70 Part I: Land and Language
time). Let’s look at how this worked using English rather than Chinese. In Eng-
lish the word “sun” (picturable) sounds like the word “son.” You could use the
sun graph for both, and let the correct meaning be deduced from context. You
could go on with this process:= sun
= son
= soon
= sung
= sin
= shun
Graphs like this were roughly phonetic; a single graph that once stood spe-
cifically for a single word came to stand for a whole set of similar-sounding
words. But you can imagine that if the system kept on like this, it would even-
tually get tremendously confusing. So ancient Chinese scribes developed
another device for sorting them out. Another set of elements, known as “signif-
ics,” were developed to combine with phonetics to give the reader a clue as to
which meaning was intended. For instance, the graph for “man” could be com-
bined with the graph for “sun” to indicate “son”—i.e., “the man-type of sun.”
A graph for an open mouth could be combined with “sun” to mean “sung.”
The mouth and man graphs could also be combined with other elements to cre-
ate other words. Because of these combinations, Chinese graphs can be learned
and remembered more easily than might be imagined, since constituent ele-
ments show up again and again.
All these combined elements are written with great elegance in a single
imagined square, so they all take up roughly the same amount of space, unlike
English words that vary tremendously in the space it takes to write them out. A
Chinese graph may have two strokes, such as in the graph for “man,” or 30 or
more in a very complex graph, but they will both take up the same size square.
These are then written in vertical rows beginning on the right hand side. And
because of the monosyllabic nature of spoken Chinese, each graph will (usu-
ally) be pronounced as a single-syllable word.
One of the virtues of the Chinese system of writing is the very fact that
there is no direct connection between the graph and its pronunciation. This
means that any given graph can be called by whatever word is used in the vari-
ous “dialects” of Chinese, so that it does not matter if all Chinese do not speak
the same dialect; they all read the same script. It works much like the numerals
in Europe, where the numeral 1 is called “one” in English, un in French, eins in
German, uno in Spanish. This feature may be the single most important factor
in the historic unity of the Chinese cultural world.
In the last several decades, the People’s Republic of China has attempted
two far-reaching reforms of the written language. The first reform is an
attempted simplification of many of the old multistroke graphs. Simplified Chi-