LINGUIST List 11.1814

Sun Aug 27 2000

Review: Chen: Modern Chinese: History and Socioling

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  • Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung, Chen: Modern Chinese

    Message 1: Chen: Modern Chinese

     Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 21:36:14 -0500
    From: Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung <taiffalomail.utexas.edu>
    Subject: Chen: Modern Chinese


    Chen, Ping. 1999. Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 244. Hb$59.95, Pb$21.95.

    Reviewed by Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung, University of Texas at Arlington

    In the Han cultural areas such as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, the public's strong demands for literacy have focused efforts on language and orthographic reform since the nineteenth century. Debates on standardization of the national language, and on the use of the Han characters have been going on for more than a hundred years in these areas. Chen's book surveys the promotion of Mandarin Chinese and the reforms of Han writing in the case of China. The book presents a comprehensive account of the development of Modern Chinese from the late nineteenth century up to the 1990s. The book is divided into three parts: 1) modern spoken Chinese, 2) modern written Chinese, and 3) the modern Chinese writing system. Each part consists of several chapters; some chapters in this book are based on Chen's previous works published in various journals.

    The first part of the book (i.e. modern spoken Chinese) covers three chapters entitled establishment and promotion of modern spoken Chinese, norms and variations of modern standard Chinese, and the standard and dialects. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, China had suffered from western colonialism. In that situation, education was considered as important tool to equip and modernize China. In order to educate people, language reform, including both spoken and written forms, was taken as one of the most urgent aspects. In China, there are several different so-called "dialects," such as Mandarin, Southern Min, Hakka, and Cantonese that are mutually unintelligible. Under the assumption that linguistic uniformity was a necessary precondition for the unity of the country, Mandarin, which had served as the official language of three successive dynasties for hundreds of years, was finally chosen as the national language of China in the early part of the twentieth century. Although Mandarin based on the Beijing dialect had been chosen as the norm of modern standard Chinese, it was not widespread until the second half of the twentieth century. The detailed process of unification and standardization of the Chinese national language is well addressed in the first part of Chen's book.

    Many Chinese scholars prefer to use "dialect," rather than "language" to refer to Southern Min, Hakka, Cantonese, and other Han languages. In Chen's book, he also uses the term dialect even though he admits that these dialects are mutually unintelligible. Thus, the term dialect may mislead the readers about the complexity of languages in China. In addition, Chen does not mention any ethnic minority reactions to the promotion of Mandarin. It seems that the book was written from the Han people's perspective rather than a broader national perspective. I am wondering how many of the ethnic minorities recognize Mandarin as the national language and how many of them recognize themselves as members of the Chinese nation. In the case of Taiwan, Chen fails to explain why Mandarin was more successfully promoted in Taiwan than in China. As a matter of fact, the reason that Mandarin was well promoted and it received the national status in Taiwan is because of the Chinese KMT's colonial policy, rather than local people's "enthusiasm" (p.31). When the Chinese KMT took over Taiwan in 1945, most local people identified themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. This situation forced the Chinese KMT to adopt a severe policy of assimilation, i.e. to convert the Taiwanese into the Chinese people through the monolingual policy and Chinese education in the national education system.

    Modern written Chinese is the theme of the second part of this book. This part includes three chapters: development and promotion of modern written Chinese, norms and variations of modern written Chinese, and dialect writing. Chen describes how baihua, the colloquial speech, gradually replaced wenyan, the classical literary language, and finally became the modern standard written Chinese. The wenyen writing style, which divorces from people's colloquial speech, had dominated in the Han cultural areas for two thousands years prior to the twentieth century. In China, wenyan was finally replaced by baihua, which is based on the daily speech of educated Mandarin speakers. Chen also analyzes the development of dialect writing, especially in the case of Southern Min writing in Taiwan. In China, people who spoke different dialects were unified by the wenyen writing. After wenyen was replaced, baihua, based on Mandarin speakers, substitutes for wenyen in unifying the "Chinese" people. Chen concludes that "the majority of the Chinese population, even in Taiwan, are not convinced that standardization of dialect writing and its widespread use will bring them greater benefits" (p.128).

    Chen attributes the immature development of dialect writing to the public's judgment and decision on the costs and benefits. However, he was not aware if the public choose to develop dialect writing, the political assumption "uniformity is necessary for the unity of the country" had depressed the development of dialect writing. In fact, Mandarin writing, to non-Mandarin speakers, is just like wenyen to the baihua speakers. In other words, as Chen mentioned by himself, Mandarin writing is promoted at all non-Mandarin speakers' expense (p. 114).

    The third part of Chen's book discusses the nature of modern Chinese writing. This part consists of five chapters: basic features of the Chinese writing system, simplification of the traditional writing system, phonetization of Chinese, use and reform of the Chinese writing system, and conclusion. Chen points out that two major strengths of the Chinese script:1) its capacity to differentiate homophonous morphemes, and 2) its versatility in bridging time and dialects. On the other hand, the difficulty of learning and use is the worst disadvantage of the Chinese script. For example, a college-educated Chinese know between 3,500-4,000 characters (Norman1988:73). These characters account for only part of the Hanzi inventory, i.e. a total of 56,000 characters collected in the Xiandai Hanyu Da Zidian, the Modern Chinese Dictionary. Owing to the disadvantages of the characters, simplification and phonetization have been proposed to improve the Chinese writing system. Although simplified characters have been the official script for decades in China, the complex and the simplified characters are used in a mixed way on some occasions. As for the phonetization schemes, such as Bopomo and Pinyin, are employed only as a supplementary tool for learning Mandarin. The details of their developments are well described in this part of the book.

    Chen points out that differentiating homophonous morphemes is a strength of Han character (in Chen's words, Chinese script). In fact, not only Han character can differentiate homophonous morphemes, but also the phonetization. For example, Kho-kun is proposed by Tan Kheng-Chiu as a system to write Taiwanese. Basically, Tan defines 60 categories with 60 simple symbols to refer to different semantic categories of words. He adds a symbol to each romanized Taiwanese word, so readers can distinguish the different meaning from the same pronunciation of the words. Regarding Han characters, as DeFrancis writes "the inefficiency of the system stems precisely from its clumsy method of sound representation and the added complication of an even more clumsy system of semantic determinatives" (DeFrancis 1996:40). In Chen's opinion, versatility is another virtue of Han character. However, he seems to ignore that although readers may still recognize each individual character in an ancient text, the readers can hardly understand the whole meaning of the text. Chen is skeptical concerning the possibility of romanization, and gave the examples of Taiwan and Japan to show Han character can remain survival in the modern society. He does not mention, however, that Vietnamese, which used to use Han character, has converted Han into romanization for hundreds years. The pattern of writing reform in Asia is the same as Gelb mentioned in his famous book about the world's writing reforms, "in all cases it was the foreigners who were not afraid to break away from sacred traditions and were thus able to introduce reforms which led to new and revolutionary developments" (Gelb 1952:196). Gelb's observation also accounts for why orthographic reform in China is much more difficult than in Vietnam, Korea, or Japan.

    In short, this book contains rich references with regard to the development of modern standard Chinese. Although Chen's interpretation and analysis may not satisfy all readers, it is still a good introductory text on the development of the national language in China.

    References: DeFrancis, John. 1996. How efficient is the Chinese writing system? Visible Language. Vol.30, No.1, p.6-44. Gelb, I. J. 1952. A Study of Writing. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Norman, Jerry. 1988. Chinese. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung is currently a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Arlington. His study areas are sociolinguistics and eco-linguistics. His current research interest is language and orthographic reform in Hanzi cultural sphere, such as Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and China.

    *** Taiffalo's Eco-linguistics of Society **** * * * * * * http://ling.uta.edu/~taiffalo * * * * * ********************************* *