Debunking the Debunker John DeFrancis clearly has a very poor understanding of the Chinese writtn language and its history Chinese characters originally represented ideas in their earlier form While vernacular Chinese has a heavy phonological basis and would not enable speakers of mutuall unintelligable languages to understand each other Classical Chinese DOES enable speakers of mutually unintelligible languages to read each other s writing and its ancient form was not phonetic at all it was an ideographic script And also there was a Old Chinese language which splintered into the many different chinese dalects today