Barthelette 1
John Barthelette
Richard Laws
6/7/06
The day the characters were born the devil wept because civilization had been born. So goes the legend of Canjie, the minister of the Yellow Emperor, who, one day, became curious at the strange patterns he found on the shell of a tortoise. This inspired him to study the earth and the seas and stars and all the living world until his labor gave birth to the character system: the beginning of Chinese civilization[1]. This story, full of mystery and spiritualism, is most likely not the historical truth of the characters’ birthing. But, it is an appropriate origin story for a system of writing, so steeped in mystique and power, that it has even reached the mellow and modern city of Orange County. The Chinese program at UC Irvine is a direct heir of this cultural tradition, transmitting a language wherein it is not a picture which is worth a thousand words but where a thousand pictures are needed to express the written word. The Chinese program, by teaching this unique system of writing, are the propagators of a cultural exchange which both protects Chinese culture and frustrates western incursion.
After centuries of global irrelevance and clumsy attempts by invaders to force it to change from its native character script to the Roman alphabet, China is at last reciprocating as it sends teachers and students to western universities[2]. To understand how UC Irvine’s Chinese program stands as such an agent, protector and propagator of the Chinese written word, the nature of the character system will be examined. The necessity of the character system to Chinese culture will be explained and the position of those who wish to Romanize said-system, or remove the characters from Chinese life, will be considered as an opposing cultural force.
And this force would have to be amazingly powerful to remove the accumulated momentum of five thousand year’s cultural history[3]. Even if Canjie’s invention of the characters is held to be mere legend, the characters’ first recorded usage comes from a distinctly numinous source: inscriptions on oracle bones which were used to tell the future. The writing system has never shaken this mystical quality from itself and the Chinese people are firmly attached to it. However, this system, for all of its cultural glories, has serious issues of applicability in the modern world, though these have been greatly alleviated by computers and language programs such as UCI’s.
Unlike an alphabet, whose letters come together to form syllables which then form words, a logographic system uses pictures to represent two elements: a meaning and a syllable sound. In the case of Chinese, the picture is mute. Its meaning and writing and sound must all be separately memorized.[4] Since 3400 BC, when the greater part of characters as the modern world has come to known them were codified, they have been “used continuously, albeit changing their script styles.” (Taylor and Taylor 75) The staggering nature of the system rests on the fact that there is a unique character for each unique morpheme. Morphemes represent all concepts that can be expressed through speech, from fire to love. But just as there is no exact count of the number of morphemes in any language, so is the number of Chinese characters “large and unspecifiable.” (Taylor and Taylor 53) However, of the 24,213,915 characters known to be in existence only 6,000 are used in daily life[5]. (Taylor and Taylor 55) But this does not mean that only 6,000 words are used. The characters are syllabic in nature and, like English syllables, can be recombined to form new words. According to a study by Liu et all, in Taiwan, although only 4,532 characters were used on a daily basis, easily 40,032 words were used every day. Though the western mind bows under the sheer weight of these numbers and the work that must be done to acquire fluency in this sort of picture writing, to the Chinese instructors of UCI and to the Chinese in general, characters are “imbued with a magical, mystical quality and power.” (Taylor and Taylor 75) Like the mundane tortoise shell whose shell’s pattern inspired Canjie, the character systems act as a sort of mystical connection to China’s past, a national treasure.
And although this system has long been held a treasure, some have suggested it is more akin to a white elephant than any treasure. The burden of memorizing not only the writing, but the reading of six thousand characters is no small load. Even at the end of a year of instruction, students of Chinese know a mere nine hundred characters, a bare fraction those required to read a restaurant menu much less a newspaper[6]. This situation presents UC Irvine Chinese instructors with the unique task of not only teaching the students this system, but convincing students of its necessity. Whatever their initial thoughts, students inevitably find that Chinese, despite its reputation as a language which is extremely difficult to speak, is much easier to speak than to write. In the writing of Chinese lies the key which can unlock an entire world of language and literature that the typical student could only have guessed at before. Because each character’s writings, reading, and meaning must be separately learned, Irvine’s “innovative approach with emphasis on the four fundamental skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing” is an essential sort of synthesis, designed to create literate Chinese speakers (East Asian Department, More and more students of Chinese begin to appreciate that this system allows them to read materials more easily than Romanized Chinese would have.
The older the reading material in question, the greater the appreciation. Until recently, literary Chinese was so divorced from the spoken language that, read aloud, it was impossible to understand.[7] The only possible way of understanding literature from the before the modern era, ushered in by the May 4th[8] movement and Bai Hua[9] literature, is to use the character system. This divorce was possible because, Chinese with its relatively limited sound set of four hundred distinct syllables, if one disregards tones[10], has many thousands of homonyms. This is not nearly so problematic in the spoken language, where words were made longer and most understandable by stacking words of similar meaning. But this is a defining problem with Wen Yan, classical literature and even some modern literature, wherein the style is to abbreviate the words until the only way to recognize them is by the look of the logograph.[11] A word which might be polysyllabic in speech is made monosyllabic in writing and hence finds itself now homophonic with a large number of fellow words. This confusion would have made literature a terminal exercise in guessing and frustration if the words, though they sound the same, did not look entirely different.
Accordingly, a student of Chinese at UC Irvine finds his or her linguistic studies inevitably bound up with the cultural[12]. No matter the inefficiency of the system relative to the roman alphabet, the fact that all five thousand years of China’s cultural history are only legible in this script tie character system to language more inevitably than any sort of coercion possibly could. When asked about the possibility of eliminating the character system in Chinese instruction, UC Irvine instructor Han Li[13] responded, “You learn language to put it into use,” expressing doubt about the ability of students trained without the character system to truly integrate into Chinese society. (Han Li, interview) She went on to say that she found it difficult to believe that anyone will “ever able to really appreciate Chinese culture without knowing the character system.” (Han Li, interview) Considering a world wherein the character system was not a part of Chinese culture, Han Li stated the only way she could validate the existence of the system was attempting to imagine such a world because such a world was inconceivable. (Han Li, interview) And even outside of the pragmatic, literary issues, “Chinese characters are not just signs with which to write and read; they are imbued with a magical, mystical quality and power, and hence are objects of reverence[14].” (Taylor and Taylor 75) Although it is no longer the case, traditional China had civil servants whose sole purpose was to burn waste paper with writing on it at altars known as “pagodas for cherishing the written word.” (Taylor and Taylor 75) Characters with “felicitous” meanings festoon vases and jars throughout China and there was a time when a bureaucrat might be demoted for writing a character incorrectly on an important document. (Taylor and Taylor 75) To imagine that this attitude has entirely disappeared from Chinese cultural life in the last century would be engage Chinese culture on a theoretical footing with no basis in reality. Therefore, it might be thought somewhat surprising that there is a movement in some American academic circles to “romanize” the Chinese written language, eliminating the characters[15].
Viewed in terms of cultural struggle, the opposing forces of UCI’s Chinese Program and romanizing elements of the academic community are natural enemies. Because the character system is syllabic, not alphabetic, it cannot accurately represent foreign sounds[16]. While English might be able to borrow “détente” directly from French, and French can easily borrow “Le Hamburger” from English, the lack of an alphabet stops Chinese from easily absorbing foreign vocabulary. When new concepts come into the Chinese language, they must either be converted conceptually or phonetically. In either case, the change necessary to use it in daily conversation is radical enough that the word hardly bears any resemblance to its foreign origins. 漢堡(han4 bao4) bears almost no resemblance to its English antecedent, hamburger, in either writing or speech. Even more radically altered are words which enter the Chinese lexicon conceptually, like 週末(zhou1 mo4) which is composed of the Chinese characters for rotation and extremity. But, if this character system was removed, the Chinese language could become more easily altered by introducing new syllable sounds and spellings, just as French phoneme-sounds are introduced into English and vice versa. UC Irvine’s Chinese program desires to protect the characters not only because they are necessary to the reading of Chinese literature but also because they, be it consciously or unconsciously, are agents of their native culture.
But what the romanizers suggest is much more easily said than done. The Chinese characters, like the roman script, is an idea representing how its users think literature should be communicated. And ideas, like any living thing, will not die without a fight. Furthermore, even as these ideas fight for life, they will also fight for living space as they attempt to gain influence. UCI’s Chinese program as an heir of Chinese culture, both fights to protect the character system and fights to spread it. It is the site of a cultural battle between its own ideals and those of the romanizers. Because a major goal of the program is literacy in the Chinese system of writing, it is seen as strengthening the contraceptive wall that prevents global exchange.
Although there are many proponents for destroying that wall in the western academic community, John DeFrancis, a now emeritus professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii stands out as the movement’s leader. His arguments have defined the movement. Furthermore, most literature that proposes to explain the character system to either a popular audience, such as Unger, or an academic one, such as Taylor and Taylor, quote him extensively. His most famous work, a hybrid piece of peer reviewed, popular literature “The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy” is a collection of arguments designed to fight against six popularly held misconceptions about the Chinese language.
DeFrancis calls it the “Indispensability Myth” and it is most obvious clash in philosophy between his view of the character system and that of the Irvine program. In its most general form the Indispensability Myth holds that Chinese cannot be written in an alphabetic script.” (DeFrancis 189) That is, DeFrancis suggests that the idea that characters are necessary to write Chinese is not only incorrect, it is an error of mythical nature. No matter where one looks, from the popular website pinyin.info to Unger’s “Ideogram,” DeFrancis’ thesis is common currency in western Chinese language literature. Many of these authors, spurred on by DeFrancis’s thesis have even gone so far as to suggest that the reason that literary Chinese needs the character system to be legible is because the character system has itself changed the Chinese language to rely on it. Hannas claims that supporting the character system as a solution to problems of monosyllabism shares “the same basic flaw of confusing the remedy for a problem with its cause.” (Hannas 1) That is, Hannas and others claim that the fact that the character system makes it easier for Chinese to read is unimportant because the character system has shaped the language to be reliant on it, the character system. The implication appears to be that it would be acceptable for a romanized system to alter the Chinese language so that it can be written legibly in a roman script. The fact that even DeFrancis acknowledges, “much of Chinese writing incorporates many elements alien to speech- at times to such an extent as to make it incomprehensible when read orally,” provides a clue that DeFrancis is not acting as objective academic but as an actor on the global stage, as an opposing force to UCI’s program (DeFrancis 290).
Even a native speaker and instructor of Chinese at UC Irvine, Han Li, has stated she would not be comfortable reading romanized materials because it would be somewhat difficult to “understand fully.” (Han Li, interview) But linguistic and cultural preservation is not the aim of DeFrancis and he even goes so far as to suggest that “the possibility exists of “translating” it [Chinese texts illegible in romanized form] into a form close enough to speech to be written alphabetically.” (DeFrancis 193) Every cultural exchange is, by nature, a two way street and DeFrancis’ arguments for romanization is the western response to China and China’s cultural agents unwillingness to quickly integrate.
So just as Irvine’s Chinese program acts as a cultural transmitter, an aggressive proponent of the character system, DeFrancis and his colleagues act against that transmission in the interests of their own culture. So, DeFrancis is indeed suggesting a dramatic cultural alteration of China’s literature and, through her literature, her culture. One of his solutions to the fundamental problem of romanizing Chinese language materials is to change the language itself[17]. Regarding the majority of literature published after World War I in China, he suggests “there is a considerable question as to how much of it is capable of being Pinyinized without changes that would bring it closer to actual speech.” (DeFrancis 191) He, like his cultural counterparts at UC Irvine, realizes that a language’s nature is based in how it is written and the key to spreading his own culture is to make sure that any rivals, such as China, are capable of receiving it.
So, the relationship between DeFrancis and the Irvine Chinese program could best be viewed in metaphorical terms: the character system is a wall standing against westernization of the Chinese language and culture. DeFrancis is attempting to tear that wall down by eliminating the popular use of the character system even as Han Li and the other instructors, lecturers, professors in the Irvine Chinese program strengthen that wall, brick by brick, character by character. The most puzzling aspect of this interaction is that neither side is entirely aware of the other, even though they directly oppose each other. Although the program whole heartedly supports the use of the character system, they have links to a popular pro-Romanization website, pinyin.info, on their web page. A further irony is that, without the efforts of UCI’s Chinese program to promote Chinese culture, among others, there would be a great deal less interest in what DeFrancis has to say on the subject of Chinese language.
Cultural exchange means changing a culture’s paradigm; it means changing the way things are done, perhaps, even how things are defined. The importance of language to culture has already been noted. The reiteration of this is important: by changing the way the Chinese people communicate, DeFrancis would necessarily change what they are, culturally. The Chinese culture, as a collective entity, views such a change would be foreign, hostile, and artificial. Such massive shifts are oftentimes so alien to the culture that would be changed that many members of that culture are oblivious to the outside threat. Although the debate of the character system continues in the west and was once a popular topic of discussion in the upper echelons of the People’s Republic, it is in no way common knowledge. It is so far removed from what is conceivable that it is not allowed to come to consciousness, much less actively considered.