Babel #6: Chinese Script

With Chinese/Mandarin (#2, 1.3 billion speakers), Gaston Dorren’s Babel focuses on the script. There are a lot of misconceptions about the script, and they never go away because they contain a kernel of truth. Let’s learn more.

 

Chinese is written top to bottom; its columns then ordered left to right. Long, long ago, both statements were true. But for a long time now, it has been written left to right on horizontal lines.

 

Chinese characters are pictures or ideograms. A very small fraction (2%), yes. But the majority (98%) are not.

 

Chinese characters are over 3,500 years old. Yes, writing in China is that old. But the characters have changed a lot over that period, so much so that most modern Chinese readers cannot read the ancient texts.

 

Chinese has over 50,000 characters. As per some official dictionaries, yes. But in practice, many of those are very niche used only in some places or professions. Only a quarter of that is relevant to daily use. Still large, but not 50,000.

 

Characters are often words. A tiny number, yes. But the overwhelming number of Mandarin words have 2 or more characters.

 

Japanese is written in Chinese characters. Incorrect, but it is true that the Japanese script is based on the Chinese one. The languages are different enough in structure that the “raw” Chinese script was not enough for writing in Japanese. New characters were added in Japanese to fill in such gaps.

 

Speaking of Japanese, it has a very weird characteristic. If written vertically, the columns are arranged right to left. But if written horizontally, it is left to right.

“This means some Japanese books open to the left, as in European languages, others to the right, as in Arabic or Hebrew.”