Françoise Bottéro is a research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in the Center for Linguistic Research on East Asian languages (CRLAO) in Paris. As a specialist of the history and analysis of the Chinese writing system from antiquity to modernity, she has been exploring the particularities of the Chinese script related to its semantico-phonetic nature such as graphic variants or tabooed characters. Her book, Sémantisme et classification, addresses the history and development of the original classification system of the characters into “radicals”. Additionally, she has completed different studies concerning the earliest Chinese theories on the script, the legends concerning the invention of writing in China, as well as some terminological problems.