Language, writing, and disciplinarity in the Critique of the “Ideographic Myth”: Some proleptical remarks

Prominent in recent discussions of East Asian writing systems has been a metadiscursive polemic that can be labeled the Critique of the Ideographic Myth. Associated primarily with John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger, this is an attack on the notion that the Chinese writing system represents ideas directly, and more broadly an argument for the primacy of phonography in inscription in general. This paper considers the disciplinary framework of the Critique, tracing its roots in a prewar Sinological debate (the Boodberg–Creel controversy) and in Leonard Bloomfield’s famous dismissal of writing, and locating it within the postwar field of Asian Studies.