History of Chinese Writing and Its Significance for China's Contemporary Language Policy Discussed at Inostranka
The Library for Foreign Literature hosted a lecture titled "A Journey into China's Past: The Hidden Stories Behind China's History and Script," organised by the BRICS Expert Council-Russia in partnership with the BRICS+ Information and Cultural Media Centre. The event was held as part of the annual Chinese Mosaic Festival and a broader educational series focused on the BRICS countries.
The speaker was Maria Efimenko, Lecturer of the School of Asian Studies at HSE University and Academic Director of the HSE Chinese Club. In her lecture, she highlighted that the evolution of Chinese writing represents a continuous thread across the millennia—from the first sacred symbols of the Neolithic period to today's simplified characters.
Special focus was given to the Shang (Yin) dynasty, which provided scholars with deciphered inscriptions on oracle bones and shells. These texts followed a binary structure: questions were posed in both affirmative and negative forms so that the divine response could be interpreted from cracks as "yes" or "no." The subsequent historical layer consists of inscriptions on Western Zhou bronze vessels, where texts became formalised "documents" for ancestor veneration, recording dates, circumstances, appointments, and lists of gifts, reflecting early elements of state bureaucracy.
Discussing the evolution of writing, the lecturer noted that the progression from pictograms to ideograms and phono-semantic compounds shaped the modern logic of Chinese characters, which rely on semantic and phonetic cues. This, she explained, is why the main challenge for European learners lies in the disconnection between writing and sound: a character does not directly encode pronunciation but requires knowledge of radicals, structure, and context.
Twentieth-century language reforms became another key topic of the lecture. Maria Efimenko recalled that in China, script simplification (the shift from traditional to simplified characters) served as a tool for mass literacy, while the parallel development of Putonghua (Standard Mandarin) aimed to create a national spoken standard amid significant dialectal diversity. She noted that the systematic teaching of tones is a relatively recent stage in phonetic institutionalisation; while an incorrect tone seldom causes communication failure, it can alter meaning within a limited set of syllables.
In closing, Maria Efimenko emphasised that the Chinese writing tradition has profoundly influenced the linguistic cultures of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, where characters were adapted to reflect their own native languages. This experience, she suggested, holds particular relevance for comparative studies and cross-cultural projects within the BRICS framework.