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Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
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Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy Customer Reviews
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Dispelling the myths
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Most of us, ranging from outsiders with no specialist knowledge of Chinese to scholars fully conversant with both the classical and colloquial language in various regional variants, tend to believe at least some of a whole series of myths about the language and in particular about its writing system: that it is composed of monosyllabic words; that its writing system is based on ideographs; that characters represent only meanings, not sounds; that regardless of great differences in their spoken Chinese all literate people can fully understand one another in writing; that even speakers of very different languages like Japanese or Korean can communicate in writing with little difficulty; that Chinese writing is not only indispensable for writing Chinese, but could usefully be extended to Western languages; that the difficulty of learning to read Chinese is belied by the success of literacy programmes in modern China.
In this entertaining and scholarly book John DeFrancis sets out to dispel all of these and other myths, and argues convincingly that they are in some cases totally false and in others largely false. Cantonese and Mandarin grammar and word order, for example, are sufficiently different to make it difficult for an untrained person literate in one to read the other. As for people literate in Japanese, the fact that they can recognize some words is far short of being able to read Chinese. An English reader can recognize a "2" in a piece of text in Finnish and know what it means, but that is not at all the same as being able to read Finnish. DeFrancis argues that the difference is only a matter of degree in comparing Chinese and Japanese -- the number of recognizable characters may be more than in a comparison between two unrelated Western languages, but it is not nearly enough for mutual comprehension. It is even worse in the other direction, because Japanese relies on inflections that are not written in Chinese characters, as well as important matters such as the word "not".
The supposed lack of phonetic elements in Chinese writing can be disproved by the use of sentences written entirely in characters that are wrong for the meaning but correct, exactly or approximately, for the sound are read with hardly more difficulty than a person literate in English would have with a sentence such as "eye sea ewe"; the converse experiment of supplying a sentence in the form of a series of dictionary meanings for the correct characters results in total unintelligibility.
DeFrancis deals with his other myths in the same sort of way, concluding that Chinese writing is by no means well suited to its purpose and that general literacy will only become a realistic objective when an alphabetic system of writing is adopted. For many reasons this is uncongenial conclusion for many people, but the argument appears overwhelming. However, people who want to keep their romantic beliefs about the nature of Chinese writing will be wise to stay away from this book. |
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