THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

Misinformation by writers of English

Most people will have picked up some ideas about the Chinese language through what they have told or have read. Included among these are likely to be widely-held misconceptions such as, that

All the above statements are false, so how is it that they have become so widespread, and believed even by people who ought to know better.

One would have thought that discussion of a subject like the Chinese language could be based on facts, and so be relatively free of controversy. Yet much of what you will find written about the subject in English is as contradictory, and as tendentious, as any article on modern Chinese politics, where opinion rather than fact form the basis of discussion! For example, one writer thinks that Chinese can do everything with 420 basic words, while a Professor of linguistics in 1985 tells his students that 70,000 to 125,000 characters are needed for writing Chinese. Yet, simply by making a rough estimate from a standard Chinese dictionary, you can easily see that both these estimates are far-off the mark.

Unfortunately, in lingusitics as in other areas of Chinese studies, misinterpretations, misinformation and exaggeration are often presented as fact. Sometimes this is due to ignorance presented as knowledge, but sometimes, sad to say, it is also done deliberately in order to mislead or to "prove" a point.

The false information is then frequently copied unquestioned from book to book until it seems to acquire a life of its own, so that it becomes impossible to kill it off, even over a long period of time. Below follows some examples of the kind of "facts" about the Chinese language that have appeared in the past in seemingly reliable sources:

1. Holliday, Carl: The Dawn of Literature, 1962.

The very nature of the Chinese language is hostile to the expression of the subtleties of philosophy, ethics, and religion.... As a spoken language it is one of the most poverty stricken in existence. Bound by rigid monosyllabic roots and by the fact that any change in the order of these roots in a sentence means a decided change in meaning, the Chinese have devised the expedient of varying the intonation of a word to give it some difference in meaning. But even this does not grant the language the power to express the finer distinctions of emotion and thought. All statements are necessarily the briefest possible declarations, while, through it all, there is a sing-song monotony that soon becomes tiresome. Restricted as is the language, the Chinese writing system reveals even greater limitations.

Holiday claims that the Chinese spoken language is so poverty-stricken, and that Chinese writing is so limited that the language cannot be used to express the finer distinctions of emotion and thought.

It takes but a short step from here to conclude that the Chinese can have no philosophy, ethics or religion, since they are incapable of feeling emotion or of thinking. Whence the 19th century idea of the "inscrutable" Chinese, and the idea expressed by some Protestant missionaries such as Smith in his book Chinese characteristics that the Chinese were incapable of feeling physical pain. And so their consequent ability to stand poverty and famine meant that the missionaries could concentrate their attention on saving their souls. In the 20th century, the inability of the Chinese to think was interpreted to mean that the Chinese progress in science and technology could only have been possible through espionage and massive thefts from American laboratories.

2. Anson, George: Voyage around the world in the years 1740-1744, Oxford UP, 1974.

The history and inventions of past ages, recorded by these perplexed symbols must frequently prove unintelligible, and consequently the learning and boasted antiquity of the nation must in numerous instances be extremely problematical.

Because Chinese writing is unintelligible to Anson, he deduces that the learning and the antiquity of Chinese civilisation is "extremely problematical". Even today, to disbelieve and reject anything the Chinese say about themselves is a common reflex among foreign observers, especially those who cannot speak, read or write enough of the language to find out information for themselves. A Chinese observer of America, Britain or Australasia who could understand no spoken English and could recognise not a word of written English would not receive the kind of respected credibility that English-speaking reporters on China in a contrary situation seem to be able to get in our media.

3. Bodmer, Frederick: The loom of language, Allen & Unwin, 1944, reprinted, 1981.

Chinese script is still largely the monopoly of a scholar caste.... the Chinese have to do everything with 420 basic words.... The simplicity of the Chinese language made it easy for the Chinese to develop a more consistent and workable system of picture writing than any other nation at an early stage in its history. Since then, it has been a cultural a millstone round their necks.... So much thankless toil tempts us to wonder why the Chinese do not discard their archaic script in favour of our own more handy and more thrifty alphabet... Elimination of illiteracy would go hand in hand with the diminishing prestige of scholars who have a vested interest in the survival of worthless traditions.... The present form of writing shuts the door to the internationally current terminology of modern science and technology.

Not only are philosophy, ethics, and religion hampered by the inability of the language to express emotion and thought, Bodmer goes even further that Holliday, sees no possibility of science and technology developing in China unless the script is abandoned. He puts this Chinese clinging to "worthless traditions" down to the obstinacy of Chinese scholars in refusing to adopt the Western alphabet. We see here a persistent theme developed over the last century by Western observers, who, when faced with a Chinese refusal to adopt Western customs or methods, see only Chinese obstinacy, feelings of superiority or xenophobia. But his argument is vitiated by his false analogy between the number of characters in the Chinese vocabulary and the number of letters in the Latin alphabet. He also contends that it is the difficulty of the language, rather than lack of opportunity for education, that is the cause of illiteracy. It is ironic too, that in spite of his strictures against the clinging to worthless traditions, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Korea, all regions which use ideographic scripts, are in the forefront of computer science and technology today!

4. Moorhouse, A.C.: The triumph of the alphabet, New York, 1953.

The great labour involved in the task of merely learning to read has always been a grave handicap on the spread of education and consequently on the improvement of conditions in the country generally.

Moorhouse sees no future for China, not only in science and technology, but can see no improvements in the conditions of the country generally, since, according to him, this follows as a consequence of the difficulty of leaning to read. If this were so, one wonders how it was ever possible for pre-literate societies to manage to improve their conditions.

5. Hughes, John P.: The science of language: an introduction to linguistics, Random House, 1962, re-printed in Clark V.P., Eschol, P.A. and Rosa, A.F. (eds.): Language: Introductory Readings, St Martin's Press, 1985.

Ideographic "writing" cannot be strictly language.... it is not within everyone's competence.... the system cannot adequately express the whole range of human thought.... The Chinese people have an ancient and beautiful script which was originally, and still is largely, ideographic.... the same written text can be read by any native (each in his own dialect), and the gist can even be made out be one who knows the principles of the system, but little of the language.... But it is estimated that 70,000 to 125,000 characters exist.... and it is said that a scholar takes seven years to learn to read and write Chinese if he already speaks it, while over 80 percent of the native speakers of Chinese are illiterate in their own language.

This extract by Hughes is from a textbook for students of linguistics published as late as 1985. He asserts that an ideographic system of writing cannot express "the whole range of human thought". For the number of characters in the written language, he passes on the highly inflated estimate of 70,000 to 125,000 characters, which is in strange contrast to Bodmer's equally misinformed statement that "everything can be done with 420 basic words". Moreover, like Bodmer and other writers, Hughes links illiteracy to the difficulty of the language, adding that even a scholar who is a native-speaker will take seven years to learn to read and write. He seems to see no contradiction here to his further claim that it is possible to make out the gist of a text of written Chinese even if one knows little of the language!

6. Pei, Mario: The story of language, Allen & Unwin, 1953.

...at the end of six years of schooling most Japanese children know about 1000 characters, in addition to the phonetic symbols, or kanas, which were devised in the eighth and ninth centuries by Buddhist priests for the purpose of bringing a measure of literacy within the reach of the lower classes.

This is something that the Chinese intellectuals have scorned to do, and China today reaps the harvest of their intellectual snobbishness in the fact that illiterates number over 360 million.

Pei also links illiteracy with the difficulty of the language. So many "experts" seem to agree on this point, that you would be justified that accepting that illiteracy is due to the difficulty of a language. Pei ascribes the refusal of the Chinese to adopt a phonetic system to the snobbishness of Chinese intellectuals. English-speaking writers repeatedly use this idea of Chinese "snobbishness," "superiority", and "xenophobia", to explain why the Chinese persist in acting or behaving differently from people brought up in a superior English-speaking culture. Even in the days when writers like Pei were writing, Japan had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and was well on the way to becoming one of the most scientifically and technologically advanced countries in the world. Today with greatly increased opportunities for education, a significant rise in the literacy rate has occurred in China and Taiwan as well.

7. Sturtevant, E.H.: An Introduction to linguistic science, Yale UP, 1947.

The Chinese must devote many years to learning characters, if they are to have a complete mastery of the literature. One result is, of course, the wide prevalence in China of complete or partial illiteracy.... It is safe to say that the Chinese, in spite of their high intelligence, must adopt an alphabet before they can rival Europeans or Americans in science, engineering or scholarship in general.

While Hughes objection to ideographic writing systems is that they are inadequate for expressing the "whole range of human thought", Sturtevant deplores the time needed to obtain a "complete mastery of the literature", seeming to imply such a mastery is possible in English. Like Bodmer he not only sees no hope for the Chinese in science and engineering, he sees no hope for them in scholarship in general either.

Of course, if you want a "complete mastery" of the literature, this will take a lifetime, whether it be Chinese or English literature. But the literacy rate was low in China, not only because of the lack of educational opportunities. It was also because "literacy" meant the ability to read everything from the Confucian classics onwards. If we based our concept of literacy on the ability to read everything from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles to Finnegan's Wake, no doubt our literacy rate would be just as low as that of pre-modern China. But while Chinese children today learn to read and recite the Tang poems, written in characters, how many of our primary school children are expected to be able to read Beowulf.

The criticisms of Chinese by the linguistic specialists above have been vitiated by their failure to define even in their own minds what they mean by terms illiteracy, literature, whole range of human thought. Their arguments are often also built on logical non-sequiturs, introduced by words such as consequently, therefore, it is evident that, and so on.

8. Müller, S.H.: The world's living languages, Ungar, NY, 1964.

Chinese writing is a cumbersome collection of about 50,000 characters, that are mainly ideograms without relation to sound.... it is self-evident that there are few men that can accomplish the formidable task of memorising all the characters. Illiteracy is therefore widespread

Müller takes the middle road between Bodmer and Hughes, presenting an estimate of 50,000 characters, which he describes as "ideograms without relation to sound", and on the basis of this piece of false information, finds the ability to memorise them all self-evident, and illiteracy therefore widespread. To assume that it is necessary to know 50,000 characters to be able to read Chinese is like saying that one must know all the words in the Oxford Dictionary to be able to read English, and it is this constant equating of the entire vocabulary of Chinese with the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet that cause many critics to think that learning to read Chinese is a self-evident impossibility! The assumption here also is that when a child knows the 26 letters of the alphabet, he is then literate in English, and presumably also, in French, German, and in every other language that uses the 26 Latin letters!

Where the above writers get their numbers of characters from is a mystery? At the end of the Shang dynasty, an estimated 4000 to 6000 characters were in general use. The first Chinese dictionary in the Eastern Han dynasty contains 9,353 characters. The most famous rhyming dictionary of the Northern Song dynasty has 53,525 characters, while the Kangxi Dictionary, the standard dictionary since the 18th century contains only some 40,000 characters. Today's standard dictionaries for everyday use normally contain 6,000 to 10,000 characters. A standard Chinese word processor stores between 8000 to 13,000 characters. All these have to include words which are either obsolete or rarely used, and just as no one expects and English-speaker to know every word in the Oxford or the Webster dictionaries, in the same way, you don't have to know every character in a Chinese wordstore before you can read Chinese. In fact, a person with a University education is likely to use something like two to three thousand characters, while a university professor's vocabulary might stretch to four to five thousand. A word-count of Mao Zedong's collected works showed a total of 2,981 different characters. Japanese official publications limit themselves to less than two thousand, while primary school pupils in Japan are expected to know about 900. All this is a far cry from the 125,000 given by Hughes!

Also characters correspond to words in the vocabulary not to the 26 letters of the alphabet. Each character is made up from strokes chosen from about 30 different kinds of strokes, just as each English word is made of letters chosen from the 26 letters of the alphabet.

There is also the problem of what is mean by a "word". Chinese characters are invariant and monosyllabic. But words may be made of of two or more characters, and such words are consequently polysyllabic. There is a single character pronounced qù, which corresponds to the English for, 'go', 'goest', 'goeth', 'goes', 'going', 'gone', 'went', and so on. Similarly a single character pronounce shì, corresponds to 'be', 'being', 'been', 'am', 'art', 'is', 'was', 'wast', 'were', and so on. In English are these all different words, or are they to be counted simply as different forms of one word?

9. Entwhistle, William, J.: Aspects of language, Faber & Faber, 1953.

For all Chinese characters, we have direct visual evidence of meaning, independent of dialect or century or even language. They have to be learnt as complete symbols, but then can be read for meaning, but not sound, as accurately in Japanese as in Chinese, or now as in the time of Confucius. A great deal of time is occupied with memorising the 6000 necessary characters and getting some acquaintance with them. But the time is not sensibly greater than that wasted on English spelling as far back as the days of King Alfred, while English orthography teaches us nothing about say, French.

Entwhistle has reduced the number of characters needed for being able to read to the more reasonable estimate of 6000 (which is still about twice the number actually needed), but is not as concerned as Sturtevant, Hughes and others about the length of time needed for learning them. He nevertheless repeats the myth that the characters cannot be read for sound, when in fact, the vast majority of the characters are constructed on phonetic as well as semantic principles, being symbols combining both sound and meaning.

The misinformation purveyed by writers such as the above are the ones which have been relayed and spread widely by other writers. Writers who have tried to present a truer picture of the real situation have been largely ignored, a situation which unfortunately repeats itself in many other areas of Chinese studies. Attempts to refute some of these false ideas have been made for over nearly two hundred years, but with little success, and so it seems likely that these myths about the language will continue well into the present millennium.


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This page last revised: 27th December, 2000

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