
To Abolish the Chinese Language: On a Century of Reformist Rhetoric - lermontov
http://lithub.com/to-abolish-the-chinese-language-on-a-century-of-reformist-rhetoric/
======
roddylindsay
I'm reminded of this passage from the delightful article "Why Chinese is so
Damn Hard":

'I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department
at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to
have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend
canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to
write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three
friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them
simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly
produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the
"Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard
forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs
is by no means uncommon in China.'

[http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html](http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)

Book looks very interesting, just ordered a copy.

~~~
nie
As a native Chinese, I can't produce 嚔 either. I'm interested in the
statistics among college-educated Chinese how many _can actually_ write down
that character...

~~~
ufmace
I'm curious about that original passage - is the real reason for that
something like that a native Chinese person writing a letter to another native
Chinese person telling them that they were sick and had to cancel something
would not phrase things like that, using the literal word for "to sneeze"? Is
some other phrase or wording more commonly used to communicate things like
that?

~~~
schoen
I was assuming the note would be something like

    
    
       Dear Dr. Li, I'm sorry to say that I have to cancel our appointment this afternoon because I've been coughing and sneezing all day. I look forward to seeing you when I feel better again.

~~~
contingencies
Modern Chinese would write 感冒 ( _gan mao_ ; 'have a cold') instead. Much
simpler to remember. Besides, they could send an audio message on WeChat,
which functions like a global distributed walkie-talkie, or type it in pinyin,
at which point the computer would auto-guess the characters and they'd only
have to remember vaguely whether those characters "looked right" with some
general degree of confidence, which is exactly how I input them myself. If
they really had to write, they'd use the same method on their cellphone then
copy the characters over. If the reader couldn't recognize the characters, an
OCR system on their phone could do it for them. In short: through technology,
this is now a solved problem.

------
peterburkimsher
Chinese is here to stay. There are enough people who speak it. Characters are
not the problem. Simplified characters made it twice as complicated.

What Chinese and Japanese need are spaces.

I struggled for 2 years to study Chinese here in Taiwan. I tried many ways
(see the blog), and wasn't picking it up.

Then I wrote Pingtype, which puts spaces between the words, colours for tones,
and a literal translation. I started reading the Bible every day using it, and
also listening to music and reading the lyrics. Since then I've learned so
much more.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

The problem is not the language. It's the education materials. Now I think
that traditional characters are better, because I can rebuild a character from
typing only the parts I know into Pingtype's keyboard and searching for a
suitable match. I had to build my own tools, but I wish these could be
popularised to help the thousands of foreigners who give up learning Chinese.

Support for Taiwanese Hokkien is also included in Pingtype, thanks to the
Taigi dictionary for POJ transcription. See the Advanced -> Regional section.
It is very different to Mandarin, but learning Chinese is a necessary stepping
stone. I'm working on a lyrics video of some popular songs by Fire Ex as some
educational materials.

Please give me feedback on Pingtype; only a few hundred people have visited
the page and it's kind of depressing. I don't know how to do marketing, so
it's not catching on. Even if the tone colours and pinyin don't become widely
used, I really wish that spaces between words could be introduced to this
beautiful language.

~~~
dionian
I am not sure I know what you mean by 'spaces', but I think I do. It's the
fact that there is no natural separation of grouped words. Without vocab it's
really hard to understand a sentence. Also there is a cultural element (much
more so than other languages perhaps)

But thats kind of the advantage too, there is no preset standard grammatical
way of looking at anything, you simply take it all in and infer everything on
context. No learning verb conjugations and endless rules like in some
languages (I'm looking at you, French)

People are saying Chinese is harder to learn than other languages, and it's
true, but mostly only for the first few years, after that, it's way easier to
learn than a new romance language for a native speaker of a romance language

~~~
schoen
> But thats kind of the advantage too, there is no preset standard grammatical
> way of looking at anything, you simply take it all in and infer everything
> on context. No learning verb conjugations and endless rules like in some
> languages (I'm looking at you, French)

I don't speak Chinese, so I don't have a personal intution about this, but in
this case, I think you're conflating as many as three different linguistic
issues.

* Word boundaries not being represented in orthography means that there is more ambiguity about whether something should be regarded a compound word, a fixed phrase, or a single word. Speakers of languages like English may disagree about items like "mail box" vs. "mailbox" or "zu Hause" vs. "zuhause" ('at home' in German). In Chinese orthography there does not necessarily need to be an answer to these questions and people don't necessarily need to take a position on them.

* "No grammar" might be an intuition that people form about Chinese, but it's not true at all. Chinese doesn't mark a large number of grammatical categories that other languages do, but it marks some that other languages don't, such as classifiers or measure words used with numbers.

[https://digchinese.com/measure-words](https://digchinese.com/measure-words)

Also, Chinese word order is not free and forms a part of the grammar. So 我爱你
'I love you' is a different sentence from 你爱我 'you love me', and that
distinction is a grammatical distinction. In Latin, "ego amo te" and "te amo
ego" have the same meaning! (The inverse is any permutation of the words "tu
me amas".) In comparison with other languages, this is one way in which
Chinese speakers _don 't_ just "take it all in and infer everything on
context", because they get to use word order to derive the meaning, which
would be a far less useful signal in Latin or Russian.

* Chinese pretty much never inflects words, so there aren't tables of inflections to learn as there would be in an inflected language. But conceivably an inflected language speaker might feel that Chinese is being verbose (!) by requiring the expression of subject pronouns in order to indicate grammatical subject. For example, a speaker of inflected pro-drop languages (where subject pronouns are optional) like Latin or Spanish might find it weird that you have to use two "words" 你有 to express what to them is just a "simple" word like "habes" or "tienes" 'you have', that inherently reveals the identity of the subject in a concise and intuitive way. :-) Or for tense, speakers of these languages might find it strangely verbose to have to throw in 以前 'formerly' or 曾经 'once' or something, instead of a concise infix like -ba- (amabas, in both languages, instead of something like 你以前爱 which can be regarded as three distinct words ... or maybe, as you said, not always analyzed that way by some speakers!).

~~~
mcguire
" _Word boundaries not being represented in orthography means that there is
more ambiguity about whether something should be regarded a compound word, a
fixed phrase, or a single word._ "

DeFrancis' counterexample for the myth that each Chinese character is a word
is "coral", 珊瑚 (I hope). According to the dictionary he quoted, the two
characters, individually, mean "coral" but they're never used separately.

~~~
jpatokal
Sure, there are words like this, but they're very much the exception, not the
rule. An analogy would be English words like "flabbergasted", which is clearly
composed of "flabber" and the past tense of "to gast", neither of which is
ever used in its own.

------
ufmace
This article touches on a broader point that I had always found fascinating -
what is the relationship of language to the ability of a culture to spread
around the world? The promotion of American culture around the world owes a
lot IMO to the British Empire and it's promotion of English around the world.
Which in turn owes a lot to the culture of the British Empire, and the
relatively light-handed way in which they ruled it. That's the only way it was
possible for them to dominate and spread their language and culture throughout
so many places. Control of it as a formal empire fell apart, but it left the
seeds for kind of a soft American empire, when America became a world power
and started spreading ideology and massive amounts of media around the world.

It's interesting that nothing like this seems to happen for any other language
and culture combination, most notably Chinese for this article. How much of
the lack of ability for Chinese to spread as a culture is just how damn hard
it is to learn Chinese as a non-native? Or is it that the Chinese just don't
seem that interested in spreading their culture and ideology farther than they
can directly benefit from? Or is the fact that they aren't interested in that
based on them knowing and even taking pride in their language and culture
being particularly impenetrable? Related to this article, it seems notable
that movements within China to radically simplify the language never seem to
pick up much steam. Sure, it would be insanely complex to do on a logistical
level, but even above that, it seems like nobody is much interested in it.

It reminds me a little of thinking about AIs. They say that an AI will only
want to do what it gets programmed to want to do. It may become smarter and
more powerful, but there's no reason for it to change what it wants to do.
Changing what it wants to do would itself be an action, and it has no reason
to take that action, because it isn't part of what it originally wants to do.
It seems similar that cultures sort of evolve to care about some things and
not care about other things, and efforts to make them care about something
they don't care about at best have quite the uphill battle.

~~~
pjc50
French spread with the French colonies, Spanish with the Spanish ones. That's
why Spanish is actually spoken by more people than English. I would put a good
part of the English-language dominance down to two factors in addition to
colonialism:

\- no central language approval body (no Academe Anglaise)

\- Hollywood, the BBC and the World Service.

> the Chinese just don't seem that interested in spreading their culture and
> ideology farther than they can directly benefit from?

Traditionally the end of Chinese outward-looking culture is attributed to the
end of the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages)
, but I'm sure it's more complex than that.

~~~
notahacker
I think the main thing is that the legacy of the English colonies (which were
more populous and diverse than the French or Spanish ones) was continued by
the dominant economic power that succeeded in them _around the time
international communication started to become direct and real time, and
education became seen as a universal right necessary to participate
effectively in the economy_. And as cultural output goes, it's not just
Hollywood and the BBC, but also the majority of the internet, and the
programming languages and computer science theorems that sit underneath them
that haven't been comprehensively localised, because sometimes it's just
easier to learn English.

Given the overhead of learning new languages, in an era of mass communication
the world's auxiliary language ought to be even more of a winner-takes-all
market than search or social, but French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian
have a headstart and a very dedicated user base.

Not sure how big an advantage the lack of central language body is though: on
the one hand it means that people using it in an idiosyncratic local way as an
auxiliary language aren't subject to foreign third parties insisting they're
doing it _wrong_ , and can inject other shared vocabulary and adjust to each
others' fluency level. But on the other hand there's nobody influential to
promote any attempt to fix English's confusing irregularities and dreadful
orthography(ies) and lack of authority to appeal to doesn't stop people being
terribly snobby about "correct" English.

------
grizzles
This seems like a good thread to ask. Can anyone recommend some good Chinese
language learning apps/resources? After a brief dalliance awhile back, I'd
like to learn to speak Mandarin, but having learned Japanese I'm keen to avoid
written literacy in the language as I know how much more that would complicate
things.

------
ilamont
A couple of thoughts to share, as someone who studied Mandarin in Taiwan the
1990s, encourages his kids to learn Chinese (1), and still loves to study
4-character colloquialisms:

* "Chinese is a world script" \- The author Tom Mullaney notes the rising popularity of Chinese classes in schools all over the world. I think Chinese script is actually holding back Mandarin from becoming more widely spoken. It's difficult to write properly, and adds another layer of complexity to remembering vocabulary. I think it's much easier for people to learn a language that has an alphabet-based script, and it's possible to go further with such a language in a given period of time.

* Paradoxically, the rise of software to write Chinese characters has really made it much easier to write. I say this as someone who learned in the dark ages before such software was widely available. If I had to write a sentence in Chinese using a pen and paper it would be painful for both myself and the reader ... but on my phone or using a laptop or desktop computer I can manage social media, email, and other lightweight uses thanks to easy pinyin input systems. It's improved my reading ability, too, because now I am interacting in Chinese on my devices using language that's more like spoken Mandarin, whereas 20 years ago most of the printed materials I encountered tended to be written in more formal style.

* Mandarin as a world language. The increasing importance of the Chinese economy is becoming a big driver for spoken Mandarin in other parts of the world. I've encountered Thais and Vietnamese who can speak it quite well (but not write) in order to do business or interact with Chinese tourists. A friend who recently visited Italy saw the same thing in high-end shops with young Italians behind the counters being able to speak proficient Mandarin.

* I disagree with the idea presented by @peterburkimsher that a lack of spaces are a problem. Chinese grammar is very straightforward, and in my opinion it's not hard to figure where words start and end (even if you don't know a specific term). (Incidentally, kudos to Peter for developing his system ... I don't have specific suggestions to market it, but I like the idea of leveraging Fire Ex and other hooks).

* There are interesting examples in Vietnam (2) and Korea of societies that abandoned Chinese characters in favor of their own alphabets. It's true that cultures lose the connection with ancient literature and older historical documents ... but not their history, thanks to the spread of literacy and public education combined with a strong interest in history and famous people from centuries past.

1\. [http://www.ilamont.com/2014/10/our-review-of-chinese-
summer-...](http://www.ilamont.com/2014/10/our-review-of-chinese-summer-camp-
in.html)

2\.
[https://www.omniglot.com/writing/chunom.htm](https://www.omniglot.com/writing/chunom.htm)

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Yep. I learned Korean while in the Army at the Defense Language Institute, and
I think the simplicity of Hangul makes it amongst the easier of the harder
languages to learn there.

One of our instructors was a more conservative, slightly older woman who'd
often write down the Hanja (Korean for Chinese characters) behind the Hangul.
I mostly rolled my eyes because it seemed too extraneous (and not at all
required for the DLPT). Its a dying skill in South Korea from what I know, and
obviously not at all well known in the North for obvious reasons.

------
unlmtd1
Hanzi is a better interface between man and computers than phonetic systems,
which add an additions compilation step (from phonetic to logic). The keyboard
was the problem for hanzi, but now with motion, touch, speech interfaces
boosted in their accuracy by ML, hanzi will dethrone Latin as the no1 man-
computer interface.

