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1.5 Cursive Script Forms
While the block script has strong merits, it is quite a slow way of writing characters,
and inevitably quicker ways of writing evolved, later to be quite commonly broadly
categorized as semi-cursive script (Ch. xingshu, J. gyōsho) and cursive script
(Ch. caoshu, J. sōsho). For caoshu/sōsho, which are terms sometimes translated
literally into English as ‘grass script’ but more appropriately rendered as ‘cursive
script’, Qiu Xigui notes both broad and narrow meanings: the broad sense refers
to any characters of any period past or present-day written hastily, while the narrow
sense is limited to characters written in certain historical periods or modelled
thereon (QX2000:130–31). In the present book, the term ‘cursive script’ is used only
infrequently, and will be reserved for characters written with an advanced degree
of cursivity (i.e., advanced degradation in shape compared with characters written
slowly and carefully), while ‘semi-cursive script’ will be used to denote modest
cursivity (limited degradation of shape compared with slowly and carefully written
equivalents). At times, the term ‘cursivized’ may also be used in this book as a
convenient way to indicate character text written with a degree of rapidity, without
going into the question of greater or lesser degree. It is worth highlighting here that
cursivized characters began to appear as early as the Warring States period, also
marking the emergence of clerical script forms as an entity born out of the small
seal script. In everyday (non-formal) usage today, as in the past, texts in Chinese and
Japanese written by hand tend to exhibit a modest degree of cursivity.
2 Formational Principles of the Chinese Script
The earliest stage of Chinese writing dates back to the period from about the 14th
to the 10th century BC. The script at that time (on oracle bones and bronze vessels)
clearly has a strong pictorial dimension. Yet it is not ‘picture writing’, i.e., texts of that
period do not represent a situation in an approximate way pictorially and without
reference to language—a convention or system that we might think of as a forerunner
of writing proper. Rather, texts already represented a full writing system, i.e.,
each character or graph represented a word or morpheme (for explanation of ‘morpheme’,
see section 8.2 [‘Terminology in This Book’] below) in the early Chinese language.
Writing is not just visual markings on paper or other material: it represents
language, and this is something we should not lose sight of.
The formational principles of Chinese characters were categorized at a very
early stage by Xu Shen, the compiler of the Shuowen jiezi dictionary, but several of
those categories have never been fully understood and so here we will not follow the
Shuowen categories completely.
12 Introduction