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Though she may have studied “Chinese” in her hometown classroom, the foreign student traveling in China will not need long to discover that this term is of little use in application to the linguistic panoply she encounters there: by the locals in Běijīng, Shànghǎi, and Guǎngdōng, for instance, she’ll be called [t’a˥], [ɦi˩˧], and [k’øy˩˧] (all ‘he, she, it’) respectively, words utterly different as regards both sound and etymological origin. Nevertheless, native words that look just as amorphous as English “Chinese” – like Mandarin Zhōngwén 中文 or Hànyǔ 漢語 (both ‘Chinese language’;…

Writing consists of symbolic means for the physical (typically visual) representation of something linguists are inclined to consider more fundamental – spoken language (Rogers 2005:2). However, though horse and cart are thus placed in the proper order, it is not always the case that where speech leads, script dutifully follows. In premodern China, the language of literature remained largely intact for centuries after the spoken tongue to which it was first tethered had split apart and set off i…