Reconceptualizing the Linguistic Divide: Chinese and Western Theories of the Written Sign 1

Abstract

At a time when cultural relativism has become the accepted paradigm for cultural and literary studies, it seems increasingly difficult to find conceptual premises upon which to build bridges across different traditions and cultures. This especially so in the areas of China and West studies. Chinese literature and culture have been viewed by not a few scholars as fundamentally different from their Western counterparts. root cause of the difference has often been traced to the difference in language and which has been further narrowed down to the nature of the written sign. difference of the written sign has, since medieval times, been viewed as a conceptual divide that separates the Chinese and Western Languages. This view seems to find support in linguistic science. In his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure divided world's languages into two large writing systems: the ideographic system in which each word represented by a single sign that unrelated to the sounds of the word itself and the phonetic system which tries to reproduce the succession of sounds that make up a word.2 The classic example of an ideographic system of writing, Saussure declared, is Chinese(26). Needless to say, the alphabetic European languages belong to the phonetic system. Saussure further pointed out that in an ideographic system, each written sign stands for a whole word and, consequently, for the idea expressed by the word. By contrast, phonetic systems of writing are based on the irreducible elements used in speaking. Saussure's classification was not only a summary of the similar views held by scholars in the field up to his time but also anticipated the dominant theme in the repeated debates concerning the nature of the Chi-