Protecting Heritage: The Preservation of Traditional Chinese

A while ago a rumour started that the UN was going to abolish the writing of traditional Chinese in favour of simplified Chinese by the year 2008, and this immediately cause a furore, especially within the Hong Kong and Taiwanese communities, with many starting petitions to preserve the writing of traditional Chinese. Far from being a minor linguistic difference which supposedly makes the Chinese language more accessible to the global community, this suggestion became a sensitive issue that caused fierce debate. Although it eventuated that it was simply a case of someone being quoted out of context, it is nevertheless interesting to think about why even a suggestion of language unification could provoke such strong emotions.

Logically, it is reasonable to abolish traditional Chinese in favour of a unified system of simplified Chinese. Anyone who has tried to learn Chinese, or indeed who has even taken a glance a page of Chinese characters, would know that traditional Chinese characters are difficult to master. Not only are they complex to write, but unlike the alphabet system where a finite number of letters can create infinite numbers of combinations, each character is unique in representing one concept, so that writing Chinese is really combining an infinite number of characters, all of which have to be rote learnt. To add to this complicated nightmare, you can never accurately predict how each character is pronounced by how it is written, so even the link between the symbol and its corresponding pronunciation must be rote learnt separately. If learning to speak Chinese wasn't hard enough with different tones of voice changing the meaning of words completely, the sight of traditional Chinese characters certainly put foreigners off learning the language. Even if we do not take into account foreigners learning the language, it is a wonder that even after thousands of years such a complicated language system continues to survive, since languages tend to devolve into simpler alternatives as they progress through time because of the inherent human need for efficiency. (Deutscher)

A simplified system of Chinese writing seemed long overdue if China were to modernise and to improve its standing in the international community, as well as to raise literacy rates domestically. Thus, in the 1970s, the Chinese government led by Mao tried to unify written Chinese by simplifying traditional characters according to a few fixed rules, resulting in the simplified Chinese system used within Mainland China today. Hong Kong and Taiwan, who were separated from China before this new system was created, continue to retain traditional Chinese as the main form of writing, using simplified versions only in casual settings (and indeed, many do not even understand this simplified system - for those who are not used to it, many words look like they may have come from another language!) Chinese is still challenging to learn, but now that pronunciation is more closely allied with the radicals used to form the word than before, and there are fewer strokes per character, it is much easier already. Since this was a logical step for China to take, why the fuss over keeping traditional Chinese (mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan)?

One argument is that while Chinese writing has always been difficult to learn, traditional Chinese characters have a certain elegant beauty to them, exemplified in the art of calligraphy. Simplified Chinese, although sometimes based on calligraphy, mainly emphasises economy and efficiency over elegance; indeed, if the Chinese government had it their way, they would have alphabetised the Chinese language to completely get rid of Chinese characters to achieve maximum efficiency; but resistance by the people made that project fail. Instead, we are left with an in-between language: one that is still relatively difficult to learn, but not artistic at all, losing the essence of the language.

Another reason for resistance against abolishment of traditional Chinese is the suggestion that in simplification, the original links between the radical of a word and the word itself is broken; a typical example is the word for love: 愛 in traditional, 爱 in simplified, the missing radical being 心 meaning "heart". To have a word for love that does not involve the heart is a ridiculous idea when one considers that most Chinese words developed from their radicals, and makes it nonsensical for students trying to expand their vocabulary to understand why a word is formed that way.

For me, although there are reasons why simplification could help China spread its language, traditional Chinese will always be the proper form of Chinese. Imagine the government announcing tomorrow that by 2010, text language will become the official English writing system. Logically, since the primary function of language is for effective communication, that would make sense; but I can imagine much resistance. Who decides what the standard form of text language is? How can the government arbitrarily change the English language by imposing its ideas on what is most efficient onto others? Simplification by a natural process of erosion is acceptable, since it is done by the masses; simplification imposed by the government is an exertion of political power to control the masses in the most fundamental way possible by altering their language; it is also an erosion of Chinese heritage by breaking modern China's link with its ancestors' conceptions of language. Why should anyone accept that?

Perversion of Language

"RSPB bans cocks, tits allowed

3:45PM, Monday June 04, 2007

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has banned the word for male birds from its website, drawing accusations of political correctness gone mad.

Visitors to the website found the word "cock" had been replaced by asterisks, while the species, tit, suffered no such indignity.

Forum user John D, of Yorkshire, told The Sun: "As bird lovers will know, a Parus Major is a great tit and while cocks do not get past the forum censor, tits do not cause offence. I've heard of PC but that is taking things too far."

A worker claimed the word had been replaced because of software filters but an RSPB spokesman said it preferred to describe birds as either male or female.

- REUTERS"

Retrieved from The New Zealand Herald.

It's sad how people perverting the usage of a word can, over time, cause the word to lose its original meaning and take on shameful connotations, so much so that it is involved in the debate of modern political correctness... Is the censure appropriate or will it just generate more immaturity surrounding the word?

The World of Language

Many people tend see language learning as simply about memorising vocabulary and grammatical structures, almost like a nuisance. It therefore seems like the world would be much better had the Tower of Babel not happened at all – then we could all communicate to each other with no trouble whatsoever. What many seem to ignore, then, is the fact that to some extent, languages are very much ingrained into the culture they represent and actually govern, or at the very least, influence ways of thinking about a country’s identity.

On the one hand, it could be seen that language contains an elitist, segregating element, as those who cannot understand the language are effectively left out of the main social group, leading to a mentality of superiority for the most widely spoken languages. Indeed, to simplify, knowing English in today’s world is like belonging to the “popular clique” in high school – everyone else is doing it, so if you don’t, you get left behind. This mentality fuels its popularity even more; therefore in my view it is hard to dethrone English from eventually becoming the language of the world.

On the other hand, we tend to forget that originally language evolved in different nations to suit the specific needs of each country, and to distinguish themselves from the others. There are always going to be concepts in one language that cannot be sufficiently expressed in another language because of different belief systems and worldviews. Seeing the development of language in this way means seeing language as having a symbiotic relationship with culture – the concepts of each nation’s culture allows language to evolve, and the evolution of language then continues to affect and reflect the nation’s way of thinking. Seen in this light, perhaps English being the most popular language in the world is not necessarily beneficial. While effective in communicating basic concepts with its vast vocabulary from all sorts of origins, loses its association with England’s identity more and more. The concepts behind English words, the contextual elements that went into creating certain phrases, are lost or at least subverted as it is spread around the world. People simply learn English as a tool to succeed in a globalised economy, isolating it from the culture it comes from, and thus many idioms lose their nuances.

On the contrary, languages with fewer numbers of speakers or with speakers that are more concentrated in one area tend to retain their place in the nation’s culture more strongly. Given the rich cultural background of these languages, to me the main mistake people make is to consider languages as a barrier to communication – in reality, it is not; it is our own laziness that is the barrier to communication. If we are patient and spend enough time trying to respect and learn other people’s languages instead of expecting them to understand our own, we will find much more is hidden behind the words and structures – there is a whole new cultural world to be discovered.