Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  The scrolls are beautiful to look at, but they’re very human, too, because they have mistakes in them. Parchment and papyrus were expensive and precious, so they couldn’t just take a fresh sheet and start again. There are marks where someone has rubbed out his mistakes, and one where the word ‘God’ has been written in where it shouldn’t have been, but because the word was ‘God’, the scribe couldn’t just rub it out, so instead he marked it so that the person reading it out loud would know not to say it here. Literally, the word of God.

  Stephen Fry examines a scroll at the Israel Antiquities Authority

  Pinyin

  Sir David Tang sits in the Luk Yu Tea House in Hong Kong. It is a throwback to colonial times – not the haunt of the guilo foreign devil (the white man) but of the old Hong Kong Chinese. Sir David is one of the most colourful and intelligent of its denizens and a true cosmopolitan. Born into a wealthy Hong Kong Chinese family, he was shipped off aged thirteen to boarding school in Cambridge and speaks perfect English. But he also speaks Cantonese, his mother tongue, which is spoken by some 70 million Chinese, and Mandarin, which is the official dialect of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), spoken by some billion people. He’s joined by his old chum Johnson Chang, and together they proceed to throw light upon the complexity of the Chinese language.

  But there’s a problem with even saying this, as they explain that Chinese is not one language but a language family of some thirteen sublanguages, which are mostly mutually unintelligible. So a Cantonese-speaking person in Hong Kong cannot understand someone from Beijing, Shanghai or Chengdu. However, the good news is that it’s all written pretty much the same way, so although it sounds very different it can be read by everyone. Since Mao’s revolution in 1949, Mandarin has become the standardized form of spoken Chinese and is based on the Beijing dialect – not a popular move with the Cantonese, according to Sir David.

  Johnson is a skilled calligrapher and demonstrates the rudiments of the writing system. Chinese characters, hanzi, are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes, units of language which are independent of phonetic change. As he dips his brush and with a few elegant strokes makes ever-more complex characters, Johnson explains that Chinese characters represent the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world, which has remained virtually unchanged for 3,000 years. The number of Chinese characters is approximately 47,000, although a large number of these are rarely used variants accumulated throughout history. Fortunately, literacy requires a knowledge of only between 3,000 and 4,000 characters. The characters are morphosyllabic, each usually corresponding to a spoken syllable with a basic meaning. However, although Chinese words may be formed by characters with basic meanings, a majority require two or more characters to write and have a meaning that is distinct from the characters they are made from. With a few more brush strokes Johnson illustrates how the earliest characters were created as pictograms, similar to hieroglyphs, but explains that, contrary to popular belief, pictograms make up only a very small portion of Chinese characters. While characters in this class derive from pictures, they have been standardized, simplified and stylized to make them easier to write, and their derivation is therefore not always obvious. Most characters contain phonetic parts and are composites of phonetic components and a basic root or radical. Only the simplest characters, such as ren (human), ri (sun), shan (mountain), shui (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. Only around 4 per cent are pictographs, and 80–90 per cent are phonetic groupings consisting of a semantic radical element that indicates meaning and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals, and the rest of the characters are built upon them.

  Chinese oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty

  So the ideograms either modify existing pictographs or are direct symbolic illustrations. For instance, by modifying dāo, a pictogram for ‘knife’, by marking the blade, you get an ideogram rèn for ‘blade’. The ideogrammic compounds symbolically combine pictograms or ideograms to create a third character. For instance, doubling the pictogram mù, ‘tree’, produces lín, ‘grove’, while tripling it produces sēn, ‘forest’. Similarly, combining rì, ‘sun’, and yuè, ‘moon’, the two natural sources of light, makes míng, ‘bright’.

  Zhou Youdong, creator of Pinyin

  Not surprisingly, literacy rates were very low when Mao came to power. Sir David lets on that the man who more than anyone changed the way Chinese now learn to read and write is still alive. His name is Zhou Youdong, and he was entrusted by Mao with the total overhaul of the Romanization of Chinese.

  Zhou Youdong is 106 years old but looks a decade or three younger. He has survived more revolutions, counter-revolutions, great leaps forward and giant leaps backwards than Newcastle United FC. He lives with his eighty-five-year-old son in one of those drab communist-era housing projects that so disfigure the Chinese capital.

  Zhou was living in the USA before Mao came to power, studying economics. But in 1950 he decided to return as he was keen to help in the modernization programme of the communists. At that time there was a rather complicated system of Romanization of the written language which was not very effective. The difficulty of learning the characters had held back literacy rates so that when Mao came to power only 20 per cent of the country was literate. It was very important to improve this if China was to become a modern state. In 1955 Mao asked Zhou to make a new system; it took him and his colleagues six years to complete. Two decades after the revolution literacy rates had improved to 80 per cent and now they are about 90 per cent. Without doubt Pinyin, as Zhou’s Romanization is called, has done more for developing China than almost anything else one can think of. Yet Zhou remains modest about his achievements. Was Mao Tse Tung grateful? Diplomatically Zhou answers, ‘Mao Tse Tung supported the work.’ Pinyin is now taught in every school in China, and its phonetic-based Romanization system allows children to write Mandarin (on which it is based) much faster than the old way of learning all the characters by heart. Moreover, it revolutionized the way you type, especially important in a country that texts more than the rest of the world combined. Without Pinyin this would simply not be possible.

  There had been an earlier Anglicization of Chinese made by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892, but it was more for foreigners than for Chinese. This system uses English consonants and vowels to approximate the phonology of Mandarin Chinese. This is the system that gives us Peking and Mao Tse-Tung rather than Beijing and Mao Zedong. In truth, neither of these systems really reproduce the sound of the Chinese, so we might as well stick with saying Peking rather than mangle the Mandarin of Beijing, which will sound all wrong, as we can never get the tone right.

  Printing

  We’ve seen how the invention of writing changed the human world utterly. With writing, we could preserve, record and shape our stories, communicate our ideas and extend the significance of our lives beyond their end. Writing gave us our history.

  Over the 5,000 years since writing was invented, hundreds of different languages have been written in hundreds of different scripts. For the vast majority of this time, everything was written by hand. But nearly 600 years ago there was a revolution in writing technology which changed, not just the face of writing, but the whole world. In the mid fifteenth century a man called Johannes Gutenberg invented a mechanical way of making books. His development of movable type printing started the printing revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period.

  Gutenberg’s achievement wasn’t that he was the single genius who invented printing in one inspired moment. Forms of printing had been used in different parts of the world long before Gutenberg came along. The Chinese had been working with type carved into wood and bronze for centuries. They had also invented paper made from a pulp of water and discarded rags which was then pressed in
to sheets for writing or printing on.

  In the British Museum there’s a copy of the Diamond Sutra, one of the most sacred Buddhist texts and the world’s earliest complete survival of a dated printed book. The original was made in 868 and hidden for centuries in a sealed-up cave in north-west China. It’s made from seven strips of yellow-stained paper which were printed from carved wooden blocks and pasted together to form a scroll over 5 metres long.

  Diamond Sutra, the oldest surviving printed book

  Later on, the Chinese developed a movable type system using porcelain characters, and in the thirteenth century the Koreans were already experimenting with metal movable type made out of copper. The screw press, which Gutenberg refined and developed, had also been around for centuries to press grapes and impress patterns on textile.

  What Gutenberg did was to combine different crucial elements and adapt them. He invented a process for mass-producing movable type – the individual pieces of type in metal, one for each character of the alphabet, punctuation and other signs, which could be set up to be printed on a printing press, and then reused over and over again. He used new oil-based instead of water-based ink. And he had the radical idea of using the traditional agricultural screw press for printing; up to then, impressions had been made from stamps or wood blocks, by pressing them on to paper or cloth or by putting paper on top of them and then rubbing to get an impression.

  He brought these techniques together into a practical system which, as it developed, became increasingly efficient, economically viable and fast. In doing so he laid the foundation for mass production of books in Europe.

  His printing press, which was in operation by 1450, played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation and the scientific revolution because it made possible the spread of learning and the sharing of knowledge on a huge scale. The written word escaped from the quill pens of the monks in their scriptorium and took flight out into the wide world.

  And yet we don’t really know very much about Gutenberg himself. He was born in the German town of Mainz in 1400 and died, a poor man, sixty-eight years later. In between, he sort of flitted about, disappearing for periods, re-emerging somewhere else, always working on something, always short of money, frequently involved in some dispute or quarrel. At one stage he was sued for debt by the man who financed his printing press, and he ended up losing the press in lieu of payment. We don’t know whether he was married, or whether he had any children, but his achievements were recognized at the end of his life when he was given the title Hofmann (gentleman of the court), an annual stipend, 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of wine tax-free. He was buried in the Franciscan church at Mainz, but the church and the cemetery were later destroyed, and Gutenberg’s grave is now lost.

  The First Books

  The first real book to be printed using the new techniques Gutenberg developed in the 1450s was the Gutenberg Bible, also known as the forty-two-line Bible. No one knows exactly how many copies he printed, but the best guess is around 180 – 145 on paper and the rest on the more luxurious and expensive vellum. Only forty-eight copies survive, not all of them complete, and scholars consider them to be among the most valuable books in the world. The Bible is a thing of beauty, printed in Vulgate Latin on hand-made, fine-quality paper from Italy in Blackletter font on a page design that was deliberately created to look like an illustrated manuscript. Each copy was sold in folded sheets and was later bound and decorated according to the wishes of its owner. They cost much less than a handwritten Bible, but at least some copies are known to have sold for 30 florins, a price beyond most students, priests or other people of ordinary income. Probably most of them were sold to monasteries, universities and particularly wealthy individuals.

  The price of books began to fall as the technology of printing improved and the number of printing presses all over Europe increased. But although the process of printing was new, in the early years the printer was in direct competition with the scribe and he wanted to make books, like the Gutenberg bible, that were as luxurious and beautiful as the handwritten ones.

  So printers left large areas of the page blank so that an illuminator could decorate the text afterwards and create the same ornate, elaborate capital letters and richly illuminated patterns as the manuscripts. The same Gothic characters were reproduced in the new fonts, and the printer would even join up some of the letters so that they looked as if they’d been written by a quill pen. It was as if the printer was saying: ‘Look, this is new and it’s the future – but it’s just as splendid and well produced as what you’re used to.’

  Gutenberg’s Bible with hand-illuminated letters to help ease the transition to print

  The nineteenth-century writer, historian and social commentator Thomas Carlyle is pretty good for a quote on most things, and his comment in Sartor Resartus (1833) on the invention of the printing press has all the drama and flair you’d expect: ‘He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.’

  It’s the creation of a new ‘democratic world’ of the free circulation of knowledge and learning that’s at the heart of the printing revolution. As printing spread, it created a wider literate reading public, and it vastly increased the range of books and subject matter. The Church had dominated book production up to then, authorizing what was to be copied and controlling access to learning. But now, more secular books began to be printed, and religious books, bibles (like the pocket versions by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius) and tracts could be printed in great numbers and widely disseminated. Now people could read and decide for themselves.

  This was crucial to the success of the Reformation in Europe. Martin Luther was armed not just with radical ideas, but with a printing press. It’s easy to burn heretical texts which have a few hundred manuscripts in circulation; but what does the Church do when thousands of texts can be sprayed around quickly and at a fraction of the cost? William Tyndale, the scholar and translator, found out when he challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the English Church and state by translating the Bible into English. Copies of his Bible were secretly published and passed around Europe, and he was tried for heresy and burned at the stake in 1536. The French humanist scholar and printer Etienne Dolet was twice condemned to death and twice pardoned for his printing of classical works and authors like Rabelais and Calvin. He was eventually burned at the stake for heresy in Paris in 1546. He’s often called the first martyr of the Renaissance. Printing spread learning and enabled the radicalism of the Reformation and the humanist ideas of the Renaissance to percolate through all levels of society. In Britain it also had a profound effect on the written language.

  Geoffrey Chaucer was the first English writer to be set in print, though, as he died just around the time that Gutenberg was born, he missed the print revolution. But he certainly made it clear that he was pretty fed up with the sloppiness of the scribes who copied out his works for readers. In fact, in one of his great poems ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, there’s a bit at the end when he writes a little verse to the reader which shows his anxiety about the lack of standardization in written and spoken English. He basically asks that his poem isn’t too badly mangled by the copyist: ‘for there is so great diversity in English and in writing of our tongue so pray I God that none miswrite thee little book. Neither miss meter for default of tongue and where so thou be or else sung that that thou be understonged. God I beseech.’ In other words he hoped that people would find some way of spelling all the different words at least in such a manner that it was generally understood by those who were going to read it.

  And that’s precisely what printing allowed. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the first book by an English author that the printer William Caxton published in England. Caxton started printing at a time when the English language was going through a period of massive upheava
l. It was changing from the Middle English of Chaucer to the Modern English we speak today – a process that’s called the Great Vowel Shift. The ‘continental’ pronunciation of sounds based on Latin and Italian gave way to more regional lilts at about the same time written English was catching on through the printing press.

  This was a time when the English language was incredibly diverse. Dialects of different regions had different words for the same thing, and as for spellings of the same words, well, there were over twenty different spellings just for the word might! In order to sell as many books as possible, Caxton needed a linguistic norm for the vernacular. He needed what Chaucer was looking for in his complaint at the end of ‘Troilus and Crisedye’ – a standardized, consistent spelling that could be understood by everyone. So Caxton printed the dialect of London and the South-east Midlands (though he dumped his Kentish eyren in favour of northern egges). Through the medium of print, Caxton made people across the country familiar with I rather than ich and home rather than hame. On the one hand he preserved old spellings that no longer matched pronunciations; on the other hand he started to modernize prose. Printing added an element of linguistic stability to literature. No doubt Chaucer would have approved.

  Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 1485

  Diderot and the Encyclopédie

  Printing didn’t just give rise to greater literacy; it was one of those inventions, like gunpowder and the compass, which changed the state and appearance of the world. With more books available to more people, reading went from being an exercise of the elite, to a far more accessible activity. And because more people could read more, it changed attitudes towards learning and knowledge. As printing spread, the costs decreased, and booksellers proliferated, especially in the big European capitals, like Paris and London. The printed word became the life blood of the age of reason and inquiry we call the Enlightenment.