Indian scripts' influence on graphic analysis in China Françoise Bottéro Workshop East Asian writing systems in contact 9 juillet 2022

Résumé En

It is a too well-known fact that Chinese had a profound influence on its neighbors in terms of script, but what about China? Could it completely escape its surrounding's linguistic systems? I shall show that it was not the case. The Chinese traditional graphic analysis distinguishes 2 types of characters according to the complexity of their structure: "simple characters" wén and "compound characters" zì. This distinction is commonly attributed to Xǔ Shèn the author of the first Chinese characters dictionary Shuōwén jiězì composed in the year 100 (who happened to be the inventor of the so-called radicals classification system bùshǒu). If, as shown by Bottéro 2004, Xǔ Shèn did not make any such structural distinction between wén and zì in his whole work, then where does this 'simple versus compound characters' analysis' come from? It goes without saying that non-compound and compound characters have always existed in the Chinese writing system since early stages. But no one ever attributed them a terminological distinction until Zhèng Qiáo (1104-1162). Zhèng Qiáo is the first author theorizing on non-compound and compound characters under the terms wén and zì. I will show that he could develop such a new analysis of the Chinese script under the influence of the Indian scripts available during his time and before.