Let’s say hypothetically we wanted to reform English to make it easier to learn. As we can see from Chinese, it’s perfectly easy to communicate without gender, case, tense, or verb conjugation. Is there really any reason for us to say “I kissed him” when “I kiss he” can perfectly communicate the same meaning?
What’s the point in having hundreds of irregular verbs? What’s so special about “go” that it can’t become “goed”? What are so special about present participles and past participles? What special nuance is in “Eating so much junk food is what has made him fat” that can’t be expressed in “Eat so much junk food make he fat”?
We could just eliminate tense altogether. As many of us here are in the English teaching profession, I’m sure a lot of us have had problems getting our students to use the past tense when they mean they describe a one-time event that happened in the past. “What did you do this weekend?” “I watch TV.” That’s because in Chinese you would say 我看電視 for both “I watch TV when I’m bored” (i.e. a habit) and “I watched TV last night” (i.e. a past action).
But aren’t the students in some way right? Why do we need to bother with all of these messy tenses when they’re clearly not needed to convey meaning? If I were to propose a New English which completely does away with all of these unnecessary frivolities, my students would be ecstatic.
Hell, why invent the wheel twice? I’m hardly an expert on it, but doesn’t Esperanto fit this role well? Couldn’t we just completely eliminate English and teach Esperanto? That should make everyone happy.
But how do you think the hundreds of millions of native-speaking adults in the world who have been proficiently using tenses and cases for the entire lives would react? How would you react? What if some government language committee came out and said that you now had to write in completely tense-less and case-less English or in Esperanto? What would your reaction be? Are you going to be some thick-headed bigot who claims that we need to preserve “culture”? Are you going to tell those whiners that we won’t be able to understand Dickens or Hemmingway to stop their crying because language changes and we have no need for classical literature in our daily lives anyhow?
Or is it because that there is a gigantic cost, both financial and mental, in so radically altering a language that you and anyone else is going to scoff at the idea unless there is an accompanying gigantic benefit?
The reason why various schemes of simplification and romanization were so heavily discussed by ROC officials around the May 4th movement and PRC officials in the mid-50s was that there WAS a gigantic benefit thought to be had: namely to reduce the astronomical levels of illiteracy in pre-modern China. But now that China is far more literate than before and Taiwan is very literate now (and I would argue that those gains in literacy had ZERO to do with language reform and 100% to do with economic development), there’s exactly zero impetus to carry out such a drastic reform.
If anything, I think a FAR greater concern for the Taiwanese government now should be to CREATE new character systems (namely to promulgate the acceptance of Taiwanese and Hakka) than to eliminate character systems.
No one is arguing that they should. The debate is over whether or not it’s possible to communicate effectively in written Chinese using a romanization system.
[/quote]
We are in agreement on this narrow point. It certainly would be possible to communicate effectively in romanized Chinese.
You have implied at several points in this discussion that China is or was being held back socially and technologically because of high levels of literacy caused by the difficulties of Chinese orthography. A far more powerful explanation is that Chinese cultural worlddid not produce a modern state until the 1950s. Modern states have universal systems of education. Traditional ones do not. Modern states that invest in education have high level of literacy. The combination of a modern state and relatively high levels of investment of education have produced impressively high rates of literacy in Chinese speaking regions. The difficulty of Chinese orthography has turned out to be a very minor factor. It’s blindingly obvious that if you don’t teach people to read, they will be illiterate.
It teaches them one study habit, rote learning. They then apply this to absolutely everything else, because the entire education system is built on rote learning, from the language up. Rote learning is a good study tool, but it’s not a good study habit.[/quote]
We could do with a bit more rote learning in the west, where it was much more prevalent than many think a generation or two ago without destroying the capacity to reason.
Be that is it may, you are overlooking the many social and institutional factors that lead to an over-emphasis on rote learning in Taiwan. The most significant is the examinations system which rewards rote learning in a misguided effort to be ‘fair’. The students don’t apply rote learning. Rote learning is imposed upon them by an ossified educational system (in Taiwan) that was designed to produce literate and numerate citizens in great numbers–and did so very successfully.
You mean they learn 3,000 characters in the same time it takes other kids to learn 26 letters? I don’t think so. The Chinese experience of phonetic systems, romanization, and simplification in the learning of their own language proves that learning is faster when phonetic, alphabetized, or simplified systems are used. So clearly they don’t all learn at the same speed.
[/quote]
The, umm … shall we say, unfortunate limitations of your Chinese are leading you into confusion again. The orthography of Chinese involves learning about eight basic strokes and 214 ‘radicals’. Sure that’s more than 26 letters, but it is not learning 3000 characters at the same time. My focus is on how long it takes to achieve literacy. Learning to read Chinese takes a few years, juts like English.
[quote]
I’ll go with the scholarly literature on this one thanks. I’ve referred to three sources, please get back to me when you’re confident contesting them.[/quote]
Oh, I’m extremely confident contesting this and would wager a fair sum that I’m far more familiar with the relevant scholarly literature. I’ve looked back through the threads quickly but don’t see your sources. Would you mind giving me a link to the post?
For a long time, a very ahistorical question (under the influence of the great Joseph Needham) was debated: Why did China not develop the scientific method? This was a bad question. History does not deal with ‘what ifs’ or ‘why nots’. It tries to explain what in fact did happen. This is hard enough. The correct question is ‘why did the west develop the scientific method?’
I’m not sure where you’re getting your facts from. Could you enlighten me? This is not the only source I’ve read which says that usage of the movable type printing press was never widespread, that it had little impact, and fell into disuse.[/quote]
It was never widespread. It was however not ‘abandoned’ and was used down to the Qing dynasty as you will read just above the passage you cite from Wikipedia in section on Movable Type in Other Asian Countries.
These two sources are a good place to begin and both discuss movable type printing and its relation wood block printing.
Brokaw, Cynthia, and Kai-Wing Chow. Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. University of California Press, 2005.
· Chia, Lucille. Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th to 17th Centuries). Harvard University Asia Center, 2002.
[quote]
Your ‘woodblock printing was far more efficient’ and ‘for linguistic reasons’ is saying the same thing as my ‘Their language prevented them from using the technology in an optimal manner’. Exactly. You’ve just said what I said.[/quote]
They found an inexpensive portable technology that allowed them to print books in vast numbers. The results speak for themselves.
Relevance? The topic under discussion was literacy levels, not the number of books published.[/quote]
Literacy level are very difficult to measure historically. However, the historical record points to far higher levels of literacy in late Imperial China than in western Europe. We appear to have returned to the historical norm now since literacy levels are now similar especially Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have not adopted simplified characters.
The operative phrase here is ‘using modern input methods’. Such as romanization.[/quote]
Whatever. The problem has been solved. Chinese people can type in Chinese just fine now. There are non-romanized systems such as Dayi and Cangjie which take a couple of weeks to learn but allow people to type in Chinese even faster than using romanized methods. People use Mandarin Phonetic Symbols to input Chinese because it is taught in the schools and they already know it.
It is very striking that as Chinese societies have become wealthier and more powerful, domestic calls for language reform has all but disappeared. Why hasn’t the US or the UK ‘optimized’ English? Because their wealth and power mean that they don’t have to. I submit that the same will be true for Chinese.
Cantonese romanization is different just like Taiwanese romanization is different. There are also characters that are only used in Cantonese and characters that are only used in Taiwanese. Yet the meaning behind common characters remains unchanged. That’s why when a Chinese person goes to Japan they can pretty much figure out what all the stores are selling.
This is going to take me a while to read through and digest.
Given how easy it is for this sort of discussion to go round and round in circles, perhaps it’s best to handle the issues one by one, with the most basic issues up front, before moving on to the many other areas discussed here.
Would people please state their answer to the following “narrow point”: True or false: Chinese characters are linguistically necessary for the writing of Modern Standard Mandarin.
(NB: In answering, please disregard notions of efficiency, culture, Literary Sinitic, artistry, “dialects” [sic], favorite flavor of ice cream, preference for dogs or cats, etc. Those are separate issues. Just true or false, based on the matter of linguistic necessity.)
l would say a lot would be lost. You could get by with ni how ma and wo yao yi ping pi jiu and all that stuff, but a lot of the literary stuff that is part of the culture - a necessary part of the culture - would be lost. A lot of the meaning of what is simply spoken is stored (like an information account in the language bank) in the characters, and refreshed by seeing them written on signs, on books, subtitles etc. If you got rid of them, it would be like spending cash on hand with an empty bank balance: eventually you would hit the wall.
And yes, it would be easier to teach kids how to speak if the language was phoneticized. But you wouldn’t be teaching them the same language.
How about a mixture of the two forms, like Korean or Japanese? You could use characters for important homonyms (ta male, ta female, ta it) key concepts (metal, air, good, sky) and specialized words (dialysis machine), and phonetic forms for everyday language (soup, dog, door, mother).
To the OP, IMO, yes, pinyin could replace chinese, but not very well. You would probably have to add additional markers to the pinyin. Otherwise, too much emphasis on context would be needed to make communication more precise ie more effective. and it also wouldn’t be very easy or fun - just check out someone’s IM conversation done in pinyin, skip to the middle, pick out one random sentence, and see if you can understand.
[quote=“Feiren”]
You have implied at several points in this discussion that China is or was being held back socially and technologically because of high levels of literacy caused by the difficulties of Chinese orthography. A far more powerful explanation is that Chinese cultural worlddid not produce a modern state until the 1950s. Modern states have universal systems of education. Traditional ones do not. Modern states that invest in education have high level of literacy. [/quote]
I think that begs the question of how and why traditional states transform into modern, literate states, and as such, your idea does not satisfy a number of questions. Your idea only states that, China did not enter modernity until 1950s. One might want to ask how and why the early modern nations were able to do it first (UK, France), how some latecomers were able to do it well (Germany and Japan), etc.
If you follow the Needham inquiry, there are a number of theories, which imo, were all possible factors, to one degree or another:
mass population obviated need for industrialisation: when you have large amounts of cheap labour, industrialisation does not make sense in its early stages. there are also social consequences for this kind of labour when your concerns are social stability and keeping people tied to the land to farm.
Note that industrialization using massive, cheap labour only makes sense in recent decades once a number of factors come into play: mass production methods had evolved further, large, fast demand cycles were needed and achievable (along with better logistics), and mass labour (relatively speaking on the Chinese scale) could be taken advantage of at that scale.
cf. Europe, lower populations levels (stemming from as early as medieval black plague) led to a greater demand in workers -> better empowered and paid and skill workers along with more independent guilds (whereas guilds and much production in ancient china was mostly state controlled. “Towns” were not urban, mercantile strongholds as counterpoint to the nobility’s castle. Chinese towns WERE the government administrative centers)
The ideals of Chinese literacy and a over-bearing ossification related to idealisation of the past: meant that Chinese society would not change “too much” in the main.
for e.g. even the cyclical perspective of past, present, and future (ie time) gave society a horse-blinder’s view of what is possible and not possible.
there were certain scientific, literary, philosophical revolutions, but I submit those were isolated, and some (especially the science) had no legacy, and some (science) ended up as toys or objects to be hidden away (e.g. much later in the Yuan or Qing, the government hid stuff to preserve “stability”)
the 100 schools only happens once when China is divided. After that, it’s mostly orthodoxy and argumentation before the emperor; note that we don’t see this kind of thing until the warlord period ie May fourth movement when China’s “integrity” is once again threatened.
renaissance men of china have no legacy; they are a blip in the stream. no one takes up their mantle, takes their discovery to the next level. Even Mozi was not rediscovered until the modern era by western scientists. By contrast, the ancient Greeks may have died out, but they continued and still continue to influence all other civilizations. These Chinese guys are novelties known only to academia.
Chinese literacy revolved only around the Analects, and other Approved canons as well as glorifying poetry, calligraphy, and painting. this is great for the arts, but not for other pursuits. This type of “education” is for the elite; why would they want to educate the peasant? therein lies one of the problems of universal education in China. Until a “modern” education is brought to the west, one with “practicalities”, what would be the point of a universal classical education?
Chinese political thought centered around stability especially in avoiding peasant revolts, etc. Scientific progress or any major new ideas is therefore irrelevant, dangerous and unwelcome to stability.
These factors all contribute to why China did not modernize and also why it did not pursue universal education. (oversimplification, but this is only 1 post long)
I’m sure they were ‘pretty bummed’ when simplified characters were invented, and they could ‘no longer read or write’. If they want to communicate, they’ll learn it. Simple. If they don’t, they won’t.
You mean, like we have to do in spoken Chinese?
I think you meant ‘low levels of literacy’. I certainly did. And it wasn’t simply the low levels of literacy, as I’ve explained.
Universal systems of education are not unique to modern states. I think Jack Burton has dealt well with the issue. In addition, there’s simply no getting around the fact that when Zhuyin and simplified characters were implemented, literacy levels soared. We can argue that Zhuyin and simplified characters had no impact on literacy or the ease of learning Chinese, but the historical facts are completely otherwise.
Again I have to note that what we have here is Westerners trying to argue that Zhuyin and simplified characters provided no significant learning advantages, whereas the Chinese themselves developed these systems specifically for their learning advantages, and benefited significantly from them. The arguments against the benefits of Zhuyin and simplified characters simply aren’t grounded in reality.
Culture again. How much of this cultural stuff is actually ‘necessary’? It wouldn’t be lost any more than Shakespeare is lost now.
Hurray, someone gets it.
Great, that’s a start.
In increasing literacy levels? I don’t think so.
It’s also blindingly obvious that the easier you make it to teach people to read, the more inclined people will be to learn, and the faster you can increase literacy. That was the historical experience of the Chinese.
I agree.
I’m not overlooking those as other contributing factors, I’m simply identifying the orthography of the language as a significant factor in the importance of rote learning. Given the extremely arbitrary nature of Chinese orthography, rote learning on a massive scale is essential to learning the language. Not simply optional, essential.
No, you’re just not reading what I write.
I’m aware of that. I’ve written hundreds of pages of them. But I was discussing the impact of orthography on learning to read. This is the same point both I and GuyInTaiwan made earlier. Learn 26 characters, and I can read English. It doesn’t mean I can automatically understand the words, but because I can read it I know what it sounds like. The reason why this is a huge advantage, as GuyInTaiwan pointed out, is that it’s immediately possible to read and write words which you’ve heard but never seen, which you can’t do in Chinese.
When it comes to building vocabulary, it’s a lot easier to do using English orthography because all words are only composed from 26 individual letters, each of which is a semantic component. In Chinese this simply isn’t the case. Learning all the 214 部首 bùshǒu still doesn’t enable you to read characters you’ve never learned before. In fact it has little impact on your ability to read characters at all. It’s simply designed to help you remember how to write them. Nor does it enable you to derive their meaning reliably, because there is no systematic relationship between the 部首 bùshǒu and the meaning of the characters.
I find it incredible that people still want to tell me that you can read Chinese characters if you just learn 214 部首 bùshǒu, when it simply isn’t true.
Learning to read takes more than simply learning eight basic strokes and 214 radicals. The fact is that even after learning eight basic strokes and 214 radicals, you can still hardly read anything at all. You can’t even pronounce the vast majority of Chinese characters, nor do you have any method of deriving them reliably.
Learning to read Chinese takes longer than learning to read English. Becoming literate in English is easier than becoming literate in Chinese.
Could you list a few?
Previous page:
See also this article to which I linked earlier, and ‘Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma’, to which I also referred earlier (and yes, I’m well aware of the criticisms of this work). Want more, just ask.
This is just semantics. Whether you ask ‘Why did China not develop the scientific method?’, or ‘What was the cause of China’s failure to develop the scientific method?’, you’re still trying to explain what in fact did happen.
That is the correct question when we’re talking about the West. It doesn’t tell us why China failed.
From the link we find:
Movable type in 13th century China, largely experimental, not adopted
Movable type not used again until the 15th century
An encyclopedia printed using movable type in the 16th century
Another encyclopedia printed using movable type in the 18th century
I’ll grant ‘fell into disuse’ is a better term to use than ‘abandoned’ (though 200 years of ‘disuse’ is significant), but this isn’t exactly a record of the success of movable type in Chinese history. You were the one telling me that they preferred wooden block type specifically because of the difficulties caused by orthography, so it seems to me you want to argue two contradictory positions (‘Chinese orthography had no impact on their use of movable type’, ‘Chinese orthography meant movable type was less useful than wooden block’).
So you’re no longer disputing my point? They found another method which was even less expensive, more efficient, and more economical, but the difficulties of Chinese orthography prevented it being used optimally.
Ok, what is this trying to prove?
Why is it taught in the schools? Is there a reason? Why is it taught at all? People don’t need it, as you point out, and you claim that stroke based methods are superior. Does the Chinese government simply not understand this?
[quote=“alidarbac”]Let’s say hypothetically we wanted to reform English to make it easier to learn. As we can see from Chinese, it’s perfectly easy to communicate without gender, case, tense, or verb conjugation. Is there really any reason for us to say “I kissed him” when “I kiss he” can perfectly communicate the same meaning?
What’s the point in having hundreds of irregular verbs? What’s so special about “go” that it can’t become “goed”? What are so special about present participles and past participles? What special nuance is in “Eating so much junk food is what has made him fat” that can’t be expressed in “Eat so much junk food make he fat”?[/quote]
I couldn’t agree with you more. I’d love to see English grammar completely overhauled and made intelligent, like Chinese grammar (which represents to me a high point in linguistic history).
[quote]We could just eliminate tense altogether. As many of us here are in the English teaching profession, I’m sure a lot of us have had problems getting our students to use the past tense when they mean they describe a one-time event that happened in the past. “What did you do this weekend?” “I watch TV.” That’s because in Chinese you would say 我看電視 for both “I watch TV when I’m bored” (i.e. a habit) and “I watched TV last night” (i.e. a past action).
But aren’t the students in some way right? Why do we need to bother with all of these messy tenses when they’re clearly not needed to convey meaning? If I were to propose a New English which completely does away with all of these unnecessary frivolities, my students would be ecstatic.[/quote]
Yep, totally ok with me. Let’s scrap the redundancies, clumsy dependence on prepositions, absurd verb conjugations and noun declensions. I’m good with that.
It would be easier to modify English, and Esparanto still has silly things like noun cases and conjugating verbs.
In all kinds of different ways.
With inexpressible joy. The idea that a primary tool of social communication should be held captive to public apathy is simply nonsensical.
Fine with me.
‘Wow, that’s great! A government decision I can agree with!’
Nope. Culture is a fickle beast, a chimera. It’s always changing.
I would point out that it’s all a matter of perspective. We can’t understand Beowulf or Chaucer, but we don’t consider that a major loss. We can’t understand Shakespeare either, without heavily annotated texts. But we haven’t lost Beowulf, Chaucer, or Shakespeare. I wouldn’t tell people that we have no need for classical literature in our daily lives now, even though that would depend on what you meant by ‘need’. We certainly have no need to write the same way as classical literature, and we have no real need to be able to read it either. It’s a luxury, not a necessity.
No, it’s pretty much just apathy and people being morons. That’s why it will continue to happen as it has always happened, but it will just take place slowly. English will continue to evolve, develop, and above all simplify, but it will do so slowly rather than radically.
But it is easier to change English faster and more efficiently today than previously, thanks to the predominant use of electronic spellcheckers. There was no global outcry among English speakers when the double consonants in most words was eliminated (‘travellers’ to ‘travelers’, and so on). There were no riots in the streets when ‘they’ became the standard term for third person singular.
Academic institutions and the organization responsible for the OED regularly publish commentary on the latest grammatical developments and refinements of English, and the trend towards simplification of spelling and grammar certainly isn’t slowing down. You get a few people grumbling about how ‘We didn’t spell like this in my day, we used proper spelling’, but that’s about it.
Ah, someone else noted the actual historical facts.
Zero impetus, or zero need? The opposition to language reform came about as a combination of cultural pride, nationalism, and Mao’s rejection of the West. It wasn’t an intelligent and rational decision.
I’m interested in your belief that language reform had zero impact on gains in literacy. Can you explain your reasoning?
Why is there a necessity to promulgate the acceptance of Taiwanese and Hakka?
Are you seriously asserting that, by merely learning how to pronounce the letters o and u, a child will know how to pronounce, for example, through, though, thorough, thought, tough, bough, cough and ouch?
Ok, my two bits (and sorry, Fortigurn, but your post is just waaay too long for me to read in the limited time I have here, so this isn’t a response to it in particular):
To the extent that modern spoken Mandarin communicates just fine without characters, of course it could be transferred to romanized writing. I believe we can all agree on this. However, I would assert that those who read at advanced levels in Mandarin (such as sjcma) will be much more aware than others (especially beginning to intermediate learners) of the extent to which modern written Mandarin deviates from spoken Mandarin, and thus such advanced users are in a better position to understand how it will be increasingly difficult to convey adequately in a purely romanized fashion.
There’s a difference between ‘necessary’ and ‘valued’. Using the characters means that a lot of history and culture is much more accessible to today’s generation. There are some who value that accessibility enough that they object strenuously to the notion of moving to romanization. I suspect that these will generally be the more highly educated among both native and non-native users of Mandarin. Those who are in the early phase of their studies, and who are struggling to learn the characters which equate to the simple, conversational modern Mandarin they are learning, are probably more likely to see value in switching to romanization, and are likely to minimize the importance of keeping this vast body of culture, literature and history accessible. And IMO there’s little value in arguing the point back and forth when a) it’s not going to happen anyway, and b) our time would be better spent hunkering down and learning those characters.
Anyway, I’ve started studying characters again and (surprise, surprise) I like it this time! Have incredibly low expectations of myself so can just plod along noticing a couple of interesting things here and there, being delighted I can read a sign somewhere. Of course I’d hate to think what a chore it would be if I actually tried to become literate at all.
I also teach PINYIN pretty regularly and (surprise, surprise) they like it! It’s just a matter of presenting it without trying to ram it down their throats at all. No long abstract arguments about the superiority of one system over another. Just show them something they can easily translate from English to Chinese and at the same time show them the pinyin. It’s easy peasy, no hard feelings anywhere.
This is all perfectly meaningless I’m aware but thought I’d throw it out there as a brief respite from the antagonism this topic invariably generates.
Are you seriously asserting that, by merely learning how to pronounce the letters o and u, a child will know how to pronounce, for example, through, though, thorough, thought, tough, bough, cough and ouch?[/quote]
Yes, but it’s not a complex set of information. How do you know what they mean and how to say them? Are you preternaturally intelligent, or is it just not really that difficult?
Really, I’m so surprised that this debate is still going on. It’s akin to ‘wouldn’t it be great if trees leaves all pointed south’, or ‘if water were really blue, it would be better’. Really, I would be absolutely amazed if pinyin happens in my lifetime, or even in the next 500 years (not that I’d know), even in the PRC.
We are working on opening a PINYIN CANTING in Taipei sometime this summer. That is of course a PINYIN CANTING, rather than a PINYIN CANTING in taipei sometime this summer. That would be awkward.
Are you seriously asserting that, by merely learning how to pronounce the letters o and u, a child will know how to pronounce, for example, through, though, thorough, thought, tough, bough, cough and ouch?[/quote]
No. In the example you provide, English learners need to understand that ‘ough’ has a range of different pronunciations. The diphthong ‘ou’ on the other hand is pretty consistent. The example you gave isn’t really about the letters ‘o’ and ‘u’, it’s about the pronunciation range of ‘ough’.
This was discussed by both GuyInTaiwan and myself previously. We both noted the problems caused by irregular diphthongs in English, but also noted that these are comparatively rare and that it’s a lot easier to derive the phonetic pronunciation of English words than Chinese words. I don’t think you were really disputing this point, and I think you understand that the example you provide doesn’t actually affect the argument being made.
Hurrah.
This has been addressed several times. I’m fully aware of how difficult it is to convey adequately written Mandarin using a romanized system, if you want to use certain writing conventions. But this is not an insurmountable problem. Sure, writing ‘wo3 máng, wo3 máng, wo3 máng’ is going to be ambiguous, possibly unhelpfully so. In that case, don’t write it. Write something else.
The answer is simple, change your writing style. People already do this when they want to be clear. They find ways of avoiding ambiguity, either in the written or spoken word. I’m not convinced by the argument ‘We can’t change the writing style, because if people use it to write things which are really ambiguous or confusing then other people won’t be able to understand them’. Perhaps people will be intelligent enough to write in a manner which avoids such ambiguity.
How about the idea that a single sound such as ‘shì’ can have more than a dozen different meanings? Here’s an example someone used in this thread:
[quote]For example the word shi4 with no character could mean:
soldier, scholar
family name
city
world
show, indicate, signify
6.serve the government
pattern, type
business, event
wait upon, serve
be; yes, right
room
wipe, rub
look at, regard as
(literary) die, pass (of time)
power, momentum
test, try, examination
ornament, decorate
delight in, relish, be addicted to
pledge, vow, swear
suitable, fitting, comfortable, go, follow
know, recognize, remember, work
explain, set free[/quote]
Now if you’re using this sound in speech, people have to be aware that it has these 22 different possible meanings, and they have to derive its meaning from what you say. Context is about all they can use. So people tend to frame their speech in a manner which minimizes confusion and ambiguity.
Undoubtedly so. In fact, I value the accessibility of history and culture, both in my language and in others. But I don’t believe it’s a justifiable reason to impede the development of the language. Clearly Chinese don’t either, since their own language has changed so much over the years. How many people on the street read oracle bone script?
Personally I wish I was a good rote learner. I wish that when I wrote out five pages of a single 部首 bùshǒu I could remember how to write it the next day. I don’t expect Chinese orthography to be changed for my convenience, or for anyone else’s, but it seems people arguing against the idea that changes to the orthography have any practical benefits are missing the point that the Chinese have, for centuries, done exactly that for precisely that reason, and reaped significant benefits from it in the process.
I think I’m not alone in believing there’s value in discussing the impact of various forms of Chinese orthography on culture, history, and pedagogy.
On a related note, history demonstrates that Chinese orthography, as with other languages, has changed dramatically over the centuries, several times, to the point that previous orthographies are now completely inaccessible to the average modern reader. It happened again with simplified Chinese, in a space of time far shorter and a population far greater than any before in recorded history. Such radical changes are entirely possible, and they are made for their observed empirical benefits.
I don’t think that the Chinese up north lost their cultural heritage when they introduced simplified Chinese, and it’s clear they don’t think they did either. Their language is going to continue to change, as all do, and as all do it’s going to become increasingly simplified. That’s the natural history of language. It evolves due to natural selection in order to optimize for its environment, and you can’t stop evolution.
You mean, like we have to do in spoken Chinese?
[/quote]
right. which has problems of its own. Reading/Writing and speaking a language are two very different things. Add to that, Mandarin has too many homonyms (Cantonese has much less, which is why single words can represent morphemes while in Mandarin, it’s more customary to form a morpheme from 2 words). That makes it impractical.
As above, shi in mandarin can sound like different words, not apparent without context. Cantonese has much less problems of this sort.
So no, I would rather not see standard hanyu pinyin as it exists today, to replace written Chinese. I kinda remember the May 4th movement and Mao thought about this exact problem. They suggested: pinyin, simplified Chinese, or just plain English.
The invention of the modern state occurred very quickly. France was the first one around 1800. By the 1870s Germany and Japan, the latecomers, were well on the way.
There was a great deal of mobility in Jiangnan in the late imperial period, especially after the economy became monetized in the late 16th century and taxes did not have to be in kind.
Yes but you are talking about an administrative system where the lowest government official (the magistrate) governed hundreds of thousands of people through a minimal staff. The state was simply not present in administrative centers in any significant way.
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2. The ideals of Chinese literacy and a over-bearing ossification related to idealisation of the past: meant that Chinese society would not change “too much” in the main.
for e.g. even the cyclical perspective of past, present, and future (ie time) gave society a horse-blinder’s view of what is possible and not possible.[/quote]
There are huge differences in how society was organized in the early Ming and the late Ming followed by the cataclysmic conquest of China by the Qing and its integration into a world empire. Contrary to popular stereotype, Chinese society was highly dynamic throughout the imperial period.
Oh really? What about the introduction of Buddhism? Or Song? Or the late Ming? These were all periods of significant intellectual freedom. Most intellectual life took place far away from the court. When did Zhu X or Wang Yangming ever argue anything in front of the emperor? Neither were ‘orthodox’ and ‘orthodox’ in the late imperial context usually just meant that a certain interpretation of the classics was standard for examination purposes.
Besides, China was under foreign or divided rule for more than 800 years of its 2100 years of imperial history. There were long periods during which China’s integrity was under threat.
The explosion in literacy in Ming China was closely associated with huge numbers of non-canonical texts (popular song lyrics, self-help books, novels pornographic and otherwise etc) that were published for and consumed by a huge literate population that were not members of the literati. Your view of literacy in China certainly does not accord with the social history of reading and publishing in Ming and Qing China. Dunhuang also provides tantalizing evidence of similar state of affairs in the Song and possibly even in the Tang.
One of the main purposes of universal modern education is primarly to create citizens of the modern state who see themselves as citizens of France, not Lyon etc.
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Chinese political thought centered around stability especially in avoiding peasant revolts, etc. Scientific progress or any major new ideas is therefore irrelevant, dangerous and unwelcome to stability.[/quote]
There are many counter-examples to this idea. The single-whip tax reforms of the Ming or the statecraft school of the early Qing are both excellent examples.
I think that all these old debates about why China didn’t modernize and why China did not have scientific revolution have been made moot over the last year as first Taiwan and now China have fully entered the modern world. Before there was a question as to whether Chinese societies were inherently incapable of becoming modern (as there now is about Islam), but no longer.
Apologies to those who feel this is off topic, but the historical dimensions of the debate of Chinese literacy are being misrepresented in my view.
Rates of literacy were comparatively quite high in pre-modern China.
I’ve responded to Jack’s ‘static’ view of Chinese history above. Can you give an example of a pre-modern state with a universal system of education?
The case of simplified characters is refuted by the Taiwanese experience. Rates of literacy are higher in Taiwan than in China despite the absence of simplified characters. As in Korea and Japan, rates of literacy soared when the state invested more money in education.
That leaves you with Zhuyinfuhao. Zhuyin is as much a tool for imposing Mandarin pronunciation as it was for increasing literacy. Traditional methods of teaching reading and writing in traditional China (texts such as the Qianziwen and the Sanzijing) by all accounts produced literate childern just as fast as teaching them Zhuyin did. The major difference was of course that they pronounced the characters in Mandarin, Taiwanese, or Cantonese etc.
It’s also blindingly obvious that the easier you make it to teach people to read, the more inclined people will be to learn, and the faster you can increase literacy. That was the historical experience of the Chinese.
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No it isn’t. The ‘historical experience’ is that people have wanted to read for a long time and that access to education, not methods of education was the main barrier.
So I suppose that Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times emphasized rote learning because of British orthography?
“Rote learning on a massive scale is essential to learning the language” for non-native adult learners. Kids who already speak a form of Chinese and are immersed in a society where Chinese is everywhere have a much easier time of it.
[quote]Oh, I’m extremely confident contesting this and would wager a fair sum that I’m far more familiar with the relevant scholarly literature.
Could you list a few?
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Previous page:
See also this article to which I linked earlier, and ‘Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma’, to which I also referred earlier (and yes, I’m well aware of the criticisms of this work). Want more, just ask.
It’s not just semantics. There’s a huge difference between explaining or proving why someone did something and proving why they didn’t do something. Also, China didn’t ‘fail’. It just developed differently. Your view of Chinese history is overly teleological with the modern west as the yardstick against which pre modern societies must be measured.
Digital books are more efficent and economical than paper ones, yet paper books continue to be printed in vast numbers because they very effectively solve problems we have now. Technologies are proved useful by their results, not inherent efficiency. Woodblock printing worked great in China because of the orthography of Chinese just as movable type printing worked well in the west because of western orthography.
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Ok, what is this trying to prove?
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Your entire argument is predicated on the idea that Chinese taught traditionally has low levels of literacy. That is historically incorrect. It is also irrelevant because now that China is rich and powerful, linguistic reform has stopped.
Why is it taught in the schools? Is there a reason? Why is it taught at all? People don’t need it, as you point out, and you claim that stroke based methods are superior. Does the Chinese government simply not understand this?[/quote]
The Chinese government wants to force its citizens to speak one national language. That is the real purpose behind Zhuyin. The main thing Zhuyin is useful for is looking up words in the dictionary. And school children in Taiwan almost never do this.
Seriously? So people would have made just as much progress in mathematics, other sciences, etc. if they’d been using Roman numerals the whole time?
I take any arguments by Taiwanese or about Taiwan about aesthetics with a grain of salt when they live in a pig sty every day. This place is a tribute to concrete, bathroom tiles, really ugly fashion, pollution and litter. I’ve heard China is even worse. Sorry, any Taiwanese person making reference to beauty or aesthetics must not collect $200 and must go directly to jail.
On another note, European languages written in cursive scripts or highly stylised scripts such as Gothic are more beautiful also. However, they also take longer to learn (both to read and to write) and there’s far more room for error. That’s probably why they’ve all but been abandoned.
Far from being an argument against simplification, this is actually an argument for it. As Fortigurn has pointed out, overhauling English would be a great thing. We should certainly start with spelling. Other European languages have a perfect (or close to perfect) one to one correspondence between letters and sounds. Make each letter or combination have one, and only one, possible sound. Create additional combinations if necessary. This brings me to:
Fortigurn has already responded quite adequately to this entire post, but I would add the following:
If anything, coming to Taiwan has made me far less anal about English. I’d give up all my Commonwealth oddities if we were to completely overhaul the language. I’ve seen that English is a complete pain in the arse to learn and teach, and unnecessarily so. Languages change, and English certainly has a lot, so we’re only clinging to “culture” for the sake of it. Reform it and make it easier on everyone. It’s only because we get all these odd spellings and verb tenses hammered into us that we get through them, but they’re hardly necessary.
Trying to learn Chinese has made me realise how simple it is to actually learn an alphabet based language. The bits of Slavic languages I have studied are distantly related to English, though often not that closely, but the major difference is being able to hit the ground running with an alphabet.
The other thing in Taiwan I have noticed (and I’m sure I’m not alone) is that there is a near-obsession with having a larger vocabulary, as though this will be the panacea for all other communication and personality problems. I’m sure every other kid in this country can not only spell paradigm, but can probably tell you which line of which page of the dictionary it is on, yet no one here can seemingly actually speak a lick of the language. Common sense and critical thinking are also seemingly in very short supply, as are good eyesight and social skills. To think that this isn’t somehow related to having to grind your way to literacy seems to miss the proverbial big nose on the foreigner here.
Compared to what? Compared to rates in post-modern China?
Not given your definition of ‘pre-modern’. Clearly we were using the term to refer to two different eras (mine referring to the era before the 20th century).
No, you’re not comparing like with like. You need to compare pre-simplified rates of literacy in China with post-simplified rates of literacy, in China. You seem to be saying that the simplification of characters produced no increase in literacy in China. Is that what you are saying?
So are you saying that Zhuyin did not result in any benefits in learning ability or speed, and no increases in literacy either?
Wait a minute, I’m not disputing that access to education was the main barrier for some time. What I’m disputing is whether or not methods of education were also a barrier. You seem to be arguing that the methods of education were no barrier, and that changes in the methods of education made absolutely no difference to the ease of learning or to levels of literacy. Is that what you’re arguing?
You would disagree with this for example?
[quote=“De Francis”]Perhaps the greatest success of the script was achieved by its use in the Mass Education Movement. In the early twenties, when he was promoting his five-year plans to wipe out illiteracy in Changsha, Chefoo, and other cities under such slogans as “An illiterate nation is a weak nation,” James Yen was also beginning his initial experiment with the use of the phonetic script.21
For a time he gave up the attempt in the face of the strong opposition which he encountered “from practically all sides,” but later he tried again after the movement had acquired somewhat more prestige.22 The Mass Education Movement used the phonetic script only as an adjunct to characters, that is, as a means of learning the established ideographs, and made plain that the symbols were not to function as an independent form of writing. 23
The new script was said to have been well received by illiterates. Even those who had studied characters first in one or two years of primary school demanded to learn the symbols. “The Phonetic Alphabet is simpler than characters,” they said. “After we have learned it we can read any book.” 24 Indeed, it was even suggested by one writer that only by the use of the phonetic symbols could the Mass Education Movement achieve any real success.
He maintained that the results were negligible with mass education in characters owing to their difficulty, and that even the “Thousand Character Theory” would provide no solution, so that the only way out was to use the Phonetic Alphabet and characters together, as in Japan. 25[/quote]
You would say this simply isn’t true?
No. He emphasized it for different reasons. Relevance?
Kids who already speak a form of Chinese and are immersed in a society where Chines is everywhere don’t have to practice rote learning on a massive scale? How do they learn 3,000 characters?
What’s the difference? Methodology? Evidence?
I wasn’t using the term in a pejorative sense. How about ‘did not succeed’, if you prefer? I’m not measuring it against the West, I’m measuring it against what the Chinese themselves were trying to achieve. All societies seek an accurate unified system of knowledge which explains the observable phenomena in human experience. The Chinese were no different. They had their natural philosophers, chemists, and scientists like everyone else. They were trying to achieve the same goal as everyone else.
To take a Western example of failure, the Greeks tried to determine an accurate unified system of knowledge which explained the stars and planets. But shackled by a pagan cosmology which had become enshrined in Greek science by Aristotle, and unable to break free from this because of their disregard for the observational methods embraced by later medieval investigators, they failed to develop an accurate cosmology. The scientific revolution never occurred in Greece. They did not succeed in developing the scientific method. They failed to develop the scientific method. The word ‘failed’ is appropriate because they did not succeed in their attempt to achieve what they were aiming for. Their cosmology wasn’t simply ‘different’, it was plain wrong. It was a failure. It was a failure in the sense that it did not succeed in achieving the specific goal for which it was intended.
The Chinese tried to determine an accurate unified system of knowledge which explained the stars and planets. They did not succeed in doing so. Or perhaps you believe they did succeed in doing so, it’s just that theirs was ‘different’. We can debate this.
The key phrase here is ‘because of the orthography of Chinese’. You say ‘Woodblock printing worked great in China because of the orthography of Chinese’, but you stop short of saying ‘Movable type printing didn’t work great in China because of the orthography of Chinese’. Why? It’s not racist to identify drawbacks of an orthographical system.
So you agree it was dependent on the orthography. The metal movable type press was superior to woodblock printing in a number of ways (durability, economy, efficiency), and it was for precisely this reason that it was investigated several times. But at the end of the day, the orthography rendered it less efficient than woodblock printing.
What? Where?
Is this the real reason, or is this just the reason you attribute to them in order to avoid mentioning the fact that they believe there are significant advantages to this system other than forcing their citizens to speak one national language?
Was that intended to be a joke? As a joke it’s not bad. But it’s not a statement of fact.
So what?
Yes, it’s a curious idea. Is it possible to do calculus with Roman numerals?
Sad but true. European languages have moved on. We too had our calligraphy, our beautiful writing, and even the 19th century copperplate is regarded fondly. But people don’t use it anymore. Why not? There’s no point. It’s pretty, but inefficient. We abandoned it, and moved on. The world didn’t end. Our culture didn’t die. These skills are still learned and transmitted. We didn’t lose anything.
I had to take a three hour written exam the other month, and I started writing in cursive just out of habit. But I hadn’t written more than a page in cursive for about eight years. After a single page of cursive which was increasingly messy, my hand was aching. I switched to printing for the rest of the exam, and had no problems. I just don’t use cursive for anything but signing my name these days. It has no use for me, so it is discarded. This is evolution. Natural selection. Optimization. It’s not a bad thing. My university lecturer couldn’t care less if my writing is classically beautiful or not, they just want the facts.
[quote]If anything, coming to Taiwan has made me far less anal about English. I’d give up all my Commonwealth oddities if we were to completely overhaul the language. I’ve seen that English is a complete pain in the arse to learn and teach, and unnecessarily so. Languages change, and English certainly has a lot, so we’re only clinging to “culture” for the sake of it. Reform it and make it easier on everyone. It’s only because we get all these odd spellings and verb tenses hammered into us that we get through them, but they’re hardly necessary.
Trying to learn Chinese has made me realise how simple it is to actually learn an alphabet based language. The bits of Slavic languages I have studied are distantly related to English, though often not that closely, but the major difference is being able to hit the ground running with an alphabet.[/quote]
I’ve had the same experience. What’s more, living in another culture I’ve developed an increasingly appreciation for a fairly simple point. The purpose of language is communication. Ease of language learning and language use facilitates communication. Language is not a toy, it is not an artwork, it is not a an optional extra or cultural luxury, it’s an essential tool for human communication. Languages shouldn’t be fossilized. They should be regularly reviewed and overhauled. Their capacity to facilitate communication should be the primary metric by which they are judged.
I can understand the view which considers language to be a kind of art form, or a mystical experience, so it doesn’t matter if it makes sense, or is easy to learn, or easy to understand because that’s not the real purpose of language. I just don’t agree with it.
If Mandarin has too many homonyms, how do people manage to understand it when it’s spoken?[/quote]
As I said, mandarin requires more use of 2-word morphemes cf. to Cantonese in order to avoid confusion. those 2-word morphemes help to provide more context. It’s not as necessary in Cantonese.
Try speaking to someone in Mandarin in “single-syllable words” and see how far you get. And I don’t mean beginner’s Mandarin like ni hao ma? I’m assuming effective communication of complex ideas.
@Feiren, i think we need to start another thread on Chinese history and reasons for “not modernizing”.
