Patrick Chew scripsit:

> Contrary to Professor Mair's claims of primacy - sound over
> symbol, word over graph - I would still have to say/maintain that the
> monosyllabic tradition it still prime, especially given the trends and
> patterns in loan phenomena, where loans (intra-Sinitic, that is) are
> quickly nativized by association with singular graphemes.

Indeed. Mark Rosenfelder puts it very well, I think, in his article
on yingzi (http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.html) -- which ought
to be required reading for anglophones who want to understand Chinese
writing, IMHO:

The complexities of the writing system, the inherent interest
of the pictorial elements, the cleverness inherent in graphic
compounds like _woods_ and the radical-phonetic system, and even
sociological facts such as the time it takes to learn the system,
and the fact that English speakers of all nations can use it
whatever their native dialect, would also combine to give the
writing system an overwhelming character of its own. It would
be seen as more important than speech; there would even be a
tendency to think of words as derived from characters rather
than the other way around.

If someone asks where a word comes from, we (now) think of its
original phonetic form; we say for instance that _language_
comes from French _langage_, itself derived from Latin
_lingua_ 'tongue', which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European
_*dnghu_. With the yingzi system, people would be tempted instead
to give what we might call the graphic etymology. They'd say
that _lang_ derives from the _speech_ radical and the _gang_
phonetic, and that the latter is actually a picture of a gang--
a reduplication of the _man_ character. That is indeed where
[yingzi] comes from, but not _lang_, which did not derive from
it! (But it wouldn't even be easy to make this point in yingzi--
how do you distinguish _lang_ from [yingzi] if you can't even
write "lang" without writing the character?)

--
John Cowan jcowan@... www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan
Assent may be registered by a signature, a handshake, or a click of a computer
mouse transmitted across the invisible ether of the Internet. Formality
is not a requisite; any sign, symbol or action, or even willful inaction,
as long as it is unequivocally referable to the promise, may create a contract.
--_Specht v. Netscape_