Tag: Pīnyīn

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bìyào

bìyào (bì·yào certainly · {[being] needed; required; essential} [→ [need | necessary; indispensable]] 必要) 👈🏼 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 Indispensability Myth. So, this week’s MEotW is “bìyào (bì·yào certainly · {[being] needed; required; essential} [→ [need | necessary; indispensable]] 必要)”, which can effectively mean “indispensable”.

Can Chinese Characters Be Replaced?

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

The belief that Chinese characters are indispensable exists on several levels that range from the most shallow mindlessness to the most serious thoughtfulness. As usual, much of the mythology is based on a confusion of terms and on mixing up speech and writing. In its most general form the Indispensability Myth holds that Chinese cannot be written in an alphabetic script. This seemingly straightforward statement turns out on closer examination to involve a great deal of ambiguity centering on the meaning of the two terms “Chinese” and “cannot.” As I have stressed repeatedly in the previous chapters, the term “Chinese” covers a wide range of meanings. The indispensability thesis needs to be tested against each of them.

…

…scientific linguists have repeatedly demonstrated in actual practice the validity of their thesis that the speech of any individual can be written in an alphabetic script. The overall approach in such an undertaking is the same for all forms of speech in that it involves direct observation and analysis. The specific solutions vary according to the linguistic details (phonemic, morphemic, lexical, syntactical, and so forth) for each form of speech. Any student of linguistics with a modicum of competence can create an alphabetic system of writing for any form of speech in the world. To deny this elementary truth in general or in specific application to Chinese is to reject science and embrace mythology.

DeFrancis goes on to discuss different approaches that have been tried to create alphabetic writing systems for the languages spoken in China. Regarding the most successful approach so far, he writes:

The third solution was adopted in the Latinization movement of the thirties and forties, and by Protestant missionaries and Chinese reformers earlier, to create as many separate schemes of romanization as there are instances of mutually unintelligible forms of speech. The basis for this approach was largely the practical one of creating as simple a system as possible for a given group of speakers in order to facilitate their acquisition of literacy. There was never an overall attempt to determine the exact number of schemes that should be created or to relate the schemes to each other as part of an integrated plan of writing reform. The more or less ad hoc empirical approach is therefore all the more impressive with respect to the results that were actually achieved. Publication in various alphabetic schemes in the century from the initiation of missionary work to the cessation of Latinization activities in the 1940s is significant both for its quantity and for its quality since it includes such diverse items as the Bible, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass, Tolstoi’s “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” Pushkin’s poems, Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and “Story of Ah Q,” the Soviet Constitution, communist land laws, miscellaneous biographies of Westerners, newpapers and journals, and much additional literature. All this provides practical proof of the theoretical truth that the alleged impossibility of using an alphabetic script in place of Chinese characters to represent spoken Chinese is a bit of unmitigated nonsense. It also provides support for the theoretical assumption that there is in fact no significant limit to the subject matter that can be written in Pinyinized versions of the various regionalects [(the mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese)].

As the article “Pīnyīn Is a Good, Workable Writing System on Its Own” says:

Pīnyīn can indeed be used to write anything that can be spoken in Modern Standard Mandarin, from the simplest expressions to the most advanced, complex, and deeply meaningful expressions, so it qualifies as a full writing system in that fundamental sense as well—Pīnyīn is indeed “a method of representing the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols”.

Indeed, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) can be used to represent the key, indispensable factor in communication on spiritual matters, that Mandarin field language learners should be striving for. This key, indispensable factor is explained to us in the Bible itself at 1 Corinthians 14:8–11:

For if the trumpet sounds an indistinct call, who will get ready for battle? In the same way, unless you with the tongue use speech that is easily understood, how will anyone know what is being said? You will, in fact, be speaking into the air. It may be that there are many kinds of speech in the world, and yet no kind is without meaning. For if I do not understand the sense of the speech, I will be a foreigner to the one speaking, and the one speaking will be a foreigner to me.

Yes, while traditional worldly human Mandarin teachers generally say that characters are indispensable, and that extensive knowledge of characters is thus the goal that Mandarin learners should strive for, the Bible itself tells us that the actual key, indispensable factor required for communication on spiritual matters is “speech that is easily understood”. In that regard, we should note that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) can simply and directly represent any and all understandable modern Mandarin speech, no characters required. Besides “speech that is easily understood”, everything else language-related is of lesser or even little importance, and perhaps even to be actively avoided, in our vital work of praising Jehovah and trying to help save lives in the Mandarin field. We should keep this principle in mind as we consider what DeFrancis calls the Speakability Test, and what he goes on to say about various kinds of traditional Chinese writings.

The Speakability Test

What is the Speakability Test? Note how DeFrancis tells us what he means by that:

The preceding discussion of the Indispensability Myth has been based on a definition of “Chinese” that is limited to its spoken manifestation. Strictly speaking, this is the only acceptable definition of the term. Yet this limitation is very often ignored—sometimes deliberately, sometimes out of sheer ignorance in muddling speech and writing. A popular formulation of the Indispensability Myth holds that because homonyms are so numerous in “Chinese,” characters must be used to avoid the unsupportable ambiguity that would result from writing alphabetically. This view has been advanced in a typically exaggerated form by writers.

…

Now we are asked to consider quite a different question based on some quite different and not entirely clear definitions of “Chinese.” The term is variously used to refer to such concepts as Chinese characters, Chinese characters in a dictionary, written Chinese, the Chinese language written in characters, perhaps even spoken Chinese written in characters. Our new question is: Can “Chinese” as thus loosely defined be written in an alphabetic script? One possible answer to this question is that it should never have been asked in the first place. “Chinese,” we might insist, must mean spoken Chinese. Whether it has been traditionally written in Chinese characters, cuneiform symbols, hieroglyphics, or anything else is totally irrelevant to the question [of] whether Chinese (that is, current spoken Chinese) can be written in an alphabetic script.

However much we might like to adopt this entirely justifiable stand, the need to confront the Indispensability Myth in its various forms requires further discussion of the issues. Actually the answer to the new question, or rather to the new series of questions, is quite simple. It is based on the eminently practical approach of asking another, quite simple question: Can the “Chinese” you have in mind be understood if spoken aloud? If the answer is yes, then this Chinese can be Pinyinized. If the answer is no, then it cannot. We can test this approach, which consists of what might be called the Speakability Test, by applying it to various kinds of Chinese.

Homophones and Homographs

Continuing on, DeFrancis says:

Those who think of “Chinese” in terms of Chinese characters often invoke such imaginary problems as the ninety words pronounced li (without tone indication) or the more modest thirty-eight words pronounced yì (with tone indication). Most of these “words,” as pointed out in the earlier chapter on the Monosyllabic Myth, exist only in dictionaries. To apply our basic question is in error on two counts. The first is that it is methodologically incorrect to pick out of a dictionary—in any language—a bunch of homophonous expressions and then parade them in isolation to show how ambiguous they are. Such a procedure could also be applied to English to show that it cannot be written alphabetically. See how ambiguous “can” is! On hearing it one cannot tell which of the half dozen or so homophonous words is intended—actually as many as ten or more if we include the slang terms for prison, buttocks, toilet, and the like as well as the standard terms for metal container, to be able to, and so forth.

Yes, the homophones bogeyman that is often trotted out by advocates of characters is an imaginary problem, because in reality, people generally don’t talk in continuous strings of ambiguous homophones (different words that sound the same) because that would be stupid, when the goal of talking to people is generally to communicate understandably! In reality, Mandarin speakers just use sufficient context to clarify the meanings of any homophones and get on with their lives.

DeFrancis continues regarding the second way in which it is in error to question whether Mandarin, with all its homophones, can be written with an alphabet instead of with characters:

The second error in this approach stems from the fact that many entries in Chinese dictionaries, in general contrast to those in English, are not even words. Most of those thirty-eight entries pronounced yì are not real words. Yì is simply a transcription for thirty-eight characters, and characters in Chinese dictionaries are at best morphemes and at worst might mean nothing at all—as in the case of the two characters 珊瑚 in shānhú (“coral”) if we follow Chao and Yang (1962:140) in refusing to give separate meanings to each of the characters. To cite yì as a problem in Chinese is therefore even more nonsensical than tearing one’s hair over the problem of “can” in English.

Many thus use the Monosyllabic Myth to support the Indispensability Myth, and fall deeper into error. In contrast, as the Bible says at Proverbs 4:18, “the path of the righteous is like the bright morning light that grows brighter and brighter until full daylight.”

Another thing that we can note is that while many have gotten into the habit of using characters as a crutch to disambiguate Mandarin homophones (different words that sound the same), characters have the corresponding problem of homographs, characters that look the same, but that represent different words with different meanings and pronunciations. For example, as the MEotW post on “zháole huǒ ((zháo·le {having caught} · {to completion} 着了 著了) (huǒ fire 火) → [having caught fire; burning; being on fire])” pointed out,

the characters “着/著” can represent 5 different expressions, each with its own pronunciation and set of meanings:

  • zhāo – add; put in | measure word for tricks, devices, moves in chess or martial arts, etc.
  • zháo – touch; come in contact with [→ [feel; be affected by]] | catch; ignite; light (fire); burn | hitting the mark; accomplishing; succeeding (This is the one used in this week’s MEotW.)
  • zhe – being (indicating continuing progress/state)
  • zhù – prominent; outstanding | book; work
  • zhuó – apply | put on/wear (clothes)

“Unspeakable Chinese”

What about written Chinese that doesn’t pass the Speakability Test? DeFrancis continues:

Taking up next the somewhat broader and more legitimate question [of] whether “Chinese” defined as written Chinese or as the Chinese language written in characters can be written alphabetically, here too we can apply our simple Speakability Test to discover whether such “Chinese” is intelligible if read aloud. Much of Chinese writing incorporates many elements alien to speech—at times to such an extent as to make it incomprehensible when read orally. For more reasons than one this might be called unspeakable writing. In the case of such unspeakable Chinese, the Chinese characters are indeed indispensable. Only if written Chinese really conforms to the definition of spoken Chinese written in characters is it possible for the characters to be replaced by alphabetic writing.

Why are many Chinese scholars so hung up on “unspeakable Chinese”? DeFrancis goes on to discuss what they really mean when they say that Chinese “cannot” be written alphabetically:

There are doubtless many purists who would insist on the original regardless of whether or not the hoi polloi [the common people] are capable of handling it.

…

A dilemma exists in the fact that the work of Pinyinization must be undertaken by people who are already literate—which means literate in characters—and Chinese literati, even of the newer generation, have displayed even less capacity than their Western counterparts to write in a style capable of ready comprehension by ordinary people. The contention that materials written in Chinese characters cannot be written alphabetically therefore has a certain sad validity because to date most Chinese scholars cannot accept the notion that the written style should be determined by its capacity for Pinyinization. They cannot bear the thought of the cultural upheaval involved in the transition from character-based to alphabet-based writing.

CANNOT = SHOULD NOT

With these attitudes the notion that Chinese cannot be written alphabetically has now shifted ground to “should not.” It is this interpretation of “cannot” that forms the basis for much of the contention that Chinese characters are indispensable. The shift in emphasis is not always apparent to unwary readers who fail to note that the approach is often based on unwillingness to place speech before writing and to consider the needs of people who might be unable to master the character-based system of writing.

Latin Bibles and Horses

Making an interesting comparison, DeFrancis writes:

Karlgren’s elitist defense not only of characters, but of the classical style as well, has the musty odor of a defense of Latin against such a break with the European cultural past as upstart writing in Italian and French and English.

If we compare traditional Chinese writings to see if they pass the Speakability Test, and to see if they measure up to the Bible-provided standard of corresponding to easily understandable speech, we’ll find that they often don’t. Indeed, because of not a little cultural and nationalistic snobbery and pride, many Chinese scholars, and even many regular Chinese people, like it that way!

However, even if many traditional Chinese writings are revered and highly valued in the world for their cultural or historical value, they show themselves to be of limited or even negative value among us fellow workers with Jehovah in today’s Mandarin field. As an object lesson on this, consider how Jehovah’s organization depicts the false version of Christianity that insisted that Latin Bibles were indispensable, and that viciously persecuted those who tried to translate the Bible into languages like English that the common people could read, and that corresponded well with how they usually spoke.

In contrast to classical Chinese writings and even many modern ones, it is evident that modern Mandarin versions of the publications of Jehovah’s organization seek to represent easily understandable modern Mandarin speech. In fact, much writing that appears in our publications, such as writing from Mandarin versions of The Watchtower and the Bible, is regularly read aloud at our meetings and easily understood. That could not be the case if it were made up of what DeFrancis calls “unspeakable Chinese”!

It’s no wonder then that Jehovah’s organization is evidently successfully proceeding at maximum practical speed to add Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) to its Mandarin writings, since, as DeFrancis points out, writing that corresponds to understandable Mandarin speech can be written in an alphabetic writing system like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音). Also, the unofficial Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus material based on certain Mandarin publications of Jehovah’s organization achieves functional success in using Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as the default full writing system instead of characters, rather than as just a pronunciation aid for the characters.

Even while it is diligently adding Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) to its Mandarin writings, we can observe that Jehovah’s organization is not getting rid of its writings written in Chinese characters, just as the world in general is not anytime soon getting rid of Chinese characters, an extreme scenario that many supporters of Chinese characters seem to fear. In reality, such an extreme scenario is extremely unlikely to come to pass—people can even still read Latin Bibles if they really want to, and also, people have not killed all the horses even though most now prefer cars. 🐴

Anyway, we can see that when it comes to representing the actual key, indispensable factor for spiritual communication in the Mandarin field—understandable Mandarin speech—and when it comes to the writings that really matter to us Mandarin field language learners, the Indispensability Myth about Chinese characters is…BUSTED!

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Culture History Language Learning Science Technology

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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Culture Current Events Experiences History Language Learning Science Technology

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.

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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).

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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!