The scripts used to write Chinese and Japanese have long drawn more popular attention in the West than have the sounds and structures of the languages themselves. For most of us who began studying Chinese or Japanese from outside of those traditions, our first impressions probably came not from the languages per se, but rather from the scripts used to write them. Similarly, when friends and relatives heard what we were studying, they were much more likely to ask us how to write the characters for a word rather than how to say it. Our language classes typically provided little instruction about the characters beyond how to write them and some origin stories of particular graphs that were more useful as mnemonics than accurate as history. Accompanying this focus on written graphs, from close to the beginning of Western awareness of Chinese in particular, have been misunderstandings of how the “Sinitic script” functions and how it was created. These misunderstandings have ranged from philosophical wishful thinking, such as Francis Bacon’s belief that they were “characters real” that could be used for a universal writing system, as they “directly represented and reflected reality” (2), to more mundane notions that each one was a picture that represented a thing or idea and could be deciphered as such.Footnote ¹

Given the crucial role that the Sinitic script has played and continues to play in numerous East Asian cultures (and arguably in cultures elsewhere as well), this lack of accurate knowledge among the educated public is troubling. We are thus lucky to have Professor Zev Handel’s new book, Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. This is familiar terrain for Handel, who brought his linguistic and grammatological expertise to bear on the subject in his meticulously researched and argued 2019 scholarly monograph Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script (Brill, 2019). Chinese Characters Across Asia covers similar ground, but is aimed at a more general audience who may have no knowledge of the languages and scripts discussed. Noting that friends and acquaintances have expressed interest in the topic, Handel states that his goal was to write a book that was “approachable yet not overly simplified.” Perhaps the greatest challenge of writing an “accessible” book on a complex subject on which one is an expert is attempting to stand in the shoes of a non-expert, anticipating points of difficulty and offering clear and coherent explanations. Handel fully succeeds at this, aided no doubt by his many years of teaching this topic to undergraduate students.

The first chapter, “What are Chinese Characters?,” begins by explaining what they are not: the universal ideographs imagined by Matteo Ricci, Bacon, and many others up to the present day. This is followed by a succinct and engaging discussion of writing in general—how, when, and where it was invented, and how it functions. After explaining how various visual symbols do not function as writing, Handel adopts Henry Roger’s useful definition of writing as “the use of graphic marks to represent specific linguistic utterances” (13).Footnote ² He then explains the different ways that those graphic marks can represent spoken languages, focusing on alphabetic, syllabic, and morphographic modes of representation. Finally, he briefly describes spoken Chinese in terms of its morphological and phonological characteristics and how those connect to the Sinographic script. This chapter introduces numerous technical linguistic terms, but the explanations are always clear and tied to easily understandable examples. Handel introduces only necessary terms, and the work done here serves as an important foundation for what will follow.

The second chapter focuses on the creation and evolution of the Sinographic script from its use on oracle bones, and perhaps earlier, to the changes made in the twentieth century. By giving a range of examples, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to simplified images of bees, eyes, and waves, Handel takes the reader through each of the steps from pictographic representations to rebuses and disambiguating semantic and phonological elements. The reader is led to understand not only how the character for ‘elephant’ came to be created some three thousand years ago, but also how that for tennessine, a chemical element first synthesized in 2010, was invented. This chapter should be assigned as supplemental reading in every first-year Chinese class. Not only would students gain an understanding of how the graphs they spend so many hours practicing came to be, but they would also be able to use this understanding as an aid to remembering these graphs, and even guess at the meaning of ones they newly encounter.

The third chapter is a brief but helpful introduction to Classical Chinese and how it functioned, at various times, as a lingua franca for much of East Asia. This enlightens readers who know little about that language, and also explains why Ricci and others mistakenly believed that Chinese characters functioned independent of any specific language. It further dispels the notion that contemporary speakers of different Chinese languages can always understand each other through writing.

The fourth chapter, “Sound and Meaning: Adapting Characters to Write Other Languages,” may be the most novel and important part of the book. The core of the chapter imagines English speakers in the position of Korean and Japanese speakers at their point of first contact with the Sinitic script, that is, as speakers of an unrelated language encountering their first example of writing in the form of written Classical Chinese. Handel methodically takes the reader through the different ways these English speakers could use Chinese characters to write their own language, including alphabetic, syllabic, and morphographic methods. In his 2019 monograph, Handel includes a brief appendix describing a classroom exercise in which he asks students how they might write English in the Sinitic script. Expanding on this and making it part of the core of the current book is a clever and effective move: it gives the reader who has no understanding of the other languages a foundation for understanding essentially all of the different aspects of the process of adapting the Sinitic script. Handel can (and does) then refer back to this early discussion throughout the remaining chapters.

Building on this inventive approach, the fifth and sixth chapters, which deal with how the Sinitic script has been used to write Korean and Japanese (Chapter 5) and Vietnamese and Zhuang (Chapter 6), form the scholarly core of the book, presenting a more widely accessible version of the research Handel covered in his 2019 scholarly monograph. The processes described here are complex, so these chapters are necessarily dense. But again, the work Handel has done in the fourth chapter ensures that the careful novice reader can understand them. Handel characterizes the adaptation undertaken for Korean and Japanese as “linear adaptation,” as Chinese characters are employed unmodified and in a linear sequence. Crucially, this linearity applies to disambiguation as well, “through the alternation of semantic and phonetic adaptation that aligns with the grammatical structure of words and sentences, and through the use of phonetic determinatives immediately following the morphographs being disambiguated” (136). The adaptation strategies used for Vietnamese and Zhuang, which Handel describes as “composite adaptation,” are less complex, but no less interesting. Because the structures of Vietnamese and Zhuang are similar to that of Chinese (e.g., most morphemes are monosyllabic, the languages are tonal, and there are no changes in morphology based on the way a word is used), speakers of Vietnamese and Zhuang did not need to create adapted graphs to write particles and suffixes in the way that speakers of Korean and Japanese did. Instead, the Vietnamese and Zhuang speakers created new compound graphs that would “integrate, rather than append, a phonetic component” (164). While this chapter might be of more immediate interest to specialists (Zhuang is not widely known in the West, and many people probably do not realize that Vietnamese was ever written with the Sinitic script), it gives the general reader additional examples of how the adaptation process can play out in different ways. As he does in the chapter on Korean and Japanese, Handel takes the reader through this process carefully and systematically, with numerous references back to the example of English in Chapter 4.

The seventh chapter brings us to the contemporary period and describes how the four main languages (other than English) discussed in the preceding chapters are written today. While some of this ground will be familiar to those who use these languages, it remains a helpful reminder to all readers that languages and scripts are in a constant process of change, whether due to societal factors, technological changes, or simple human inventiveness. Though I found this chapter to cover interesting ground, there are some recent developments around technology Handel might have fruitfully addressed. A minor one is the phenomenon of “character amnesia,” or ti bi wang zi 提筆忘字 (“forgetting the character when you take up the pen”). This is the oft-reported problem of adults, especially in China, forgetting how to write less frequently used characters (sometimes for words that are common in speech) because most writing is now done on phones or other digital devices. While this makes amusing news segments, what is more interesting is the underlying cause and more important phenomenon: since the rise of the personal computer, but to a much greater extent since the rise of the cellphone, people are far less likely to write with pen and paper after they leave high school. Instead, the vast majority type in the pinyin romanization system to produce Chinese characters, with pinyin thus functioning as what the scholar Thomas Mullaney has dubbed “hypography,” or writing whose “only job is to help search for and retrieve orthographs from memory.”Footnote ³ This is surely the first time in the history of writing that hundreds of millions of people are effectively writing one script, the Roman alphabet, to produce text in a completely different script. The chapter does not suffer from the lack of attention paid to these topics, but it would be fascinating to see what Handel thinks about them and where he imagines they might take the script in the future.Footnote ⁴

The final chapter, the shortest in the book at just about ten pages, returns to the notion of a universal writing system, here aptly described as “the impossible dream” (190). While the topic is abstract, by this point Handel has supplied the reader with all the tools and evidence to engage meaningfully with the argument. Handel convincingly shows why, for example, a script made up of basic notions that “could be represented by pictures, or abstract symbols, or numbers,” could not function as an actual written script. In this context he might have noted that the artist Xu Bing, whose art project “A Book from the Sky” was mentioned in previous chapters, has published an book that attempts just this. Titled Book from the Ground, it consists entirely of symbols and pictures used in such public places as airports and is meant to be universally understood.Footnote ⁵ As an experiment in a class I teach on the Sinitic script, I have students individually “translate” a couple of pages from the book into English. The vast differences in their interpretations prove that the dream is indeed impossible. Later in the chapter, Handel amusingly invents the story of a Mongolian soldier who finds himself wandering through Europe in the thirteenth century and marveling at the universal language known as Latin, which can be read and understood by educated people from dozens of lands, though they speak completely different languages and could never hold a conversation. He creates this story not to mock the soldier’s real-life counterpart, Matteo Ricci, but to help us understand why he misunderstood characters as universal ideographs untethered to a particular language. The reader has thus returned to the beginning of their journey, having learned much on the round trip.

Handel has done the field a great service. This book should find a place, in whole or in part, in undergraduate syllabi everywhere Asian languages, literatures, histories, and cultures are taught. Though being published by an academic press may limit the book’s distribution, it deserves as wide a readership as another recent linguistics book aimed at a broader audience, Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. The stories Handel tells here are just as important and his writing is equally engaging.