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Updated: May 20, 2025
The Chinese Ministry of Public Instruction, by an edict of November 3, 1919, officially introduced in all secondary schools a phonetic system of writing in place of the ideograms theretofore employed. This is undoubtedly an event of the highest importance in the history of culture, little though it may interest the Western world to-day.
This theory is based upon the assumptions that the ancient Chinese ideograms include representations of tropical animals and plants; that the oldest and purest forms of the language are found in the south; and that the Chinese and the Indo-Chinese groups of languages are both tonal.
There are certain broad features of the traditional Chinese civilization which give it its distinctive character. I should be inclined to select as the most important: The use of ideograms instead of an alphabet in writing; The substitution of the Confucian ethic for religion among the educated classes; government by literati chosen by examination instead of by a hereditary aristocracy.
In view of that his movements were inexplicable: he got out from a locked chest the yen tsiang, a heavy tube of dark wood inlaid with silver ideograms and diminutive earthen cup at one end. Then he produced a small brass lamp, brushes, long needles, and a metal rod. Taking off his clothes, and in the somber black folds of the silk robe, he made various minutely careful preparations.
Where each word has to be drawn, a little picture taking time and care, you are in no danger of overlavishness; you do not spill and squander your words, "intoxicated," as they say, "with the exuberance of your verbosity." Style was forced on the Chinese; ideograms are a grand preventive against pombundle.
It is evident that the Babylonian royal scribes at length showed some consideration for their unfortunate Egyptian correspondents by writing as a rule in phonograms which could be easily spelt out, since strange ideograms might have brought the reader to a standstill.
The ideograms, with which his name is written, En-ki, designate him as god of that 'which is below, the earth in the first place; but with a more precise differentiation of the functions of the great gods, Ea becomes the god of the waters of the deep.
There are no texts extant in which images are exclusively used, but we can point to a few where the ideograms have preserved their primitive forms sufficiently to enable us to recognize their origin with certainty.
Even when their civilization was at its height the Babylonians never came so near to alphabetism as the Egyptians. This is not the place for an inquiry into the reasons of their failure, nor even for an explanation how signs with a phonetic value forced themselves in among the ideograms, and became gradually more and more important.
For the most part, however, it is easy to recognize their origin, and in this they differ greatly from the symbols of the first Chaldæan alphabet. In the very oldest documents there are certain ideograms that, when we are warned, remind us of the natural objects from which their forms have been taken, but the connection is slight and difficult of apprehension.
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