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Script Reform in China
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16641 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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10 / 1989 |
2,874 Words |
| Author
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Victor H. Mair
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Nearly everyone who has seen Chinese characters is deeply impressed by them. Even without being able to read a single graph, one is struck by their longevity, beauty, complexity, and numerousness. Indeed, all these qualities are true of the Chinese writing system and account for the strong feelings it evokes. These emotions are particularly intense for those who consider the script to be one of the primary symbols of Chinese cultural identity. There is a great fear that, without this distinctive set of graphs, Chinese civilization as such would cease to exist.
Yet, during the past century, there have been persistent and equally urgent calls for radical changes in the script--including its abolition--from other segments of society. The traditionalists strive to maintain a proud and unique heritage that goes back over three millennia. The reformers worry that, unless their country modernizes its cumbersome, out-of-date script, everything--including the script itself--will be lost in an unsuccessful race to keep up with the rest of the world. A dispassionate look at the history and nature of writing in China may help to reconcile these two contradictory attitudes.
The Chinese writing system first occurs in virtually full-blown form around 1200 B.C. in the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty. Scholars are perplexed by the suddenness with which the script appears; prior to the oracle bone inscriptions, there were only a few isolated and still undecipherable marks on pottery and occasionally on other objects. Hence the origins of the Chinese script remain a mystery. Its basic characteristics, however, do not. From its very inception as a tool for recording facts and ideas, the same fundamental principles have governed both the shape and the function of the individual graphs. In spite of widespread belief to the contrary, there seems never to have been a purely pictographic or ideographic stage of full writing in China. The earliest connected texts contain sizable proportions of sings that communicate meaning through sound (the so-called "cyclical stems and branches," the graph for "all" [xian], the graph for "come" [lai], and so forth).
John DeFrancis and others have convincingly shown that it is actually impossible to record all the nuances of speech without substantial recourse to phonetic indicators. Certainly, for at least the last twenty-five hundred years, by far the largest proportion of Chinese characters was made up of a component that conveys meaning and another component that conveys sound, though neither does so with precision alone. Since these components are gathered together in a consistently quadrilateral configuration, Chinese refer to them as tetragraphs (fangkuaizi, literally "square graphs" [a cluster of four successive letters in cryptography]).
Reasons for language reform
Perhaps the single most outstanding dissimilarity between the Chinese writing system and alphabets is the vast quantity of separate units in the former compared to the strictly limited elements of the latter. In contrast to the 26 letters of the English alphabet, for example, there are over 60,000 discrete tetragraphs in the Chinese script, and new ones are being added continually. Mastery of such an enormous assemblage of individual shapes is beyond the ability of any mortal. For practical purposes, literacy in Chinese requires the passive recognition of approximately 2,000 tetragraphs and the active ability to
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