It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them.
Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status.
They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, creating lots of problems to the people on top. Before printing it took three years of a worker salary to copy a book.
The same process happened in Korea and Japan, with equivalent systems to alphabetic, the difference is that in China elites won, because it was central planned. It was not easy though, specially at first it faced very strong opposition in these small countries.
"as though Europe had thrown away Latin and decided to enforce French across the continent."
That is exactly what happened with Napoleon. Then the fashion language to speak became German, then after WWII it was English, because of the Americans new world hegemony.
Language is powerful in China. Wars were fought in China to unify culture. For example, the Chinese language in modern vernacular is generally not referred as a language in itself but referred as zhongwen, or "Chinese culture." The first emperor to unify China realized how important for maintaining power it was to have the people using a single common language (just as it were with the Roman Empire, compared to after its fall).
The Qin dynasty despite its short reign laid the cultural foundations for generations of China (including and up to now). Before that, China was a collection of several warring states with their own written languages that the Qin dynasty immediately abolished. It allowed them to centralize administration of standards and take power from local lords to the central bureaucracy.
What is happening in Hong Kong is a power play by the mainland authorities, just as it was in many instances in mainland history starting from the first emperor.
My mother's family was from southern China, and relocated to Taiwan when the Communists won, my maternal grandparents' family having worked in the Kuomintang government. While my grandparents' native tongue was Cantonese, the only language my mother knows from her years in Taiwan is Mandarin (the Taiwan authorities had a strict prohibition on non-mandarin Chinese dialects).
Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. If you can see the Chinese characters at all as this is displayed on your screen, you should easily be able to see that many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Well that example is rather radical. As long as you know (or can guess) traditional characters you can read a HK newspaper just fine with a stutter here and there.
This is only partially related, but I remember watching the news in the nineties and being dumbstruck on how Académie française policed the usage of language in public life. It was probably about use of Anglicisms in television or by politicians.
I forgot about it for years until I learned from Wikipedia that that wasn't just a reaaction against Internet, but a policy that has been going on for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
So the mandarinisation doesn't seem that odd against such a background. The similar effort bore fruit in France as I think now virtually all people in France speak Parisian French compared to 12% or so at the advent of French Revolution and the following policies.
I learned about the Académie Française in French class (1990 or so). I thought they were guarding against anglicisms creeping in through teen slang -- "c'est too much" and that.
David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics.
Case in point:
Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan's literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic.
In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the "complex" traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don't hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are.
As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.
All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language's written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate.
So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it.
Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it's just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It's the people who forces down a way to use it that's rigid.
I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin.
That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.
//As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.//
The reason for lower literacy rates in India may not anything to do with how complex their scripts are. Elites just passed on their Sanskrit scriptures orally among themselves to exclude others from learning them. Their laws also denied education to the working class. In modern times, many children just can't go to school for many reasons. There are no schools accessible or affordable, they may need to fetch firewood, water, may need to take care of cattle, family members, and so on. (My mom curse their parents to this day, because they stopped her school in her 4th grade, to take care of her baby sister). In south India, there are free meal schemes for school children to alleviate these problems to some extent.
The above post repeats some widely believed but inaccurate statements about literacy in Japan. The frequently mentioned 9x% literacy rate is a myth. In the premodern period, it was much less than 1% of the population. In 1948, the rate of full literacy was reported to be 6.2% of the population. In 1955, a literacy census reported that functional illiteracy ran at 60% of the adult population. See Rubinger[1] for the premodern period and Unger[2] for post-WW2. Unger also maintains a bibliography on Japanese literate on his web site.[3]
[1] Richard Rubinger. 2007. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan.
[2] J. Marchall Unger. 1996. Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan.
In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.
Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters.
> gaining so much regional identity and independence that they want to do a Brexit of their own.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they've wanted their own Brexit from day 1. At least Hong Kong does, and even Taiwan probably too. Especially Taiwan. I feel sorry for Taiwan, watching stuff like this (http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong-kong-student-begs-for...) from Hong Kong and knowing that's a real possibility for them. At least the pro-China people in Taiwan (yes, they exist) will have to reevaluate their opinions after seeing how China has handled the Hong Kong return...
At least in Hong Kong, "new" characters for spoken Cantonese are often derived from existing Chinese characters that sound similar, despite those characters having a completely different meaning. Wikipedia has a fascinating entry [1] with many examples of this.
> But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority
It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic.
Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languages, but which are intermingled here in this article.
Weird. On Firefox, with ad-blocker and PrivacyBadger disabled, I am stuck on a page with only navigation menus and a title that reads 'Explicit cookie consent'.
In Chrome I get the expected I-agree-to-your-cookies consent form.
"the use of a standard language is undeniably helpful in educating the poorest and helping them engage with broader development trends in the country and across the world."
This is what the powerful say every time they're trying to forcibly strip a community of its language and culture. But is it even remotely true? The major varieties of Chinese have as many speakers as major European nations. Is it really to be believed that local varieties of Chinese or minority languages can have no recognition in school?
Hokkien Taiwanese is no longer particularly prominent in Taiwan, let alone the Taiwanese kana (according to that link they're not even all in Unicode).
There are some complications when Chinese characters are used to write non-Chinese languages, but in general Chinese characters correspond to sounds (one character per syllable). You might like this article, "The Ideographic Myth". http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
> It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for a writer to distinguish dialog spoken by a country bumpkin vs a sophisticated urbanite or between a ruler and a peasant because they have a different set of vocab and there are Chinese characters for most of the vocab that the different speakers will use.
Can you elaborate, because I don't understand what you mean. Is it because you think they're ideographs that have no corresponding phonemes? They do. Every character is a syllable complete with a tone.
Other responses have shown why characters do the job just fine, and they're not wrong, but there's something to be said for phonetic literature, which is why there is Pinyin Literature contest [0]. See [1] for some more explanation.
At least in Mandarin, given enough context, each Chinese character has one correct pronunciation. It's frequently the "context" that trips up non-native speakers.
Generally representing dialog is not a problem. In the case that they want to represent a word/sound that does not have a character assigned to it there are a number of strategies to deal with it: romanization (pinyin), zhuyin fuhao (phonetic notation), non-standard character or pick a character with similar meaning or sound. Generally context is sufficient for native speakers to figure out what they are trying to convey.
"It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice."
Isn't this true for any general writing system? The textual recording of one's speech is always lossy. That's why the writers, when they deem it to be important enough, add descriptions here and there about the speaker, to capture all kind of verbal or non verbal details.
>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state.
The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.
> They do not accept a canon of unchanging characters handed down from antiquity. They want to make up new ones and use Roman letters
I've never heard such claims. Why do we need to make up new characters when there are more strange characters than necessary? Even the youngest can enjoy the so called Martian language[1] (the Chinese version of the leetspeak) with valid Chinese characters. And you can actually make up new characters by writing components as individual characters, and the outcome is just a larger and funnier character.
As for wishing for a Roman alphabet... I think it's more of a fancy of those already using such an alphabet. If you grow up seeing Chinese characters everywhere but Roman letters not so often if ever, the characters will be a habit. Also, pinyin may not be very easy for many parts of the country, as the inhabitants will have difficulty in making the precise pronunciation. Their words can be easily understood, but it will be a hard time for them to pin down the correct pinyin. To input characters, the input method is very forgiving, allowing missing or redundant g's in ng or h's in sh, ch and zh. Some people even need to guess between r and l, h and f. Characters are a much better, semantic way of communication.
What does it even mean? We are all "prisoners" of our language, because we can't easily think and express anything that cannot be molded in this language. But Chinese characters may actually give more "freedom" to their users, in that they convey directly their meaning, without the necessity of a sound. See 凹 and 凸, they mean concave and convex. Avoiding the articulation over the pronounciation is a blessing in many respects. It allows more people from distant cultures to converge with the writen language, and share much more.
Except that's not what "concave" and "convex" look like.
It also means that you need to agree with everyone, what the meaning of every symbol is. For instance symbol of "convex" you give, might also be a street intersection, so you can't really just rely on the shape of a character, and you need to spend many years memorizing each one of them. If you look at reality, your assertion that
> people from distant cultures [...] converge with the writen language
is really not true. Chinese writing systems aren't universal in a way that makes them easy to pick up to express yourself in. Quite the contrary.
Only a tiny minority of Chinese characters are pictographic, and most characters have a phonetic element. You'll have a better chance guessing the pronunciation of a random Chinese character than guessing the meaning of a random Chinese character.
[+] [-] pipio21|9 years ago|reply
Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status.
They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, creating lots of problems to the people on top. Before printing it took three years of a worker salary to copy a book.
The same process happened in Korea and Japan, with equivalent systems to alphabetic, the difference is that in China elites won, because it was central planned. It was not easy though, specially at first it faced very strong opposition in these small countries.
"as though Europe had thrown away Latin and decided to enforce French across the continent."
That is exactly what happened with Napoleon. Then the fashion language to speak became German, then after WWII it was English, because of the Americans new world hegemony.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
Signs use the same principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.
[+] [-] wyuenho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonjei|9 years ago|reply
The Qin dynasty despite its short reign laid the cultural foundations for generations of China (including and up to now). Before that, China was a collection of several warring states with their own written languages that the Qin dynasty immediately abolished. It allowed them to centralize administration of standards and take power from local lords to the central bureaucracy.
What is happening in Hong Kong is a power play by the mainland authorities, just as it was in many instances in mainland history starting from the first emperor.
My mother's family was from southern China, and relocated to Taiwan when the Communists won, my maternal grandparents' family having worked in the Kuomintang government. While my grandparents' native tongue was Cantonese, the only language my mother knows from her years in Taiwan is Mandarin (the Taiwan authorities had a strict prohibition on non-mandarin Chinese dialects).
[+] [-] tokenadult|9 years ago|reply
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. If you can see the Chinese characters at all as this is displayed on your screen, you should easily be able to see that many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
[+] [-] auganov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dak1|9 years ago|reply
Does he know how to speak Taiwanese?
他會曉講台語無?
No, he doesn't.
他毋會。
The above is actually somewhat close to the Mandarin version, although many other phrases can vary much more significantly.
[+] [-] Immortalin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est|9 years ago|reply
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D....
In your example:
> 第一及第二人稱用「我」、「你」，與官話相同，但粵語音「我」（ngo5）更保留了中古漢語唐音（*ngɑ̌ ）之疑母（ng-）。第三人稱不用「他」，而是「渠」（俗寫「佢」；東漢《孔雀東南飛》：「雖與府吏要，渠會永無緣」），跟吳語一樣。複數人稱不用「們」，而是上溯至端系的同源形式 [taʔ] 或 [ti]（現代粵語寫作「哋」，本字為「等」，見聖公會的公禱書）。粵語用「係」而不用「是」來代表正面答覆，「係」是明清兩代常用字。這些字眼在中共接管政權初期，仍然有作書面語用，例如李儼《中算史論叢》第一冊 (1955年版本，第210頁) 提及18世紀數學家 Issac Wolfram 時，就寫為「渠係荷蘭礮隊副隊長」。
TL:DR Cantonese is Middle Age "Mandarin" in disguise, plus some Ancient Vietnamese dialects.
[+] [-] eonwe|9 years ago|reply
I forgot about it for years until I learned from Wikipedia that that wasn't just a reaaction against Internet, but a policy that has been going on for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
So the mandarinisation doesn't seem that odd against such a background. The similar effort bore fruit in France as I think now virtually all people in France speak Parisian French compared to 12% or so at the advent of French Revolution and the following policies.
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyuenho|9 years ago|reply
Case in point:
Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan's literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic.
In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the "complex" traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don't hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are.
As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.
All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language's written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate.
So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it.
Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it's just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It's the people who forces down a way to use it that's rigid.
[+] [-] jbooth|9 years ago|reply
That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.
[+] [-] pramalin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrp|9 years ago|reply
[1] Richard Rubinger. 2007. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan.
[2] J. Marchall Unger. 1996. Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan.
[3] https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-...
[+] [-] cheatdeath|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjdavis|9 years ago|reply
Links for those unfamiliar with those two things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
[+] [-] mahranch|9 years ago|reply
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they've wanted their own Brexit from day 1. At least Hong Kong does, and even Taiwan probably too. Especially Taiwan. I feel sorry for Taiwan, watching stuff like this (http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong-kong-student-begs-for...) from Hong Kong and knowing that's a real possibility for them. At least the pro-China people in Taiwan (yes, they exist) will have to reevaluate their opinions after seeing how China has handled the Hong Kong return...
[+] [-] kiwidrew|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_ch...
[+] [-] legulere|9 years ago|reply
It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic. Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languages, but which are intermingled here in this article.
[+] [-] jacobolus|9 years ago|reply
That doesn’t mean they aren’t distinct languages (and not mere “dialects”) by any definition a modern linguist would typically use.
Calling them “dialects” would be similar to calling English, German, and Dutch “dialects” of “Germanic”.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|9 years ago|reply
To me, any non-mutually-intelligible dialect is in position to be called a language.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|9 years ago|reply
In Chrome I get the expected I-agree-to-your-cookies consent form.
Anyone else getting this?
[+] [-] seszett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panglott|9 years ago|reply
This is what the powerful say every time they're trying to forcibly strip a community of its language and culture. But is it even remotely true? The major varieties of Chinese have as many speakers as major European nations. Is it really to be believed that local varieties of Chinese or minority languages can have no recognition in school?
[+] [-] peteretep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeCaN|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin is more relevant, as it's still moderately widely used today in Taiwan.
[+] [-] ianbicking|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vilhelm_s|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imron|9 years ago|reply
You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for a writer to distinguish dialog spoken by a country bumpkin vs a sophisticated urbanite or between a ruler and a peasant because they have a different set of vocab and there are Chinese characters for most of the vocab that the different speakers will use.
[+] [-] jonathankoren|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taejo|9 years ago|reply
[0]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26503
[1]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26546
[+] [-] zhoutong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchaver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] restalis|9 years ago|reply
Isn't this true for any general writing system? The textual recording of one's speech is always lossy. That's why the writers, when they deem it to be important enough, add descriptions here and there about the speaker, to capture all kind of verbal or non verbal details.
[+] [-] allemagne|9 years ago|reply
The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.
[+] [-] echaozh|9 years ago|reply
I've never heard such claims. Why do we need to make up new characters when there are more strange characters than necessary? Even the youngest can enjoy the so called Martian language[1] (the Chinese version of the leetspeak) with valid Chinese characters. And you can actually make up new characters by writing components as individual characters, and the outcome is just a larger and funnier character.
As for wishing for a Roman alphabet... I think it's more of a fancy of those already using such an alphabet. If you grow up seeing Chinese characters everywhere but Roman letters not so often if ever, the characters will be a habit. Also, pinyin may not be very easy for many parts of the country, as the inhabitants will have difficulty in making the precise pronunciation. Their words can be easily understood, but it will be a hard time for them to pin down the correct pinyin. To input characters, the input method is very forgiving, allowing missing or redundant g's in ng or h's in sh, ch and zh. Some people even need to guess between r and l, h and f. Characters are a much better, semantic way of communication.
[+] [-] Noseshine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|9 years ago|reply
What does it even mean? We are all "prisoners" of our language, because we can't easily think and express anything that cannot be molded in this language. But Chinese characters may actually give more "freedom" to their users, in that they convey directly their meaning, without the necessity of a sound. See 凹 and 凸, they mean concave and convex. Avoiding the articulation over the pronounciation is a blessing in many respects. It allows more people from distant cultures to converge with the writen language, and share much more.
[+] [-] yoo1I|9 years ago|reply
It also means that you need to agree with everyone, what the meaning of every symbol is. For instance symbol of "convex" you give, might also be a street intersection, so you can't really just rely on the shape of a character, and you need to spend many years memorizing each one of them. If you look at reality, your assertion that
> people from distant cultures [...] converge with the writen language
is really not true. Chinese writing systems aren't universal in a way that makes them easy to pick up to express yourself in. Quite the contrary.
[+] [-] Chathamization|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralfd|9 years ago|reply