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chénggōng

chénggōng (chéng·gōng {becoming [of]}; {accomplishing [of]} · {meritorious service/deed}; achievement → [succeed | success | successful[ly]] 成功) 👈🏼 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 Successfulness Myth. So, this week’s MEotW is “chénggōng (chéng·gōng {becoming [of]}; {accomplishing [of]} · {meritorious service/deed}; achievement → [succeed | success | successful[ly]] 成功)”, which can effectively mean “successful”.

Success?

In the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, linguist and sinologist John DeFrancis begins the chapter entitled “The Successfulness Myth” with the following:

Success, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. No other aspect of Chinese characters is so much a matter of subjective judgment. I focus on such modern concerns as mass literacy and see failure. Others, concentrating on other aspects, see great success.

From some perspectives, Chinese characters have unquestionably been a great success. “We all agree,” said Premier Zhou Enlai (1965:7), “that as a written record they have made immortal contributions to history.” They have indeed made immortal contributions to a civilization deserving of superlative tributes that would extend Edgar Allen Poe’s “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” to include also “the splendor that was China.”

Given this esteem for the past role of Chinese characters, it seems almost sacrilegious to suggest that because of their difficulty they have failed, and will continue to fail, in meeting some of the major needs felt by modern society. Nevertheless, in the case of one such need, that for mass literacy, I believe that success via characters must be characterized as a myth.

Speaking of the eye of the beholder, what can we deduce about how Jehovah God sees Chinese characters? A case can probably be made that characters are a leading contender for being the most widespread and deeply entrenched human cultural tradition in all of human history, which is a kind of success, I guess. However, while imperfect humans of this system may find that impressive, is that the kind of thing that impresses Jehovah God, whom the Bible calls “the Ancient of Days”? (Daniel 7:9) From Jehovah’s point of view, are characters a successful and effective tool for helping to glorify his great name and spread the good news of his Kingdom? Or, have they been a Great Wall impeding the preaching and teaching work that Jehovah wants accomplished in the vast worldwide Mandarin field? When Jesus, who perfectly reflected God’s qualities, encountered successfully entrenched human traditions that got in the way of doing what was good in God’s eyes, how did he respond?—John 14:9; Mark 3:1–5; 7:13.

“To Jehovah, for whom ‘a thousand years is as one day’, Chinese civilization has only been around for a few days.…

“…we should boast in Jehovah, not in needlessly and self-indulgently complex knowledge relating to a mere worldly human culture” troubadourworks.com/tiandi/meotw…

#MEotW #PīnyīnPlus

[image or embed]

— tiandi, Links News (@tiandilinksnews.bsky.social) Dec 2, 2024 at 3:40 PM

The Great Wall of China

Does Jehovah see Chinese characters as a successful writing system? Or does he see characters as a Great Wall obstructing his vital preaching and teaching work in the worldwide Mandarin field?

“Success” Through Definition and Denial

Regarding how some have defined successful literacy through the learning of characters, DeFrancis says:

If literacy sights are set low enough it may be possible to claim great success for the characters both in the imperial era and at the present time. Illiteracy can be eliminated by defining it out of existence, which is apparently what the “Gang of Four” did when, according to Zhou Youguang (1980e:21), it proclaimed that China no longer had any illiterates. The picture becomes less rosy, however, if we insist that literacy should be defined as the ability to accomplish such relatively elementary tasks as corresponding about family matters and reading newspapers and instructions in various matters. For this, a knowledge of about four thousand characters is required, and even then Chinese, unlike their poorly educated Western counterparts, will be unable to express in writing everything they can express in speech.

After offering some thoughts on how solid information could be obtained on actual rates of maintained literacy among the people of China, DeFrancis says:

Until solid information like this becomes available, all we can do is speculate. My own speculations lead me to share the profound skepticism of many Chinese, including Lu Xun, who doubted that the people as a whole could achieve an acceptable level of literacy on the basis of the traditional script, even in its simplified form. Here it must be pointed out clearly that this skepticism has never taken the form of a belief in the absolute impossibility of achieving literacy with a character-based script. The skepticism takes the form, rather, of the belief that the nature of the script and the material conditions of life for the vast majority of people, especially the 80 percent comprising the peasantry, are such that in the not too distant future there is little possibility of their becoming literate in the full sense of the term. This is the only timetable and the only definition of literacy acceptable to many people interested in the ability of the masses to raise their cultural level (DeFrancis 1950).

It is possible, however, that others may count achievements in literacy based on characters a success because they do not accept the emphasis on the importance of mass literacy. …

…And radio and television may indeed reduce the need for literacy in the areas of mass indoctrination and information. In the light of these considerations, success in an educational system may well be measured, as it is at present in China, less by the ability to solve the problem of mass literacy than by the success in producing a body of technicians and specialists in science and technology.

Concerning how some claim success for the characters by denying that they are difficult, DeFrancis writes:

LITERACY THROUGH MODEST EFFORT

The assertion that the difficulty of the Chinese characters is a prime reason for the lack of success in achieving mass literacy evokes several kinds of responses. One, already noted, is to deny the lack of success. Another is to deny the characters are difficult, which automatically removes one explanation for any failures. Karlgren (1929:40) has expressed the following view:

Even very learned Chinese do not encumber their memory with more than about six thousand characters. Four thousand is, as we have said, a tolerably high figure, and even with three thousand some progress can be made. For a receptive child this is a modest task, and an adult foreigner in the course of a year’s study masters without difficulty from two to three thousand characters.

Karlgren’s view of mastering large numbers of characters “without difficulty” is not supported by the experience of those involved in teaching reading either to foreigners or to the Chinese themselves. His estimates may be right for someone like himself, who probably had a photographic memory, and for others, especially Chinese intellectuals, whose lifestyle, not to mention livelihood, is characterized by almost full-time involvement in reading and writing, so that they often fail to appreciate the difficulty that ordinary people who spend long hours at hard physical labor encounter in finding the time and the energy to attain and retain literacy. As a more observant writer, George Jan (1969:141), has noted:

Another serious deficiency in mass education in the communes was the tendency for peasants to lapse back into illiteracy because of their failure to practice their newly acquired skill. According to the statistics of Wan-jung County [Wanrong County in Shanxi], of the 34,000 people who had received instruction in reading by October 1958, one-third had again become illiterate, and the other two-thirds were unable even to read newspapers. If this was generally true, the qualitative significance of the illiteracy-elimination program in the communes must be questioned.

Regarding how some, including Chinese officials, have sought to “move the goalposts” by defining literacy as knowing a limited number of characters, DeFrancis says:

A limited number of characters cannot possibly serve (unless they are used as phonetic symbols) as a medium of free expression to convey the thousands of concepts the average Chinese commands in speech.

Yet this idea of literacy through a limited number of characters is widely held and forms the basis for official policy. In 1952 the official definition of “basic literacy” increased Yen’s figure of 1,000 characters to 1,500 for peasants and 2,000 for workers (Zhou Youguang 1979:329). Attempts to reach this goal initially placed much emphasis on Mao Zedong’s instructions to proceed by searching out in each village the characters locally needed to record work points and to write down names of people, places, implements, and so on. He thought two or three hundred characters would do. Next another few hundred would be learned to handle matters beyond the village. There would be successive additions of characters for a total of 1,500, the mastery of which was considered the test of literacy (Mao 1956: 165; Hu and Seifman 1976). Although 1,500 characters unquestionably have some utility, their mastery can hardly be equated with achieving literacy in the full sense of the term, and even this limited success, as the Wanrong case shows, has tended to be ephemeral.

How About Simplification, Etc.?

DeFrancis proceeds to go over several different methods and approaches that have been tried to help improve the literacy situation in China, including the simplification of the characters. Regarding this, he says:

The true extent to which simplification has eased the burden of learning characters must remain a matter of subjective evaluation until there is firm supporting evidence. Such evidence must take two forms. First is a survey along the lines previously indicated to find out the exact state of literacy among different segments of the population. Second is research to disentangle how much of whatever advance in literacy that has been achieved, and there undoubtedly has been some, is due to simplification itself and how much to other factors, such as improved living conditions and more widespread schooling, especially in urban centers.

My own view is that simplification was a distinctly secondary factor and that high-level decision makers like Mao Zedong, who as members of the educated elite were of course already quite familiar with the simpler characters, through infomal use, were mistaken in thinking that just because they themselves were able to save much time and effort by using the abbreviated forms, therefore illiterates would also find it significantly easier to learn to read and write if the simplifications were officially adopted as part of the writing system. No doubt illiterates thought so too and, according to the official line, clamored for the change. As far as language reformers are concerned, however, many place little stock in extravagant claims of success and reject the ability of simplified characters to contribute to the elimination of illiteracy among the masses. Zhou Youguang (1978a) has expressed the view that the time needed to master characters has not been significantly reduced by simplification. Wang Li (1980:13–15) has dismissed simplified characters as a solution: “Simplified characters are simply a transitional stage. Strictly speaking, they are not even a transitional stage. They are far removed from a basic reform.” This comment is in line with the statement attributed earlier to Liu Shaoqi that simplification “will turn out badly in the future” (Wang Boxi 1974:22–23). Although it is by no means certain that Liu actually made this statement, the fact that the criticism was attributed to him suggests that many people have been skeptical of the value of character simplification. Such doubts, which have been echoed directly or indirectly by many advocates of reform, suggest the need for a blunt and harsh conclusion: A whole generation, both of people and of time, has been uselessly sacrificed in a timid, bumbling, and predictably unsuccessful attempt to achieve mass literacy through simplification of characters.

How About the Examples of Japan and Taiwan?

Continuing on, DeFrancis discusses how relevant or not the examples of Japan and Taiwan are to the matter of successful literacy in China through the learning of characters:

JAPAN AS A MODEL FOR LITERACY

This conclusion is rejected by those who advance a final argument against the idea that the difficulty of the characters, even in simplified form, makes them unsuited for mass literacy. It is argued that although this was true of the old society, the new order initiated in 1949 will eventually make it possible for everyone to learn to read and write. Expression of this view is frequently supported by the contention that Japan with its high rate of literacy in a character-based script provides proof of what China too can accomplish. The superficiality and irrelevance of this argument becomes apparent if we look a little more closely at the true state of literacy in Japan.

…

More recently Sato Hideo, head of the Research Section for Historical Documents, National Institute for Educational Research in the Japanese Ministry of Education, has estimated that public school graduates, who now receive nine years of compulsory schooling, retain a recognition knowledge of the 1,945 kanji but soon forget how to write all but 500 or so (1980: personal communication). As far as this limited kanji orthography is concerned, they may possibly be considered literate in reading it but must surely be considered illiterate in writing it. More precisely, their literacy in reading consists in reading the mixture of partly phonetic kanji and purely phonetic kana, whereas their literacy in writing is largely limited to writing phonetically. Such is the concrete reality of what Neustupńy calls “the myth of 99 percent literacy” in the character-based writing system of Japan.

Moreover, apart from the use of kana by Japanese illiterate in writing kanji, the simple syllabic script is also used, even by those literate in kanji, in many aspects of Japanese life, such as computer technology, and has general application in informal writing because kana is so much quicker and easier to handle than kanji. There are even areas, such as Telex, where romaji is the preferred or exclusive medium of communication. Thus the Japanese policy of limiting the number of kanji in the writing system has resulted in consolidating a narrowed use of characters in such obvious activities as schooling while expanding the role of kana and rōmaji in less publicized fields.

The character-based Chinese writing system as presently constituted does not permit the Japanese option of limiting the number of characters in the basic system or of dispensing with them entirely in some areas. It is not clear how much support there would be for the idea of developing a Japanese-like writing system by using a limited number of characters interspersed with alphabetic symbols such as Zhuyin Zimu or Pinyin. Zhou Youguang (1979:337-338) thinks worthy of serious consideration the suggestion made by a fellow language reformer that interspersing Pinyin with characters could serve as a means for effecting a gradual transition to Pinyin. On the other hand, an American delegation to China reported that “when we raised this question, it was glossed over by our Chinese hosts” (CETA 1980:23). This means that the all-character Chinese writing system must be recognized as incomparably more difficult than the mixed writing of Japan. Apart from the greater difficulty in determining what goes with what in a given text, a knowledge of twice the number of characters is essential for an equivalent level of literacy. And all this in turn means that it is superficial in the extreme to view Japan’s “success” as providing any sort of model of what China too can accomplish.

TAIWAN AS A MODEL FOR LITERACY

Taiwan has also been advanced as a model for achieving literacy via Chinese characters. There is more relevance to this contention, but not much more, since it needs to be qualified by noting the special conditions that set Taiwan apart from Mainland China. In Taiwan, speakers of Min or Taiwanese and Hakka are intermixed with speakers of Mandarin in a fashion quite different from the situation on the mainland with its huge blocs of regionalect speakers only thinly diluted by speakers of Putonghua. The small size of the island and the ease of communication, both physically and by radio and television, contribute to continual contact among members of different linguistic groups. A relatively efficient educational system, based in part on the fifty-year experience under Japanese occupation, made it easy to shift the medium of instruction from one foreign-imposed language to another form of speech imposed by the dominant group of Mandarin speakers, the majority quite well educated, who took over control of the island in 1945. The latter, in order to survive as an intrusive minority, were forced to promote their own speech among the whole island population with an intensity that is utterly beyond the capacity of the PRC. One result of this situation is that after only a few decades “more than 80 percent of the population is bilingual, speaking both Taiwanese and Mandarin” (Cheng 1978:308). This successful promotion of Mandarin in Taiwan has provided the means to promote literacy in a system of writing based on this standard language. The much higher standard of living in Taiwan, which is unlikely to be matched on the mainland for many years to come, is a major cause of whatever success has been achieved in literacy based on characters. Finally, although the conditions peculiar to Taiwan have undoubtedly aided literacy in characters, a careful assessment of success in more specific terms of level of achievement and particularly of retention of literacy would be desirable before making projections elsewhere, especially in view of the reality behind the myth of 99 percent literacy in Japan.

“Time and Cost”

In his book, DeFrancis thus concludes the chapter on the Successfulness Myth:

TWO CRUCIAL FACTORS: TIME AND COST

It is essential to give special consideration to the two crucial factors of time and cost in considering the potential for success in Mainland China. One major cost—the added time necessary for literacy in characters—has been a constant theme in discussion of Chinese writing reform and is receiving new emphasis in connection with China’s drive for the Four Modernizations. It is frequently remarked that Chinese children must devote at least two more years than do their Western counterparts to the task of learning to read and write. In an article pointedly entitled “We Can No Longer Waste Time,” one writer cites the frequently mentioned calculation that “if we do not change our Chinese characters, with our population of close to a billion people, if each person wastes two years, then in every generation 2 billion [man-] years are lost” (Li Yisan 1979:4). The Declaration of the Chinese Language Reform Association of Institutions of Higher Learning adds to this wastage another three years in each lifetime due to the inefficiency of characters relative to alphabetic writing (Association 1981:284). For a population of a billion literates this would bring the total wastage to 5 billion man-years in each generation, a figure which is probably a gross underestimation.

…

Some people give optimistic answers to these questions. They minimize the difficulties that need to be overcome to achieve success. Literate themselves, and forgetful of the generally favored circumstances which enabled them to become literate, they feel little sense of urgency in pressing for an effective policy that would enable others less favored also to become literate. Wang Li (1981:4–5) is highly critical of such attitudes. He takes to task literates who point to their own command of characters as evidence that these are not difficult, charges them with disregarding the needs of the masses in emphasizing their own need for access to China’s literary heritage, and calls on intellectuals to think of the masses by promoting Pinyin. Such views have been expressed repeatedly. The inability of Chinese characters to meet modern needs has been apparent to many Chinese for almost a hundred years. Beginning in the 1890s, and increasingly in recent years, the demand has been growing for what the Chinese call wénzì gǎigé: language reform.

A View from the Mandarin Field

For what it’s worth, in the corner of the worldwide Mandarin field that I have been in for decades, where there is a significant minority of publishers who were educated in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, etc., I have observed that it is indeed a common view that of course the characters are a successful writing system, and of course they are not too difficult to learn.

However, while many who have spent many long years to learn the characters “the hard way” have successfully used them to learn about or teach Bible truth, I have also seen many Mandarin field language learners, many of whom were ordinary people just trying to help out in the Mandarin field, struggle to learn and also remember the characters. (One estimate I have heard is that only about 1 in 10 Chinese field language learners seem to get along just fine with the characters—the rest struggle.) Sadly, many of them eventually left the Mandarin field, citing difficulties with the language, even though spoken Mandarin is actually not especially difficult to learn compared to other spoken languages. That leaves the characters writing system as the evident actual main difficulty.

While it is not impossible to use Chinese characters to read and write Mandarin, and while the literacy situation in China has according to official figures improved significantly since DeFrancis’ book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy was published in 1984, the inherent unnecessary extraordinary complexity of the characters has obviously made it much more difficult and time-consuming than it should be to learn and to remember how to read and write Mandarin. Really, it’s apparent that any real success that the characters have had as a learnable and usable writing system (as opposed to phony success resulting from lowered standards and expectations, etc.) in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, etc. has been in spite of the characters, not because of the characters, and has only been achieved with great, unnecessary difficulty through heroically persistent efforts. However, something as basic as reading and writing shouldn’t universally require such heroic efforts to achieve. As pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay said, “simple things should be simple”. Also, as well-known jazz musician Charles Mingus said, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple—awesomely simple—that’s creativity.”

Common things should be easy. Complex things should be possible.

To illustrate, consider that it was not impossible to use punched cards to control computers, and that it could be said that punched cards could successfully be used to accomplish the goal of controlling computers. However, who would agree that punched cards were so successful that they are the ultimate way of controlling computers, and that they should be enshrined as the only way in which people should ever control computers? If such an attitude had ever become entrenched in the culture, would anyone have ever invented or been allowed to distribute the personal computer or the smartphone, with their far more intuitive and easy-to-use graphical user interfaces?

Unfortunately, instead of allowing for the adoption of an easier-to-use writing system more suitable for ordinary people, China’s approach to literacy has been to just force everyone to continue learning the basic existing system that the educated elite had already invested much time and effort into, but that unfortunately is the writing system equivalent of punched cards for controlling computers.

Punched card used to load software into an old mainframe computer

Creative Commons Attribution License logo BinaryApe [source]

Chinese characters are the punched cards of writing systems. Punched cards were not totally impossible to use, but there are now much better and easier-to-use ways to control computers.

This is not a question of mere convenience—recall the vital role our personal computers and mobile devices played during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which these devices allowed the vast majority of Jehovah’s people to continue attending and participating in meetings through Zoom videoconferencing. In that trying situation, computing devices that had to be controlled by punched cards just would not have worked successfully! (Imagine having to fill out a stack of punched cards, and then having to put them through your card reader, just to tell your mainframe computer that takes up most of your living room to invoke the Zoom command that would indicate to your Watchtower Study conductor that you want to make a comment. Just, NO! Okay then, how about using the newer, slightly simplified punched cards? …)

Similarly, how well we can communicate with and give spiritual assistance to Mandarin-speaking sheeplike ones can have a big impact on their spiritual health and welfare. So, whether Chinese characters help or hinder our ability to learn how to successfully communicate in Mandarin, or whether a simpler system like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) would enable us to be more successful in this regard, are questions of vital importance.

The ZT Experiment

The article “Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Was Plan A” has a section about the ZT experiment, an experimental program that “encouraged students to read and write in pinyin for longer periods than was stipulated by the conventional curriculum.” How successful was using more Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) found to be, compared to the traditional method of focusing on characters?

It is actually not necessary to rely merely on personal opinion when considering whether or not it would be a good idea for Mandarin-learners to use Pīnyīn more than it has traditionally been used. For one thing, many of us have seen and experienced much evidence for this ourselves in recent years, during which Jehovah has blessed the worldwide Mandarin field with explosive growth as Pīnyīn has been used more and more for training and helping Mandarin-learners. This is in striking contrast to the agonizingly slow growth experienced in the Chinese field in earlier years, when Chinese language training was more focused on characters.

Strong additional evidence was provided by an experimental program that was conducted in many elementary schools throughout China to explore what would result from expanded use of Pīnyīn. Under the Z.T. subheading there, the article “The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform”, mentioned above, discusses this interesting experimental program. …

…

Basically, compared to those in the standard program who were just taught Pīnyīn for a couple of months or so purely as a phonetic aid for pronouncing characters, the students who were allowed to use Pīnyīn on its own as a writing system for a couple of years or so not only did significantly better in learning the language and in learning the Chinese characters, they also did significantly better overall academically. This is not surprising to me, since language is needed to learn and progress in any and every other field of learning.

So, the ZT experiment has shown that while those who focused on characters as per the traditional “hard way” had some success, those who used more Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) had more success in various ways!

Considering all the above, it can be seen that while Chinese characters have been successful in some ways, the myth of the complete, unqualified, incomparable, overwhelming successfulness of the inhumanly numerous and complex Chinese characters is…BUSTED!

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Hāmǐjíduōdùn

Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓) 👈🏼 Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Notes: Tap/click on a Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to reveal its “flashcard”; tap/click on a “flashcard” or its Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to hide the “flashcard”. 📖 📄 📘 icons mean 📖 Reveal All, 📄 Reveal Advanced, and 📘 Reveal None re all the “flashcards” in the heading, paragraph, etc. that they are placed at the beginning of.]

[As part of a series of posts about some common myths about Chinese characters, this reposting of the post on “Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓)” discusses the Ideographic Myth.]

[The first time this post was posted], jw.org was featuring an article with the following title:

English:

Will Armageddon Begin in Israel?—What Does the Bible Say?

Mandarin:

📖 📄 📘 Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓) Dàzhàn (Dà·zhàn {Big → [Great]} · War 大战 大戰) Huì (Will 会 會) zài (in 在) Yǐsèliè (Israel 以色列) Bàofā (Bào·fā Explode · {Issue Forth} → [Erupt] 爆发 爆發) ma ([? ptcl for “yes/no” questions] 吗 嗎)? Shèngjīng (Shèng·jīng (the) Holy · Scriptures → [the Bible] 圣经 聖經) de (’s 的) Guāndiǎn (Guān·diǎn {Looking At → [View]} · Point → [Viewpoint] 观点 觀點) Shì (Is 是) Shénme (Shén·me What · [suf] 什么 什/甚麼)?

This week’s MEotW is “Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓)”, the Mandarin syllables of which were obviously chosen first because of how much they sound like the English word “Armageddon” (and perhaps the original Hebrew word from which that came), not because of the meanings of the supposedly ideographic Chinese characters used to write them out (“Exhale Rice Lucky Much Pausing”??? 🤷🏻).

This emphasizes to us that when it comes to human language, SPEECH is primary—SOUNDS are the primary medium for transmitting meaning, and a writing system that transmits meaning purely with its visual symbols, without any dependency on speech sounds, is not a thing. However, this erroneous concept is so prevalent that there’s a name for it: The Ideographic Myth.

Several past MEotW posts have mentioned in passing the Ideographic Myth concerning Chinese characters, so it’s about time this blog took a deeper dive into this subject. Below are some selected excerpts from the chapter “The Ideographic Myth”, of the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, by John DeFrancis, along with some commentary.

the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech

This is a definition of the concept of “ideographic” writing.

Aren’t Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren’t they an ideographic system of writing?

The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing…There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.

Indeed, Chinese characters are always used to represent some language’s speech, are they not? They can be used to represent the speech of multiple languages, but they are not used in any way in which they do not represent the speech of any language, are they? There are no Chinese characters that have no spoken pronunciation in any language, are there? So, while some may find the idea of Chinese characters being an ideographic writing system fascinating, in real-life, actual use, Chinese characters are a phonetic writing system representing a language’s speech sounds (which do the actual representing of meanings)—Chinese characters are not an ideographic writing system directly representing meanings.

Origin of the Myth

The concept of Chinese writings as a means of conveying ideas without regard to speech took hold as part of the chinoiserie fad among Western intellectuals that was stimulated by the generally highly laudatory writings of Catholic missionaries from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

…

It was not acquaintance with Chinese but decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing following Napoleon’s conquests in North Africa that led to the coining of several expressions related to the ideographic idea.

…

Decipherment of this script had long been impeded by the notion that it was symbolic of ideas, particularly mystical or spiritual ones. It was not just the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone, with its bilingual text in three scripts (Hieroglyphic Egyptian, Demotic Egyptian, and Greek) that made this possible. As Gordon (1968:24) stresses: “The decipherment of Hieroglyphic Egyptian required the replacement of the deep-seated notion of symbolism by the correct view that the main (though not the only) feature of the script is phonetic.”

Champollion’s success in deciphering the Egyptian script was due to his recognition of its phonetic aspect.

…

The rebus idea seems obvious to us since we use it in children’s games, but it actually constitutes a stupendous invention, an act of intellectual creation of the highest order—a quantum leap forward beyond the stage of vague and imprecise pictures to a higher stage that leads into the ability to represent all the subtleties and precision expressible in spoken language. Writing is now directly, clearly, firmly related to language: to speech. If there was ever any question whether a symbol had a sound attached to it, this now receives a positive answer. In the earliest form known to us, the character for “wheat” was borrowed to represent the word “come” precisely because both were pronounced in the same way.

…

What is crucial is to recognize that the diverse forms perform the same function in representing sound. To see that writing has the form of pictures and to conclude that it is pictographic is correct in only one sense—that of the form, but not the function, of the symbols. We can put it this way:

QUESTION: When is a pictograph not a pictograph?

ANSWER: When it represents a sound.

The use of the pictograph for “wheat” to represent the homophonous word ləg (“come”) transformed the function of the symbol from pictographic depiction of an object to syllabic representation of a sound. This change in function has been the essential development marking the emergence of all true systems of writing, including Chinese.

Sinological Contribution to the Myth

The fact that some Chinese pictographs have not undergone a change in form parallel to the change in function has tended to obscure the significance of the change that did take place. As a result, the phonetic aspect of Chinese writing is minimized by many people, even specialists in the field.

…

The error of exaggerating the pictographic and hence semantic aspect of Chinese characters and minimizing if not totally neglecting the phonetic aspect tends to fix itself very early in the minds of many people, both students of Chinese and the public at large, because their first impression of the characters is likely to be gained by being introduced to the Chinese writing system via some of the simplest and most interesting pictographs…. Unless a determined effort is made to correct this initial impression, it is likely to remain as an article of faith not easily shaken by subsequent exposure to different kinds of graphs.

…

Myth vs. Reality

A limited number of pictographic or semantic characters…cannot be considered indicative of full systems of nonphonetic writing that can function like ordinary orthographies to express nearly everything we can express in spoken language. The fact is that such a full system of nonphonetic writing has never existed. The system of Chinese characters, the Sumerian, Accadian, and Hittite cuneiform systems, and the Egyptian hieroglyphic system were none of them complete systems of semantic writing.

How limited is the number of pictographic or semantic characters, like “人”, “口”, “山”, etc., as opposed to the number of characters with some phonetic component related to pronunciation? This table from p. 129 of the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy says that only about 3% of all Chinese characters are purely pictographic or semantic:

Table 7 Semantic Versus Phonetic Aspects of Chinese Characters, p. 129, _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_

This myth, it is apparent, exists in two aspects. Both must be rejected. The first is that the Chinese characters constitute an existing system of ideographic writing. This has been shown to be factually untrue. The second aspect is the validity of the ideographic concept itself. I believe it to be completely untenable because there is no evidence that people have the capacity to master the enormous number of symbols that would be needed in a written system that attempts to convey thought without regard to sound, which means divorced from spoken language. …But while it is possible for a writing system to have many individual “ideographs” or “ideograms”, it is not possible to have a whole writing system based on the ideographic principle. Alphabetic writing requires mastery of several dozen symbols that are needed for phonemic representation. Syllabic writing requires mastery of what may be several hundred or several thousand symbols that are needed for syllabic representation. Ideographic writing, however, requires mastery of the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of symbols that would be needed for ideographic representation of words or concepts without regard to sound. A bit of common sense should suggest that unless we supplement our brains with computer implants, ordinary mortals are incapable of such memory feats.

Indeed, how many concepts exist, or could potentially come into existence as they get invented? That’s how many symbols an actual ideographic writing system would need to have. Obviously, even if such a system could be made to exist, it would be unusable by actual imperfect humans. Even Chinese characters, which “only” number somewhere over 100,000, are not numerous enough to be an actual ideographic writing system, and Chinese characters are already inhumanly complex and numerous.

Objections to the Term “Ideographic”

We need to go further and throw out the term itself.

…

Chinese characters represent words (or better, morphemes), not ideas, and they represent them phonetically, for the most part, as do all real writing systems despite their diverse techniques and differing effectiveness in accomplishing the task.

…

Both terms [“logographic” and “ideographic”] are inadequate and misleading because they fail to indicate that the process of getting from graph to word/morpheme involves the phonetic aspect of the latter and because this failure leaves the way open to the idea that we get from graph to word/morpheme by means of some nonphonetic, in a word, “ideographic”, approach. Only the adoption of some such term as “morphosyllabic”, which calls attention to the phonetic aspect, can contribute to dispelling the widespread misunderstanding of the nature of Chinese writing.

Chinese characters being a “morphosyllabic” writing system means that “each character is pronounced as a single syllable and represents a single morpheme”* (smallest unit of language SOUND with meaning)—a Chinese character does NOT bypass language sounds to directly represent an idea.

So, every time you hear in Mandarin a name like “Hāmǐjíduōdùn (Armageddon 哈米吉多顿 哈米吉多頓)” that came from another language, and is made up in Mandarin of syllables that make no sense except that they sound like the name in the original language, remember that the Ideographic Myth is just that—a myth!

As worshippers of the one true God Jehovah, we carefully avoid spiritual idolatry, realizing that no visible idol or image can be allowed to replace the invisible, almighty Spirit Jehovah as the object of our worship. Similarly, us Chinese field language learners must also carefully avoid the linguistic idolatry of considering visible Chinese characters to be direct representations of meaning in Chinese languages, when the truth is that in human languages, including Chinese languages, meaning is primarily transmitted via invisible speech.

 

* John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), p. 125. ^

Categories
Culture History Language Learning Names Science Technology

Yànwén

Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

This week’s MEotW is “Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文)”, which seems to be the most commonly used Mandarin expression referring to the modern Korean writing system. In English, we refer to this writing system as “Hangul” or “Hankul”, depending on which romanization system we prefer.

The Korean text “Joseongeul” and “Hangeul,” written in Hangul, the native Korean script.

The Korean text “Joseongeul” and “Hangeul,” written in Hangul, the native Korean script. [source]
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“…By Any Other Name”

One of the first things I noticed while researching this topic is that Korean, English, and Mandarin each have multiple names for the modern Korean writing system. Here is Wikipedia’s summary of its names in Korean and in English:

Official names

The Korean alphabet was originally named Hunminjeong’eum (훈민정음) by King Sejong the Great in 1443.[source] Hunminjeong’eum (훈민정음) is also the document that explained logic and science behind the script in 1446.

The name hangeul (한글) was coined by Korean linguist Ju Si-gyeong in 1912. The name combines the ancient Korean word han (한), meaning great, and geul (글), meaning script. The word han is used to refer to Korea in general, so the name also means Korean script.[source] It has been romanized in multiple ways:

  • Hangeul or han-geul in the Revised Romanization of Korean, which the South Korean government uses in English publications and encourages for all purposes.
  • Han’gŭl in the McCune–Reischauer system, is often capitalized and rendered without the diacritics when used as an English word, Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries.
  • hān kul in the Yale romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies.

North Koreans call the alphabet Chosŏn’gŭl (조선글), after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea.[source] A variant of the McCune–Reischauer system is used there for romanization.

Other names

Until the mid-20th century, the Korean elite preferred to write using Chinese characters called Hanja. They referred to Hanja as jinseo (진서/真書) meaning true letters. Some accounts say the elite referred to the Korean alphabet derisively as ‘amkeul (암클) meaning women’s script, and ‘ahaetgeul (아햇글) meaning children’s script, though there is no written evidence of this.[source]

Supporters of the Korean alphabet referred to it as jeong’eum (정음/正音) meaning correct pronunciation, gungmun (국문/國文) meaning national script, and eonmun (언문/諺文) meaning vernacular script.[source]

In addition to all the above, some dictionaries, including the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, use the English name “onmun” to refer to the modern Korean writing system. This is apparently derived from the Korean name “eonmun (언문/諺文)”, mentioned in the last paragraph of the above quote. Speaking of “eonmun (언문/諺文)”, the Chinese characters used to write it are the same as the Traditional characters used to write this week’s MEotW “Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文)”, indicating that this is where this Mandarin expression came from.

Speaking of “Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文)”, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, this seems to be the expression most commonly used in Mandarin to mean “Hangul”—it is, for example, the main expression used to refer to Hangul in the Mandarin version of an Awake! article about Hangul. Also used in that Mandarin version of that Awake! article—once—to refer to Hangul is the expression “Hánwén (Hán·wén Korean · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 韩文 韓文)”. Another Mandarin expression referring to the modern Korean writing system is “Cháoxiǎn Zìmǔ ((Cháo·xiǎn {Royal/Imperial Court [→ [Dynasty]]} · Rare → [North Korea | Chosŏn (Tw pron.: Cháoxiān)] 朝鲜 朝鮮) (Zì·mǔ Word · Mothers → [Letters (of an Alphabet) [→ [Alphabet]]] 字母) → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system) (name used in North Korea)])”, which corresponds to the Korean expression “Chosŏn’gŭl (조선글)”, mentioned above. (“Cháoxiǎn (Cháo·xiǎn {Royal/Imperial Court [→ [Dynasty]]} · Rare → [North Korea | Chosŏn; [Great] Joseon [State] (Tw pron.: Cháoxiān)] 朝鲜 朝鮮)” corresponds to “Chosŏn”, the Korean name for North Korea—these two expressions are in fact written with the same Chinese characters.)

An Exceptionally Phonetic Writing System

In the linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm, in the episode entitled “Writing is a Technology”, linguist Gretchen McCulloch said the following about Hangul:

“But Korean’s really cool.” The thing that’s cool about it from a completely biased linguist perspective is that the writing system of Korean, Hangul, the script, is not just based on individual sounds or phonemes, it’s actually at a more precise level based on the shape of the mouth and how you configure the mouth in order to make those particular sounds. There’s a lot of, okay, here are these closely related sounds – let’s say you make them all with the lips – and you just add an additional stroke to make it this other related sound that you make with the lips. Between P and B and M, which are all made with the lips, those symbols have a similar shape. It’s not an accident. It’s very systematic between that and the same thing with T and D and N. Those have a similar shape because they have this relationship. It’s very technically beautiful from an analysis of language perspective.

[Note that the above quote alludes to the featural aspect of Hangul. The term “featural” refers to distinctive features, which are components of speech such as nasality, aspiration, voicing, place of articulation, etc. which are subphonemic, that is, below the level of phonemes. In his book Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, pp. 196–198, John DeFrancis concludes that while Hangul has a featural aspect, and while it is an ingenious system of phonemic representation, it is not a featural writing system.]

Regarding how precisely Hangul represents the sounds of Korean speech, the above-mentioned Awake! article says:

In Korean schools there are no spelling contests! Why not? Because Hankul represents the sounds of Korean speech so accurately that writing them down correctly as you hear them presents no challenge.

Elsewhere, that Awake! article also explains how Hangul systematically represents the sounds of Korean syllables:

All Korean syllables consist of two or three parts: an initial sound, a middle sound (a vowel or vowels) and, usually, an ending sound. Words are made up of one or more syllables. Each syllable is written inside an imaginary box, as shown below. The initial sound (a consonant or the silent ㅇ) is written at the top or upper left. If the middle vowel is vertically shaped, it is written to the right of the initial sound, while horizontally shaped vowels are written under it. Letters may also be doubled, adding stress, and multiple vowels may be compressed and written alongside each other. If the syllable has a final consonant, it always appears in the bottom position. In this way, thousands of different syllables can be represented with Hankul.

I don’t speak or read Korean, but from what I can gather from information like the above quotes, it seems that Hangul is like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) (“Piecing Together of Sounds”), but for Korean.

The Hangul of Mandarin?

If Hangul is like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) for Korean, then conversely, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is like Hangul for Mandarin, at least when it comes to what is accomplished by its technical design—both systems systematically represent the individual phonemes (distinct speech sounds that can distinguish one word from another) of the language it was designed for.

Another thing that Hangul and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) have in common is that they have both been bitterly opposed and ridiculed by supporters of Chinese characters. Even though it was sponsored by King Sejong of the Korean Yi dynasty, Hangul was opposed by scholars, etc. who were invested in the more complex Chinese characters, the Hànzì (Hàn·zì {Han (Chinese)} · Characters 汉字 漢字) (or the Hanja, as the Koreans call them), and even though Hangul was created way back in the 1440s, the above-mentioned Awake! article says that “more than 400 years elapsed before the Korean government declared that Hankul could be used in official documents.” That was in 1894, and it would not be until 1949 in North Korea and the 1970s in South Korea that Hangul was promoted to become the dominant writing system in these places.

Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) was promoted by Máo Zédōng ((Máo Hair (surname) 毛) (Zé·dōng Marsh · East 泽东 澤東) (the founder of the People’s Republic of China)) and other early movers and shakers in modern China as a full writing system that was intended to eventually replace the Chinese characters, but when Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) was officially adopted by the PRC in 1958, it was not as a full writing system with equal status to that of the Chinese characters. (A scenario like that, with two writing systems for the same language, is known as digraphia.) (By the way, like Hangul and Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [Chinese] 中国 中國) Mángwén (Máng·wén Blind · Writing → [Braille] 盲文) (中国盲文/中國盲文, Chinese Braille), Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)—designed along similar principles as those other two systems—is indeed a full writing system, not just a pronunciation aid.) As with Hangul, scholars, etc. who were heavily invested in the Chinese characters wouldn’t stand for that. Even as late as 2001, China’s Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language of the People’s Republic of China said that in China, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is officially just “the tool of transliteration and phonetic notation”.

If Hangul took hundreds of years to become the dominant writing system in Korea, even with the added nationalistic motivation of it having been invented in Korea to be used instead of the characters invented in China, then Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) could take even longer to become the dominant writing system for Mandarin, if it ever does, and if this old system were hypothetically allowed to last that long—the supporters of invented-in-China Chinese characters are even more proudly and stubbornly resistant to the idea of changing away from Chinese characters in China itself.

At this rate, the current government of China, as long as it lasts, will probably never explicitly officially approve of using Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as a full writing system for Mandarin in China, even if it’s just as an alternative to the characters instead of as a total replacement for them. Even if it actually wanted to do so, even this government would hesitate to approve of something like this that would probably be opposed by many of the people of China. (As a historic comparison, in 1977, the PRC promulgated a second round of simplified Chinese characters, but this was rescinded in 1986 following widespread opposition.)

Your Own Personal Hangul for Mandarin?

However, while that may be the situation with the proud worldly nation of China, what about each of us Mandarn field language learners, as individuals who are dedicated to Jehovah God and not to any worldly human culture? Especially if we don’t live in China, under the authority of the current government of China, we are free to choose for ourselves to use Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as a full writing system for Mandarin and thus be fully empowered by its simplicity and elegance to serve Jehovah better, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to be shackled by mere human tradition, or by peer pressure.

Even in China itself, people should take into account that Article 18 of the above-mentioned Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language of the People’s Republic of China says, in part:

The “Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” [Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)] is the unified norm of the Roman letters for transliterating the names of Chinese people and places as well as Chinese documents and is used in the realms where it is inconvenient to use the Chinese characters or where the Chinese characters cannot be used.

Technically, it could be said that the extraordinarily complex and inhumanly numerous Chinese characters are by their very nature inconvenient, and that when one does not know or remember some or all of the Chinese characters, “the Chinese characters cannot be used” in those situations…

The above-mentioned Awake! article mentions this historical milestone involving Hangul:

Finally, there was a Bible in Korean that could be read by nearly anyone​—even by women and children who had never had the opportunity to learn Chinese characters.

Many Mandarin field language learners, and literally tens of millions of Chinese people around the world as well, have also not learned Chinese characters. Will there ever be a Bible that uses Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as its main writing system, and not just as a small-print pronunciation aid for the Chinese characters? Perhaps time will tell.