Chinese and Sumerian

18 THE CHINESE “CEASSIFICATION ‘OF (CHARACTERS

It is evident from these examples that the Phonetic may play an important part in enabling us to determine the older sounds of a Chinese word.

There is practically no limit to the possible multiplication of characters by this ingenious device, the credit for the extended use of which must be assigned to the Chinese themselves, although it may have been originally suggested by such Sumerian analogies as BAD, ‘wall’, ‘fortress’, where >< BAD appears to be used as a Phonetic giving the sound ; t-]I-] NIG, ‘bitch’ (female + dog), in which TY LIG seems to stand for NIG; ny Oy MEN, ‘crown’, diadem’, where the inserted Y+>J]] ME-EN is certainly phonetic and, moreover, spelled out phonetically ; ~=44 GIN, GEM, ‘bondmaid’, in which 4 GIN may be phonetic; *] J UG ‘spittle’, ‘venom’, where “7 UG indicates the sound of the compound ideogram (see D. 235 for the archaic form of the character). Similarly, the ancient form (D. 354) suggests that in a&j5- DUR, ‘all’, = DU-R may be phonetic; and in [RX] DUR(?), ‘marsh’, ‘swamp’ (also read SUG, SHUG), the sound DUR is possibly indicated by Vy DUR. The eye-symbol <J- BAD (C.T. xi. 2) is phonetic and seems to suggest both sound and sense in <]><]TJ, BAD, ‘to see’, ‘to choose’; a compound sign which is then itself used phonetically for BAD or PAD, ‘to call’, ‘speak’, ‘swear’, &c., thus becoming an instance of the Sixth Class (Kia-Tsié, ‘ Borrowed Characters’ :

g.v.). The symbol & GIG, ‘dark’, is in like manner both phonetic and significative in <EESV4Q GIG, ‘sick’, ‘sickness’, written darkness—offspring (see D. 264; 283); alluding to the demons, children of night or darkness, which were supposed to cause disease—possession by which, in fact, was disease. The character Fe I, NI, DIG, ZAL, appears to be phonetic in By 47 I, NA, DAG, ZA, ‘stone’, both parts of which latter ideogram, indeed, indicate that stone is a shening substance (see D. 322). Lastly, > AM, AN, AG (ang?), may be regarded as phonetic in Sq@==l AMA, AGA, (ved. Lex. s.v. AGA-RIN, parent).

Examples of this class of written characters are comparatively rare in Sumerian, because a more or less syllabic writing already prevails in most of the texts that have come down to us; so that any inscription of Ur-Nina or Gudea will afford instances of the same character used sometimes as an ideogram with its original meaning, and sometimes as a mere syllable: while other texts present us with such complete syllabic spellings as U-MU-UN for UMUN, ‘lord’, and DA-MU for DAMU, ‘child’, ‘son’ (e.g. the Tammuz-hymns, C. T. xv). Chinese never attained this degree of freedom in the use of the written character, which was perhaps due to the ingenuity of Semitic scribes and, in any case, is not primitive.

In Sumerian, as is well known, a simple pictorial character like SL (cuneiform 57), an outline of the human foot, stood for a number of different words and meanings. Read GIN, it has the diverse meanings 4o walk and ¢o establish, set up. In Chinese GIN is preserved as kien, kin; but kien, fo wadé, is written fi and kien, to establish, is #4, the latter character being used as a Phonetic in the former. Jf