sydcarten

Hmmm, I'm not so sure of that.  I think that written Chinese has gone through several abrupt changes.  I guess abrupt changes doesn't exactly mean broken continuum, but I would argue that the West's written language development is very similar.  But I will try to hold off a bit.  That is for my next little essay.

Anyway, I guess most of this stuff just really depends on how one wants to see it.  It would be really cool if I could lure a Chinese antagonist in here.

I think Chinese might be unique in the sense that while it has evolved over the millennia it still spans an unbroken linguistic continuum from ancient times to the present, and it is still very much alive and kicking.

I don't know of any other language that can boast that.

Ah, the West is still in the running then.

I think Sumerian is a language isolate, in other words it is not related to any other known language.

It's structure is described as agglutinative (most words are formed by joining morphemes together.)

hey xiaophil

don't have any link, read it a while back, i like paper, and a comfortable bed to lay on while i read. i'm always willing to be trumped mate, if i wasn't then i'd just be your everyday run of the mill, holier than thou my fecal matter smells of rasberries type ;)

cheers for the research syd, so i guess vedic-sanskrit was a product of the indus-valley civilisation.

sydcarten, assuming your info is correct (I read something similar), the next question is which modern language group is most directly related to Archaic Sumerian.  Whoa.  That might be too much for us 业余.

Dammit! I hate it when that ^ happens. Hopefully it won't happen this time:

According to Wikipedia, Sanskrit "as defined by Pāṇini, had evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form. Beginning of Vedic Sanskrit can be traced as early as around 1500 BCE (accepted date of Rig-Veda)."

but Sumerian texts begin with Archaic Sumerian — 3100 – 2600/2500 BC

sydcarten

Thanks, but please edit before it's too late.  Garbled code nightmare... Hahaha

(Phew, it's under control.)

this mess deleted. see below

I was wondering about that.  I did go so far as to check out Wikipedia (which who knows how accurate that is).  It said this:

The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, its oldest core dating back to as early as 1500 BCE,^[5] qualifying Rigvedic Sanskrit as one of the oldest attestation of any Indo-Iranian language, and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family."

This seems to indicate that it was one of several written languages started around 1500 BCE-ish, but I am by no means trying to shoot down your response.  If you have a good link, I would like to read it.

sanskrit is the oldest known recorded language, which according to some linguisitic historians was the progenitor of all known current languages.