ft. 1: "Shell-and-bone" 

 rlpt, late 2nd millennium 

 C. 



Flft. 2: Inscription on cere- 

 monial bronze ax, late 2nd 

 millennium B.C. 



Flft. 3: Inscription from a 

 bronze "knife coin** from 

 the State of Ch'l, 1st millen- 

 nium B.C. 



Flft. 4 (above): "Seal style" 

 Inscription on a roof til.-. 

 late 1st millennium B.C. 



Flft. 5: Relftn name in "cler- 

 ical style," from tomb brick, 

 dated A.D. 96. 



Flft. 6: Portion of Inscrlptlor 

 In "clerical style" on a ran 

 rubblnft of a memorial stom 

 erected to K'unft Chou, lin- 

 eal descendant of Confucius 

 dated A.D. 164. 



CAT DOG BOY GIRL 



_h ^ K. 



M. Kenneth Starr, Curator 

 Asiatic Archaeology and Ethnology 



IVIany American children learn to recite their ABC's by 

 means of the following familiar jingle: 



ABCD, EFG 

 HIJK, LMNOP 

 QRS, TUV 

 W, and XYZ 



Now I know 

 My ABC's, 

 Tell me what 

 You think of me. 



Having mastered the recitation of the alphabet, the young- 

 sters then learn to write the letters, upper case and lower, 

 first in block form and then in cursive form. Next, the indi- 

 vidual letters are put together to form simple words such as 

 cat and dog, and, finally, the words are strung together to 

 make sentences. Through the years the student gradually 

 learns longer and more difficult words such as pneumonia, 

 chalcedony and antidisestablishmentarianism and with these ex- 

 presses more complex ideas. In this continuing educational 

 process both science and memory play their part: there are 

 principles for forming the letters and for combining them 

 into words. Thus, c-a-t becomes cat and in this particular 

 sequence symbolizes a feline animal, while d-o-g becomes dog 

 and calls to mind a different image. Memory, too, is of no 

 small importance, as will be allowed by those of us who still 

 rely on ";' before e, except after c." 



Chinese and English 



Chinese children, too, must rely upon both science and 

 memory in learning to write, but in both the actual writing 



and in the building of vocabulary memory plays a more im- 

 portant role in learning Chinese than it does in learning to 

 write English. This situation in large measure arises from 

 the fact that the principles on which the writing of the two 

 languages is based are very different. 



English and Chinese belong to two completely unrelated 

 language families, and, more importantly for present pur- 

 poses, the writing of the two languages is founded upon 

 totally different concepts. The writing of English, and of 

 Western languages generally, is based upon an alphabet com- 

 posed of letters, twenty-six in the case of English, that repre- 

 sent the corpus of sounds occurring in the spoken language. 1 



Written Chinese, however, is non-alphabetic and so has 

 no letters that can represent the sounds of the spoken lan- 

 guage and spell "words" as we know them. Instead, Chinese 

 is based upon the representation of things and ideas by means 

 of "characters" — pictograms, ideograms, and phonograms 

 whose traceable origins in China go back at least to the 

 middle of the second millenium B.C. 



(Continued on next page) 



1 This representation more often than not is both clumsy and inac- 

 curate, thus contributing to problems in spelling. In English, there 

 have been efforts to ameliorate this situation by modifying the alphabet 

 so as to make it conform more closely to the corpus of sounds in the 

 spoken language. The 44-letter Initial Alphabet of Sir James Pitman, 

 which has gained increasing acceptance in England, is an example of 

 such an effort. 



SEPTEMBER Page 3 



