Culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. In elementary school, we learned that 文化是血統,語言,宗教,和生活習慣的綜合体. Here language plays an important part. Why are there so many dialects in China? Because there are many mountains & rivers that tend to isolate people from contacting each other. When time goes by, each region develops its own language. Language also shapes the way you think, you behave & forges a set of values in daily life. Minority people in China usually live in a remote or isolate area. When time goes by, it develops its own language. Say it in a reverse way, if you want to separate people, let them speak different kind of languages & soon they will drift apart. Babel towers in ancient Babylon is an excellent example.Whenever I visit Taiwan, I hang around book stores & end up buying a lot of books. When I visit mainland China, I also go to bookstores. The BookCity in Shanghai (福州路), seven-story building, filled with thousands of books. I spent a lot of time inside but I didn't buy anything. I try to explain my behavior. I found that I didn't have any incentive or interest to buy them. The main reason is that the printed words look so alien to me & sometime they look even worse than Japanese. Either 白字連連 or 錯字連篇. The culprit is the simplified characters. If I have to read the translated "Pride & Prejudice" in simplified characters, I rather read it in English directly. 文章帶感情, 文字亦然. There are two camps when it comes to writing, Traditional & Simplified. The former is called 简体字, the latter has several names: 正体字, 原体字, 傳統字, 繁体字 etc. I have no idea why some people go along with 繁体字. It is derogatory, misleading & bad. How could it be so complicate for several hundred years & people don’t feel it. I think the English translation says it better, Traditional or 傳統字. Our ancestors used traditional writing for so long & also used brush pen (毛筆). They didn't have any complains. They simply grew with it. Nowadays we don't use brush pens & we write without any problems in schools. As a matter of fact, with the help of computer technology, the input of Chinese characters is via keyboard (most kids do) & bypass the handwriting. The side effect of this is that we are having a new generation of people that can only read but can not write. In other words, people can't write without a computer. It is scary if you can't count or calculate without a calculator.
In fact, 傳統字 already has a set of characters simplified & should be adopted & included in 簡体字. The current 簡体字 is way over the reasonable limit. It is a bad idea to get rid of 同音字. We already have a lot of confusion in speech. We should use the writing to reduce it instead of aggravating it. For example, most people seem to agree in keeping 後 & 遊.
If Chinese people have the wisdom, they should sit down & really think hard for the issue of the character writing. This is important & it will have enormous influence to the future generations. Both camps should recognize the pros & cons of 簡体字 & 傳統字. Just sit down & iron out a compromise version of writing, called it 進化字. Without it, we will see Chinese people drift apart when time goes by. In fact, it already causes a lot of confusion outside China as to which is the right way to teach our kids Mandarin.
8 comments:
Indeed, the simplified Chinese has caused a great deal of annoyance to the majority of people in Taiwan. But with the need to communicate with mainland Chinese, especially commerce wise, people in Taiwan seem to be getting used to it. Is the traditional Chinese going to go away? This is too big a question for me. Personally, I don't see any need to learn the simplified Chinese myself; because I think in my life time, I can always get anything I may need in Chinese from Taiwan. Really, so far, I have not seen any evidence that literature written in simplified Chinese amounts to much value, so why bother.
The current leadership in China is in about the same generation as ours, which in China is about the last generation with similar education like ours. The next generation of the leadership in China is worrisome though. That is a generaion without much intellecture and moral education due to the cultural revolution. I have heard so much from visitors to China about how morally corrupt the general Chinese population are; other than money, nothing is worh a damn. The generation after the next is much better. I have met quite a few of them here who are eager to learn and do have respect for others.
Oh, well, this is getting a bit editorial. And like most editors, I am not one with the courage myself.
Wei may be right in saying that he can get anything he may need in Chinese from Taiwan. Here I just look at the whole thing from the top. It is simply not wise to not unite the language writing unless Chinese want to divide themselves into several different cultures or countries. In our lifetime, we may not see a big problem. But when time goes by, people will drift apart like people in Europe. Eventually, Germans don’t read French & French don’t understand German script. It is just sad to see Chinese people don’t have the far sight to work on something constructive on something so important like language & writing. For example, we seldom run across a good Chinese dictionary. You either don’t know how to start or you find the word & don’t know how to pronounce. Remember 反 切 音? 二: 耳 肄 切. 五: 吳 魯 切. It is like a joke. You look up 冬: 音 東. Now you look up 東: 音 冬. Is it Tautology? What happen if you don’t know both? No wonder so few Chinese people use Chinese dictionary. I also think 注音符号 is a very good system & used extensively in Taiwan for so many years. I was surprised to find out that people in China never heard of it. In communication, we are not in the same page or same wavelength. It is tragic.
A nudge from Mark Lin has substantially pared my hesitation to divulge my thoughts and feelings on this subject of Chinese language.
Everytime I thought about the issues regarding the our national language along with its many regional derivatives, I always ended up throwing up my hands in frustration. Maybe that's because I don't have a deep understanding of the whole spectrum of various aspects of our language. I thought about it from the perspectives of history, geography, culture, etc.. Though that's not much to speak of, I can't deny the good times I had pondering them. Take it as a non-expert mumbling, I will make a few separate comments to discuss my thoughts since I can't say it in one comment or in less than 30 minutes of typing. And dear classmates, I would love to see your thoughts also.
I think the key question is whether this world needs more than one language. I agree with you two that Language is part of a person, or tribe, or nation's pride. Thus, most politicians would like to keep a particular language that helps him to grab political power.
If we agree that language is for communication, or for self-expression of emotion, then I think almost all the major languages can do it, be it English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, French, German, or Russian. My children are good in English, bad in Chinese, but I do not feel that they have any deficiency in lacking the ability to enjoy poems, although I think Chinese poems are much more suited for human emotion.
To have so many languages is a waste of energy. Worse, they causes miscommunication and conflicts. It is the same as having so many religions. Most major religions can serve the need of a religious mind. One in this world is enough. Why there are so many? Becuase the religious clerks use religion to grab power. For them it is better to advocate his own religion and despise others.
The major handicap of Chinese is that it it not compatible with computer system. I have worked in Taiwan universities for many years. Most professors of our generation cannot type Chinese input better than I. Yes, some of the young faculty can do better, but they prefer using English. This is also true for professors from mainland China.
A natural input system for language must be from its sound. That how language was generated, by talking. There are so many Chinese words with the same sound that you just cannot keep typing without stopping to look at the word list. It is a pain.
Go back to the original discussion on simplified characters. I have no problem reading them. You were right that there was almost nothing the mainland Chinese books could offer from knowledge viewpoint. But this was the past. When I look at recent books on the web, mainland writers are doing excellent jobs. For example, 剎那櫻花, Mark you have read it. I have not seen any books published in Taiwan that give such a vivid description of the Japanese.
About the simplified Chinese, the following web page has a decent synopsis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_character
According to this summary, the second part of the simplification process was left unfinished. Meaning a lot of characters were left unsimplified. It also indicated that there are people who doublt the merit of this simplification effort. All in all, it appeared that China did not get the best and brightest linguistic scholars to participate in this effort. My guess is that many of the people in power were not so literary, and the real literati were being persecuted. So you got a bunch of half way smart people dictate what the future Chinese should be.
I agree that some characters can be simplified in its strokes without losing anything except appearance. But a character must not be eliminated just because its similarity in meaning or pronunciation to other simpler character; for each character has its own unique representation or expression. For instance, two characters may mean the same thing in most occurances, but they always have differences when used in some specific ways. Without eliminating characters, most confusions we experienced will not exist. A good Chinese dictionary should include newly simplified characters without taking out any old exsisting ones. So, people are free to use simplified characters if they choose to. This way, we won't lose any of our literary treasures.
In this computer age, I don't see simplification of Chinese character would help in the input of Chinese data. Instead of a conventional keyboard, a pen writing tablet that many of you have been using may be a better input device if its intelligence can be improved (I am sure it can be done with today's processor speed and vast amount of on-chip memory - it's easy for a retired guy to say).
Our language is wonderful, but we are handicapped in this computerized civilization just like any other language not built upon alphabets. Too bad that we did not invent computer first. Just how good is our language? Look at Japanese or Korean, whenever they want to express deeper or more sofisticated emotion or thoughts, they would choose to use Chinese letters.
The issue of Taiwan vs. China in using traditional vs. simplified Chinese is highly political. As long as the two sides would not tolerate each other, there would not be a uniformed use of a standard Chinese. Ideally, it should be like English. There might be slight differences in pronunciation among the British, American, Canadian and Australian, but basically English is English, same dictionary can be used by all. For Chinese to reach such uniformity, the mainlanders should listen and work with the Chinese language experts in Taiwan.
It is well said of the comment from Markyang & Wei. Basically we don’t disagree among ourselves. The main point is that without a common writing of language is divisive for people in a country. The two living examples are India & Singapore. Throughout the history, Indian has many groups of people using different language writings. They were not united most of the time. They fought among themselves & were conquered by Mongols, Moslems & British. However, it was a fortune in disguise when British drove out French & controlled the whole Indian subcontinent in 1759. In order to move things effectively, British imposed English as the common language in the subcontinent. After Indian gained independence after WWII, they wisely adopted English as the national language. That is the turning point of the Indian history & leads to the current software industry. Without a comment language, Indian will forever be a divided country. Without a language like English, Indian will not emerge as a world power so soon. It is fortunate for British & western world, since it guarantees that India will lean toward the west instead of China due to the language similarity. Singapore gained independence from Malaysia in 1965. It was divided at that time due to several groups of people with different language writings. Eventually they wisely chose English as the common & official language. Now Singapore is in good shape to join the world community & becomes a regional world power in itself. I mentioned similar approach sometime ago for China. India & China are similar historically. If India can adopt English without losing their soul & culture, why China can’t do the same? I know this is not a popular topic & almost not practical to do, at least it is something to ponder. For example, during two world wars, the English speaking nations were united against German or Axis. If the earth are occupied by the people speaking the same kind of language, perhaps it will reduce the frequency of conflicts & so it has a higher probability of survival in the universe.
One single language for all of mankind to communicate directly is certainly good. But to have just one religion for all would be quite impossible. Yes, there are cases where people change their religious belief for reasons of identity, marriage, inheritance, etc. But for large scale religious change, it would likely trigger large scale war if the people involved already have their own religious affiliation, such as between Romans and Arabians. It is a different story between Indians and Chinese, as Chinese didn't have their own religion, so Buddhism was adopted easily by Chinese. Even in India, the conflict between Hinduism and Buddhism was like civil wars.
We didn't get to where we are without thousands of years of various cultural developments that oringinated from separate corners of the world. Today, without forcing it, we are actually seeing some movements to use English as a common language. A close to home example is Cantonese:Mandarin:Taiwanese. If people in Hong Kong want to directly communicate with people in Taiwan, they had better learn Mandarin.
Back to the simplified Chinese discussion. In the wikipedia article, it mentioned that the purpose to simplify the Charaters was to spread nationwide education and make it easier to learn. I don't think that approach would work. From what I have witnessed growing up in the small town of Puli, people didn't send their kids to grade school becasue they could not afford it. If you provide people with food and shelter, they would be happy to send their kids to school. Furthermore, I don't believe making character simpler would make it easier to learn; it just makes writing a little easier which has little to do with enriching the small young minds.
About the pronunciation of Chinese. First I have to make a disclaimer that I don’t speak accurate Mandarin; my Mandarin pronunciation is heavily accented with Taiwanese. Also, I am not a linguist.
Let’s agree that Mandarin is the Chinese common language; forget the historical and political disputes as to what is the truest Chinese language.
Mark Lin mentioned the pronunciation methods in our old dictionaries, such as Kan-Si dictionary. In this fashion, one needs to know the pronunciation of some basic characters as the rest of all other characters are pronounced based upon this basic set. There was a set of these basic characters whose pronunciation was taught to student early on so that the student can use the dictionary. Now depending on how these basic characters were pronounced, the whole language pronunciation may differ. For example, “heaven and earth”, in both the Mandarin and Taiwanese pronunciations, “heaven” is the same, while “earth” is quite different; but they are all according to the same dictionary. Cantonese is no exception. The problem of this method was well spoken of by Mark Lin. We had a set of basic characters at home when I was small, but I suspect it was incomplete; because I did run into problems myself in using Kan-Si dictionary.
I think the best set of Mandarin pronunciation keys is the one we learned in school, i.e. Bo, Po, Mo, Fo. (Here I agree with Mark Lin, again.) This is not a complicated set of key, and is much easier to learn its precise pronunciation. Of course all the teachers must teach the pronunciation of this set of keys exactly the same way (maybe by government certification); otherwise, our colorful regional languages will be back in play. I think we have to give credit to the people who came up with the “Tzu Yin Hu How”. Well, how did I come to speak Mandarin with such heavy Taiwanese accent? Growing up in Puli and went to Taichung First High School where we spoke mostly Taiwanese, what do you expect? Besides, ever since my good friend in middle school was punished by speaking Taiwanese at school, I have intentionally used my Taiwanese Bo Po Mo Fo.
A while back, I borrowed a book of ping-yin from a friend from China. After going through it, I told myself, what a mess. When I asked my friend how did China decided to use ABC in ping-yin, I was told that using ABC lets people get to know English earlier and better. Wow! That’s some national decision. As far as I am concerned, first, they are twisting the pronunciation of ABC with Chinese accent; no wonder their spoken English is in such sorry state. Second, using ABC for ping-yin does not teacher them any single word of English. So, my guess is that they didn’t want to use Bo Po Mo Fo because Taiwan is using it, and they cannot afford to do the same. How smart.
A poem written by Cantonese when read in Mandarin, it won’t feel quite right. And a poem written by Taiwanese when read in Mandarin will make you feel that way too. Now, take the Tang poems and read them in various regional Chinese languages, and see which regional Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc.) gives you the most harmony. This might reveal which regional Chinese has the least twist from the original. Hey, this might be a good topic for some advance degrees in graduate school.
The above mumbling is intended for you to have a laugh while you are having a cup of tea or coffee (H2O for Mark Yang) or a glass of wine. Don’t take it seriously.
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