Ideography or Phonetic Inter-subjectivity? The Interactional Dynamics of Writing-mediated Sinitic Brush-talk in Sinographic East Asia until the 1900s

Driven by religious fervor, intellectuals in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe were eager to restore the primitive, universal language that was thought to prevail before Babel. Jesuit missionary reports of people from (present day) China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea speaking mutually unintelligible languages yet engaging in interactive and face-to-face intellectual exchange in writing fascinated these intellectuals. The non-alphabetic Chinese script (漢字 Mand: hànzì, Jap: kanji, Viet: chữ Hán, S. Kor: hanja) was widely construed as an ideal ideographic code or cipher not unlike Arabic numerals, mathematical symbols, and musical notation. Here, ideologies embodied by the script were such that it conveyed meanings by eye, through non-alphabetic ‘real characters’ and semantic imprecision, and which could overcome or avoid confusion frequently arising in European aural communication. (edited to here) That misguided belief unleashed the ‘ideographic myth’ concerning the semiotic affordance of written Chinese since the seventeenth century. That myth was laid to rest relatively recently in the twentieth century through evidence-based scholarly debate, buttressed by robust psycholinguistic research insights whereby to express any and all ideas in any natural language, morphographic Chinese included, writing must necessarily be mediated by speech. Even though the once popular but misguided belief in ideography was finally debunked, the interactional dynamics or modus operandi of how literati of Sinitic from different parts of Sinographic East Asia could comprehend and make meaning using the Sinitic script remains unaccounted for. In different parts of Sinographic East Asia, sinograms were acquired by those raised in socio- politically influential and/or econo-culturally resourceful families, often studiously through repetitious reading and writing practices using the local vernacular pronunciation. Shared knowledge of a range of literary canons written in Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic was an indispensable condition behind its ‘scripta franca’ function in cross-border communication. With the help of selected documented examples of Sinitic brush-talk (漢文筆談), this paper illustrates how, for centuries until the 1900s, Sinitic-based ‘silent conversation’ was made possible by phonetic inter-subjectivity, in that individual brush-talkers were able to improvise and make sense of sinograms via their respective vernacular reading pronunciations.