Tag: Ideographic Myth

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pútao

pútao (grape 葡萄) 👈🏼 Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

As part of a series of posts about some common myths about Chinese characters, this post discusses the Monosyllabic Myth. So, this week’s MEotW is pútao (grape 葡萄)”, since the very existence of this simple, well-known Mandarin word, with its two inseparable syllables that together express a single meaning, handily disproves this myth.

A bunch of grapes hanging on a vine

Creative Commons Public Domain logo Michael Pardo [source]

Monosyllabic?

In the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linguist and sinologist John DeFrancis thus introduces the chapter entitled “The Monosyllabic Myth”:

“In this language there is neither an alphabet nor any definite number of letters, but there are as many characters as there are words or expressions.” So said the sixteenth-century Catholic missionary Michele Ruggieri, one of the first Westerners to undertake what he called the “semi-martyrdom” of studying Chinese (quoted in Bernard 1933:149). Ruggieri’s views were similar to those of his superior, Father Matteo Ricci, as paraphrased by Father Nicola Trigault, who also transmitted the opinion that in Chinese “word, syllable, and written symbol are the same” and that the words “are all monosyllabic; not even one disyllabic or polysyllabic word can be found” (Trigault 1615:25-26).

Even these early observations reveal one of the main reasons for the confusion leading to the Monosyllabic Myth—namely, the failure to distinguish between speech and writing. It is the despair of linguists, who insist on keeping the two apart, that they have so little success in achieving their aim and hence must do incessant battle against the practice of using an observation about writing to reach a conclusion about speech.

Just as with the Emulatability Myth, it seems that missionaries of Christendom were involved in spreading the Monosyllabic Myth, the erroneous idea that each Chinese character represents a one-syllable word. Yes, the list of erroneous ideas that Christendom has been involved in spreading is certainly a long one!

As for speech and writing, the article “Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Was Plan A” says the following about their relative importance:

Jehovah built right into us the specialized equipment we need to directly produce speech, but we can only produce writing indirectly through the general purpose tools that are our hands, which generally must do so using external, man-made tools and media such as pens and keyboards and paper and computer screens. If even us humans can design and build things with screens that can dynamically display writing, then Jehovah certainly could have designed our bodies to be able to do so as well, but he didn’t. Instead, Jehovah himself designed our bodies so that “speech is primary, writing secondary”.

Chinese Characters, Chinese Speech, and Monosyllabism

Having reminded us of the important distinction between speech and writing when it comes to any human language, including Mandarin, DeFrancis goes into some detail about how the views of many about Chinese writing and about Chinese speech have contributed to the pervasiveness of the Monosyllabic Myth:

MONOSYLLABISM DERIVED FROM WRITING

In alphabetic writing systems such as English the separation of graphic units by white space, a relatively late development in the history of writing (Gelb 1963:19), is a popular means of defining a word despite the somewhat haphazard way in which many of the demarcations came about. In Chinese the fact that the characters in a running text are normally set off from each other by the same amount of space between adjacent characters regardless of how closely they may be tied together in meaning is also an important factor in defining characters as words.

It is individual characters that form the basis for dictionary entries. Each character is provided with a dictionary listing which gives its pronunciation, consisting always of a single syllable, and its meaning, which may be single or multiple. The conventional dictionary pronunciation of a character does not always correspond with the sound in speech that the syllable is supposed to represent. …

A more serious objection to the handling of characters in ordinary dictionaries involves semantics. Each character is presented as an independent unit and is defined as having at least one meaning. The assumption that each character represents an independent meaningful syllable leads to the conclusion that each character represents a monosyllabic word.

MONOSYLLABISM SURMISED FROM SPEECH

The notion of monosyllabism derived from the writing system is further reinforced by the generally held view of Chinese speech. The syllable in Chinese is often considered phonologically distinct in that it is more rigidly determined than is the case in many other languages, such as English. Chinese syllables, with some exceptions that can be disregarded here, are invariant in the sense that they do not undergo the kind of internal change exhibited by English man-men, his-him, love-loved. In itself this is not a particularly distinctive or particularly significant feature. It has, however, helped to create a situation in which “the syllable is accorded a special status in Chinese…as a psychological unit” (Arlotto 1968:521). The syllable is held to be the type of unit between phoneme and sentence that in English is called a “word” (Chao 1968a:136). Since the syllable is represented by a character, the latter too is held to represent a word. The equating of syllable with character, the notion that both represent a word, and the fact that each individual character, and hence each individual syllable attached to it, has individual meaning, all combine to characterize both speech and writing as “monosyllabic.”

Commenting on the extent to which the Monosyllabic Myth has spread because of factors such as those mentioned above, DeFrancis speaks of

the popular view that the syllable always has meaning and is not a mere morpheme [e.g., the “er” in “teacher”] but a full-fledged word.

He goes on to say:

The popular misconception of the Chinese speaking entirely in words of one syllable is reinforced by some specialists who exaggerate…either because they lack…understanding or because in the interest of popularization they oversimplify to the point of error.

Sweet Grapes

Providing a well-known example of a Mandarin word which definitely has more than one syllable, DeFrancis discusses “pútao (grape 葡萄)”, this week’s MEotW:

Assiduous scholarly research may sometimes succeed in tracing the provenance of a specific term, such as pútao (“grape”). The usual dictionary handling of this term, similar to that for “butterfly,” presents a two-character expression meaning “grape” under both the character 葡 (pú) defined as “grape” and the character 萄 (tao) also defined as “grape.” In fact, however, the two syllables are inseparable and meaningless in themselves. They actually constitute a phonetic loan derived from an Iranian word *badag(a) that entered into Chinese when the grapevine was brought back from Ferghana in Central Asia by the Chinese general Zhang Qian in 126 B.C. (Chmielewski 1958). This precise dating of the origin of a disyllabic expression in Chinese further illustrates how misleading is the dictionary procedure that gives independent meanings for each of the characters used to write the two syllables in such terms.

Not Created Equal

It’s true that in the Chinese characters writing system, each character represents a Mandarin syllable. However, all Mandarin syllables are not created equal. DeFrancis gives us a breakdown about the different types of Mandarin syllables:

There are thus three types of Chinese syllables:

1. F: free, meaningful
2. SB: semibound, meaningful
3. CB: completely bound, meaningless

These three categories are roughly comparable in English to the free form teach, the semibound form er in “teacher” and “preacher,” and the completely bound forms cor and al in “coral.” The first two categories are morphemes, the third is not, as is the case also with their counterparts in Chinese.

…

A random sample of two hundred characters reveals the following distribution:

44% free (includes 7% literary)
45% semibound
11% completely bound
100%

So, while the Monosyllabic Myth holds that “each character represents a monosyllabic word”, the reality is that, as shown above, fewer than half of characters stand on their own as free, monosyllabic words—the rest are bound as components of multisyllable words. DeFrancis goes on to share what Zhōu Yǒuguāng ((Zhōu {Circumference; Circle (surname)} 周 周/週) (Yǒu·guāng Has · Light 有光) (Chinese linguist, etc., known as “the father of Pīnyīn”)), who led the team that developed Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), had to say on the matter:

Zhou Youguang, using a different corpus of characters than the approximately 4,800 of the Chao and Yang dictionary, and also perhaps having a different opinion as to whether a specific character is free or bound, says that “44 percent free is too much!” In his opinion, only 2,000 or so, or about 30 percent, of the 6,800 “modern standard characters” needed to write contemporary Chinese are free words (Zhou 1982:personal communication).

Where’s the Harm?

Is the Monosyllabic Myth merely of academic concern? Has it resulted in any real, practical harmful effects? Note how DeFrancis concludes his chapter on the Monosyllabic Myth:

HARMFUL ASPECTS OF “MONOSYLLABIC”

As in the case of the Ideographic Myth, the Monosyllabic Myth has fostered a kind of cliché thinking about Chinese. Because of its application to both speech and writing it has helped to obscure the difference between the two. Moreover, it has distracted scholarly attention from pursuing certain meaningful lines of research, such as a closer examination of the possible relationship between speech and writing as revealed in China’s voluminous literature.

But the worst aspect of the myth is when it is taken up in a distorted version by the public at large, as for example by the illustrious and authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, in which “monosyllabic” is glossed as a philological term “used as the distinctive epithet of those languages (e.g., Chinese) which have a vocabulary wholly of monosyllables.”…

For the impact of the term “monosyllabic” on the general public has been generally bad. The notion of speaking wholly in words of one syllable, or of reading and writing in the same fashion, in many minds carries with it a connotation of inadequacy and backwardness or at best of childish simplicity. …

…

…This is unfortunate because, apart from denigrating a language and a script of enormous complexity and sophistication, it reveals our failure to get across to the public at large the idea that the real world of Chinese speech and writing is much more fascinating than the mythological world of Chinese monosyllabism.

Reverberations Beyond Characters

The Monosyllabic Myth about characters has even reverberated in the world of Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), which some have insisted on writing as if each syl la ble was a sep a rate word, in slav ish de vo tion to the sup pos ed ly mon o syl lab ic na ture of the char ac ters.

At the other extreme, in their efforts to properly move past the erroneously perceived monosyllabism of the Chinese characters when they write Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), some seem to have overcompensated for the Great Wall of spaceless, faceless, seemingly monosyllabic text written in characters by often smooshing multiple syllables together into long, unbroken, hard-to-read expressions. For example, some would write “dānyīnjié” as one continuous string.

However, breaking up long, multisyllable expressions with spaces or hyphens can often significantly improve readability, as in the case of “dān‐yīnjié” ((dān single 单 單)‐(yīn·jié sound · node; knot → [syllable] 音节 音節) → [monosyllabic | monosyllable]) compared to “dānyīnjié”, “wùlǐ‐xué‐jiā” ((wù·lǐ things’ · {logic → [laws]} [→ [physics]] 物理)‐(xué studying 学 學)‐(jiā -ist 家) → [physicist]) compared to “wùlǐxuéjiā”, or “wù‐rù‐qítú” ((wù {by mistake}; mistakenly; {by accident} 误 誤/悞)‐(rù enter; {go into}; join 入)‐(qí·tú {fork; branch → [different; divergent | wrong]} · road; route; journey; way 歧途) → [go astray; be misled; take a wrong step in life]) compared to “wùrùqítú” or even “wùrù‐qítú”. So, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus material now often uses spaces and hyphens as appropriate to enhance readability when rendering multisyllable Mandarin expressions, especially those with three or more syllables.

Anyway, to conclude, the Monosyllabic Myth about Chinese characters is…BUSTED!

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fǎngxiào

fǎngxiào (fǎng·xiào imitate; copy · imitate; {follow the example of} [→ [emulate]] 仿效 仿/倣效/傚) 👈🏼 Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

As part of a series of posts about some common myths about Chinese characters, this post discusses the Emulatability Myth. So, this week’s MEotW is “fǎngxiào (fǎng·xiào imitate; copy · imitate; {follow the example of} [→ [emulate]] 仿效 仿/倣效/傚)”, an expression that seems to express well the emulating that the Emulatability Myth claims is a good thing.

The first morpheme in “fǎngxiào (fǎng·xiào imitate; copy · imitate; {follow the example of} [→ [emulate]] 仿效 仿/倣效/傚)” means “imitate; copy”, and other expressions in which it appears include “fǎngshēng‐xué ((fǎng·shēng {to imitate; copy} · {life → [living things]} 仿生)‐(xué studying 学 學) → [bionics | biomimetics])”, “fǎngfú (resembling; {[is] like}; {as if}; seemingly 仿佛 彷/髣/仿彿/髴/佛)”, and “mófǎng (mó·fǎng imitating · imitating; copying [→ [imitation; model]] 模仿)”.

As for the second morpheme in “fǎngxiào (fǎng·xiào imitate; copy · imitate; {follow the example of} [→ [emulate]] 仿效 仿/倣效/傚)”, it here means “imitate; follow the example of”, and it also appears in the well-known expression “xiàofǎ (xiào·fǎ imitate · {follow the model of} 效法)”.

When put together, the morphemes in fǎngxiào (fǎng·xiào imitate; copy · imitate; {follow the example of} [→ [emulate]] 仿效 仿/倣效/傚)” can effectively mean “emulate”. According to the Emulatability Myth, it would be good for other writing systems to emulate Chinese characters when it comes to (supposedly) representing meaning directly, without depending on speech sounds. Is this really a good thing to seek to emulate?

A Good Example?

In the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linguist and sinologist John DeFrancis thus introduces the chapter entitled “The Emulatability Myth”:

The caveat sounded at the end of the preceding chapter is no tongue-in-cheek turn of phrase intended merely to amuse. It is a sober warning of the consequences, some of them quite serious, resulting from the fact that just as the Ideographic Myth leads logically to the Universality Myth, so does the latter lead to the Emulatability Myth—the idea that Chinese characters provide a model to be followed in one way or another in writing without regard to sound.

The Emulatability Myth, then, is the idea that because Chinese characters supposedly represent meaning visually, without dependence on speech sounds (the Ideographic Myth), they are supposedly exceptionally good at functioning across barriers of space, time, and language as universal enablers of communication (the Universality Myth), and thus are able to serve as “a model to be followed in one way or another in writing without regard to sound”. How so? DeFrancis continues:

The reports of missionaries from the sixteenth century onward firmly established the idea that Chinese characters already served as a common written language among the peoples of the East and therefore could be further extended as a universal language for Europe and the rest of the world.

…

Chinese characters can indeed be extended beyond their present use to replace alphabetic writing in the case of English, French, Russian, Hindi, Arabic and all other languages, but at such an astronomical cost that this venture can only be envisaged by those so blinded by their view of Chinese characters and so lacking in responsibility that they feel no need to look below the surface and confront reality. Small wonder that the idea of directly emulating the Asian use of Chinese characters has received little serious consideration in the four centuries that the subject of Chinese as a universal script has been under discussion.

Much more attention has been devoted to the idea of developing a new “Universal Language” and “Universal Writing” based on “Real Characters” or “Universal Characters” that would adapt what were generally considered to be the underlying principles of Chinese writing—namely, that the characters represented meaning without regard to sound and that a single character was ascribed to a single thing, whether concrete or abstract. The supposed one-to-one correspondence between thing and symbol was seized upon for two reasons. The first was the tendency, against which linguists still have to inveigh, to overemphasize the role of vocabulary compared to grammar and other linguistic aspects in the working of language. The second was the need to find a means of labeling and classifying the vast amount of new scientific and technological knowledge that was coming into being. The concept of a universal set of written symbols dovetailed neatly with the concept of a universal taxonomy of nature (Slaughter 1982).

…

In a more recent expression of the emulatability thesis we find the well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead calling on scholars in various fields to put aside their parochial differences and unite in seeking to create

a written form of communication independent of any languages of the world, but dependent upon the concepts essential to high-level philosophical, political, and scientific communication. We have, of course, many such partial artificial languages now in the Arabic numeral system, in chemistry and physics, in engineering diagrams. But the most complete model we have of a written language that is independent of particular languages is the classical Chinese system of writing through which two educated men, who cannot understand a word the other speaks, may nevertheless communicate fully with each other by writing. [Mead and Modley 1968:62]

So, missionaries of Christendom were involved in spreading the idea that Chinese characters could show us how to create a universal language (i.e., a universal writing system) for the world. As we who have learned Bible truth know, this wouldn’t be the first thing that members of Christendom have gotten wrong! Additionally and unfortunately, even people such as the well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead got on board with this particular train of thought.

“Humanly Quite Impossible”

What, in particular, is wrong with the seemingly appealing idea of universal writing? DeFrancis has this to say:

One of the basic reasons for the failure of the proposed schemes is the now obvious impossibility of classifying all things known in tables so devised that each item would be assigned its own universal character. These attempts to invent a universal language based on a universal nomenclature were inevitably incomplete, impossibly clumsy, and wholly impractical (Knowlson 1975; Slaughter 1982). Even more fundamental, such attempts are doomed to failure at the outset because, as pointed out in the earlier discussion refuting the notion of Chinese as an ideographic script, any system of writing not based on actual speech would require feats of memory that are humanly quite impossible.

This reminds us of one of the fundamental flaws of Chinese characters as a writing system for us imperfect humans. While Jehovah in his wisdom designed us to communicate with speech based on the relatively few basic sounds used in any particular human language, combined in various ways to potentially abstractly represent anything one may think or feel, different Chinese characters represent the different syllables (which are the highly numerous combinations of a language’s few basic speech sounds) with meaning that are used in a language, which can theoretically be as infinite in number as are all the things humans may want or need to talk about.

As experience has plainly shown, this high, theoretically potentially infinite number of different Chinese characters, many of which are quite complex, is simply beyond the ability of our limited, imperfect human brains to manageably deal with. The character amnesia that’s common even among native Chinese speakers who have been learning characters for decades is clear evidence of this.

To illustrate the problem of trying to be too direct in representing a large number of things, with too little abstraction, consider an example that many of us in the Mandarin field are quite familiar with:

JW Library app, Library tab (iPad)

The Library tab in the JW Library app

As shown above, a relatively manageable number of categories are used to abstract and organize the many individual items that are available in the Library tab. Alphabets like the Latin alphabet used in English, French, Spanish, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), etc. similarly use a relatively mentally manageable number of symbols to basically represent the sounds of a language, which in turn are combined in various ways and used to abstractly represent the various and hugely numerous meanings that can be expressed in that language.

In contrast, using Chinese characters is more like trying to directly use a single unorganized list of all the many items available in the JW Library app’s Library tab, every book, brochure, tract, video, etc., without the abstraction and organization provided by the categories, or even by consistent sorting. (Imagine if a developer on the JW Library app team actually implemented such a usability nightmare. It’s highly doubtful that this developer would be allowed to remain on the team!) And actually, the situation with Chinese characters is really much, much worse than that, because even the many items available in the JW Library app’s Library tab are few in number compared to the practically infinite number of things and concepts that human language can represent, that Chinese characters seek to represent relatively directly.

Myths and Consequences

Continuing on, DeFrancis highlights a serious harmful effect of the Emulatability Myth about Chinese characters, that reaches beyond those who are trying to learn a Chinese language:

CHINESE INFLUENCE ON READING THEORY

It is not enough, however, to note shortcomings in the aspect of the Emulatability Myth that seeks to create a universal language while still advancing the notion of “the special learning that characterizes a logographic system such as Chinese.” Pursuit of the will-o’-the-wisp of a universal language has the result merely of wasting countless hours of time. Much more serious is the result of the thesis, which underlies Kolers’ reference to “special learning,” that “there are two major systems of writing in the world today, the semantic and the phonetic” (Kolers 1970:113). This belief in the semantic nature of Chinese writing leads Kolers to argue that all research into reading—that is, how we read and how children should be taught to read—should be based on the alleged existence of two completely disparate systems of ideographic and phonetic writing. Kolers’ assumption that readers of the Chinese “semantic” script go directly from print to meaning leads to the conclusion, as Gough points out (1972:335), that “if they can do it, so can we.” And on this conclusion of emulatability is based a pedagogical approach to reading that affects millions of little victims of the Ideographic Myth.

There is an enormous literature on the teaching of reading. For present purposes, at the risk of oversimplifying the complexities involved in this literature, we can say that there are two main schools of thought on the subject: one arguing for the use of phonics [Wikipedia link] in teaching reading, another arguing against the use of phonics and for an approach in which readers go directly from writing to meaning. Adherents of the second approach constantly buttress their argument by reference to the “ideographic” or “semantic” nature of Chinese writing. So widespread is this aspect of the Emulatability Myth, and so serious are its consequences, that the whole question merits a thorough and long-overdue airing.

We can begin by observing that the line of reasoning espoused by adherents of the emulatability approach can be summarized as “Since A is true, therefore B is true.” Since readers of “semantic Chinese” read without regard to sound, therefore readers of “alphabetic English” can read without regard to sound. But what happens to this line of argument if it turns out that A is false? Does this mean that B is also false? Not necessarily. Proposition B may still be correct, but the proof of its correctness must be sought elsewhere than by citing the false proposition A. The least we can say is that confidence in the truth of B is seriously undermined when it is advanced on the basis of something so patently false. Perhaps it should also be added that specialists in reading, although responsible for the application of the Ideographic Myth to the teaching of reading, can be excused to some extent because they have been misled by specialists in Chinese.

This reminds me of an article I came across a few years ago, about how children are being taught to read English:

Here are a couple of excerpts from the article linked to in the above post:

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don’t know there’s anything wrong with it.

Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing [Wikipedia link]. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."

Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking about what makes them good readers.

One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it."

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.

She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."

Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing.25 She was shocked. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.

This problem is real, and it has really affected us Mandarin field language learners. I remember that a few years ago, I talked to a brother who was learning Mandarin, and who insisted that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) was bad, just like learning how to read English with phonics was bad. Unfortunately, the actual, verified cognitive science shows that he was completely wrong! I wonder how many other Mandarin field language learners have been similarly misled by the ripple effects of the linguistic idolatry of the Ideographic Myth and the Emulatability Myth…

Writing Is Not Pictures

Another interesting point that DeFrancis touches on is:

A fundamental error made by psycholinguists who uphold this type of investigation is the belief that since we can recognize many objects in the physical world around us we can equally well memorize the meanings of thousands of Chinese characters or the meanings of English words approached as ideographs. Thus Smith (1973:75) states that

we can both recognize and recall many thousands of words in our spoken vocabulary, and recognize many thousands of different faces and animals and plants and objects in our visual world. Why should this fantastic memorizing capacity suddenly run out in the case of reading? It is surely no more difficult for a person to remember that 家 or the printed word house is called “house” than that 🏠 (or an actual house) is called “house.” Unfortunately, we tend to believe that the alphabetic form house is read in an exclusive manner, simply because it is composed of letters.

This is an astonishing statement. How can the cognitive impact of little two-dimensional black-on-white symbols be compared with that of three-dimensional, multicolored, multitextured, and otherwise differentiated objects in our visual world? Smith has apparently not bothered to acquaint himself with the well-known difficulty of mastering Chinese characters. A modicum of inquiry would have revealed to him the sad but incontrovertible truth that this “fantastic memorizing capacity” does in fact run out for most Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, not to mention Western students, when they are confronted with what actual experience has clearly shown to be the much more difficult task of recognizing and remembering many thousands of different characters.

While Chinese characters have taken some inspiration from the visual world that we humans see around us, which can be represented in pictures, characters are just characters (a type of writing), not actual pictures. So, while we humans are designed to be able to naturally connect speech and pictures of physical objects with meanings, abundant actual experience shows that connecting the inhumanly numerous and crazy complex (for writing) Chinese characters with meanings in our minds requires a long, hard, unnatural struggle. It follows, then, that no, Chinese characters are not a good model to follow by attempting to design a hypothetical universal writing system for use by us limited, imperfect humans, nor are they a good system to take inspiration from when it comes to teaching children how to read writing written in an alphabet, like English writing is.

Yes, since the Ideographic Myth and the Universality Myth are just myths, the Emulatability Myth that is based on them is also…BUSTED!

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Culture Language Learning Science

gòngtōng

gòngtōng (gòng·tōng shared · {through → [connecting | [in] common]} [→ [applicable to both/all; shared; common; universal]] 共通) 👈🏼 Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

As part of a series of posts about some common myths about Chinese characters, this post discusses the Universality Myth. So, this week’s MEotW is “gòngtōng (gòng·tōng shared · {through → [connecting | [in] common]} [→ [applicable to both/all; shared; common; universal]] 共通)”, an expression that seems to express well the supposed universality that is the subject of this myth.

In “gòngtōng (gòng·tōng shared · {through → [connecting | [in] common]} [→ [applicable to both/all; shared; common; universal]] 共通)”, “gòng (share | common | together | altogether 共)” means “share | common | together | altogether”. This morpheme also appears in other well-known expressions such as “gòngtóng (gòng·tóng shared · {same | together} 共同)”, “gònghé‐guó ((gòng·hé shared · harmony → [republic] 共和)‐(guó country; nation; state 国 國) → [republic])”, and “Gòngchǎn (Gòng·chǎn {Commonly Possessing} · {Produced (Things) → [Property]} → [Communist] 共产 共產)‐Dǎng (Party 党 黨/党)”.

As for “tōng ({[(going)] through[(out)]; open [to]} [→ [common; general | connecting/communicating [to/with] [→ [logical; coherent]]]] 通)”, it here literally means “through”, and effectively means “connecting” or “in common”. It also appears in well-known expressions such as “gōutōng (gōu·tōng {(through) channel} · {(going) through → [communicating]} → [communicating; communication | linking up] 沟通 溝通)”, “jiāotōng (jiāo·tōng crossing; intersecting; meeting; joining · {(going) through → [connecting; communicating]} → [traffic; communications; transportation] 交通)”, “pǔtōng (pǔ·tōng common; general; universal; widespread · {through(out) → [general; common]} → [ordinary; common; average; general] 普通)”, and “tōngguò (tōng·guò through · passing → [passing through] → [through] 通过 通過)”.

When put together, the morphemes in “gòngtōng (gòng·tōng shared · {through → [connecting | [in] common]} [→ [applicable to both/all; shared; common; universal]] 共通)” can effectively mean “shared; common; universal”, which in itself can generally be good. In fact, in our ministry, we look for “gòngtōng (gòng·tōng shared · {through → [in common]} → [common] 共通) diǎn (points 点 點)” (common ground) with those with whom we speak. How universal, though, are Chinese characters? Are they really more universal than, say, alphabets?

Basis and Beliefs

In the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linguist and sinologist John DeFrancis writes the following in the chapter entitled “The Universality Myth”:

The Universality Myth is the logical extension of the Ideographic Myth. It is based on the threefold belief that:

1. Chinese characters enable a speaker from Beijing and another from Canton to communicate in writing even though they cannot understand each other’s speech. …
2. Chinese characters make it possible to read today’s newspapers as well as poems written a thousand years ago and philosophical essays written long before Christ. …
3. Chinese characters can function as a universal means of communication among people speaking totally unrelated languages. …

…

Implicitly or explicitly, the statements are meant to contrast Chinese characters with the familiar alphabetic scripts of the West. Chinese characters, it is believed, can do all these things, whereas alphabetic scripts cannot.

In other words, the Universality Myth regarding Chinese characters is that these visible, supposedly ideographic (representing meaning visually, without dependence on speech sounds) symbols of worldly Chinese culture can function across barriers of space, time, and language as universal enablers of communication. That seems amazing, if true. But, is it true? And, is it any more true for Chinese characters than it is for alphabets?

Testing the Relative Universality

DeFrancis goes on to test the Universality Myth by examining what it would take for an illiterate Mandarin speaker and an illiterate Cantonese speaker to learn how to communicate with each other by writing in characters, compared to what it would take for an illiterate French speaker and an illiterate Spanish speaker to learn how to communicate with each other by writing in French (which, as is widely known, is written using the Latin alphabet):

My Chinese colleagues estimate on the basis of their own experience and direct contact with the Chinese educational system that it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn how to read and write three thousand characters and another year or two for a speaker of Cantonese to reach the same level in Standard Chinese. …My colleagues in French and Spanish estimate it would take the two imagined European illiterates less than half the time to reach a comparable level of proficiency in French.

…The overall picture is clear. It seems incontestable that both Europeans will find it easier to learn to read and write French than it be for either Cantonese or Mandarin speakers to learn to read and write Chinese. If we could add up the combined number of hours needed for the two members of each group to accomplish the same thing, the total would be enormously greater in the case of Chinese written in characters than in the case of French written in an alphabetic script. Even more significant, it would also be enormously greater for Chinese written in characters than for Chinese written in Pinyin. That is to say, it would be much easier for illiterates from Peking and those from Canton, even if the latter remain incapable of speaking Mandarin, to acquire the ability to communicate with each other by learning to read and write Standard Chinese written in Pinyin rather than in characters. Where, then, is the vaunted marvel of tongue-tied Chinese o’er-leaping barriers in speech by communicating with each other by means of those magical Chinese characters?

So, it’s possible for speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, English, French, Spanish, etc. to learn Chinese characters and use these as a means of communication. However, they could also do this with Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)! Also, it would actually be much faster and easier to do this with Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) than it would be to do it with the crazy complex characters!

Going Back in Time

What about the claim that characters allow us to still be able to read Chinese writings from long ago? Concerning this, DeFrancis writes:

Apart from learning the characters in their current meanings, Chinese must also learn the frequently different meanings of characters in earlier usage and the definitely different syntactical structures of classical versus contemporary written Chinese. This ability involves considerable training in tasks notorious for their difficulty—tasks that involve mastering differences at least as great as those between current English and the language of Chaucer. Without going into great detail, it should be readily apparent that an illiterate Chinese, regardless of whether he speaks Cantonese or Mandarin, will have a much greater task in learning to read classical Chinese than will an illiterate European, regardless of whether he speaks Spanish or French, in learning to read Latin. In the case of those already literate in current Chinese or French, it is doubtful that Chinese readers would enjoy any advantage over Europeans in respect to the amount of additional effort required to read classical Chinese in contrast to Latin.

So, it would probably be harder for a Chinese person to learn characters and then learn classical Chinese, than it would be for a European person to learn the Latin alphabet, and then learn Latin!

For us Mandarin field language learners specifically, since Jehovah’s organization is continually moving forward with ever broader, deeper, and clearer understandings of various truths, we in contrast seek to use the newest, most up-to-date writings from the organization whenever possible. Even with regard to the Bible itself, first written long ago, we seek, as a rule, to use the most up-to-date translations available. For specific examples in this regard, Appendix A2 (English, Mandarin) of the New World Translation Bible lists ways in which the current version of this Bible has been carefully revised to be more beneficial for modern readers.

It’s worth noting that the Chinese versions of the organization’s publications used to be written only in Chinese characters, but the most recent versions of the organization’s important writings generally have Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) available for them as well now.

Sunk Costs and Future Investments

Of course, those who have already spent years of hard work learning characters wouldn’t have to start that particular long and difficult process from zero (although, tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) (character amnesia) is real thing that takes constant ongoing effort to ward off). And, if they happen to meet others, even others who don’t speak the same language, who have also already spent years of hard work learning characters, then, yes, they might be able to use characters to imperfectly communicate with these others, to a limited extent—that is indeed one imperfect benefit arising from the massive sunk costs they have incurred in the process of learning characters.

However, those who have not already poured enormous amounts of time and effort into learning characters still have the opportunity to objectively weigh how much time and effort it is reasonable and worthwhile to sink into the characters going forward. As they consider this, they can keep in mind the inescapable reality that, due to the inherent extraordinary complexity of the characters, and due to the way that Jehovah actually designed us humans to use language, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) and other sound-prioritizing writing systems (like Hangul, for those learning Korean) offer much greater ROI (return on investment) than characters do for those considering investing time and effort into learning how to actually communicate with others. Dedicated servants of Jehovah should also keep in mind that the time and energy they have are not theirs alone to spend or waste—their time, energy, etc. actually belong to Jehovah, and should thus be used and invested accordingly.

Anyway, to summarize, the Universality Myth regarding Chinese characters is…BUSTED!