Disclaimer: I speak no Chinese at all. So if some of my premise is wrong, please correct me.
That said, is it time for Chinese to undergo a major change? Specifically in a number of ways:
People who DO speak Chinese have explained to me that it is very difficult to convey emotions while speaking the language, as what we use to do so in Western languages – changing tones, emphasis, etc – would change the actual meaning of the words in Chinese. So, for instance, to let someone know they like you during a conversation, they frequently have to interject “tee hee hee’s” into it, much like an IM conversation uses smileys. All “loss of culture” issues aside, this seems to be a very inefficient means of communication, not to mention very difficult to learn for outsiders (easy if you are raised in the culture, obviously). That is, one could learn French, or Russian, or German, or vastly different languages like Hebrew or Japanese much easier than Chinese, due to its inherent difficulty. Is this accurate?
What I think REALLY needs to change is their almost heiroglyphic writing style. I still am not really sure how it works, but it seems incredibly complicated (needlessly so), horrifically difficult to learn and understand, and even harder to implement in a modern, keyboard-driven digital world. Many modern writing systems evolved from a symbol-based precursor, but moved past it to a much more useful alphabet system because, frankly, it’s a superior system. Much easier to learn, able to expand to convey an infinite number of words merely by sounding them out, easy to put on a keyboard.
Is the Chinese writing system as outdated and inefficient as I believe it to be? Or am I grossly misunderstanding it?
And yes, I am aware that the Japanese have an alphabet, but it’s considered to be “for kiddies only” as the adults use a system based on the Chinese system. For a country known in the modern age as efficient, that seems unbelievably obtuse to me. What am I missing here?
One thing you’re missing is that the use of Chinese characters allows people who speak different languages (or dialects) to read a common script. For example, a person who speaks only Russian would still know that $ = dollar (or US monetary unit if they don’t actually know the word “dollar”). Now imagine if every word had a symbol that could be understand across language barriers.
At any rate, the issue of the spoken language vs written language are two completely different things. There are precedents to countries/cultures abandoning scripts “voluntarily”, but not spoken languages. Vietnamese and Koren were both once written using Chinese characters. Vietnamese in now written using Roman script and Korean has it’s own syllabary (consonant-vowel combinations that can’t actually be called an alphabet).
Still, the difficulties of the Chinese script may doom it eventually. But if anything, Mandarin will becomre even more dominant as China grows economically.
The Chinese language underwent a major change after 1949, at least in the PRC, in which the writing system was greatly simplified. It is very difficult to explain in simple terms, but basically, characters were redrawn to conform more to how the words are pronounced, rather than relating the entimology of the word. The downside of this change is that much of the beauty of written Chinese was gutted in the process.
What’s more, there are several systems available for input of Chinese characters with a keyboard. They conform to the phonics of the character, or even how it is written. I don’ t think it’s a huge problem; the disputes between each entry method are no more serious than the various keyboard layouts (i.e., QWERTY vs. those other ones that are supposedly “more efficient”). And, as a side note, it’s rather laughable to describe Roman characters as “a superior system” when one admits that they know nothing of the alternative.
The pronunciation of tones is a hard thing for Westerners to pick up, but I wouldn’t say that it is much different than non-English speakers learning to pronounce the sounds that exist in English, but not in their native tongue. Try getting a Frenchman to say “thistle,” and compare to an American learning to pronounce the four-plus tones of Mandarin, and I defy that the tones are a more substantive hurdle to overcome.
Further, if one goes back further, there have been enormous changes between classical and modern Chinese. They are not mutually comprehensible, because contemporary Chinese is much more specific. It has changed a lot in the past few centuries, and it is a beautiful language in structure and style. Plus, the grammar is as simple as one can imagine. No conjugation of verbs is a great thing.
Mandurin is spoken by about 3/4 of the Chinese peoples. You wanna scrap an entire language that almost 1 billion people speak?
There’s been pretty much one standard written form of the language since the Shang Dynasty (though back then, alot of people weren’t literate). In 1955, the PRC declared Putonghua the standard written form of the language. Attempts at westernizing the written form (Pinyin) have been underway for quite a while.
Clarifications. I didn’t say the Roman characters were superior, at least I didn’t mean to. I wanted to emphasize that ALPHABETS are superior in general, be they Roman or any other variety that can convey infinite words with a very limited number of symbols. (For that matter – can words be put into a logical – “alphabetical” or otherwise – order in Chinese? I have no idea how that would work…)
Second, I didn’t say tones can’t be learned by Westerners, I said they restrict the ability to convey emotional subtext to the words. I can say one word in – I dunno, 6? 7 ways? – that each change the meaning behind the word without affecting the message/definition. A frequent example I’ve heard in Chinese is “MA” meaning one thing, ‘mA’ meaning another, 'Ma" a third, etc. Versus in English, “MA!” is an urgent cry for one’s mother, raise the last syllable and it’s a questions. Drop the last syllable and you’re whining to your mom.
Yes I realize that I’m asking the impossible for a billion Chinese to abandon their language. Heck, I’d rather see the entire planet adopt a universal language over the next century, so I’m really asking 5 billion people to change. Let’s just not pick Chinese…
Anyway, is there a reference out there for us non Chinese speakers? Not to learn the language, but to get a better understanding of how the writing system works? Say, Chinese Characters for Dummies or something along those lines?
is very broadly correct … but so what? All it boils down to is that Chinese will likely never be widely spoken by non-Chinese. As most educated people there are learning English or perhaps Japanese or other languages, it’s not a problem.
is much more problematic. As ravenman points out, it’s been simplified; but it is still harder, and typing a given text in characters does take longer, and likely always will. Things might get better as computer tablets get better and cheaper.
That efficiency isn’t everything. For one thing, you can’t just wave a wand and change things for 1.5 billion people. But more fundamentally, the hanzi script is an integral part of Chinese culture. Calligraphy is perhaps the most important art form there; no painting is complete without a poem written on the it in a good hand.
The nearest analogy I can think of would be a proposal to drop written english in favor of writing in morse or binary code; perhaps more efficient, but still not worth it.
There’s two ways. In English-Chinese dictionaries, and more modern Chinese dictionaries, characters are alphbetized by the pronunciation of the character… leading, in fact, to the conclusion that alphabets are superior.
But characters can also be organized by the radical of the character, as is done in more old style dictionaries. A radical is the part of a character that signifies its origin, and there’s around 150 of them. You look up the radical, then count how many strokes are needed to draw the rest of the character. It works, slowly…
But then again, how difficult would be be to find the word “wrong” in the English dictionary if one were only to know that the word is pronounced, “rong?” Or the word “physiological,” which is pronounced something like “fizzyoh-logical?” My point here is that no language but Esperanto is as efficient as it could be, and the more tinkering that a language undergoes for the sake of efficiency, the less the language reflects its rich sociological history.
Of course, it strengthens my own beliefs that the writing has to change.
As for the cultural argumements, can’t touch those. Changing the wriitng system would absolutely be massive culture change. But I am firm believer in language being a device for communication between people far before it should be a cultural anachronism. But hey, that’s just me.
Yeah, I’m also for reforming much of the English spelling rules. I mean, really, it SHOULD be spelled “SKOOL”. And I’d love to have FRENDS to go with my trends.
If you’re suggesting some sort of forced change from the outside for the convenience of the non-Chinese, then no. I can hardly imagine a worse idea in the world of language. If you’re talking about change from within for the convenience of the Chinese, well, it’s their language and it’s naturally going to evolve to suit their needs. I don’t see that this is anything non-Chinese need trouble themselves with.
*Are these native Chinese speakers, or people who learned Chinese as a second language? I don’t speak Chinese but I know a fair few Chinese people, and none have ever mentioned any such problem to me. The Chinese certainly seem able to understand one another well enough. For non-native speakers I’m sure subtle shades of meaning and emotional emphasis are more difficult to master, but that’s true for non-native speakers of any language.
*Chinese children seem to learn Chinese just as easily as French, Russian, German, etc., children learn their native languages, so I don’t think “inherent difficulty” is a problem. Chinese is difficult for native English speakers to master, but I’ve heard that Russian is actually more difficult. I don’t see why the Chinese or Russians should care though, just as English speakers don’t seem to care that English is pretty difficult for the Chinese and Russians to learn. You can’t expect people to change some important aspect of their own culture just because foreigners find it tricky.
*As John Mace said, the fact that the Chinese writing system does not use an alphabet is precisely what allows it to be used by everyone in a nation where many distinct and mutually unintelligable dialects are spoken. A Chinese character can be read and understood by both a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker, or even a Japanese speaker, but it may be pronounced in completely different ways. A phonetic system could not be used to communicate across dialects and languages the way an ideographic system can be.
Not exactly. Japanese uses two phonetic systems (hiragana and katakana, the latter of which is primarily for transliterating foreign words) as well as Chinese characters (kanji). These three systems can all be present within a single document. A phonetic pronunciation may be written over a kanji (some of which have multiple pronunciations) if necessary for clarity. It would be considered rather embarassing for an adult to have to write out a word in hiragana if that word were normally written in kanji, but many adult Japanese have confessed to me that after leaving school they forgot many of the less common kanji. This isn’t a great analogy, but it’s a bit like an English-speaker forgetting how to write a capital “Z” in cursive, or how to write cursive at all.
As someone who has pored over heavy dictionaries looking up characters by stroke count and radicals, and has memorized over 1000 of them, I can tell you that literacy in Chinese characters is ludicrously difficult and inefficent. Can you imagine running into an adult native English speaker who said “Huh? Letter Q, you say? Heard it but never learned it. Looks like a tough one, how do you use it?” The ideogrammatic system will be a barrier toward Chinese or Japanese ever being accepted as an international language. Non-natives have to put in many hours of study before they are able to use native written materials as study aids. The percentage of literate adults in China is placed somewhere around the mid-80’s and I suspect that is either highly inflated or based on a ludicrously basic standard of literacy, perhaps in the 500-character range.
Yes, kanji are lovely and occasionally fraught with deeper meaning, but people’s ideas should be limited by their knowledge of the language, not because of an artificially high literacy barrier.
Having said that, I think spoken Mandarin at least is quite an interesting language and one I’d like to learn sometime. Maybe after I finish Japanese… (insert raucous laughter smiley).
I’m a little curious about this statement. Korean writing, as you said, uses a series of vowels and consonants to form syllables which then form words. I’m not sure how this could possibly be considered anything other then a phonetic alphabet. Is there some subtlety of the definition of alphabet I’m misunderstanding? Now, they also use a great number of sino-characters of course but that’s a different issue.
A syllabary uses one symbol to represent an entire syllable, not one sound. For instance, you can write “ka” in either of the two Japanese syallabaries, but you can’t write “k”.
IIRC, a true alphabet has been invented only once, and all the alphabets in existence today are derived from that original-- ie, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Roman all have to same origin.
Ah, there’s your problem. You Japanese-speaking types screwed up the beauty and simplicity of hanzi with your bastardized meanings! If only you studied the “pure” form of Chinese characters, your views would be completely different.
In any case, I must disclaim that I am terrible at keeping up with my proficiency in reading, and especially writing, Chinese. It is hard, no doubt.
However, moving from characters to something like pinyin (the Romanized version of Mandarin) which is what the OP appears to suggest – would absolutely strike at the heart of the language. For me, it would be like proposing that English should be stripped of all words that were derived from French, or completely forbid the use of poetry: it would have an absolutely devistating impact on the form of the lanugage for a short-sighted pursuit of an idealized notion of what languages should be like.
How would it be devastating? Yes, it would require Mandarin and Cantonese to merge, agree on a standard pronounciation of a word for an alphabet to work… but that would also allow Chinese people to communicate with each other across larger swaths of the country. Isn’t that inherently GOOD?
As for forbidding poetry in English as an analogy… what if we were forced to speak only in poetry? English needs adjusting, I won’t argue with that, but at least we are able to communicate across an entire country with each other. That hasn’t destroyed poetry at all. Poetry instead is found in poetry books, or collections, or individual poems.
Why not keep current Chinese writing systems as an artform, but move the language (especially the writing) forward into one that simply makes more sense?
Well, why should we? It’s a lot of work to change something, translate everything, develop new teaching methods, etc. It’s more than a matter of just working out a better system. Actually implementing it would be a nightmare and very likely far more trouble than it is worth.
