The Linguistics Delusion - Geoffrey Sampson
9. The Reality of Compound Ideographs
The Linguistics Delusion - Geoffrey Sampson
Geoffrey Sampson [+]
Sussex University, Professor Emeritus
Description
A number of Western orientalists hold a more or less explicit theory that all writing systems must be essentially phonetic-based. One expression of this, by William Boltz, who is currently the most widely-read writer on the early history of Chinese script, is a claim that one of the standard categories used by the Chinese for thousands of years to classify their written graphs, namely hui yi or “compound ideographs”, never existed. All the graphs normally seen as hui yi are claimed by Boltz to have had an original phonetic basis that has become invisible in modern times. This claim is the purest adhockery, akin to a suggestion that the planets are maintained in their orbits by flying angels which are too transparent to be detected by telescopes. It is an unusually striking example of linguistics distorted by allowing pseudoscientific theorizing to override empirical description.