DeFrancis article on Chinese writing reform

[wushijiao]

Gato kindly lent me his copy of “The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy”, and I would encourage people to read it because he makes various arguments over the course of a book, which are much more convincing than the summary of arguments put into a paragraph or two. Anyway, DeFrancis’s concern with script reform and language reform stems from the very widespread illiteracy that existed in China. DeFrancis, along with tons of other Chinese intellectuals, were very interested in whether China’s massive illiteracy was a hindrance to China’s development.

In his book, he emphasizes the difficulty of measuring literacy with any type of accuracy. But he does present a decent case that probably most farmers (who make up the vast majority of Chinese people) were functionally illiterate. As Gato mentioned, characters were taught in the communes in the Great Leap Forward, but many peasants quickly lost their writing/reading skills due to a lack of use. I remember when I first started learning Chinese. I went to a tent to eat 麻辣烫. I asked the people what the food was called, they said malatang. But no one in the tent was able to write those characters. After a few more times asking people if they could write down the pinyin and character for new words that I was learning, and after embarrassing them, I kind of stopped doing that. Also, my wife’s grandmothers and both her mom and dad’s side were illiterates. My wife said that for rural people of their generation (born in the 1930’s) that was pretty common. So, since DeFrancis was mainly writing about writing reform back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, I think his arguments were certainly timely.

Another comical thing from Defrancis’s book, when the government wanted another round of simplification in the late 1970’s, they received tons of letter of protest, of which only 1% or so came from rural areas. In other words, peasants in China contribute very, very little to the “national discussion” on issues.

Talking about this issue, I’ve always thought was a waste of time because major reform could have only taken pace in the midst of “national crisis” (roughly from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the early Mao days). There is no sense of national crisis now, and China is midst of becoming a superpower. When you feel like your country is doing really well, there is simply no political consensus to overhaul the foundation of your culture (or at least what some people perceive to be their foundation).

And yet, the peasants in China are still massively disenfranchised. The gap between the rich and poor is at a crisis level. Most economic policies in the past decade and a half favored the rich. The rural area delegates are not proportionally represented at the national level, so their issues receive less attention. The hukou system, which is still in place and still important, systematically screws over people from rural areas. I hate to sound like a Marxist, but would this horribly unequal state of affairs be allowed to happen if people from rural areas could read and write to a higher level? In other words, if these people were more plugged into the “national discussion”, would things be different? Clearly the Chinese political system is less receptive to public opinion than in democracies, but the political leaders are still very watchful and conscious of public sentiment.

In any case, I agree with Quest that there is absolutely no way that China will change away from characters. Absolutely no way. There’s a better chance that the US will make Arabic its official language.

By the way, I think DeFrancis argues for a state of “digraphia”, in which pinyin and characters exist side-by-side, perhaps like pinyin in comic books, or something like that.

[Eulloba]

Some contributors to this blog seem to ignore where DeFrancis, just a few months ago, advocates and what's more, vaticinates the unavoidable abandonment/abolition of Chinese characters. You can find the link on the first page of this blog "The Prospect for Chinese Writing reform" by John DeFracis, originally published in Sino-Platonic Papers, issue 171in June 2006.

John DeFrancis gives a series of alternative scenarios all which ending up in the sealing of the fate for Chinese characters, in the following main ways:

EXPANDED ROLE OF PINYIN WITH OR WITHOUT GOVERNMENT SUPPORT.

"...the government abandons its hostility to an expanded role for Pinyin..."

"This is essentially a reversion to the Latinization movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Mao Zedong..., lent their prestigious support to the New Writing".

"Perhaps sooner rather than later, given the success of the promotion of Mandarin, some influential Party bureaucrats will finally arrive at the conclusion that the “some day in the future” anticipated by Mao has arrived, and that wholehearted Party support should now be unleashed for his anticipated “basic reform.”

As I said in my previous comment, very soon I will write about this horrifying "prophesy" by John DeFrancis. In a sense he is right, little by little Pinyin is gaining ground and the lack of real support for characters is resulting in a weakenig of the system underlying them, system which has not been expounded and elucidated making many people believe that Chinse writing is absurd and has no place in the modern world. ¡¡

[roddy]

In none of those cases are Chinese characters abolished - he predicts they may become used less (or even not at all outside of academia, although I think that is highly unlikely) due to Chinese people preferring of their own free will another system provided in parallel to characters, but in no scenario is he in favor of - or even discuss - anything you can reasonably call abolishment - which would surely require not just the increased use of pinyin but also official requirements to use less characters.

It might not seem a major difference, but I think it's an important one. That said, I'm still keen to see where he did actually call for abolition.

[djwebb2004]

For some reason I can't post m reply. The precondition on the request for the URL /sendmessage.php evaluated to false.

Edited in by Roddy:

I don't think it is correct to say that DeFrancis does not advocate abolishing the characters in China. He writes approvingly of attempts to replacecharacters by romanized scripts in China, such as the Latinxua Sinwenz, and also about the Dungan experiment in Kirghizia, and in his latest article writes in a highly disapproving tone of government attempts to prevent pinyin from becoming a workable alternative written language. It is true that there is no line in his books saying "Characters must be abolished now", and that he claims to support digraphia. However, digraphia surely is a path towards replacement of characters by pinyin. Because if the majority of people can read books in pinyin, and 50% of the books are still issued in characters, then gradually there will be a move towards "accessibility" and only publishing in pinyin. Digraphia is a path towards replacement of the characters. I am sure Roddy will supply me with an example or two, but I cannot think of a language that has stable functioning digraphia. Now in one essay on the pinyin.info site he speaks of "Pinyin for computers, characters for historical research" (see url referenced below). Actually, this leaves a gap: in pinyin should be used on computers, and characters for historical research, what should daily life writing be if not written on computers? What should handwriting be? He doesn't say, but in the modern world books are typset on computers and computers/text messages etc are becoming our main form of writing. I can't remember last time I wrote a page of English by hand. So I think his formulation "Pinyin for computers, characters for historical research" means the Vietnamese approach. There are a tiny proportion of Vietnamese who have to learn characters for historical research, and the rest use Romanized Viet. In other word: he advocates the abolition of the characters (except for a small minority of archivists).

I think it is more productive to see DeFrancis in context with his acolytes, Victor Mair and William Hannas and others at the University of Hawaii. They have all built a career on advocating romanization - in Victor Mair's case he actually funded a series of romanized textbooks and battled with the Ministry of Education to get them approved as DeFrancis explains in his recent PDF. Their argument rests on a few foundations, including the "monosyllabic myth": claiming that people think Chinese is monosyllabic when it is not, and so characters are not as appropriate as previously thought, or at least word division should be shown. Now: I don't know anyone who learned Chinese who is not aware that monosyllabic characters, most of which do mean something in isolation, are generally put together as bisyllabic words. So there is not myth: just the creation of a straw man in order to knock it down. The other foundation is to claim that Chinese does not have as many homophones as thought, or not in running text, even if there are many in the dictionary, and anyway, the Chinese will have to change their writing style to cope with Romanization.

Some interesting quotes:

John DeFrancis at http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html:

"However, reformers seeking to speed China's modernization by modernizing the writing system through a policy of digraphia have to contend not only with the natural attachment of Chinese to their familiar script but also with chauvinistic and mindless claims for its superiority."

"But writing with a simple phonetic script, whether syllabic or alphabetic, would be impossible without the adoption of a further feature that has characterized Chinese written in an alphabetic script. This is a literary style that is more closely based on actual speech."

Er...yes.... a literary style based on actual speech is not a literary style - this is dumbing down.

William Hannas at http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html:

"I suspect that what lies at the bottom of the incessant carping about how Chinese, because of its "homonym problem," could not be understood if written phonetically is a deep-seated realization that if the characters did disappear, users would be forced to adjust to a new and unwanted regimen. They would have to use words that are words and abandon the undisciplined, self-indulgent practice of creating them arbitrarily."

"There was no need to take phonetic intelligibility into account when the expectation was that discrimination would be accomplished through Chinese characters. According to Sokolov, "In creating Chinese or Chinese-style words little or no consideration was given to the need for distinguishing the words by sound. " Rather, they were formed with the tacit understanding that their use would be restricted primarily to the written medium. The characters allowed phonetically deficient words to come into the language, and as long as these terms exist, there will be a need for characters."

Victor Mair at http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html:

"If something of substance can be said without ambiguity in the spoken language, then it most assuredly can be written with suitable phonetic symbols. Unless we assume that the content of spoken Han languages is decidedly less colorful and interesting than that of written Chinese, then, as the Dungans have shown us, we need not fear that a written language based on phonetically transcribed speech will be necessarily inferior to tetragraphic writing and may even be superior in some aspects."

What is he talking about? All spoken languages are less rich in vocabulary than written languages - Chinese is no different.

Part of the campaign for romanization is the Wenlin dictionary and pinyin examples. I concede Roddy is right that most of these are using basic Chinese and are intelligible. I noted only a few that perplexed me, but I can't find them now, but will post as I find them. So I suppose basically Roddy is right on that.

[roddy]

I'm not sure what the problem was with posting that message - a process of elimination and a strategic spelling change solved it, but I'm looking into the actual cause.

I can't think of any functioning cases of digraphia, but there are plenty of cases of two languages existing side by side - why would it be more difficult? A quick look on the internet finds some leads

After their independence in 1991 some ex Soviet republics have decided to change their script system from Cyrillic to the Latin (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan), the Arabic (Tajikistan) or their specific (Armenia, Georgia) script system. The result is that in practice both, the Cyrillic and the new scripts are used.

but they seem somewhat ad hoc and nothing I know enough about to say 'hey, this works'.

Just to take a couple of points from what you wrote

It is true that there is no line in his books saying "Characters must be abolished now", and that he claims to support digraphia.

Somewhat odd for a man who only a page or two ago was described as having "built his career on a campaign to abolish Chinese characters." As I see it he's predicting characters falling out of use as a result of reforms originating in China. A small point perhaps, but when you start arousing nationalist ire (or cultural pride, if you prefer) it is an important one.

On another point,I also have to disagree with both you and also the big man in Hawaii - I see no reason why the availability of an alternative script would result in characters falling out of use. Why would pinyin be found so superior?

Roddy

PS Is Lu Xun dumbed down?

[djwebb2004]

Roddy, thank you for pasting in my message.

I suppose the most fundamental urge on my part is that, after slogging through learning the characters in the belief I was learning one of the hardest languages in the world, I would hate to think that future learners will learn a Romanized language, with no characters, and a greatly reduced use of out-of-the-way chengyu, and find it one of the world's simpler languages!!

[roddy]

Christmas message from DJWebb: "I had it hard, so everyone else should have it hard too"

No problem on the pasting - see here for a similar example. Don't know what the issue with yours was, but it fixed itself when I changed replace characters with replacecharacters - and yet this message goes through ok. Perhaps the server has its own opinions on language reform.

[wushijiao]

Djwebb- I think in your previous posts you had a good point about style. I love the literary style that combines a lot of slang, idioms, historical references, abbreviated forms along with Baihua (or course, to the very limited degree that I can understand and appreciate it). In some ways, I think for people who love literature, Chinese is probably one of the best of the world's languages because of the advantages of characters and the ability to coin new words easily. Pinyinization of the language might dumb that down.

However, digraphia surely is a path towards replacement of characters by pinyin. Because if the majority of people can read books in pinyin, and 50% of the books are still issued in characters, then gradually there will be a move towards "accessibility" and only publishing in pinyin. Digraphia is a path towards replacement of the characters.

I certainly understand that point of view, but I think digraphia wouldn't lead to any sort of overall pinyinization because:

1) Characters, despite their flaws, fit Putonghua pretty well. Even if one had a lot of practice reading pinyinized books, I'd bet good money that one could still read faster in characters.

2) The vast majority of people would still prefer characters, and the publishing industry would respond by publishing in characters. Once you can read in characters, reading pinyin is kind of annoying.

3) Most likely the gaōkaǒ （高考） would still require students to know characters. College students might have to do historical research or read ancient literature in characters, and thus the exam would probably still require characters. Since every parent pressures their kids to study non-stop, almost all kids would still learn characters.

4) Characters will always have cultural prestige. As far as I know, Taiwan does not ban the use of pinyin or any other alphabetic system, and yet romanized systems haven't caught on. In other words, I personally feel that given a free market system in which scripts can compete with each other, characters will easily beat out pinyin anyway.

That doesn't mean that digraphia doesn't have its merits. I think for primary school education it has advantages. I think it is a good way to help people who didn't have the chance to get a formal education.

The real threat from romanization, as many other people have said, would be if the various 方言 developed their own popularized scripts, and if people started to use them en mass, would a strong provincialism/regionalism/splitism start to form? I have no idea. I think DeFrancis doubts it.

[atitarev]

Armenia and Georgia never changed their original scripts. Tadjikistan still uses Cyrillic.

[Josh-J]

The real threat from romanization, as many other people have said, would be if the various 方言 developed their own popularized scripts

I wonder, is there any pro--pinyin feeling among young people in china as a kindof 'its cool to be western and modern' type thing? I mean for a start if you're young and have a computer, you'll be using pinyin anyway..

[Quest]

I wonder, is there any pro--pinyin feeling among young people in china as a kindof 'its cool to be western and modern' type thing?

No, if anything pinyin's looked at with scorn... young people are simply pro cool not pro western. Nice associations, I don't think young people in china could jump from pinyin to western then to modern then to cool in their wildest imaginations..

[Ama-Li]

All the posts about how hard it is to read Chinese in pinyin is very similar to arguments in Japan (all pretty much by JSL learners) about abolishing characters. After all, the cultural arguments aren't as strong, it's obviously a foreign import. So there must be some benefit for them to retain the characters--and this immediately comes to mind when reading anything put into pure hiragana--it is slow going, and you'd immediately want the hanzi to speed up reading. No magazines for anything beyond elementary school would have pure hiragana at all--too taxing--they'd just put hiragana readings above the more obscure characters.

But the creativity with characters is very alive in Japanese, and hanzi still have the advantage of knowing vaguely what a word means--this is less so with English, either because too many languages were bred together for modern English, or because we aren't made to study latin anymore.

And, cursory google searches put literacy at over 90% for HK and a really high 96% in Taiwan, and that's even with the really archaic versions of the Hanzi. So I don't think that the "difficulty" of learning hanzi is really all that--I remember having to study grammar and spelling until sixth grade--time I guess that could have been more suited towards math and science lessons--even though I can remember all those times in school I was told we were falling behind Asia in math