NYTimes – Chinese Language Debate
Today I read in the New York Times an article called, “The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving.” According to the article, the PRC government will have a computerized identification database, designed to recognize people’s names, and will only be able to read 32,000 characters of the total 55,000 characters, leaving out the more obscure and less used characters.
The article is correct in that this is not the first attempt by the PRC government to “modernize” the Chinese script, but one of the most ambitious attempts since the 1950s with the introduction of “simplified” characters. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan to an extent still use traditional Chinese characters.
What this article looks over is that this is not the first attempt by any Chinese (or Eastern Asian for that matter) government to control the script being used. Historically, the Chinese monarchy has tried to standardize the characters in its realm. In Korea, one of the reasons why Hangul was promulgated was that King Sejong wanted to standardize and “update” the pronunciation of Hanja characters. In addition, changes in the orthography of way of writing is nothing new. “Traditional” Chinese is not really something set in stone. It has naturally developed throughout the centuries, changing gradually by the very people who use them. Also, now the fact that we use computers to type may slow down this natural development, and even in fact may encourage the use of characters of higher number of strokes, as was in the case with Japanese publications.
千字文(천자문)
However, what is so novel with the simplified characters promulgated by the Chinese Communists — compared to the changes before — was that it was a radical attempt to change the Chinese script from the top (the Communist party) down (the people). The Japanese simplification of Kanji (called Shinjitai) was not as radical, nor as offensive, as many of the simplified characters were well in use before the 1940s. Despite the claims of one of the authors in the NYT article that simplified characters were “linguistic democratization” and one of PRC’s “most successful programs”, it nevertheless has problems and shortcomings. I myself laugh at his second assertion, as Mainland China still has a lower literacy rate than Japan and Taiwan, both countries that use traditional Chinese Characters extensively. Simplified Chinese is merely an embodiment of the political ideology behind the Chinese Communists, as was the push for Hangul-only writing by the North Korean Communists.
I will not cover in this post why I think simplified Chinese should be dropped. You can find plenty of more arguments against simplified Chinese elsewhere on the internet even in that very article. I would like to go one step further and even argue against the use of Vernacular Chinese (白話, “baihua”). It renders the traditional characters and the whole notion of pictographic characters as useless. Baihua could be even written in the Latin alphabet (as was done in Vietnam), and its readers would still understand one another! Classical Chinese is short, precise, elegant, and utilizes the fact the very essence of pictographic characters.
I understand that North Korea has not been able to get away from Chinese characters completely. After seeing the effects of hangeul-only education, the “Great Leader” decided to reinstate them for educational purposes only, fearing that the youth were becoming unable to deal with the language effectively. While North Korea does not use Chinese characters, except perhaps on banners when Chinese heads of state or foreign ministers come to visit, I believe that their students are exposed 2,000 characters in elementary, middle, and high school only to get a better grasp of the language.
Japan did try and limit the number of characters in use and make that number legally binding on all publishing. However, they’ve since relaxed that, I believe. Currently, the ministry of education is poised to add another 191 characters to the Joyo Kanji list.
Hong Kong has an additional set of some 1,000 characters used only there. This supplementary set is meant for vernacular Cantonese writing. It is most often encountered in novels, tabloids, and such like. However, most formal writing, even in your higher-brow newspapers utilizes standard Mandarin grammar which does differ from standard Cantonese a bit. I understand that Cantonese speakers in neighbouring Guangdong province wouldn’t use these at all.
Robert Badger
2009/06/24 at 9:34 am
Joija,
I know that you know that, strictly speaking, only about 5% of the Chinese lexicon is pictographic is the strict sense. Chinese characters are about 90% phonoideograms.
The ideas about baihua are of course very droll, and raise a smile, but I think you are excessively brightlining the historical/linguistic distinction between 文言/白花. Classical Chinese as you present it, is the literary language used for official writings, histories, and more “serious” poets (but not 白居易, who, while a master of classical forms, was not slave to them, and whose language is markedly different from that of Kongzi, or a Qing dynasty eight-legged essay) that was regulated on the pre-Han and early Han forms of the language. As early as the 6th century we are already finding literature written in markedly different syntax from anything found in Kongzi or Sima Qian. 世說新語 is replete with syntactical constructs found in baihua but not in classical, and IIRC, is the locus classicus for the use of 是 as a verb.
I would also add that unless you want to employ reconstructed pronunciation (ie Karlgren), or do away with 普通話 entirely, it will not be possible to read anything written aloud, as it would be unintelligible to speakers in a bi-syllabic Altaicized phonolgy language like Mandarin. In this sense, the isolation of the meaning from the pronounciation made possible by Hanzi enabled the spread of Classical Chinese throughout Asia, but unlike Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit we do not have a fully consistent and verifiable pronouciation key with which to implement the language in all phases; written, read spoken, and heard; quite unlike in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew
TimH
2009/06/27 at 2:40 pm
Maybe not pictographic in the strict sense, but even phono-ideogramic Chinese characters nevertheless have the total loss the meaning. For instance, the character for castle is the combination of the characters for “to succeed” and “earth” 成 + 土 -> 城 (castle). With simplified characters such as these (not this one specifically) become less clear.
I merely wish to start the discussion on that topic. I do realize that later on the differentiation between 文語 and 口語 is lessened. The 1960s Choi Family Clan records have some changes in grammar from Confucius’ Analects, but both written in文語. I am also aware of the fact that “是” as a copulative does not appear till later, but are still apparent in 文語 texts (though in Korean texts, “是” is seen less frequently, due to Korean authors trying to mimic the Korean verb “-이다” which would appear at the end of a Korean sentence with “也”).
I did not suggest that we try to reproduce how it originally sounded. It is mainly a written language, not a spoken one. As with Latin, people still do not know how it’s pronounced. Some have suggested even pronouncing Cicero as “tsee-tseh-ro” as opposed to the more accepted “kee-keh-ro.” Classical/Ecclesiastical Latin in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance became more of a scholarly language, whose pronunciation differed widely from region to region. However, scholarly works published in Latin were able to be widely read nevertheless, despite the differences in pronunciation.
hoija
2009/06/27 at 11:47 pm