Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2020I have a casual interest in China and the Chinese language. I've spent nine months China in four separate trips in the past five years. I was based in Chengdu or Chongqing and I traveled thousands of miles by train to visit other parts of China, mostly in the west and south. Written Chinese has always interested me. When I began to read this book, I was at first somewhat disappointed as Prof. DeFrancis concentrates on the interaction of the spoken language and the writing, mostly focussed on the spoken language. I didn't give up. Then, as I read some more, although the matter is dead obvious, I began to get the point. Language is spoken language. I'm 75 years old and I had not yet come to realize this fundamental fact. I've even spoken and read two languages my entire life. Humankind has been speaking a language of some sort for maybe 200,000 years. Writing of any sort is about 5000 years old, and widespread writing is less than 500 years old, maybe only 200 years or so. Prof DeFrancis's theme in this book is that writing is not language, but rather an attempt to represent language, that is, the spoken language. As I read the book, I learned that the Chinese characters may be close to something phonetic, maybe as phonetic as written English (!). Many characters contain a more common sub-character on the right that has the same sound as the whole character. This gives the reader a chance to guess (!) at the pronunciation of the whole character so that maybe a meaning can be heard, provided that the reader knows the sound of that right-hand sub-character. The reader must know the character; there is no way to try sounding out the word, as there is in true alphabetic writing. I've learned a number of characters and I've wondered how the Chinese people remember all those many thousands of characters in present use. I found the answer in this book. They don't. Remembering those thousands of characters requires constant use and exposure. Attempts were made in the 1950s, after the end of the civil war, to make the Chinese people literate. (Probably less than 5% of the population was then competent in reading and writing the characters.) The Chinese government figured out rapidly that learning and retaining the characters then in use was (and is) too much work for the average Chinese person who is busy making a living. The people in charge led a movement to simplify the characters in common use. This did not solve the problem. Reducing a 12-stroke character to 4 strokes does not make memorizing and retaining much easier. The fundamental problem of learning many thousands of characters has not been made significantly easier. A solution to the problem was developed at about the same time as the simplification of the characters. This was the development of an alphabetic system known as Pinyin. This system even has room for describing the tone of the vowels. The tones are absolutely essential for understanding spoken Chinese. (For some reason, the Chinese describe their common language - "Putonghua" - as having four tones. It actually has five, the fifth being the neutral tone. Since it's neutral it has "no tone," so "no" equals zero, and 0 + 4 = 4. Strange.) Unfortunately the powers that be decided that it's a shame to leave behind a 5000 year tradition of writing, so the simplified characters were pushed much harder than Pinyin. Pinyin was (is?) only taught in the first grade. Starting in the second grade, the arduous task of learning characters began and begins. The second graders forget their Pinyin. Any writing system must be constantly exercised in order to be retained. If the Chinese really want a literate population, they will have to drop the characters. Only the idle rich and those who write for a living have the time to maintain their competence in using characters. Pinyin has the capability to represent the sounds of spoken Chinese in an unambiguous way. The characters are a complete mystery if one doesn't know the sound. Pinyin reduces the problem of writing the Chinese language into learning about 26 letters and four applied marks over vowels to indicate a sound. Contrast that to learning 10,000 or more random squiggles and their sounds. (There is an illusion among non-Chinese that the characters are pictographs that are fundamentally readable if one knows the pictures. This is true for only a relative handful (200?). The other thousands are just squiggles on paper, all of which must be memorized to be useful, an impossible task unless all one has to do all day is to memorize and write characters. Until I read this book, I was one of those non-Chinese with this completely wrong idea.)
