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