The People's Republic of China is has announced they will make changes to Simplified Chinese characters to make them easier to understand. By making them more complicated.
Not so fast. Alphabets do offer considerable advantages. They're shockingly easy to learn and teach, comprehensible to foreigners, and compatible with technology. They also enforce linguistic homogeneity, which I'm sure had something to do with Mao's enthusiasm. I'll illustrate by comparison with "Arabic", which like "Chinese" is a political construct rather than a language. Politics aside, we'd talk about "the Chinese languages" and "the Arabic languages" the same way we talk about "the Romance languages" or "the Germanic languages", but historical, cultural, and political forces have shaped the idea of the unity of "Arabic" and "Chinese" as something distinct. Both cases exhibit diglossia, in which educated speakers function in both a standardized archaic form of the language (Modern Standard Arabic and Standard Mandarin) and their own native language. Modern Standard Arabic "works" precisely because it is fully artificial; it is nobody's native language. Spelling is standardized and predictable because "proper" pronunciation is universally recognized and strictly taught in school. Moreover, the fact that MSA is heavily modeled on Koranic Arabic gives it remarkable cultural authority. Arabs use their alphabet to write their dialects phonetically in comic books and text messages, but nobody's arguing this should expand beyond those uses. The usefulness of MSA is self-evident.
Chinese is a very different story simply because Mandarin is a first language for many Chinese. But while they might have a slight leg up on learning Standard Written Mandarin, speakers of other dialects aren't really disadvantaged. The logographic writing system works just as well for every different regional pronunciation as it does for the "standard" pronunciations. In a gross oversimplification, most of the world recognizes that 8 means 8, whether we call it eight, acht, ocho, huit, thamanya, or whatever. The logogram signifies a great diversity of spoken words, which you simply can't do with an alphabet. Switching to a phonological alphabet for Chinese would require designating a prestige dialect as the model, which would certainly be spoken Mandarin. Where would that leave the other languages? Do they come up with their own orthographies, precipitating the breakup of Chinese the way Medieval Latin broke into the Romance languages? Or do they continue to read the same Mandarin words and pronounce them in their own language, doing what they've always done just with the added confusion that the written language is expressly Mandarin?
If you haven't gathered already, I think that Chinese characters seem to work pretty well for writing Chinese. The technological difficulties quite evidently aren't insuperable. Even the education argument, that it's just too difficult to teach all those characters, doesn't seem well-supported. Literacy in Chinese doesn't seem to be any harder to achieve than anywhere else. Non-mainland Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Chinatowns worldwide certainly don't seem to have any particular trouble. I've also read good arguments that the logographic system has a much longer but far flatter and more forgiving learning curve than an alphabet, in which learning to read tends to involve a "Eureka!" moment that far too many people never reach. In every other case in history, logographic writing systems were replaced by alphabets within a few generations of exposure to the concept. The anomalous survival of Chinese suggests this is a writing system supremely well-suited to its language. As to the announced de-simplification: the characters have been simplified, standardized, de-simplificated, and recomplified for three millenia. I suspect they'll survive.
So, if all this talk about logograms and phonology has you thinking I might have some thoughts about the way we write and speak English, you'd be correct. But that's a topic for a whole 'nother post.
*This breaks down a bit when we're talking true logograms: the use of 8 in "have a gr8 day!" is only comprehensible to English speakers. Apparently Chinese does quite a lot of this sort of internal punning, so that dialect speakers do at least need familiarity with spoken Mandarin to fully parse the written language. An alphabet would still make the situation worse.
Some characters will have more strokes added and thus be brought closer to their earlier, more complicated forms. But officials insist the move does not mark the start of a campaign to scrap simplified characters. China, they say, need not move back toward the traditional forms, nor further along the path of simplification. It simply needs to “standardise” things.An expat, Jacob von Bisterfeld, argues in the Shanghai Daily News for Mao's linguistic goal, the alphabetization of Chinese. He raises a valid point: the switch to simplified characters has already relegated all pre-20th century texts solely to the purview of scholars and the elderly, so Chinese might as well become alphabetic.
Not so fast. Alphabets do offer considerable advantages. They're shockingly easy to learn and teach, comprehensible to foreigners, and compatible with technology. They also enforce linguistic homogeneity, which I'm sure had something to do with Mao's enthusiasm. I'll illustrate by comparison with "Arabic", which like "Chinese" is a political construct rather than a language. Politics aside, we'd talk about "the Chinese languages" and "the Arabic languages" the same way we talk about "the Romance languages" or "the Germanic languages", but historical, cultural, and political forces have shaped the idea of the unity of "Arabic" and "Chinese" as something distinct. Both cases exhibit diglossia, in which educated speakers function in both a standardized archaic form of the language (Modern Standard Arabic and Standard Mandarin) and their own native language. Modern Standard Arabic "works" precisely because it is fully artificial; it is nobody's native language. Spelling is standardized and predictable because "proper" pronunciation is universally recognized and strictly taught in school. Moreover, the fact that MSA is heavily modeled on Koranic Arabic gives it remarkable cultural authority. Arabs use their alphabet to write their dialects phonetically in comic books and text messages, but nobody's arguing this should expand beyond those uses. The usefulness of MSA is self-evident.
Chinese is a very different story simply because Mandarin is a first language for many Chinese. But while they might have a slight leg up on learning Standard Written Mandarin, speakers of other dialects aren't really disadvantaged. The logographic writing system works just as well for every different regional pronunciation as it does for the "standard" pronunciations. In a gross oversimplification, most of the world recognizes that 8 means 8, whether we call it eight, acht, ocho, huit, thamanya, or whatever. The logogram signifies a great diversity of spoken words, which you simply can't do with an alphabet. Switching to a phonological alphabet for Chinese would require designating a prestige dialect as the model, which would certainly be spoken Mandarin. Where would that leave the other languages? Do they come up with their own orthographies, precipitating the breakup of Chinese the way Medieval Latin broke into the Romance languages? Or do they continue to read the same Mandarin words and pronounce them in their own language, doing what they've always done just with the added confusion that the written language is expressly Mandarin?
If you haven't gathered already, I think that Chinese characters seem to work pretty well for writing Chinese. The technological difficulties quite evidently aren't insuperable. Even the education argument, that it's just too difficult to teach all those characters, doesn't seem well-supported. Literacy in Chinese doesn't seem to be any harder to achieve than anywhere else. Non-mainland Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Chinatowns worldwide certainly don't seem to have any particular trouble. I've also read good arguments that the logographic system has a much longer but far flatter and more forgiving learning curve than an alphabet, in which learning to read tends to involve a "Eureka!" moment that far too many people never reach. In every other case in history, logographic writing systems were replaced by alphabets within a few generations of exposure to the concept. The anomalous survival of Chinese suggests this is a writing system supremely well-suited to its language. As to the announced de-simplification: the characters have been simplified, standardized, de-simplificated, and recomplified for three millenia. I suspect they'll survive.
So, if all this talk about logograms and phonology has you thinking I might have some thoughts about the way we write and speak English, you'd be correct. But that's a topic for a whole 'nother post.
*This breaks down a bit when we're talking true logograms: the use of 8 in "have a gr8 day!" is only comprehensible to English speakers. Apparently Chinese does quite a lot of this sort of internal punning, so that dialect speakers do at least need familiarity with spoken Mandarin to fully parse the written language. An alphabet would still make the situation worse.
