Phonetic Writing, Conceptual Writing
There are various reasons for the success of the construction of tributary centralisation throughout the Chinese world. Chinese authors, who are not very well known outside their country (like Wen Tiejun), have proposed different hypotheses, depending on the geography and ecology of their region.
They emphasise the early invention of intensive agriculture, associated with a population density that gradually became considerably greater than that of the Mediterranean/Europe world. It is not our purpose here to open up debate on these difficult questions which have been barely studied much up until now, because of dominant Eurocentrism. Personally I would insist on the very long-term effects of the Chinese adoption of conceptual writing.Phonetic writing (alphabetical or syllabic), invented in the Middle East, gradually became that of all the languages of the Mediterranean/European region and the Indian sub-continent. It is only understandable by those who know the meaning of the words pronounced in the written language, and it requires translation for the others. The expansion of this way of writing reinforced the differences between the languages and consequently the forms of identity that were based upon them. This constituted an obstacle to the expansion of regional political powers and therefore to tributary centralisation. Then, with capitalist modernity it created the mythology of the nation/state that was linguistically homogenous. This persists—and is even reinforced—in contemporary Europe and is thus an obstacle to its political unification. The obstacle can only (partially) be overcome by adopting a common language, foreign for many, whether it is the languages of the empires inherited by modern states (English, French and Portuguese in Africa, English in India and up to a point Spanish and Portuguese for the Indians of Latin America), or the ‘‘business English” that has become the language of contemporary Europe.
The Chinese invented another way of writing which was conceptual and not phonetic. The same character described an object (like a door) or an idea (such as friendship) and can be read with a different pronunciation: ‘door’ or ‘bab’, ‘friendship’ or ‘sadaka’ by readers who are respectively English or Arab. This form of writing was an important factor promoting the expansion of the imperial power of the Chinese world at the continental level. It was a world whose population was comparable to that of all the Americas from Alaska to the Tierra del
Fuego in Argentina and of Europe from Portugal to Vladivostok. The conceptual way of Chinese writing enabled phonetic reading in the different languages of the sub-continent. And it is only recently that, through generalised education, the Mandarin language of Beijing is becoming the (phonetic) language of the whole Chinese world.
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