Driven by religious fervor, intellectuals in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe were eager to restore the primitive, universal language that was thought to prevail before Babel. Jesuit missionary reports of people from (present day) China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea speaking mutually unintelligible languages yet engaging in interactive and face-to-face intellectual exchange in writing fascinated these intellectuals. The non-alphabetic Chinese script was widely construed as an ideal ideographic code or cipher not unlike Arabic numerals, mathematical symbols, and musical notation. Here, ideologies embodied by the script were such that it conveyed meanings by eye, through non-alphabetic ‘real characters’ and semantic imprecision, and which could overcome or avoid confusion frequently arising in European aural communication. That misguided belief unleashed the ‘ideographic myth’ concerning the semiotic affordance of written Chinese since the seventeenth century. That myth was laid to rest relatively recently in the twentieth century through evidence-based scholarly debate, buttressed by robust psycholinguistic research insights whereby to express any and all ideas in any natural language, morphographic Chinese included, writing must necessarily be mediated by speech. Even though the once popular but misguided belief in ideography was finally debunked, the interactional dynamics of how literati of Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia could comprehend and make meaning using the Sinitic script remains unaccounted for. This paper illustrates how Sinitic-based ‘silent conversation’ was made possible by phonetic inter-subjectivity, in that individual brush-talkers were able to improvise and make sense of sinograms via their respective vernacular reading pronunciations.

Authors:
Reijiro Aoyama, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

About the Presenter(s)
Before taking up his post at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, he taught Japanese literature and culture at Fudan University, Tsinghua University, and City University of Hong Kong.

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