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The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
Describes some of the concepts underlying the Chinese language and writing system, and gives the author's position on a number of ideas about the language.
331 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1984
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September 22, 2019
Last April I read a book called "The Story of Writing", the author of whom asserted that the idea that "speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin who cannot understand each other's spoken language can nevertheless communicate in writing" is a myth. I didn't agree with this, so in response I had my Mandarin Teacher Mei Ho (whose native language is actually Cantonese) send me a sample of written Cantonese, which I then attempted to read using only my knowledge of Mandarin. At the same time, I had Maria - whose native language is Mandarin but knows no Cantonese - do the same experiment. Although there were some minor disagreements - Maria was able to parse some bits I couldn't understand due to her superior grasp of Mandarin - we arrived at roughly the same result, which we then submitted to Mei Ho. We were both more or less correct (see my review of "The Story of Writing" for more details).
Later, when I researched the author and checked his sources, I learnt that he did not speak any of the Chinese languages and also was not a scholar of China, and had essentially just been parroting what he had read in a book called "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy". The author of this second book was (he is now dead) both a fluent Mandarin speaker and a professor of Chinese studies, meaning that he should know his stuff. I wanted to understand how someone highly knowledgeable with respect to Chinese (indeed, this was his career) could have arrived at a conclusion so at odds with my own thinking and the apparent results of my experiment. Was there some flaw in my own reasoning? Or, had the author of "The Story of Writing" simply misunderstood what he'd read? I decided the only way to find out was to read the book myself.
Having now done so, I think that to write a proper, thorough critique, would require me to (at minimum) write the equivalent of a masters thesis on the topic, as well as do all the supporting research. I don't have time for that right now, so I'm going to write an incomplete critique of limited scope:
The bulk of this book is a series of "myths" regarding Chinese characters, which the author then "debunks" (one myth per chapter). While in a few cases I felt that I learnt something, for the most part, I found the author's arguments unconvincing, and for essentially the same reason in every case. Specifically, the author would "debunk" each myth by doing what amounted to a thought experiment. Whether or not I found the results of these thought experiments plausible is less important than the fact that thought experiments are not as good as real experiments, and in each case, there was an obvious real experiment that could easily have been done to clear up the matter. Especially by someone with the resources of a professor of Chinese studies, who is not only in the fortunate position of having it be literally his job to perform this kind of research, but in addition has an essentially infinite supply of free labour in the form of graduate students. I would have been far more convinced by the solid evidence of real experiments, and I felt annoyed that the author chose not to do any, despite research in Chinese being his career choice and him having had literally decades (he began his academic career in the 1950s, retired from teaching in the 70s, but was still active in research up until the 80s) of time with which to get these experiments done.
Now for some specific examples:
The Indispensability Myth:
This "myth" is the idea that Chinese characters are indispensable in the sense that they are required for writing Chinese down in an unambitious fashion, and in particular that any alphabet based on sound alone would be inadequate. The basic logic behind this idea (I won't refer to it as a myth) is that because the mapping from Chinese characters to their corresponding sounds is many to one, Chinese characters contain strictly more information than is contained in any representation of Chinese that is purely phonetic (such as pinyin). Writing Chinese in anything other than characters, therefore, results in a loss of information, potentially to the point of it becoming unintelligible.
Before I get into how the author "debunks" this myth, I want to point out the very obvious experiment that would clear up the matter. You take a series of Chinese books, and you create for each an edition written only in pinyin. You then do an experiment in which people who have not read any of the books are randomly assigned to read either the original character version or the pinyin version, and you test them on their comprehension after reading. You check to see whether or not the subjects given the character version scored higher.
Instead of using his vast resources as a professor of Chinese (including, as mentioned above, access to infinite free labour) to do such an experiment, the author writes the following: "One way to answer this question is to consider it theoretically. The answer must then be unequivocally in the affirmative. Such an answer is based on the simple observation that scientific linguists have repeatedly demonstrated in actual practice the validity of their thesis that the speech of any individual can be written in an alphabetic script. The overall approach in such an undertaking is the same for all forms of speech in that it involves direct observation and analysis. The specific solutions vary according to the linguistic details (phonemic; morphemic; lexical; syntactical, and so forth) for each form of speech. Any student of linguists with a modicum of competence can create an alphabetic system of writing for almost any form of speech in the world. To deny this elementary truth in general or in specific application to Chinese is to reject science and to embrace mythology."
The main issue that I take with this "debunking" is not that I find the argument implausible, but that I find it less plausible than doing a real experiment such as the one described above. However, it is also true that I find the argument implausible. First of all, it is far too vague. The author appears to be citing a general state of affairs in linguistics as it applies to most languages, and then asserting that it applies to Chinese as well. If the mentioned experiments were actually done in regard to Chinese in particular, then this would be fine - however, this is far from clear, and no references are provided. On the other hand, if the author is merely asserting that things true of other languages must be true of Chinese as well, then this unscientific and deeply disturbing.
Second of all, the possibility that Chinese might really be a special case is not completely unreasonable. Consider the following poem, written first in Characters, and then in pinyin:
施氏食獅史
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。氏時時適市視獅。十時，適十獅適市。是時，適施氏適市。氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始試食是十獅屍。食時，始識是十獅，實十石獅屍。試釋是事。
Shī Shì shí shī shǐ
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.
An important wrinkle here is that this poem is written in Classical Chinese - i.e. not how people speak today - and that means that even native Mandarin speakers will have trouble understanding it. However, it remains true that the poem written in characters is understandable to someone who has studied classical Chinese, while the poem written in pinyin is not understandable to anybody. This is obviously an extreme case, and it doesn't mean that pinyin - in situations likely to arise in real life - is less comprehensible than characters. However, it does demonstrate that such situations, while potentially rare and artificial, are nevertheless possible.
Now, the author was not so bad a scholar as to be unaware of counterexamples such as the above, and he does address this. However, he does so by making another assertion without evidence, this time going in the opposite direction. First, he emphasizes that the crucial point here is that these poems are written in classical Chinese. He then asserts that Chinese Characters *are* indispensable for classical Chinese (just not indispensable in the case of modern Chinese). While he actually does present some plausible arguments for why this might be the case, my criticism remains the same - do an experiment. Expand the experiment above to include a series of Chinese Classics (written in the classical form), as well as modern books written in modern Chinese. Produce pinyin editions of both. Randomly assign subjects to the pinyin edition or the character edition. Test them on their comprehension after reading. Look for a difference in comprehension between characters and pinyin in the modern books. Do the same for classics. See if the gap in comprehension (assuming it exists at all) is bigger for the classics.
The Universality Myth:
This "myth" is the notion that speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese (or other Chinese languages) who cannot understand each other's spoken language, can nevertheless understand each others writing (or, in some variants, that both languages are identical when written down).
In order to debunk this "myth", the author did a thought experiment in which a pair consisting of a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, as well as a pair consisting of a speaker of English and a speaker of French, are each given the task of learning to communicate in writing. He argues that it will take more work for the Cantonese and Mandarin pair, and therefore the myth must be false.
What's wrong with this? First of all - **do a goddamn experiment**. Get actual, real pairs of Cantonese/Mandarin speakers and French/English speakers, put them in a room, and see who succeeds at communicating in writing first. But second of all, and in this case more to the point, the author makes the rather bizarre hypothesis that each pair should be illiterate. That is, neither person in the Cantonese/Mandarin pair can read Chinese characters, and neither person in the English/French pair can read or write in their respective language. His argument that the Cantonese/Mandarin pair will take longer then boils down to it taking longer for a person already fluent in Spoken Chinese to learn to read and write in Chinese characters than for a person already fluent in spoken English/French to learn to read and write. This is true but irrelevant. The Universality "myth" is obviously not applicable to people who cannot read *any* Chinese language.
However, the existence of a bogus argument debunking a fact does not mean that the fact is true. Moreover, it *is* true that certain forms of this idea - specifically, that speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese can understand each other's written language *perfectly*, and that both languages are *exactly* the same when written down, are indeed myths. Neither I nor Maria was able to understand the sample of writing Mei Ho sent us perfectly - both of us had some minor mistakes (see my review for details). Similarly, Cantonese and Mandarin are not exactly the same when written down. I'm going to quote directly from my review of "The Languages of China" a couple of examples (Cantonese on top, Mandarin on the bottom):
Example one: "He gave me three books"
koi pei sam pun su ngo
他給三本書我
he give three volume book me
ta gei wo san ben shu
他給我三本書
he give me three volume book.
Example two: "Did you eat rice?"
nei sik fan m sik?
你吃飯不吃？
you eat rice not eat?
ni chi bu chi fan?
你吃不吃飯？
you eat not eat rice?
Example three: "He is taller than me"
koi kou kwo ngo
他高過我
He tall pass me
ta bi wo gai
他比我高
He compare me tall
Examples one and two, once written using characters, differ only in the order of the characters (and hence the meaning is fairly easy for someone fluent in written Mandarin to guess). Example three, which is actually something that came up in my earlier experiment, is not so simple, however, is also fairly easy to guess correctly (and I did so). Reading Cantonese written in Chinese characters with no knowledge of Cantonese but a decent knowledge of Mandarin is similar to reading the word for word English translations and guessing as to their meaning. "He tall pass me" and "He compare me tall" sound strange, but it isn't a huge stretch of the imagination to guess the meaning "he is taller than me".
From what I can tell, the author of this book seems to mainly be objecting to the notion of 100% understandability - when perhaps a more realistic percentage would be (say) 50%-70%. What is unfortunate is that he is so eager to prove that a person fluent in Mandarin would not be able to read Cantonese with 100% comprehension that he doesn't examine the possibility that they might nonetheless be able to read with a somewhat lower 50%-70% comprehension, which is remarkable in and of itself, and I think very different from the situation with other languages such as English and French.
What I would like to see here, again, is an experiment. One possibility would be to get a bunch of native Mandarin speakers in a room, give them samples of Cantonese writing, and then test them on their comprehension. Do the same for English and French speakers. See which comprehension rate is higher. By focusing exclusively on how the rate is not 100% in either case, a false impression is created that the two situations are *identical*, which is the impression that the layperson gets when they read this book. When said layperson then goes and writes a book of their own, this false impression ends up being stated as fact, as occurred in "The Story of Writing".
Later, when I researched the author and checked his sources, I learnt that he did not speak any of the Chinese languages and also was not a scholar of China, and had essentially just been parroting what he had read in a book called "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy". The author of this second book was (he is now dead) both a fluent Mandarin speaker and a professor of Chinese studies, meaning that he should know his stuff. I wanted to understand how someone highly knowledgeable with respect to Chinese (indeed, this was his career) could have arrived at a conclusion so at odds with my own thinking and the apparent results of my experiment. Was there some flaw in my own reasoning? Or, had the author of "The Story of Writing" simply misunderstood what he'd read? I decided the only way to find out was to read the book myself.
Having now done so, I think that to write a proper, thorough critique, would require me to (at minimum) write the equivalent of a masters thesis on the topic, as well as do all the supporting research. I don't have time for that right now, so I'm going to write an incomplete critique of limited scope:
The bulk of this book is a series of "myths" regarding Chinese characters, which the author then "debunks" (one myth per chapter). While in a few cases I felt that I learnt something, for the most part, I found the author's arguments unconvincing, and for essentially the same reason in every case. Specifically, the author would "debunk" each myth by doing what amounted to a thought experiment. Whether or not I found the results of these thought experiments plausible is less important than the fact that thought experiments are not as good as real experiments, and in each case, there was an obvious real experiment that could easily have been done to clear up the matter. Especially by someone with the resources of a professor of Chinese studies, who is not only in the fortunate position of having it be literally his job to perform this kind of research, but in addition has an essentially infinite supply of free labour in the form of graduate students. I would have been far more convinced by the solid evidence of real experiments, and I felt annoyed that the author chose not to do any, despite research in Chinese being his career choice and him having had literally decades (he began his academic career in the 1950s, retired from teaching in the 70s, but was still active in research up until the 80s) of time with which to get these experiments done.
Now for some specific examples:
The Indispensability Myth:
This "myth" is the idea that Chinese characters are indispensable in the sense that they are required for writing Chinese down in an unambitious fashion, and in particular that any alphabet based on sound alone would be inadequate. The basic logic behind this idea (I won't refer to it as a myth) is that because the mapping from Chinese characters to their corresponding sounds is many to one, Chinese characters contain strictly more information than is contained in any representation of Chinese that is purely phonetic (such as pinyin). Writing Chinese in anything other than characters, therefore, results in a loss of information, potentially to the point of it becoming unintelligible.
Before I get into how the author "debunks" this myth, I want to point out the very obvious experiment that would clear up the matter. You take a series of Chinese books, and you create for each an edition written only in pinyin. You then do an experiment in which people who have not read any of the books are randomly assigned to read either the original character version or the pinyin version, and you test them on their comprehension after reading. You check to see whether or not the subjects given the character version scored higher.
Instead of using his vast resources as a professor of Chinese (including, as mentioned above, access to infinite free labour) to do such an experiment, the author writes the following: "One way to answer this question is to consider it theoretically. The answer must then be unequivocally in the affirmative. Such an answer is based on the simple observation that scientific linguists have repeatedly demonstrated in actual practice the validity of their thesis that the speech of any individual can be written in an alphabetic script. The overall approach in such an undertaking is the same for all forms of speech in that it involves direct observation and analysis. The specific solutions vary according to the linguistic details (phonemic; morphemic; lexical; syntactical, and so forth) for each form of speech. Any student of linguists with a modicum of competence can create an alphabetic system of writing for almost any form of speech in the world. To deny this elementary truth in general or in specific application to Chinese is to reject science and to embrace mythology."
The main issue that I take with this "debunking" is not that I find the argument implausible, but that I find it less plausible than doing a real experiment such as the one described above. However, it is also true that I find the argument implausible. First of all, it is far too vague. The author appears to be citing a general state of affairs in linguistics as it applies to most languages, and then asserting that it applies to Chinese as well. If the mentioned experiments were actually done in regard to Chinese in particular, then this would be fine - however, this is far from clear, and no references are provided. On the other hand, if the author is merely asserting that things true of other languages must be true of Chinese as well, then this unscientific and deeply disturbing.
Second of all, the possibility that Chinese might really be a special case is not completely unreasonable. Consider the following poem, written first in Characters, and then in pinyin:
施氏食獅史
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。氏時時適市視獅。十時，適十獅適市。是時，適施氏適市。氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始試食是十獅屍。食時，始識是十獅，實十石獅屍。試釋是事。
Shī Shì shí shī shǐ
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.
An important wrinkle here is that this poem is written in Classical Chinese - i.e. not how people speak today - and that means that even native Mandarin speakers will have trouble understanding it. However, it remains true that the poem written in characters is understandable to someone who has studied classical Chinese, while the poem written in pinyin is not understandable to anybody. This is obviously an extreme case, and it doesn't mean that pinyin - in situations likely to arise in real life - is less comprehensible than characters. However, it does demonstrate that such situations, while potentially rare and artificial, are nevertheless possible.
Now, the author was not so bad a scholar as to be unaware of counterexamples such as the above, and he does address this. However, he does so by making another assertion without evidence, this time going in the opposite direction. First, he emphasizes that the crucial point here is that these poems are written in classical Chinese. He then asserts that Chinese Characters *are* indispensable for classical Chinese (just not indispensable in the case of modern Chinese). While he actually does present some plausible arguments for why this might be the case, my criticism remains the same - do an experiment. Expand the experiment above to include a series of Chinese Classics (written in the classical form), as well as modern books written in modern Chinese. Produce pinyin editions of both. Randomly assign subjects to the pinyin edition or the character edition. Test them on their comprehension after reading. Look for a difference in comprehension between characters and pinyin in the modern books. Do the same for classics. See if the gap in comprehension (assuming it exists at all) is bigger for the classics.
The Universality Myth:
This "myth" is the notion that speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese (or other Chinese languages) who cannot understand each other's spoken language, can nevertheless understand each others writing (or, in some variants, that both languages are identical when written down).
In order to debunk this "myth", the author did a thought experiment in which a pair consisting of a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, as well as a pair consisting of a speaker of English and a speaker of French, are each given the task of learning to communicate in writing. He argues that it will take more work for the Cantonese and Mandarin pair, and therefore the myth must be false.
What's wrong with this? First of all - **do a goddamn experiment**. Get actual, real pairs of Cantonese/Mandarin speakers and French/English speakers, put them in a room, and see who succeeds at communicating in writing first. But second of all, and in this case more to the point, the author makes the rather bizarre hypothesis that each pair should be illiterate. That is, neither person in the Cantonese/Mandarin pair can read Chinese characters, and neither person in the English/French pair can read or write in their respective language. His argument that the Cantonese/Mandarin pair will take longer then boils down to it taking longer for a person already fluent in Spoken Chinese to learn to read and write in Chinese characters than for a person already fluent in spoken English/French to learn to read and write. This is true but irrelevant. The Universality "myth" is obviously not applicable to people who cannot read *any* Chinese language.
However, the existence of a bogus argument debunking a fact does not mean that the fact is true. Moreover, it *is* true that certain forms of this idea - specifically, that speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese can understand each other's written language *perfectly*, and that both languages are *exactly* the same when written down, are indeed myths. Neither I nor Maria was able to understand the sample of writing Mei Ho sent us perfectly - both of us had some minor mistakes (see my review for details). Similarly, Cantonese and Mandarin are not exactly the same when written down. I'm going to quote directly from my review of "The Languages of China" a couple of examples (Cantonese on top, Mandarin on the bottom):
Example one: "He gave me three books"
koi pei sam pun su ngo
他給三本書我
he give three volume book me
ta gei wo san ben shu
他給我三本書
he give me three volume book.
Example two: "Did you eat rice?"
nei sik fan m sik?
你吃飯不吃？
you eat rice not eat?
ni chi bu chi fan?
你吃不吃飯？
you eat not eat rice?
Example three: "He is taller than me"
koi kou kwo ngo
他高過我
He tall pass me
ta bi wo gai
他比我高
He compare me tall
Examples one and two, once written using characters, differ only in the order of the characters (and hence the meaning is fairly easy for someone fluent in written Mandarin to guess). Example three, which is actually something that came up in my earlier experiment, is not so simple, however, is also fairly easy to guess correctly (and I did so). Reading Cantonese written in Chinese characters with no knowledge of Cantonese but a decent knowledge of Mandarin is similar to reading the word for word English translations and guessing as to their meaning. "He tall pass me" and "He compare me tall" sound strange, but it isn't a huge stretch of the imagination to guess the meaning "he is taller than me".
From what I can tell, the author of this book seems to mainly be objecting to the notion of 100% understandability - when perhaps a more realistic percentage would be (say) 50%-70%. What is unfortunate is that he is so eager to prove that a person fluent in Mandarin would not be able to read Cantonese with 100% comprehension that he doesn't examine the possibility that they might nonetheless be able to read with a somewhat lower 50%-70% comprehension, which is remarkable in and of itself, and I think very different from the situation with other languages such as English and French.
What I would like to see here, again, is an experiment. One possibility would be to get a bunch of native Mandarin speakers in a room, give them samples of Cantonese writing, and then test them on their comprehension. Do the same for English and French speakers. See which comprehension rate is higher. By focusing exclusively on how the rate is not 100% in either case, a false impression is created that the two situations are *identical*, which is the impression that the layperson gets when they read this book. When said layperson then goes and writes a book of their own, this false impression ends up being stated as fact, as occurred in "The Story of Writing".
July 24, 2007
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: Fact and Fantasy, by the legendary pedagogue of Chinese John DeFrancis, is an imprecisely titled book. What DeFrancis seeks to show here is that the Chinese character writing system is inefficient, unnecessary, and detrimental to mass literacy.
DeFrancis begins with an introductory essay (which he later revealed to be a joke) about a World War II committee of Asian scholars attempting to design a character-based writing system for Western peoples once they were subjugated by the unstoppable Japanese. After this brief piece, the reader will already see that characters are unsuitable for most of the world's languages.
The first part, the only portion of the book which is dedicated to the Chinese language in the sense of speech, elucidates the division language -> regionalect -> dialect. In the second part, DeFrancis tries to reach a conclusion on what exactly characters are, as diverse terminology from "pictograph" to "ideograph" has been used. The third part, "Demythifying Chinese Characters" is the real meat of the book. While hard to believe now, in previous centuries European intellectuals were enamoured with characters and even called them a universal writing system. DeFrancis slays the universality myth, and the closely related emulatability myth, mainly based on the fact that literacy is so hard to acheive, as well as on the fact that no phonetic information can be had. The idea that Chinese is monosyllabic is shown as a myth, since the spoken language has and depends upon polysyllabic constructions to avoid redundacy and only in the thoroughly artificial written language could one see monosyllabism. The myth that characters are indispensable is revealed, since pinyin works well once the spoken language is used as a basis for writing, and only the use of an artificial literary language hampers alphabetization. Students of Chinese will already understand this, for reading a transcript of a conversation in pinyin presents little confusion. Finally, if anyone out there really still believes that characters could be successul, DeFrancis shows how terrible their impact has been on mass literacy in China compared to Japan. An interesting aside in this chapter is that even Japanese literacy isn't what it's cracked up to be. The fourth and final part discusses historical steps for reform of the spoken and written languages.
Some knowledge of Chinese, ideally Mandarin (Putonghua) is necessary to fully enjoy this book, although DeFrancis tries hard to make it accessible to a general audience. DeFrancis was one of the great Western scholars of Chinese, and from a three-year sojourn in China in his youth he had a great love of the Chinese people and their culture. If he argues against the use of characters, his opinions are worth hearing out, and students and scholars of Chinese may be quite interested by this work.
DeFrancis begins with an introductory essay (which he later revealed to be a joke) about a World War II committee of Asian scholars attempting to design a character-based writing system for Western peoples once they were subjugated by the unstoppable Japanese. After this brief piece, the reader will already see that characters are unsuitable for most of the world's languages.
The first part, the only portion of the book which is dedicated to the Chinese language in the sense of speech, elucidates the division language -> regionalect -> dialect. In the second part, DeFrancis tries to reach a conclusion on what exactly characters are, as diverse terminology from "pictograph" to "ideograph" has been used. The third part, "Demythifying Chinese Characters" is the real meat of the book. While hard to believe now, in previous centuries European intellectuals were enamoured with characters and even called them a universal writing system. DeFrancis slays the universality myth, and the closely related emulatability myth, mainly based on the fact that literacy is so hard to acheive, as well as on the fact that no phonetic information can be had. The idea that Chinese is monosyllabic is shown as a myth, since the spoken language has and depends upon polysyllabic constructions to avoid redundacy and only in the thoroughly artificial written language could one see monosyllabism. The myth that characters are indispensable is revealed, since pinyin works well once the spoken language is used as a basis for writing, and only the use of an artificial literary language hampers alphabetization. Students of Chinese will already understand this, for reading a transcript of a conversation in pinyin presents little confusion. Finally, if anyone out there really still believes that characters could be successul, DeFrancis shows how terrible their impact has been on mass literacy in China compared to Japan. An interesting aside in this chapter is that even Japanese literacy isn't what it's cracked up to be. The fourth and final part discusses historical steps for reform of the spoken and written languages.
Some knowledge of Chinese, ideally Mandarin (Putonghua) is necessary to fully enjoy this book, although DeFrancis tries hard to make it accessible to a general audience. DeFrancis was one of the great Western scholars of Chinese, and from a three-year sojourn in China in his youth he had a great love of the Chinese people and their culture. If he argues against the use of characters, his opinions are worth hearing out, and students and scholars of Chinese may be quite interested by this work.
March 12, 2012
I can't understand why my professor recommended this book for me. It's outdated, presents a very narrow-minded view on Chinese language (apparently though written by an expert?) and writing, in a completely unscientific style perhaps dedicated to a (very, VERY) broad readership. It was almost painful to read it and I had to skip over a lot of unnecessary and repetitive ramblings. Merely the chapters about the Chinese language and writing reforms were very informative and gave a nice overview. If anyone wants to learn anything about Chinese *not* written in a Bastian Sick style and with more useful information, read Jerry Norman. This book isn't at all suitable for sinologists and linguists. I'm very disappointed.
December 18, 2007
Fundamentally changed my perception of the Chinese language.
July 10, 2021
This book dates back to 1984 and in linguistics 37 years amount to centuries.
That said, the author was a celebrated sinologist and he is also known for his didactic works: his readers, though dated, appear to be still very much appreciated by Chinese learners and are easily available for purchase.
This essay, on the other hand, is somewhat harder to find and it is rather expensive.
Is it worth buying?
It depends.
If you are trained/have an interest in linguistics and/or Chinese language teaching, you will definitely want to give a thorough read to this work.
Despite the publisher's unfortunate attempt to present it as accessible for the general reader, this book is only usable by linguists. A belaboured exposition and the somewhat clumsy order of topics also make for a demanding read.
The author's purpose, in short, is to prove that Chinese characters are inefficient and unsuitable for mass literacy.
To do that, he examines all the tropes about written Chinese and its characters, beginning by discussing the various words commonly used for the characters themselves.
He also discusses the idea that Chinese characters, far from being "ideographs", are to be analysed as a phonetic script, if a very inefficient one.
He also discusses at length all the attempts to reform the language, particularly those concerning the writing system and language education for native and non native children.
As mentioned before, exposition is often laboured but the author's competence is out of the question and I am sure a chinese-linguistics scholar will profit from a read.
An undergrad student with no particular interest in linguistics can probably skip this book.
That said, the author was a celebrated sinologist and he is also known for his didactic works: his readers, though dated, appear to be still very much appreciated by Chinese learners and are easily available for purchase.
This essay, on the other hand, is somewhat harder to find and it is rather expensive.
Is it worth buying?
It depends.
If you are trained/have an interest in linguistics and/or Chinese language teaching, you will definitely want to give a thorough read to this work.
Despite the publisher's unfortunate attempt to present it as accessible for the general reader, this book is only usable by linguists. A belaboured exposition and the somewhat clumsy order of topics also make for a demanding read.
The author's purpose, in short, is to prove that Chinese characters are inefficient and unsuitable for mass literacy.
To do that, he examines all the tropes about written Chinese and its characters, beginning by discussing the various words commonly used for the characters themselves.
He also discusses the idea that Chinese characters, far from being "ideographs", are to be analysed as a phonetic script, if a very inefficient one.
He also discusses at length all the attempts to reform the language, particularly those concerning the writing system and language education for native and non native children.
As mentioned before, exposition is often laboured but the author's competence is out of the question and I am sure a chinese-linguistics scholar will profit from a read.
An undergrad student with no particular interest in linguistics can probably skip this book.
Want to read
January 21, 2017Johnson: The story of pinyin
One country, two systems
The coexistence of pinyin and Chinese characters highlights the role of emotion in language decisions
Jan 21st 2017
in:
http://www.economist.com/news/books-a...
One country, two systems
The coexistence of pinyin and Chinese characters highlights the role of emotion in language decisions
Jan 21st 2017
in:
http://www.economist.com/news/books-a...
December 13, 2021
An amazing book that people should read before starting to learn Chinese. It got rid of so many misconceptions I had about the language.
Read
December 31, 2022I sit on no pedestal from which to criticize one of the 20th century West's greatest linguists and sinologists, *except* the fact that I have the hindsight of 2022, unfortunately ungranted to DeFrancis, from which said hindsight it is easy to see DeFrancis was incorrect regarding his doubts about the CPC's ability to balance Pinyin and a perserved character system in their efforts at language reform. He also went overboard comparing the Cultural Revolution to Nazism. The rest of the book however remains a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad it was recommended to me and anyone curious about the links between modernization and language reform in developing countries should give this text at least a once-over.
July 19, 2018
I read this as a sort of introductory guide to the Chinese language, which sounds like it would be both fun and impossibly difficult for me to learn. Also includes some history of the Chinese language, and recent efforts to reform it, from the perspective of an author writing in 1984. It would have been nice to have had an updated epilogue that outlined subsequent developments in Chinese language reform. The introductory essay "The Singlish Affair" was also entertaining.
May 7, 2023
Begins as an accessible and engaging introduction to the Chinese language, but its polemical nature leads it to be a tad repetitive as it continues. The last section on language reform efforts is interesting but a book from 1984 is always going to be out-of-date on that front.
September 5, 2013
This book will be of interest only to those who want to dig into the linguistics of Chinese. For people learning Chinese it might illuminate some of the problems you are having.
It's by one of the most prominent Chinese linguists of the last century, who in the first half of the book tackles (and for the most part demolishes) many of the myths about the Chinese language held both by outsiders and by Chinese scholars themselves. For example: that Chinese characters are ideographic, expressing ideas directly without appeal to spoken language; that the language itself is monosyllabic; that Chinese is a unified language across China with only minor differences in pronunciation.
I would have rated it higher if the second half hadn't been so out of date. It consists mostly of discussions of the political history of the attempt to spread literacy in China, and the issues of the writing system--should the characters be replaced or at least supplemented by a phonetic system? Written in 1984, the whole discussion I believe has been or soon will be rendered obsolete by the widespread use of the internet and cell phones, for the way characters are input into computing devices is by typing phonetically. Once communication is mediated by computers, game over.
It's by one of the most prominent Chinese linguists of the last century, who in the first half of the book tackles (and for the most part demolishes) many of the myths about the Chinese language held both by outsiders and by Chinese scholars themselves. For example: that Chinese characters are ideographic, expressing ideas directly without appeal to spoken language; that the language itself is monosyllabic; that Chinese is a unified language across China with only minor differences in pronunciation.
I would have rated it higher if the second half hadn't been so out of date. It consists mostly of discussions of the political history of the attempt to spread literacy in China, and the issues of the writing system--should the characters be replaced or at least supplemented by a phonetic system? Written in 1984, the whole discussion I believe has been or soon will be rendered obsolete by the widespread use of the internet and cell phones, for the way characters are input into computing devices is by typing phonetically. Once communication is mediated by computers, game over.
March 21, 2013
A very enticing title for a pretty dry read. Also quite dated by now!
November 18, 2015
Informative, but I felt some parts of the book dragged on and the author repeated his main ideas too many times.
August 21, 2012
Very interesting book if you're into Chinese and linguistic histories. If not, don't bother.
Want to read
August 26, 2018Via death end
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