Some Thoughts on Chinese Languages

     'Sapir (Sapir-Whorf) said something else about language and reality. It is the part that often gets left behind in the dot-dot-dots of quotations: "No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached."    -    Amy Tan. The Opposite of Fate, p 284-5'

     “The most famous was Hu Shih, who attended Cornell and Columbia from 1910 to 1917 and came back to Peita with a conviction that written Chinese must change to a vernacular style, using the vocabulary of everyday speech...”       ...Why was this necessary? Classical Chinese used single characters to convey ideas to the eye, but so many characters sounded the same that a classical statement often remained ambiguous or unintelligible to the ear. To get around this problem, Chinese speech generally uses two-character phrases to express an idea. Accordingly the vernacular written style used the two-character phrases of everyday speech. Because polysyllabic English is not plagued like monosyllabic Chinese by a multitude of homophones all sounding the same but with different meanings, analogues of the Chinese problem in English seem far-fetched, but let us try: an ambiguous classical statement about a "sole (soul?)" would now read "fish-sole" or "shoe-sole" or "spirit-soul" or even "alone-sole." Similarly, "Have you my all? (awl?)" could be specified as "Have you my all-everything?" or "Have you my awl-tool?" The ambiguity of "Where is the sun (son?)" could be met by using "solar-sun" or "Mother's-son."... “...once Hu Shih and Ch'en Tu-hsiu joined forces to promote the new style, it caught on quickly. By 1920 the Ministry of Education decreed its use in textbooks.”     -    John King Fairbank, "The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985, ch.11"

    "Chinese characters are composed of any number of brush strokes, from one, as in 一, meaning "one, unity, all, uniform" to more than 20, as in 灣(22 strokes), meaning "bay, bend of a stream." Although they seem to the Western eye a mysterious forest with no clue to the maze, they contain a definite principle of order. They are classified in dictionaries under 214 radicals, such as 男, "man"; 女, "woman"; 口, "mouth"; 山, "mountain"; 工, "work" or "workman" (originally a carpenter's square); 宀, "roof"; 車, "cart" (a two wheeled vehicle viewed from above). The radicals were originally pictographs which gradually became stylized. The rest of the language is represented by the addition of what are called "phonetics" to the radicals; for example, the character 論 (lun), meaning "to discuss, discourse" is made up of the radical 言, meaning "words," plus the phonetic 侖 pronounced lun and meaning "to arrange, set in order," which indicates both sound and meaning "to set words in order," i.e. "to discuss." Not all phonetics, are so helpful or logical. Some indicate neither sound nor meaning".
    "There are approximately 880 phonetics which together with the radicals (some of which double as phonetics) make up the 1,000 basic forms a student must know to be able to read and write all Chinese characters. The task requires persistence, hours of practice and constant review, which obviously limits the number of foreigners willing and able to accomplish it but the number of Chinese who could achieve literacy before pai-hua, a written form of the vernacular, was introduced."    -   Barbara Tuchman, "Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, ch.4"