Chapter 2 Tongues, Texts, and Scripts 57fangyan, “regional speech.” Chinese speak of “picking up” one of the other
regional speeches but do not think of themselves as “learning another language”
as an Italian learning French would say. Nor has there been a time in Chinese
history, even during periods of disunity, when a region asserted its independence
by the sort of “linguistic nationalism” that divides India, another place where
the Latin model, not the Chinese model, has been followed.
The diversity we see in South China on the dialect map has therefore been
growing for the last 2,000 years. At the same time, the dialect of the Beijing area,
Mandarin, has dominated since the fifteenth century. Called guanhua, the “lan-
guage of the officials,” it is spoken everywhere north of the Yangzi. It even has
its own dialects. Thus, it is repeating the early history of Chinese, moving south-
ward, diversifying, and absorbing earlier dialects in its wake (Norman 1988).Tex t s
“You Are Hurting My Language”
The linguist J. L. Becker describes his first lesson in writing Burmese at the
beginning of three years of study with a kindly old teacher, U San Htwe:
As I had been taught to do, I would ask him words for things and then
write them down. He watched me writing for a while and then said,
“That’s not how you write it,” and he wrote the word in Burmese script.
For the word evoked by English “speak,” I wrote / / and he wrote. I insisted it made no difference. He insisted it did and told me I
was hurting his language. And so I began, somewhat reluctantly, to learn to
write Burmese: /p—/ was a central , and /-y-/ wrapped around the to
make and the vowel / / fit before and after it:.
This difference in medial representation made a great difference... I
could not segment the Burmese syllable into a linear sequence.... But seg-
mentation into linear sequence is a prerequisite for doing linguistics as
most of us have been taught it.... To write my kind of grammar I had to
violate his writing.
At first it seemed to me a small price to pay, to phonemicize his lan-
guage. But over the years—particularly twenty years later, in Java and
Bali—I learned how that kind of written figure (a center and marks above,
below, before, and after it; the figure of the Burmese and Javanese and Bali-
nese syllable) was for many Southeast Asians a mnemonic frame: every-
thing in the encyclopedic repertoire of terms was ordered that way:
directions (the compass rose), diseases, gods, colors, social roles, foods—
everything. It was the natural shape of remembered knowledge, a basic
icon. (Becker 1995:195)
This respect for writing, even to the single syllable, is pervasive throughout
Asia. The mystery of capturing a sound in an inscribed symbol is thought to be
divine. The name for the script of Sanskrit and the North Indian vernaculars,
devanagari, suggests the writing of the gods (Horton 1992), and the earliest