[QUOTE=Birdmonster]
Millions,
So, I was chatting with my boss on one of our many leisurely, work-avoidance cigarette breaks and he told me that people whose languages are iconic, symbol-based languages (Japanese, Chinese, the old egyptian hieroglyphics) dream in black and white. I was floored. He claims that he has a bilingual Chinese friend who reports that her dreams in English are in full color, whilst her Chinese dreams are in black & white. I was floored twice.
But, color me skeptical.* Can anyone confirm or deny this, through evidence or anecdote? And if confirmed, why in the hell are we wired this way? Boss claims that it has to do with sections of our brain; to wit: people who read letters & sound out words use a totally different part of their brains in regards to language than those than read symbolic texts. This makes sense. But why would that translate to black & white dreams?
*pun intended
[/QUOTE]
As a linguist and someone with a slight command of Mandarin, can I take a minute to disabuse you of some notions about Chinese characters (and by extension, Japanese, which uses a writing system based upon Chinese)?
All languages use symbols - that is, in any language, the great majority of words are symbolic rather than possessing any kind of iconic representation of their referents. The exceptions are onomatopoeic words; clearly “boom” attempts to suggest a booming sound. Chinese and Japanese are certainly not exceptional this way.
You’re conflating writing systems with language as well. Chinese is not “based” upon Chinese characters; like every language, it was spoken long before it was written; writing is a mechanism for encoding speech on a permanent medium. A language’s writing system is separate from the language itself - in fact, many languages have changed to new writing systems. Rumanian, for instance, abandoned Cyrillic letters in favor of Roman ones in the mid-nineteenth century; Turkish switched from Arabic letters to a modified Roman alphabet early in the twentieth. In fact, the People’s Republic of China developed a system of “simplified” characters (though they are by no means simple by any stretch of the imagination) that require fewer strokes to write in the mid-twentieth century (the older traditional characters are still used in Taiwain, Singapore, and most overseas Chinese communities.)
None of those changes reflects any change to the language - a writing system is a separate entity from the language or languages it’s used to represent. After all, some people are illiterate but still fluent in their native language - it’s simply mistaken to try to conflate a writing system with a language.
Secondly, Chinese characters are not “iconic” except for a tiny minority. They developed out of pictographs once upon a time way back when, as most or all writing originally did. But now only a tiny number of the characters in use nowadays are based upon pictures - and even those are rarely very easily recognizable as what they represent; for the most part, it’s only when you know the word a character stands for that you can recognize any resemblance. Most Chinese characters are formed through compounds of radical and phonetic - the radical being one of 214 or so characters that hint at the meaning of the word, and the phonetic being a character that has (or at least had, once upon a time) a similar sound to the word represented by the new compound. They are based, then, upon very vague representations of sound and meaning, and not on pictures of objects. While Chinese writing is quite different from what we’re used to, it’s in no way basically or largely “iconic” at all.
Japanese combines Chinese characters with the native kana, which are purely phonetic in nature, representing syllables, mostly in order to represent things like verb inflections, which Chinese doesn’t have and thus doesn’t represent in its writing system. Japanese is thus even further removed from being “iconic”.
And of course Roman characters are based originally on pictures as well. Before A got flipped upside down (damn Phoenicians), for instance, it represented an ox’s head - that was the origin of the character. You can see it if you know to look for it - well, with very, very few exceptions Chinese characters aren’t any more similar to what they’re depicting than our letters are to pictures of oxen and houses and camels.
