Those of you who follow the Unicode list will have seen me mention
Peter A. Boodberg before. Professor Boodberg's passionate interest in
the study of the early history of the Chinese language and script
remained a constant throughout his teaching career at UC Berkeley
(1932 - 1972). I came along at the tail end of this period, and had
the good karma to attend several of his classes and seminars as a
graduate student in Chinese, and then to follow up with an independent
study course from him. Although that same karmic dispensation soon
moved me permanently outside the realm of academe, I have never
stopped trying to understand and apply, if only as an amateur, what I
learned from him during those last two years of his life.

Here, I would like to take the liberty of reproducing one of Professor
Boodberg's Cedules, those short, one-page self-published dispaches
written during the mid-1950s. I realize I may be pushing the limits of
decorum with such a long post, especially as a newcomer to this list,
and apologize.

***

CEDULES FROM A BERKELEY WORKSHOP IN ASIATIC PHILOLOGY

015 - 541120 Peter A. Boodberg, ed.

Berkeley, California, U.S.A.

* Some Basic Grammatonomic Characteristics of the Chinese Script *

Grammatonomy may be defined as the philological and linguistic
discipline concerned with the study of graphic forms of linugistic
expression and with the structural and historical analysis of a system
of script, of its component units (termed graphemes and graphs, or
-grams, in binary compounds), and of the relation of the latter to
their phonetic and semantic counterparts (treated in the allied fields
of inquiry of phonematics and semantematics).

The nature of the Chinese script is best revealed through contrasting
it with our own (from which it differs in dregree, rather than in
kind, as generally supposed). Now, the Latin script as used in
English may be described as a linear, dextrorsal, phonetically
atomistic (alphabetic) form of writing, with only sporadic recourse to
syllabic, lexigraphic, or pictorial signs (such as '&', the ampersand,
and 'X', in 'Xmas' and 'Xing', i.e. 'crossing'). It is
sesquidimensional in that half of its graphemes project above (all
majuscules and 9 minuscules) and below (5 minuscules) the relatively
thin ribbon of the script-line, but eschews diacriticals and super-
and sub-scription. With phthegmic (word) division marked by means of
intermittent black spaces, the tape of the script has the appearance
of a row of segmented and somewhat ciliated bacillary streaks. This
spacing coupled with extralphabetical punctuation provide for
rhetorical articulation. In its normal font of type, it is biform or
quadriform (small letters and capitals, romans and italics); the
number of its standard graphemes rarely exceed 140 (26 x 4 letters,
plus some 30 marks and figures). It seems irrespnsive to a change of
alignment.

The Chinese script is agminal (columnar), deorsal and sinistrorsal,
though easily vertible to horizontal alignment, (as in many modern
Chinese scientific publications), and phonetically molecular (syllabic
and lexigraphic). The number of graphemes runs from 500 to 800,
estimated on a purely graphic bais, and to over 2000, if reckoned on
an organic-structural, historical, and phonosemantic basis. These
form in bidimensional combinations a graphicon of some 50,000 graphs
or lexigrams (of which only about 10,000 are in common use). The
majority of the lexigrams are treated as digrams containing aphonic
semantic signals, or sematic hemigrams. These later graphemes number
about 300 and are used as classifiers for lexicographical purposes.
Graphs are bidimensional and isometrical (and thus spatially fungible)
occupying, irrespective of grpahic complexity, equidimensional and
equidistant celliform quadrates of space in which they remain
ensconced even when associated in larger lexical units. Vestigial
zographic (pictorial) connotations remain potent in many graphemes and
graphs. Rhetorical intermittence is used chiefly for paragraphing
purposes, but graphic punctuation was little developed until recently,
parison and kommatic particles (represented by full-fledged graphs)
effectively serving to punctuate a text. It must be emphasized that
the isometry of grpahs is much more characteristic of the script than
its traditional alignment the peculiarity of which first strikes the
popular imagination. Homologous scripts, such as the Egyptian and
Cuneiform, were polymetrical. It is not unlikely that this graphic
isometry became a factor in arresting the complete phonetization of
the Chinese system of writing in that semantic signals (corresponding
to the detachable determinatives of the Near Eastern scripts) were
permantently welded to the phonetic hemigrams. Phonetization of a
graph pre-supposes a certain degree of de-semantization, and the
Chinese seem to have refused to forego the certain orismological
advantages, and perhaps the aesthetic satisfaction, in being able to
apprehend at a glance the approximate semantic contour of most of
their graphs.

Workshop Fund 1, in memoriam Edward T. Williams.

***


This Cedule is one that was not included in _Selected Works of Peter
A. Boodberg_, University of California Press, 1979. ISBN
0-520-03314-0.

Jon

--
Jon Babcock <jon@...>