"Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Basil Hall and the Ryūkyūan language: On the Possibility of Using the Chinese Script as a Pasigraphy"

Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Basil Hall et la langue ryūkyū: sur la possibilité d'utiliser l'écriture chinoise comme une pasigraphie.

Patrick Beillevaire (1, 2)

1 CCJ - Chine, Corée, Japon
2 CRJ - Centre de recherches sur le Japon

Since its discovery in the 16th century, Chinese writing has always been intriguing to Westerners. The alleged possibility of its use as a “universal language”, or pasigraphy, counted for a lot in that fascination. Until the first half of the 19th century, but the opinion still lingers on today, it was dominantly conceived as being of a pictographic or ideographic nature, in other words, as being made up of characters or symbols which would convey their meaning directly to the mind and could be understood without requiring prior acquaintance with the Chinese speech. Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (born Pierre Etienne Du Ponceau, Saint-Martin-de-Ré 1760 - Philadelphia 1844), a renowned jurist and a brilliant linguist, was the first scholar who decidedly dismissed that idea and insisted on considering Chinese writing as logographic or lexigraphic.

Mots clés: ideographic writing; logographic writing; Universal script; Sinosphere; Chinese characters; pictographic writing; C. Gutzlaff; pasigraphy; Leibniz; Abel-Rémusat

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Linguistique; Histoire; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Patrick Beillevaire. "Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Basil Hall and the Ryūkyūan language: On the Possibility of Using the Chinese Script as a Pasigraphy". The Kingdom of Ryūkyū and the Island of Okinawa in 19th and 20th-Century American and European Literatures (University of the Ryukyus and Meiō University), Jan 2015, Nago (Okinawa), Japan. ⟨halshs-01953449⟩