December 29, 2011

  • What is the Chinese language?

    Recently, in the Economist, the Blog Johnson put forth a message that has netted over 1450 comments on the above topic.

    http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/12/chinese

    There is no way I'm going to even try to summarize the entire discourse - and I'm not even going to read the entire discussion, for that matter.  A good deal of the arguments boil down to, can you get rid of Hanzi (the characters) and use a pure phonetic system to capture the language?  Many would advocate using pinyin (or Zhuyin) to teach pronunciation - and why not go further, simply write everything in a phonetic form.

    Justification?  Easier to use, less memorization, more standardized.  Makes a possible lingua franca, exportable to other cultures easily.  After all, spoken language is the root of written language.

    What are the problems with this?

    I think a fundamental problem with most western language users analyzing Chinese and other sinitic writing systems is that they assume that written language is for capturing sound.  Given that most western languages are now either Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, or even sanskrit based, it makes some sense.  But the reality is that written Chinese might as well be a separate language from spoken chinese - and it's origins different as well.

    In the west, most words aren't symbols, they're descriptors of sound.  Sometimes, like emoticons, they become symbols, and interestingly, when you "read" a picture, you can say what it is, "smiley" for instance, but the picture doesn't need to be pronounced for you to know what it is.  I think that's the biggest difference between Hanzi, hanja, kanji based writing and western - the visual and symbolic elements create a pseudo pictorial element in the mode of communication that is less evident/prominent in alphabetic systems.

    ONe of the assertions was that Chinese read Hanzi faster than pinyin - and I think the above concept is related/causative.

    Another reaction to the debate:

    Chinese writing can be reduced to a phonetic.

    Not really possible - which phonetic?  Should the phonetic be Northern, Central, Southern, Mandarin, Canto, Shanghainese, Hakka, Minnan?  The phonetics are all different for the same character.  Which do you pick?

    Strangely, Hanzi has evolved to a system where two people can communicate with the characters without knowing how to pronounce them in the other's language.  I've seen situations where Japanese and PRC or TW persons can exchange ideas without spoken words via writing characters.  I find this absolutely amazing.  This isn't a characteristic present in a phonetic language.  You either understand the language by sound, or not.  I've certainly read words I can't pronounce, but know what they mean.

    Lastly, poetry and writing in Chinese have a level of visual beauty that's hard to describe in western language.  There are visual elements to characters that can be played with for instance: 請,語,詩- all have the same root on the left.  It creates a visual harmony/resonance - as well as meaning resonance.  In english, you can use assonance or alliteration, or you can duplicate a morpheme (pseudonym, pseudopod, etc), but it's the same morpheme with the same pronunciation in the first part of the word - they're locked.  On the other hand, in chinese, you can use discordant sounds with visual similarity, and vice versa.  Additionally, because of the monosyllabic relationships characters have, syllabic schema are naturally bounded by the cadence of the language - often in 2 word pairs.

    Creating dense poems with 16 characters is possible, one could also do that with internal visual play using character elements and so forth.

    All this goes away with a pure phonetic system.

    I'd rather keep the written language the way it is... and enjoy the fact that there is such discordance in the pronunciation.