The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.
This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction of a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.
More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.
We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.
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Anonymous2012-01-22 13:03
Hmm, I see points being missed all over the place.
– Chinese has no inflections or case endings or anything (what illiterates out there confuse with "grammar"; they're two different things[1]), instead it uses word order to specify differences and nuances in meaning. Coming from that gives speakers a hard time learning a language that's full of them. And just for the record: English is simple in this respect.
In a small(er) way, that includes English; it has neither a noun gender system (otherwise found in every Indo-European language, just to name one example), nor a noun class system (like most Asian and a few African languages use). In fact, it's the only language (AFAIK) that has none of those. Which is why English speakers tend to struggle with that when learning other languages.
OTOH, Western European languages (like English) tend to have not one but two past tenses ("went" and "have gone", etc), with complex rules for when to use which. One needs go no further than Eastern Europe to find people struggling with that.
– Using a shorthand version of the same writing (like "simplified" Chinese) isn't going to make it easier to learn to read and write; there are still a gadzillion different symbols to learn.
In the real world, the first step to teaching peasants to read and write, is to have schools out there in the first place. Having a writing system that's easy to learn, while still important, is secondary.
The Korean feudal lords knew this, which is why they resisted the Han'gul writing system for centuries; it can be learned in a day (which was most of the point in the first place), while the Chinese character set takes years.
On a similar note, you can write Vietnamese with Chinese characters (after all, it was done for centuries), but they had no problem switching to the Latin alphabet once a suitable adaptation was made.
– Japanese and Korean use suffixes a lot. These don't always translate well into Chinese characters, and so they use their own writing systems instead to show those. Not to mention they have native words that they prefer to use their own writing for.
And that's not counting how Korean has largely (though not completely) stopped using Chinese characters altogether. As Japanese would have long ago if their simple phonetics hadn't led to their language having homonyms galore. (Classic example: "kami" meaning "hair", "paper" or "god"; context may take care of a lot, but hardly all)
– When a language uses a gadzillion cases (like Finnish or Hungarian), it's more often than not because it has no prepositions ("in", "on", "at", etc); it uses some of the cases instead. This may be a bit hard for a beginner to get their head around, as this is a radically different concept, but it's really not more complex or anything; European languages can be systematically illogical when it comes to choosing which preposition to use. (Like how my native Norwegian uses "_i_ huset" for "in the house", but "_på_ kontoret" for "in the office").
[1] "Grammar" is no more the inflection system (like the infamous "amo/amos/amat" of latin) than traffic lights are the whole book of traffic rules. Grammar is the rulebook of which words go where in a sentence, what and how much to leave to context, if and when to use cases, inflections, prefixes and suffixes, etc. Saying a language has "no grammar" because it uses word order instead of inflections, is like saying a city has "no traffic rules" just because it uses roundabouts instead of traffic lights.