Law and Politics in Modern China: Under the Law, the Law, and Abo ...

than literature. Greek was an oral language, or more precisely a collection of regional dialects, until the eighth century BC, when the Phoenician alphabet was successfully adopted. At that time, written Chinese (in literary texts) was at least several centuries old and contained a considerable written vocabulary.² All other ancient languages that had produced original scripts and utilised phonetic systems either have died or have been replaced, completely or partially, by subsequent languages. As universal languages, Sumerian, ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Latin are no longer spoken and are rarely written. Ancient Semitic languages have reoriented many times, have adopted various scripts, and have been replaced by several ancient and modern languages.³ Like Latin, Sanskrit and Biblical Hebrew became so abstract and inaccessable that they cloistered themselves from the daily lives of the common people who used different oral and/or written languages.⁴

Because of its unique and continuous written language, Chinese law evolved differently from those of both Western and Middle Eastern legal traditions because it did not experience any linguistic change. Without a single linguistic rupture, Chinese literary tradition has managed to maintain its basic characteristics throughout its long history. Chinese law was made and remade, and continues to be made, in the same written language that has corresponded to hundreds of regional vernaculars.

Western legal tradition, which replaced Latin with its modern European languages, made a relatively clean break from the Christian canon law that had produced a sophisticated universal order and moral code during the medieval era. This linguistic reorientation made it possible to create a boundary between legal and political discourse and between secular and religious codes. A majority of the legal traditions of ancient Semites was buried with their languages after repeated linguistic changes from the original Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Aramaic. When law was initially written in Biblical Hebrew, it inherited a relatively vague and open concept of divine authority and moral rules. It took religious leaders and biblical scholars many centuries to gradually specify and refine its language.