...] Some hold that writing contains nothing but pictographic writing (as Mr. Shen Jianshi believed), and so on and so forth — all such views are advanced without any point of reference for comparison
This review essay discusses the book "A Comparative Study of Ancient Chinese Characters and Naxi Dongba Script," affirming its central claims through comparison with other ancient scripts (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian pictographs, Babylonian cuneiform, Cretan and Mayan writing). The author agrees that both Chinese and Dongba scripts originate from pictorial drawings, evolving from "depicting objects" to "depicting meaning," a pattern common to logo-syllabic writing systems worldwide. He argues that "linearization"—the shift from pictures to abstract dots and lines—is an inevitable developmental stage, illustrated by the Dongba "sacred tree" character's coexisting freehand and detailed forms. Rejecting labels like "pictographic" or "hieroglyphic" for modern Chinese, which is now purely linear/symbolic, the author further endorses classifying scripts by whether they record sound, meaning, or both, situating both ancient Chinese and Dongba writing as ideophonographic (meaning-sound) systems combining semantic and phonetic elements.
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