The Ideograph-Based Linguistic Chineseness: Evidence from the Disappearance of Derivational Morphology

Many Classical Chinese words were derived through tonal/voicing alternations. New characters were specifically created for some derived words, while other derived words kept using the original characters, making the original characters multifunctional. In the evolution of the Chinese language, those derivations represented by specifically created characters have mostly been preserved, while multifunctional characters were not likely to stay multifunctional: it is common to eliminate some form-meaning pairs, leaving each character with only one pronunciation. Meanwhile, the form-meaning pairs represented by characters began to compound with each other, reducing syntactic freedom. Ideographic characters thereby stabilized the basic units, that is, root morphemes, for the Chinese language, while those phonological alternations that were not clearly represented in writing mostly disappeared, making the language increasingly analytic. This finding sheds light on the stabilizing effect of writing on (the spoken) language and thus challenges the traditional view that writing is secondary to language.