Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Why the Chinese language should not adopt phonetic writing?

This is part of a comment posted to Xujun Eberline's blog Will Chinese Go Alphabetic? Re-posted here as a standalone piece. "Phonetic" and "alphabetic" are used interchangeably when referring to a writing system.

There's an often-forgotten aspect of the resistance against Chinese romanization: unification of China. A number of scholars have expounded this idea since about one hundred years ago. The earliest I read is from Sun Yat-sen in his "Three Principles of the People". If China were to use an alphabetic writing system, people in different regions of China would soon find it impossible to communicate with each other due to great differences in pronunciation of the dialects, and China would disintegrate into many small countries as Europe. Sun's voice might appear weak against the few prominent figures in the 1920's and 1930's advocating romanization, because Sun's major concern was something bigger. In fact, that idea is largely unknown to most people, in spite of reiteration by a few scholars mostly in Taiwan. Generally, in the past 100 years, when the Chinese woke up to the fact that China is weak in power, romanization of the Chinese writing system would gain momentum, and subside in other times. I think the latest wave was in the 1980's, on a much smaller scale than its predecessors. With economic boom in recent decades, romanization is only a wishful thinking of the foreign students interested in something about China except the language itself.

To be fair, I think it's proven that children spend more time studying Chinese to a literacy level than studying an alphabetic language. But in view of the benefit of national unity, and to a lesser extent, artistic and literary beauty, let the kids, or foreign students, suffer! (By the way, I'm not sure if there's proof that simplified Chinese takes less time to learn than the non-simplified, but all anecdotal evidence suggests so.)

5 comments:

The Mojito Corner said...

Mr. Yong,

I have a blog in which I sometimes discuss China's position vis a vis America and the West. I've been actively studying Chinese culture throughout this year and would be very grateful to you if you could honor me with some of your opinions on my blogs.

www.mojitocorner.blogspot.com

John de Denghy

Yong Huang said...

Hi John,

I took a quick look at your writings. They're very well thought out. Unfortunately, I have no expertise at those issues you discussed. I'm mostly interested in the Chinese and English languages. Sorry I can't make any comments on your blog.

But thanks for visiting my blog!

Hedda said...

I agree with the arguments against romanisation of the Chinese language. Their alphabet is so beautiful, like pictures, and is of great cultural value. I have been learning the Japanese language in school for two and a half year now, and as you know, they use the same alphabet as the Chinese (although they use it somewhat differently), and I would not trade my knowledge of the beautiful "letters" for anything. The Chinese written language must be kept alive! :)

Yong Huang said...

Hedda: While I have a different reason for hoping that the Chinese writing system will not be converted to phonetic, I do appreciate your comments, and fully understand your perspective.

Lady Gaga Bad Romance said...

My own opinion is that each language should try to save its national character, not to adopt any innovations from other languages!