Affiliation:
1. School of Chinese Language and Literature, Soochow University , Suzhou , Jiangsu Province , China
Abstract
Abstract
Chinese is commonly believed to be an analytic language, but evidence from philological works and cross-linguistic comparisons clearly suggests that various morphological operations existed in Old Chinese. The loss of Chinese morphology can be explained by the ideographic nature of Chinese characters: the Chinese language has been evolving in a way that stabilizes the pronunciation of each character. The effects of writing systems on language evolution can be widely observed from world languages, while writing per se has been evolving along the path of phonetization driven mainly by borrowings instead of conscious linguistic analysis. In history, language never picked writing systems based on linguistic features; instead, writing systems affect the evolutionary paths of languages: single signs of a writing system stabilize the basic units of the language.
Funder
Interdisciplinary Research Team in Humanities and Social Sciences at Soochow University
National Social Science Fund of China
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