Prof. David C.S. LI, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

The use of written Chinese as a ‘scripta franca’ in Sinographic East Asia until the 1900s: from Sinitic brush-talk (漢文筆談) to pen-assisted conversation (筆桿面談). The 6th International Symposium on Chinese Language and Discourse (ISCLD6). Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Macau and Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (hybrid mode), 9–10 December 2022.

Abstract
Speaking is premised on the interlocutors having at least one shared spoken language. Writing-mediated interaction, synchronously and face-to-face, seems rare or unheard of in phonographic civilizations, ancient or modern (e.g., Latin or Arabic). By contrast, literati of morphographic Chinese from different parts of Sinographic East Asia 漢字文化圈 were able to conduct ‘silent conversation’, interactively in writing mode using brush, ink, and paper, hence ‘brush conversation’ or ‘Sinitic brush-talk’ 漢文筆談. Oral communication barrier was overcome by engaging in writing-mediated brush conversation in three recurrent cross-border communication contexts involving (i) boat drifters 漂流民筆談, (ii) diplomatic envoys 外交官筆談, and (iii) traveling literati 遊歷者筆談. Today, Chinese-Japanese and Chinese-Chinese writing-assisted interaction can still take place sporadically in pen-assisted conversation (筆桿面談) or ‘pen-talk’. All this supports the ‘morphographic hypothesis’, which predicts that writing-mediated interaction is premised on the pragma-linguistic affordance of the morphographic Sinitic script. The widely held Ideographic Myth in Europe for centuries since the Renaissance will be briefly discussed: rather than ideography, the modus operandi and interactional dynamic of Sinitic-based brush conversation is more adequately accounted for by phonetic inter-subjectivity.