On “the ancient Chinese language”, “language reform”, etc.
[In the Beijing Sounds studio lounge, on the couch next to the ping pong table, two analysts are surfing the web on their broadband (read: sippy-cup slow) internet connections.]
A: [gazing intently at his screen] Wow this is hideous. [scanning further] Unbefu…
B: Ah, the F-bomb infixation. Something wrong on the Internets* again?
A: Plain, damn wrong and debunked over and again, [lowering voice] by folks whose prose and logic are far more incisive than anything these studios could ever muster. [Raising voice again excitedly] Wow and they’ve got their experts all lined up on point. I don’t get it. Don’t they read DeFrancis? I’ve got to get the editor to approve a post on this.
B: My poor, simple friend, I won’t let you become another sadsack blogger who falls into the correction trap. You could spend three life sentences hyper-hypercorrecting singular they problems and accomplish nothing more than to get yourself disinvited from a few more dinner parties.
A: You really don’t get it! Sometimes the sky is falling to hell in a handbasket and so on. This is in the New York Times!
B: Do they still have readership in the double digits?
A: C’mon, smartass, you just don’t want to acknowledge that we’re losing not just this battle but the entire war. Look: languages change, and language is not script. How many times does it have to be said?
B: How many times did Copernicus say the earth moves?
A: Listen to this hooey: “The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving”
B: It’s a headline, buddy. Can’t blame’em for trying to sell papers — I mean: banner ads, whatever.
A: You’re always blaming the headline writer. Fine. How about this, no further in than the second paragraph: “This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language.” Both fallacies in one sentence: first that it would be possible to “modernize” a language through script reform, and second that Chinese is somehow older than any other language.
B: Easy now, tiger. For most folks, even when talking about English, let alone Chinese, “language” means “writing system.” Get over it. Just mentally make the substitution and you’ll be fine. It’s yet another case of the vernacular vs trade vocabulary. Remember how Language Log got all worked up about the popular misuse of “passive voice”? And you got so fed up with their worked-up-edness that you wrote in to support the more common interpretation that it means “vague about agency”?
A: Fair enough. But I side with Language Log when it comes to specialists: that they should try to correct popular misunderstandings. Check out their first expert, from a Boston institution that you just might’ve heard of. Bear with me and I’ll give you the entire paragraph in all its obscenity:
The utopian impulses behind standardization and simplification of a living language are always understandable. Increased literacy, administrative efficiency, and ease of communication are laudable goals. But those impulses can also strip a language of its wit, whimsy, and play, not to mention its capacity to accommodate new concepts and usages.
“Standardization and simplification of the living language”?! I’m telling you I couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s complete conflation of writing system and language, straight from the mouth of a so-called expert whose academic credentials would qualify her, in most people’s minds, to speak authoritatively on the subject.
B: Well, it is a bit ugly.
A: Ugly?! I haven’t even started. Here’s expert #2
Simplifying traditional Chinese characters was a linguistic democratization and one of China’s most successful progressive programs in the 1950s. The majority of the population was lifted out of illiteracy.
How do you like that? Through the miracle of cutting out a few strokes, hundreds of millions of people were able to achieve literacy.
B: [chuckling] Yeah, I’m sure that making education compulsory and putting students through thousands of hours of character practice had nothing to do with it. You know what your problem is? You think it matters. You think if kids spent a few hours less on their writing system that they would all have time to learn the zither or something, when in fact they would just spend more time learning how to do long division on the abacus (if their parents are Beijingers) or learning how to beat their uncles at Wii bowling (if their parents are from Minneapolis).
A: [indignant] It’s not just a few hours here and there. Look at PBS — she’s probably putting in 3-4 hours a day exclusively on characters between home and school. Think of what that time could get you!
B: Sure, she’d be able to recite the Nickelodeon programming schedule, in 15 minute chunks, for an entire week. Get real. Get over it. Or if you really care, get the boss to put his money where his mouth is. He could quit buying up property around the studios and stop work on the Olympic-sized reflecting pools and start distributing copies of DeFrancis like Gideon Bibles throughout language departments in universities around the world.
A: [sighing] Maybe I’ll just see what’s new on pinyin.info
B: [soothingly] That’s a good fellow. Just to make you feel better, here’s a 1928 quote about Japanese from George Sansom, courtesy of DeFrancis (p.159):
One hesitates for an epithet to describe a system of writing which is so complex that it needs the aid of another system to explain it. There is no doubt that it provides for some a fascinating field of study, but as a practical instrument it is surely without inferiors
Now quit surfing and get to work on those Pleco flashcards.
————-
*Update: thanks, Sima, for directing to the LL link that B must have been paraphrasing. And Update #2: thanks for the comic that inspired it all, with love from xkcd:
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Comments 10
My, oh my, you are on form this week. That 上地 air must be pretty special.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 11:56 am ¶Well, you got me all worked up, too!
Posted 06 May 2009 at 11:56 am ¶The commenters are even worse than the “experts”!
I’m not sure about the Sansom quote. Can you name a writing system that doesn’t need another writing system to describe it?
Maybe all of them do when you are writing about them, and none of them do when you are speaking about them.
Or maybe something is lost by taking the quote out of context?
Also Japanese has a syllabary (OK, 2) that are pretty easy to read and write. A typical piece of Japanese text (like the interview on the CD of the soundtrack of Totoro, that happened to be the closest piece of Japanese text to me at the moment) is scattered with kanji here and there, but doesn’t look so overwhelming.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 1:46 pm ¶At first I was really impressed when I heard about Japanese: “Wow! 3 different writing systems and each one has it’s own purpose! They’re not restricted to kanji (hanzi) at all. They even whipped up a whole alphabet just to use for foreign words (katakana)! And Chinese is stuck trying to cram foreign words into hanzi. Why don’t they take a page out of Japan’s book?”
But then the fever broke when I learned 1) katakana actually can’t express any more sounds than hiragana and and 2) for new kanji (like in kids books), there is little note in hiragana to show how to pronounce the kanji.
So…what’s the point of having all 3 writing systems? Why not just use hiragana for everything?
To me it’s just another example of something I call…oh…how to put this: unnecessarily complex. Maybe I’m just narrow-minded.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 5:44 pm ¶Must be the heat, but I blew my shit the other day too.
http://thetemperatureoffreedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/i-have-got-to-stop-reading-language-log.html
And I bet you could squeeze some at least some ‘ch’ ellisions out of people if you tried hard enough.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 9:46 pm ¶@Albert
Trying to read Japanese written only in hiragana is very slow and frustrating*. Kanji help the eye visually separate words that otherwise slosh together (there are no spaces, nor would it be entirely clear where spaces should go due to the vagaries of particles).
I’ve been reading this blog for quite a while and it’s been quite interesting. I am a westerner, fluent in Japanese, who is currently studying Mandarin. I wanted to say also that I disagree wholeheartedly with the anti-hanzi (yes, I know I’m oversimplifying) undercurrents on this and other China-related blogs. However I recognize that my perspective (someone beginning Chinese already having a hanzi background) is different from most.
*For someone who already has (even a little) kanji proficiency.
Posted 07 May 2009 at 11:00 am ¶@hsknotes: maybe I had been feeling a little feverish… Now I’ve got the recorder tuned to Retroflex Affricate, which I’ve heard is also a Madagascaran perennial.
@Aaron, it’s always good to have a hanzi proselyte in the studio lounge. Welcome, and that’s not just standing on ceremony. It would be an exaggeration to call this place godless in regards to characters. Several frequent commenters have defended the script vigorously from perceived slights.
The dirty secret at the BJS studios, though, is that there is no real attack to defend the characters from, if that’s what you mean by “undercurrents.” WRT characters, the production goal at the studios is to generate only facts and reasonably testable hypotheses, e.g.
Are any of these an argument for some kind of hard switchover to Pinyin or Bopomofo or whatever? Hardly. Might as well advocate for the US to go metric. Fat chance.
If that’s a clarification, I hope you’ve still got stuff to disagree with — this lounge was built for contention and conflagration.
Posted 07 May 2009 at 7:48 pm ¶@syz
Thanks for the welcome. I’m slowly working my way back through the archives, and it’s been quite entertaining and enlightening so far (and workplace-friendly, what with the lack of video to catch the boss-man’s ever-watchful eye).
On second thought, my accusation of “anti-hanzi undercurrents” was a bit overzealous. As a typical American (from Minneapolis, no less) I am always eager to see everything in black and white.
It tickles me that the BJS Studios are probing questions I have also had (though never posed as eloquently nor investigated as thoroughly) while studying Japanese, particularly relating to dialects. Perhaps someday I will have something to contribute on the Sinitic front.
Keep up the good work!
Posted 08 May 2009 at 4:12 pm ¶My humble opinions:
Japanese is a wonderfully efficient and effective writing system. This is not to say it isn’t also complex. But complexity is not always bad. The complexity of the English writing system gives it some distinct advantages.
Granted, learning to become literate in Chinese or Japanese is difficult and time-consuming for second-language learners. But making life easy for second-language learners is not, nor should it be, the primary consideration in script design or reform. As foreign learners of Japanese and Chinese become more proficient with the language overall, and are exposed to a wider variety of text types, they usually come to develop an understanding of the advantages that the existing righting systems bestow on fluent, literate speakers.
Posted 10 May 2009 at 5:35 am ¶Zev, good to have you drop by. I was hoping one of the lead hanzi proselytes (to carry on the metaphor) would enter the fray.
One thing we can fully agree on: no writing system should be designed to serve the needs of second language learners. But when you say
it seems to imply that it is NOT difficult and time-consuming for first language learners. You can tell me if that’s not what you meant. If it is, then we could have a more rambunctious disagreement. I’d hazard a guess that it takes three times as long (just for argument’s sake) as English, which is already an enormously imperfect system. Someone has probably already tried to study this, I’m sure. And it’s a very messy problem, but I’m sure you could turn it into a testable hypothesis.
[Not to belabor the obvious, but just to avoid confusion for the record: this post was not intended to be an anti-hanzi screed but merely to lament a state of linguistic knowledge in which "experts" talk about writing systems and language as if they are one in the same]
Posted 10 May 2009 at 9:42 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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