Origins - Early Chinese Writing

Boltz, William G. “Early Chinese Writing.” World Archaeology 17, no. 3 (February 1986): 420-436.
Summary

The article starts with the first evidences of early Chinese writing that were discovered—Shang bronze vessels. The Author notes that the writings found on these vessels fall into the categories of ‘clan names’ and ‘content inscriptions.’ These engravings are fairly simple to understand although the exact pronunciation has been lost us. A work published in 1903 by Liu O shed new light to the topic of early Chinese writing when he unveiled his collection on ‘oracle bone inscriptions.’ The author debunks the claims that the oracle bones carvings are much more archaic as opposed to the bronze vessels by noting that the differences in the quality of each script can be explained by the material used to write it on. The characters written on bones needed to be scratched whereas the bronze could be artfully crafted. Therefore the oracle bone characters are mostly made of straight lines of differing lengths, whereas the bronze character are perfectly proportioned and contain many curves. Although there seem to be many differences between the two scripts they both represent full-writing, just used for different purposes.Chinese evolved in much the same way as writing in other parts of the world. It first started off as pictographic and then slowly changed to logographic. But unlike other scripts Chinese never moved towards a syllabographic or an alphabetic script. Early Chinese evolved through three main stages: Pictographic, Multivalent, and Determinative. In the pictographic stage only tangible objects, such as animals, were represented by characters. Next ideological definitions were added to existing characters that were homophonous, the meaning ‘come’ was added to the word 'grain' (both pronounced lái). Lastly a determinative was added to clarify which meaning was meant, such as adding 亻(human) to 象 (elephant) to show that the 像 (image) meaning is meant. By 1200 B.C.E. (Shang Dynasty) all three stages had already taken place. While other scripts around the world continued to change Chinese stayed the same.
The author flatly denies the theory of stimulus-diffusion and offers other explanations to the Chinese invention of writing. Some archaeologists claim that Chinese originally came from scratches found on pottery as early as 4800 B.C.E. The main argument for theory is that some of the scratches resemble a few of the Shang characters, but this is speculative at best. A second reason for doubting this claim is, as noted above, scripts usually appear in pictographic form first which goes against what we know about the development of the Shang writing. And a third reason is the large gap of time 4800-1200 B.C.E. It is very unlikely that a ‘half-way’ developed lasted for three and a half thousand years nearly unchanged. With this said the author challenges the view of Cheng Te-k’un as stated the development of writing took no less than 6000 years. It is an invention not an evolution. A second candidate is the more likely origin of the script—marks from the Ta wen k’ou culture. These marks are obviously objects and are roughly dated to 1900 B.C.E. which puts it in a much more reasonable time frame to eventually cause the invention of the Shang script; the Ta wen k’ou graphs also share the ‘clan-name’ inscriptions found on pottery. The Author concludes with his postulation that it is not much of a jump to go to a clan being represented by a character to the character representing the pronunciation of the clan name. The Ta wen k’ou graphs are the ‘tangible’ proof to show how the script moved from ‘non-phonetic to phonetic.’