Chinese script

Chinese script began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is simple repetition: tree + tree = forest: more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness and east + east = everywhere. The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look. Characters can be transformed in meaning by reorienting their elements: child to childbirth and man to cropse. Some elements are phonetic; some even punning. The entirety is the richest and most complex writing system that humanity has ever evolved. Considering scripts in terms of how many symbols are required and how much meaning each individual symbol conveys, Chinese thus became an extreme case; the largest set of symbols, and the most meaningful individually. Writing systems could take alternative paths: few symbols, each carrying less information. An intermediate stage is the syllabary, a phonetic writing system using individual characters to represent syllables, which may or may not be meaningful. A few hundred characters can serve a language.~ Page 32-33