Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schniftfestscschriji: Ersays in Honor of John DeFrancis
In conmemoration of 80th anniversary of Prof. John DeFrancis
TYPOLOGY OF WRITING SYSTEMS by Zhou Youguang
Every writing system has its individuality of external appearance and its
generality of internal structure. It is easy to see the external appearance
and difficult to discern the internal structure. Typology of writing systems
is based not on individuality but on generality.
Writing systems are like prisms, each having three phases: I, the phase of
symbol form, 11. the phase of speech segment and 111. the phase of expressing
mode.
I, THE PHASE OF SYMBOL FORM
The phase of symbol form has three layers: I. picture symbols, 2. charac-
ter symbols and 3. alphabet syabols,
Picture symbols are either transparent and understandable by seeing, or
opaque and not understandable by seeing. Picture symbols are not possible of
being decomposed into strokes.
Character symbols do not look like any real thing, They can be decomposed
into a number of strokes, but the total number of strokes is indefinite,
Alphabet symbols have a small number of units and the number of units is
generally defini te. Alphabet symbols have three layers: a. sy llabic alphabets,
b,, consonantal alphabets and c. phonemic alphabets.
Picture symbols generally belong to the earliest stage of writings.
Character symbols are generally developed from picture symbols. Alphabet
symbols are mostly the simplified forms of characters
11. THE PHASE OF SPEECH SEGMENT
The phase of speech segment may have Long segments or short segments. Long
segments may be thesis segments, paragraph segments or sentence segments, with
one integrated symbol chart representing a whole story, a section of a story
or a complete sentence. Short segments have three layers: 1. word segments,
2, syllable segments and 3. phoneme segments,
I I I. THE PHASE OF EXPRESS I NG HODE
The phase of expressing mode has three layers: 1. picture drawing mode,
2. idea narrating mode and 3, sound denoting mode.
Picture drawing mode requires the reader to understand the writing without
previous Learning. With this node. functional words are not possible to be
written down, and human speech cannot be recorded in word sequences. Such
writings can be read in any human speech with super-speech nature.