I shall start a society for the preservation of Chinese characters...

[flemmings]

I never got a handle on the whys and wherefores of hanzi/ kanji simplification, but I assumed it had to do with general standardization and, possibly, the promotion of universal literacy. Now I find my 1971 author blandly declaring that the Chinese government effected both simplification and pinyin as preliminary steps in the *abolition* of hanzi, and a move to a phonic western-alphabet-based writing system. (Which 1971 guy thinks is long overdue.) Was he totally on crack, as my reflexes say he must be, or is there something to this?

And I have to say, I do not get the character-hatred. The idea of reading Chinese in pinyin, even with tone markings, gives me the horrors. This is because I've read all hiragana Japanese and it's horrible. Horrible for the foreign reader, certainly; a native speaker might provide meaning and context by ear, but god knows I can't. So pace almost everyone I've read, dispensing with characters will *not* make reading easier for foreigners at all at all at all.

Also watched an hour of an NHK special on tea caravans that travel through Tibet. May rethink this taking ikkyuu business because dear god my ear (and my vocabulary) is so baaaad.

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Wasn't there a lot of noise in Japan about the possibility of getting rid of kanji altogether, in the early part of the 20th century? I don't know why I'm really really glad that people no longer write てふ　for ちょう　but also really really glad that they kept kanji. It makes me suspect that it's a problem of adaptation rather than anything objective, though I agree that all hiragana Japanese is tortuous to read.

Have you done the listening sections of any practice tests? My ear is bad enough that I start to tune out dramas when they get to anything more complicated than who's in love with who, but listening wasn't even my worst score on the test -- I feel like it's skewed relatively easier than the other sections.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

What's the name of this book you're reading?! It sounds like fun/ There is a bit of truth to it, though it sounds like he gleans his information from random paraphrasing of People's Daily from a third source.

So there was actually two waves of simplification. The first was actually initiated by the Nationalist, and completed by the Communist in the early 1950's. The idea was that in fact many of what we think of as simplified characters already existed and were in common use by the shopkeepers and town folks-- people who aren't scholars but were still required to be somewhat literate. So the thought goes that if these commonly used alternate and simpler character were collected and standardized, it would be a big boost for spreading literacy. So this is pretty much what we know as simplified Chinese today.

There was a second wave of simplification. during the cultural revolution, which really carried it to an extreme, but then was reversed after the cultural revolution, so that's probably what your writer was referring to, and given the craziness that was sprouted during cultural revolution, I'm sure western-alphabet was not beyond them.

[deepfryerfire.livejournal.com]

Can I have Zhuge Liang pickled in vodka?

... this *is* about the preservation of Chinese characters, isn't it?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

(mandatory): Argh argh argh.

smrterthanu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang), as qwerty calls him? You may have him with my blessing. Vodka might improve his bumptiousness.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

I've run into non-Chinese that have this position on characters, historians and other non-natives fluent in Chinese. I don't really understand it, but as far as I can tell, it's a form of pigden-ization of the language. "Let's simplify it down to all the most common phrases and poetry and other kinds of literary use can just go hang. After all, you can identify all the common 'words' like 'train station' with just pinyin." Never mind that "lin2" can't be identified as any single pinyin "word" 'cause no one ever uses "lin2" by itself. I'm a tad hostile to the idea, in case it didn't come thru.

[doire]

I wonder if it all comes down to " I found it difficult, so it must be difficult" a variation on " I can't workout how they 'built the pyramids' (insert feat of your choice) so it must have be aliens".

I have some children's easy readers in Japanese which made me pine for kanji.

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

*looks at others' comments too* - I see. *sigh* I wish they would teach my children 'Higher(Traditional) Chinese' here. But the reasoning is that they are struggling to cope anyway and will only be picked to learn it if one shows an ability for the language.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

About Chinese (http://flemmings.livejournal.com/402627.html#cutid1) by one Richard Newnham, 'helped by' Tan Lin-Tung who handwrote the characters Newnham includes because western printers didn't have the fonts. He's talking about the early 50's reforms and sighs that it will be some time before the government reaches its goal of substituting pinyin for hanzi.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The Japanese have always been so obliging about catering to western notions of what's what, she says with no irony at all. I'm sure there were noises about dispensing with kanji, possibly because they weren't particularly standardized either at the time. I should read up on why the Japanese simplified them post-War.

Have never done a listening section, partly because you have to buy the book and CD, mostly because in past level 1 challenges I knew I'd flunk the listening part and relied on the other sections to pull me up. The listening may be easier than the others but argh, too complicated for me. As witness that Eva selection last year that I had to play three times to get a notion of what was what, and that was *knowing* it was Eva.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Are these people fluent in *spoken* Chinese? I just can't see anyone who reads wanting to do it in pinyin.

Newnham says that precisely *because* lin2 never occurs by itself, you can write it in pinyin, since the compound in which it occurs will be a recognizable word. But it'll be a commonplace word, yes. Your 2000 kanji for all reading, your 2000 words for all conversation. And I'll note that even the Japanese can't get by with 2000 kanji and must have recourse to other less common ones. The beauty of kanji, unlike any phonetic alphabet, is that you can have a guess at the meaning of an unknown word just from how it's written. Why give up that immense advantage?

The oddity is that even a basic reader can read a lot of classical poetry just as it stands. Wang Wei doesn't use hifalutin' vocabulary. What's lost to people like me is all the allusion and the context of the words themselves, the stuff that makes it poetry-- but hey, you want simple, Du Fu is simple.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

There may be something to that. And then it gets dressed up in highly reasonable argumentation about practicality, which irks me. I mean, sorry there were no Chinese font faces in 1971, Mr Newnham, but that doesn't make it impossible to print Chinese per se. (In fact much later there were no font faces for unstandard Japanese kanji, which made life difficult for Mr Henshall when he wrote his invaluable Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters; but he coped.

Truly. Hiragana is only easy to read if you already speak Japanese.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

So 'higher' = 'traditional'? And simplified is lower? This makes me happy, since I dislike simplified and (almost) all its works. (Will admit to using the simplified shorthand for　言 when writing because, meh, is simplified shorthand. But I hate it in print because it looks so much like several other radicals.)

And in practical terms, everyone but Taiwan and older HK Chinese uses simplified now, so better learn simplified. Though of course all the Chinese newspapers here are in trad.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

My guess is that the first wave was driven by literacy, the second wave by productivity. But then computers and Chinese-born Microsoft engineers happened, and it turned out one can type hanzi quite fast on a standard keyboard after all. As long as you know pinyin (I can actually read it better than my parents, I think XD;).

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

The ones I knew advocating this simplification? Fluent in spoken and written Chinese. Professors and scholars. Married to Chinese people.

Yes, lin2 is typically combined with other characters to make it clear what it is, and yes, when they're used by themselves, you can tell usually what is meant by context, except when it's intended to be something surprising or uncommon or unexpected. But everyday life really only needs communication at the level of 5th graders, so what does it matter?

I'd like to see someone suggest that English be artificially limited to the n most common words. "Let's drop the words cerulean, azure, cornflower, beryl, cobalt, indigo, navy, royal, turquoise, and ultramarine and just go with blue, shall we? Don't bother arguing that those words have other meanings 'cause we all know none of the names of rocks or chemicals will make that "n most common words" list other than granite, marble, lead, and iron." LOL!

From my point of view, it's a serious gutting of the language and by connection the culture. Besides, it's a solution geared towards the technology of the 1900s and destroying a culture to match the technology of the "present" is always a mistake.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I see a de facto dumbing down err sorry-pardon simplification of English vocab already, and it hurts me. What was standard literate English in 1950 now elicits jeers of 'he must have rifled the thesaurus to get all those fifty cent words.' Truly, just because you don't hear them on TV sitcoms doesn't make them obsolete-- but for a section of the population, obsolete is exactly what they are. I had hoped that the 'subtle shades of meaning' Chinese words might survive precisely because there's a hanzi for each of them, whose shape and history make it different from any other words; but maybe I too am romanticizing how hanzi work.

destroying a culture to match the technology of the "present" is always a mistake

Precisely; as Sabina says below, MS engineers have proved Newnham wrong.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Mh yes; hadn't occurred to me-- because I didn't realize how recent an innovation pinyin is-- that an already literate generation might have difficulties being lumbered with a totally new phonic system.

[mauvecloud.livejournal.com]

My very first encounter with ro3k was an abridged translation which used Wade-Giles. So I was imprinted on it, despite the fact that after pinyin, Wade-Giles actually does not feel _that_ sensical and intuitive. Also as someone pointed out, it is easy to use pinyin for inputs on computers.

Ditto traditional vs. simplified characters.

As in the former I like, the latter I acknowledge as are more practical (but still dislike, that's the very rational Scorpion for you :D)

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have problems with the dumbing down of the language, too. Current pop music doesn't help, with it's use of grunting in lieu of words when they can't figure out something to say.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

LOL! My parents can't do pinyin or it's hiragana-like predecessor. They pre-date both of them.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

Really? I'm surprised, because I think Kanji tends to be closer to simplified than traditional, so I thought you might have found simplified easier.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

Though nowadays it's the Chinese engineers dumbing down the script -- apparently the number of characters supported by unicode is not large enough to contain some extremely obscure characters, so then the standardization bureau in China just decided to excise these characters from the modern lexicon. >_<

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Simplified is what you're used to, so you see where it's the same as Japanese. Japanese is what I'm used to, so I notice the traditional forms that Japanese uses and don't think about the simplified ones. ^_^ So that to me 学 is a kanji, and not that far a step from 學. Whereas it's harder for me to go from kanji with the same form as trad hanzi to the simplified forms; the reasoning escapes me.

Like, I can't see any logical connection between 買 and 买, which looks like it uses the same element as 头-- except that 头 is 頭. And 实, almost identical to 买, is 實. 買, 頭, 實, identical to Japanese, are easily differentiated, while I find the simplified forms infinitely confusing.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

And news to me that the phonic alphabet was a recent innovation as well.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Ohh, sad. And it's not like reverting to 1971-- the characters exist, we just can't print them so we must hand write them. Officially these hanzi don't exist any more. Only it might be like Japan and the hiragana forms that won't die, like ゐ and ゑ. 'But we need them for old texts!'

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

I think the specialist printer will always have them, but now that everyone types their paper on a computer, I don't know how even literature professors are going to produce papers with these characters, unless they hand write them, I guess.

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

I see. That is true. It's funny, people always say it's easier to go from traditional to simplified, but I find it's not true in practice. I never thought it was particularly difficult to read traditional, but the Taiwanese I know always whine their heads off about it being impossible to read simplified.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Well, and I will whine with them. Non-intuitive and ugly, is my gut reaction to simplified. OTOH I'm also knee-jerk reactionary and loathe change, so there's that as well.