Chinese and Sumerian

PROGRESSIVE TRANSFORMATION OF CHARACTERS IN SUMERIAN AND CHINESE

Tue cuneiform Syllabaries or lists of characters are nothing more to the ordinary eye than a repellent congeries of arbitrary and conventional signs, having no apparent relation either to the sounds or the meanings intended to be conveyed. In their cuneiform shape, the originally pictorial symbols have mostly lost all resemblance to the things they represented at an earlier stage of their existence. Dr. Chalmers makes a similar observation about the Chinese characters. Eight or nine tenths of them, he says, are apparently ‘nothing more than conventional signs, having no resemblance to the things, or natural association with the ideas, which they represent’. Fortunately for us, the archaic linear forms from which the cuneiform characters were in course of time gradually developed, in many cases preserve a sufficient resemblance to the original picture-signs to enable us to determine, with a greater or less degree of certainty, what objects these already conventionalized outlines were intended to suggest. The cuneiform 4], for instance, can hardly be called a picture of the sun; but the oldest linear form “Y¥ (D. 234) approaches considerably nearer to what is required. Even in this form, which belongs to the fourth or fifth millennium before our era, the symbol has already a history behind it. The original figure, probably a circle, has become angular under the stress of sculptural necessities; and in its modified shape it seems to suggest the orb of day emerging into sight from between two peaks (the subject of a well-known seal-intaglio). Cf the symbol for TUD, ‘to beget’, D. 147. The cuneiform ls does not inevitably suggest a swallow; but it

is no great strain on imagination to see a bird of some kind in the archaic figure al

(D. 42), from which this character has descended by a series of regular changes. This example demonstrates very clearly how fallacious it would be to explain the character by the apparent significance of its cuneiform elements. ~]<{*% looks as if it had been compounded of +]<] bird and * lucky. But though this may have been what was intended by the ultimate modification of the character, it is certainly not the suggestion of the original pictogram. In the same way, the corresponding Chinese character 3G yeu, ‘a swallow’ (from ¢an; P. 997), looks like a combination of several Radicals in the modern writing; but the old forms suggest the figure of a bird (see Sign-list, No. 34). With yen, yeng, tan, tam, cf, NAM, SIM, the sounds of the

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