10. Forrest, R.A.D.: The Chinese Language, Faber and Faber, 1965.

The neglect of Far Eastern languages, if it had remained a merely negative phenomenon would have been regrettable enough... But positive mischief has resulted.... and where accurate knowledge fails we get statement (in works from which we have the right to expect better things) which are misleading, when not definitely false...

Having read the views of "linguistic experts" on the last page you will not be surprised at Forrest's despair, in 1965, at the positive mischief which has resulted from the misleading and falls information presented in "works from which we have a right to expect better things." This complaint, as has been pointed out, can be made against writings about China in almost any field.

Most of the nonsense cited above was published in the last fifty years, some of it as late as 1985. Nearly two hundred years ago, voices like those of Lord Macartney were already expressing their doubts about their truth.

11. Macartney, George, Earl: An embassy to China, being a journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch'ien Lung (Qianlong) in 1793-1794, ed. and introduction by J.L. Cranmer-Byng, Longmans, 1962.

As to the great difficulty of learning Chinese.... I am persuaded that it is much exaggerated, for I have never heard it complained of by the Chinese themselves, and among them I observe that everybody, even the meanest people can write sufficiently well for their business and the common purpose of life. Sir George Staunton's son, a boy of twelve years old, during our passage from England learned, in a few broken lessons from a very cross Master and by his own attention, not only such a copia verborum and phraseology as enabled him to make himself understood, and to understand others when he arrived in China, but acquired such facility in writing the Chinese character, that he copied all our diplomatic papers for the Chinese Government (the Chinese writers being afraid of their hands being known) and in so neat and so expeditious a manner as to occasion great astonishment among them.

Sir John Davis, the first Governor of Hong Kong, was also exclaiming against the "exaggerations of ignorance" already 150 years ago, pointing out the equivalence between Chinese characters and English words, and drawing attention to Prémare's estimate of 4000 to 5000 characters or words as being enough to enable one to read and write Chinese.

12. Davis, John Francis, The Chinese, London, 1840.

The rumoured difficulties attendant on the acquisition of Chinese, from the great number and variety of the characters, are the mere exaggerations of ignorance, and so far mischievous as they are calculated to deter many from the pursuit, whose business takes them to the country, and would no doubt be greatly promoted by some practical acquaintance with its language.... To assert that there are so many thousand characters in the language, is very much the same thing as to say that there are so many thousand words in Johnson's dictionary; nor is a knowledge of the whole at all more necessary for every practical purpose, than it is to get all Johnson's dictionary by heart, in order to read and converse in English. Premare very correctly observes "that there is nobody who might not read and write Chinese, after he had once acquired a good knowledge of 4000 or 5000 characters or words". A much smaller number might in fact suffice; and it is worthy of remark that the entire number of different words, apart from repetitions in the Penal Code translated by Sir George Staunton, was under 2000.

...

The highly artificial and philosophical structure of so singular a language entitles it to the attention of intelligent persons, as a part of the history of the human mind. But it has now other powerful claims to notice, from being the medium through which at least four hundred millions of mankind, occupying countries which exceed the united extent of all Europe, communicate their ideas. With the growth of our commerce, and of our Protestant missions, the value and importance of its acquisition may no doubt increase in estimation. By only knowing how to write a few hundred Chinese words, a man can make himself understood over an extent of 2000 miles of latitude, from Japan in the north to Cochin China in the south. As a portion of general literature alone, and without one-half of the practical importance which attaches to it among ourselves, the French have long since thought it worthy of the endowment of a professor's chair: and that nothing of the kind should as yet have existed in England is remarkable.

Father Huc in 1855, one hundred and fifty years ago, also inveighs against the prevailing inaccuracies, correcting many of the false ideas to which your attention has been drawn above. The extracts below are taken from his travel book The Chinese Empire, which was translated from the French, and had a wide circulation at the time it was published, but apparently to little effect, since mainly of the errors he pointed out are still being promoted by journalists and reporters today.

13. Huc, M: The Chinese Empire, 2 Vols, Longman, 1855.

.... many very inaccurate ideas prevail.... The written language is not....alphabetical; it is a collection of an immense number of written characters.... of which each expresses a word and represents an idea or an object. The primitive characters used by the Chinese were signs or rather coarse drawings.... These primitive characters were two hundred and fourteen in number.... As society advanced and the circle of their knowledge enlarged.... the number of characters had necessarily to be increased.... The number of characters successively introduced by the combination of strokes amounts to thirty or forty thousand in the Chinese dictionaries; but two-thirds of these are seldom used, and by cutting off the synonyms, five or six thousand characters, with their various significations, would amply suffice to understand all original texts.... It has been said, and repeated over and over again, that the Chinese pass their lives in learning to read.... The notion is amusing, but fortunately for the Chinese very incorrect.... If to know a language it were necessary to know every word in it, how many Frenchmen would be able to boast of being acquainted with their native tongue?.... It has been imagined and asserted in very serious works that Chinese writing is purely ideographic. This is an error. It is ideographic and phonetic at the same time.... The Chinese characters are so far phonetic, that in all our missions those who learn to serve the mass have for their use a little book in which the Latin prayers are written out in Chinese characters. How could that be if they were simply ideographic? .... The language called Guanhua.... is that which the Europeans wrongfully designate by the name of Mandarin language, as if it were exclusively reserved for the Mandarins or functionaries of government.... The Guanhua is the language spoken by all instructed persons throughout the eighteen provinces of the Empire.... The study of Chinese was long regarded in Europe as a thing extremely difficult, if not impossible.... But the prejudice has at last been overcome, and philologists have found out that Chinese may be learned as easily as other foreign languages. M. Abel Rémusat is perhaps the first.... to conquer the obstacles which seemed to forbid access to it; but when this learned Orientalist had.... shown by his example that it was possible to acquire a knowledge of the language of Confucius, many learned men threw themselves eagerly into the route that he had pointed out.... With respect to the spoken language, Chinese does not present as many impediments and difficulties as many of the languages of Europe. The pronunciation alone requires some pains, especially in the beginning; but by degrees you become familiar with the exigencies of accents and aspirates, especially when you live in the country, and have no intercourse with any but natives.

In addition to the misinformation about the language, Huc points out another myth which was being spread in his day,and is still being spread today, not only by the instant experts of our modern media, but also by more serious journalists, commentators, and reputable historians, from which as Forrest says of language, "we have the right to expect better things." This is the idea that the Chinese name for China means that the Chinese have always believed their country to be situated in the middle of the world, an explanation which appears in no standard Chinese dictionary.

In the introduction to his textbook, published in 1899, on the writing of Japanese kanji, the Japanese name for Chinese characters, Chamberlain mocks those of his fellow-missionaries who believe that "Chinese and Japanese are languages invented by the devil to prevent the spread of the Christian gospel", and points out something which is still true today. By their insistence that the Chinese characters are too difficult for them to learn, such missionaries imply that they are incapable, in spite of their high education and great intellect, of learning to do what any Chinese or Japanese shool child, even a dull one dull one, can succeed in doing after a few years of shooling!

14. Chamberlain, Basil Hall: The art of Japanese writing, 1899.

Some worthy folks go on clinging to the belief - shall we rather say the desperate hope - that if they learn the kana they will have done their duty, that the kana is in fact the Japanese writing system, that to know the kana is to know how to read and write Japanese, and that either the Japanese will end by adopting the kana as the sole and exclusive national method of writing, or that they may do so, or that they might do so, and in any case they ought to do so, because then things would be so much simplified, and everyone would be able to learn Japanese easily and live happily ever after.

Good people, you are deluding yourselves, or others are deluding you. The kana does not suffice, the kana by itself is not the Japanese written system. As for its imaginary future triumph over the Chinese characters, recent actual experience and all theoretical probabilities point the other way. Besides which it is not the future that practical students have to deal with, but the present... Anglo-Saxon students should surely - of all people in the world - be practical. Now this fiddle-faddling with the kana is not practical.... Not only every popular book, every important newspaper, every official notification, but every private receipt, every estimate, every play-bill, every advertisement, every letter, even every postcard sent by your cook to his people at home, every written document of every kind connected with the life and work of the whole people of Japan, individually and collectively has the Chinese character as its basis.... Any missionary whose attainments are limited to the kana will inevitably figure as the intellectual inferior of the meanest of his flock....a position not calculated to assist him to gain influence or respect.... After all, very dull Japanese boys succeed in learning the characters perfectly. Then why should we not do so?

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This page last revised: 27th December, 2000