From one of our fellow skritterer's blog: http://eastasiastudent.net/china/chn-spc/ccp-abolish-hanzi/

(the original article appears to have been taken down, I get a 404 error when trying to look at it on the BBC's website)

The government's been tossing this idea around for most of the last century, but I wonder if something has changed this time around. I sure hope not. Personally, I am hoping that 漢字 and 繁體自 in particular will hold out in the PRC.

By the way, I couldn't corroborate this story after doing some searching on Google. In fact, the BBC has another article suggesting that the government has no plans to abandon 漢字: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15252102

I wonder how they would make such a transition.

That where luckily just an April fools Joke from last year if I not wrong. Fun joke but it will not happen in real world.

@mandarinboy: that explains a lot... I saw the April 1 date, but it just didn't click for me.

well they already ravaged the language with simplified and destroyed their culture in the revolution, i hope they switch back to traditional one day

I think it would be a good idea, although I imagine the Skritter team wouldn't be happy :P

"Just look at English – no foreigners have any trouble pronouncing that" I think this line in the article confirms it as merely an April fool...

Other links include:

Are Chinese characters edible?
Interview with a real Chinese character
Pinyin my clothes together
Being gullible

:P

In "Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" John Defrancis discusses the possibility of moving to pinyin as the principal writing system of China. Something like this has been done in Viet Nam although I believe their alphabetic system of writing comes closer to the sounds of Vietnamese than pinyin does to Chinese.

The idea behind pinyin and simplified characters is to increase literacy in China. This is one of the things John Defrancis covers in his book. His view remains controversial.

Yep, it's a good book and makes a lot of sense to me. Just the fact that Vietnam has basically given up on Chinese shows that it's in some way inferior to the Latin alphabet. Of course V is a different language than Chinese, but the canard that Chinese has so many synonyms and so needs the written system just doesn't hold up (as Defrancis eloquently explains). Anyway, Im sure a better system could be created (not necessarily using pinyin) like the Koreans have done.

It's gonna happen anyway IMO, if you just open any Chinese website or newpaper it will usually have quite a few words and acronyms that come from English, that's just going to increase.

@Dennis, I am strongly in the DeFrancis camp, but then again, I wish the English language had an academy (like the Real Academia Española for Spanish) that would have implemented spelling reform align English spelling with modern spoken English.

But putting that aside, I greatly enjoy the rich history and culture of Chinese characters. I use and study both Chinese and English as they are and not how I would wish them to be.

@antimacassar, I don't think the Skritter team stays awake at night worrying about language reform. If only Adobe Flash were as dependable as the Chinese and Japanese languages!

Oh, making the system work nicely with the strange crazy relationship between the simplified and traditional characters has lead to many lost hours of sleep, believe me! For all of Japanese's wackiness, I'm glad there's only one version...

Indeed, I wasn't thinking about that!

Setting aside the arrogance that outsiders believe that they know better than China about how their writing system should be implemented....

1) Has someone come up with a romanisation system for every dialect/language in China? Or is the proposal that only Mandarin speakers stop using characters? How does that help the people who dont speak mandarin?

2) Who's Defrancis anw what does he have to say about pinyin and stuff like this?

http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20090607_shi_shi_shi_shi_-_chinese_pinyin.htm

With regards to this poem:

Shi Shi shi shi shi
Shishi shishi Shi Shi, shi shi, shi shi shi shi.
Shi shishi shi shi shi shi.
shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi.
Shi shi, shi Shi Shi shi shi.
Shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi shi, shi shi shi shi shishi.
Shi shi shi shi shi shi, shi shishi.
Shishi shi, Shi shi shi shi shishi.
Shishi shi, Shi shi shi shi shi shi shi.
Shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi shi shi.
Shi shi shi shi.

@xkfowboa,

The following page has some interesting readings, by DeFrancis and other authors, and you can track down the full books if you're interested:

http://pinyin.info/readings/index.html

Mulling over these issues can lead to a greater understanding of Standard Chinese, its writing system, and its relationship to other languages and dialects.

1) This text clarifies some of the issues involved, even if you don't agree with the author on some points:
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html#chinese_dialects
It's a chapter from Asia's Orthographic Dilemma by Wm. C. Hannas. The most pertinent section is "Dialects or languages?" A warning - Hannas has a sometimes fiery argumentation style.

2)

Here's an excerpt from the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuen_Ren_Chao:

"He also wrote "The "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den". This Chinese text consists of 92 characters, all with the sounds shī, shí, shǐ and shì (the diacritics indicate the four tones of Mandarin). When written out using Chinese characters the text can be understood, but it is incomprehensible when read out aloud in Standard Chinese, and therefore also incomprehensible on paper when written in romanized form. This example is often used as an argument against the romanization of Chinese. In fact, the text was an argument against the romanization of Classical Chinese and Chao was actually for the romanization modern vernacular written Chinese; he was one of the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh."

@董雅各

it's hardly arrogance. From Wikepedia: John DeFrancis (August 31, 1911 – January 2, 2009) was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Or do you think that only Chinese people can talk about Chinese (and then do you mean ethnically or just people who were born there?) Either way, I think we can agree he is hardly 'an outsider' (not that I see the logic of 'outsiders').

This is an old topic anyway, many Chinese people think/agreed that characters should be reformed (as they obviously have been in M China).

1. a)As I'm sure your aware many languages in China don't even use characters (just look at a Chinese bank note)
b) I think it was basically for Mandarin, although I read it quite a while ago.
c) the idea is that it should help both learners and native speakers speak and learn the language.

2. Is that poem actually read ? I find it hard to believe that it is. Either way, I dont think that DeFrancis said that characters should be totally abolished (I'm remembering here so might not be right), so for classical works and other things it could still be used, but for everyday use pinyin should be used.

However, you dont necessarily need a romanised system (e.g. Korea). All you have to accept is the fact that that the job of a writing system is to adequately reflect the sounds of a language, if you accept that then it follows logically that written Chinese (as a phonetic description of the language) was great about 2000 years ago (and maybe not even then) but could be greatly improved upon now.

I also think that the trouble is (as your comment about 'outsiders' suggest) is that this is a political issue (esp. with the variants that exist now). Chinese people are sensitive about it and are rightly proud of Chinese characters, but I think that the points that I made above are still valid or at least it needs to be shown why they are false.

"外國人“ seem quite happy to have an academic discussion on the topic, however there seems to be no empirical evidence one way or the other with which to make a sound conclusion. Are Chinese school students that much disadvantaged over say American school students when it comes to literacy?

Sure conceptually having to learn characters add's another step to the learning process, however my child (so far) does not seem to find reading chinese any more or less difficult than english. (In terms of one laaging behind the other)

@董雅各


since I guess everyone is getting bored of this topic I'll make it short :-P

your right of course (if there was empirical evidence it would be a revolution in Linguistics I imagine), but it rests on a false assumption, namely that English is a good example to contrast Chinese with, but, as Chris pointed out, English is in pretty bad shape in this regard as well (just ask a native speaker to spell Diarrhea the British way)

There are languages though (I might be wrong here, but I think German is a good example) where a native speaker can see almost any new word and say it precisely, while people in English and Chinese have to rely on a hunch or best guess (in fact English may be harder to reform since, among other things, it has so many words from other languages like Latin, Greek etc.).

I would very much like to see some empirical studies on how quickly kids learn to read. My impression from my time hanging out with my wife's little cousins in Colombia is that it's much faster to learn to read in Spanish than in English, which makes sense since it's almost entirely phonetic; in English kids have to memorize thousands of crazy spellings and pronunciations. And I would imagine that it takes even more work to learn to read Chinese and Japanese characters, but maybe that's not true...

I don't remember where I read it, or if the source is credible (I have a feeling I saw this statistic in one of Peter Hessler's books), but I've heard that it's been demonstrated that it takes about a year longer for a student of Chinese to reach a high-school level of literacy than it does for a student of English.

It makes sense that a student of Spanish would become literate faster than a student of English. Not only are the phonemes more consistent in their spelling, but also the vocabulary of Spanish is a little bit smaller than the vocabulary of English, so it's not necessary to learn as many words, and there's less focus on learning to pronounce those words.

As for Japanese, I have absolutely no authority to say this, but I would think that Hiragana and Katakana would come quickly to the Japanese student, while an acceptable level of Kanji recognition would come much later.

So I have only really said things here that I have absolutely no leverage to claim as truth. These things are just my gut feelings.

"I don't remember where I read it, or if the source is credible (I have a feeling I saw this statistic in one of Peter Hessler's books), but I've heard that it's been demonstrated that it takes about a year longer for a student of Chinese to reach a high-school level of literacy than it does for a student of English."

That indeed would be interesting!

I'm not versed in the academic arguments, and I didn't read through every post here (just most of them), but I have a hard time imagining that a language in which words are made up of significant syllables that have gobs of homonyms could successfully be converted entirely to an alphabetical system. I'd suggest that the language itself is limited by this reliance on a certain set of different syllables with limited options for adding new sounds or altering existing ones, but we're discussing a language that's evolved over millenia and is spoken natively by about 1/5 of the world's population, so you can't just scratch the whole thing to make it alphabetic.

When you first start learning the language through pure sounds or pinyin, it seems very simple once you've picked up a small cross-section of words, because most of them have different sounds and you're able to pick them out (or think you're picking them out) pretty easily in a conversation. However, once you reach a certain point in your vocabulary development, it becomes clear that the simplicity that you thought was there is an illusion that your mind convinced itself of to cope with the fact that it could only understand a handful of the words being said in a conversation. Without some kind of radically-designed system, I would think that the common sense argument of anyone who knows more than a handful of Chinese is that pure Romanization is a silly and unattainable goal. Of course, one form of genius is jumping the common sense hurdle to create a new paradigm that most people wouldn't have thought was possible, but until someone can pull it off in front of me, I stand on the side of the naysayers.

@FatDragon:

"I have a hard time imagining that a language in which words are made up of significant syllables that have gobs of homonyms could successfully be converted entirely to an alphabetical system."

A native speaker of Mandarin should be able to understand Pinyin even without diacritics (tone markers), since it's easy to determine from context the correct pronunciation of a word. 時間 appears in different contexts than 事件, for instance, even though the pinyin for both is shijian. Same with 老師 and 老是, etc. If all you read is "shijian" or "laoshi," it should be pretty easy, most of the time, to deduce the word being written (for instance, in English, most native speakers wouldn't mispronounce "record," the noun, as "record," the verb, even though both are spelled the same way but pronounced differently). It's not necessary to use characters to effectively communicate meaning in Mandarin.

"I would think that the common sense argument of anyone who knows more than a handful of Chinese is that pure Romanization is a silly and unattainable goal."

Insofar as China would lose a significant part of their cultural legacy to do away with Hanzi, yes, Romanization is counter-productive. However, Romanization is a very useful tool. Romanization systems make it far easier for Westerners to learn Chinese and other languages that employ unfamiliar methods of representing phonemes. Going beyond this, there is some sense that Romanization can provide a complete replacement for Hanzi. This was the goal of many linguists in the earlier half of the 20th century, who sought to create an alphabetization system or Romanization system to help alleviate the problem of low literacy rates in China (ultimately, the problem of literacy was due to a poor education system, not a poor writing system, so this approach has been mostly abandoned). Alphabetic replacements for Hanzi don't undermine one's ability to understand Chinese; if characters were necessary for comprehension, then the Chinese spoken languages would not exist. The goal of using an alphabetic system is merely to represent the sounds of Mandarin using a smaller, easier to memorize set of glyphs. So replacing Hanzi with a Romanization system such as Pinyin is certainly not unattainable. But is it silly? I think that yes, to a certain degree, eliminating Hanzi in modern usage would not be a very wise move.

wow this is fun :P

@FatDragon (et all) It's already been pulled off. You just have to look at history. To cut a long story short, the Phoenician alphabet beat both Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

from Wikipedia :

"The Phoenician adaptation of the alphabet was extremely successful, and variants were adapted around the Mediterranean from about the 9th century, notably giving rise to the Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian and Paleohispanic scripts. The alphabet's success was due in part to its phonetic nature; Phoenician was the first widely used script in which one sound was represented by one symbol. This simple system contrasted with the other scripts in use at the time, such as Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, which employed many complex characters and were difficult to learn."

Ring a bell?

OK, Chinese is not exactly the same as those two, but it's similar enough IMO (not to mention the already cited fact that Vietnamese and Korean have both abandoned characters). So there seems to me to be basically 2 explanations.

1. Either Chinese is so unique that it needs a writing system that has been falsified in history many times (i.e. something that other languages have abandoned), or

2. it's doing something that is rather illogical for reasons of culture/politics or whatever one you wanna pick (which may, in the end, not matter at all, or may be very important).

And the fact that Chinese has lots of similar sounding words so needs characters just doesn't hold up. Apparently the English word 'set' has 464 definitions but I cant remember ever having a problem with it, and Chinese has many sounds that are represented with just a few characters (some with only 1!?).

I don't know anything about Korean and Vietnamese or their transitions away from character-based writing systems, nor do I know much about Sumerian versus Egyptian versus whichever languages used Cuneiform (ancient Babylonian and ...?), but compared to any language I'm marginally familiar with, the syllabic density of Chinese is extreme - words don't have one or two homophones but sometimes dozens, even more in the case of many single character words.

I would argue that Chinese is a different kind of language from most Western languages. In those languages there is a greater deal of freedom to create new syllables from existing phonemes, whether that came before or after the advent of their writing systems. As the number of words in those languages increases, the syllabic density increases slowly. Chinese has for a long, long time been a language that is built on a set number of syllables, and as the number of words increases, the syllabic density increases rapidly so that homophones become harder to distinguish. As compared to English specifically it's even worse, since current Romanization systems that I know of have no way to distinguish homophones, so they all end up with the same spelling, whereas English uses a varied set of spelling rules derived from different languages allowing for a great deal of homophones that are spelled differently from one another.

Yo FatDragon

1. From Wiki:

"Phoenician [is] the ancestor of most writing systems in use today. This possibly includes even hangul, which may have been influenced by Brahmic Phagspa. This would mean that of all the major national scripts in use in the world today, only the Chinese script and its derivatives have an independent origin."

What this means is that there has been two evolutionary processes, the first, where numerous scripts competed and basically one kind, a phonetic kind, has now become so successful that it has now been adopted by basically almost all of the world's languages (although admittedly none were exactly like Chinese, but I think it's fair to say that some were similar in some respects, either way a purely phonetic script was the winner). Now, if this isn't just down to luck it means that a purely phonetic script is the best way to represent a language in writing (we don't have to even argue how or why, the fact that it was the winner shows that it was/is superior in some way).

The second is the Chinese one, which, because of the relative isolation from other ancient civilizations, was able to independently create it's own script and propagate itself with basically zero competition. And it gets worse, since, when we get to the modern era, we find that in the few examples where written Chinese was adopted by other languages it has subsequently all but been abandoned in preference for phonetic ones.

(I leave aside the question as to how far Chinese is actually a kind of phonetic script, just not a very effective one)

2. The rest of what you wrote I think can best be refuted by taking a look at the link that Chris posted, especially the chapter titled 'The Homonym Problem'

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html

You offer some good arguments. Perhaps it's possible after all, but I will remain a skeptic until I see it working on a large scale.

Even though it's a headache to study enough characters to read a long passage, I imagine it being an even worse headache trying to read pure pinyin writing since you'd constantly have to think about what the different morphemes and syllables were trying to say. I suppose someone who learned like this from the beginning might not have much trouble, but you'd have to phase out characters over a long time to accommodate people who weren't used to a pure pinyin system.

One thing I hadn't thought of before is that proper spacing would make a huge difference - normally pinyin is presented one morpheme at a time, but if the morphemes for a single word were pushed together it would make comprehension magnitudinally easier.

Either way, pain in the butt or not, I like characters and I hope that they remain in regular use for the rest of my natural life, otherwise I should just start going for more bike rides rather than spending time on Skritter every day.

haha, indeed. I gotta say that I love them loads and hope that they never phase them out, but it's still a fascinating topic. I imagine though that if science ever said that there was some ultra-precise way to represent sounds and that that gave some kind of advantage everyone would adopt it straight-away, the Chinese being the first :-P!

That's an interesting point you make about spacing though. It just made me think why characters are spaced the way that they are in written passages. Why isn't it better to write something according to the word rather than have an equal space between each character?

For example why isn't this way easier to read?

国家 主席 胡锦涛 12号 在 美国 夏威夷州 会见了 美国 总统 奥巴马。

Than:

国家主席胡锦涛12号在美国夏威夷州会见了美国总统奥巴马

@Antimassacre

Funnily enough this is exactly how over texts in one of our classes look like.

The class is about writing and reading business letters in classical and modern Chinese. The modern letters are not spaced, whereas the classical ones are, I assume so that it's easier for us students (who have no experience with classical Chinese btw) to read.

@Antimacassar

我不怎么喜欢留空的那种写法。很不通顺，又很别扭。读起来也咔咔的。

@ DaXia

I think the lack of spaces is one of the larger intimidators to those that are just starting to make attempts at reading (besides the characters themselves, of course).

I sometimes find it very frustrating when I don't know a sequence of characters in some article, look them up one by one, only to realize in the end they are some annoying transliteration of a Western name/place. The use of 书名号 alleviates that, but sometimes their application isn't consistent, and anyway doesn't help when the word in question is a unlearned, multi-character Chinese word.

@Antimassacre

"why characters are spaced the way that they are in written passages. Why isn't it better to write something according to the word rather than have an equal space between each character? "

当然对一个初学汉语的老外来说，那是挺方便的。这个不能否认。不过在学汉语的老外只占极少数，对其余的大部分人来说那是一点帮助也没有的。在中国，就算只是一个小学生，也会认为那简直是脫褲子放屁。而空白的坏处就很大。就拿你那句共有27个字的句子为例。一加了空白就要占32个字的位置。照这样推算，一份28页的报纸就会变成了32页。试推想一下中国一天所印刷报纸的数量，多少的纸张就会被这些无用的空白浪废掉？地球的温度又会因此而升高了多少呢？

@icebear
那些音译词见多了就不会成问题了。我们都要慢慢来，习惯了就好。

@pts
怎么从词间留空格说到世界环保情况？⊙.☉ 反正我们在最基本上是一个意思的，就是没必要留空格 ^^

@pts, haha you have a good point, but that surely wasn't the reason that that particular system was adopted. I just wondered if there was a real reason why that system was adopted rather than the one I suggested.

BTW the same argument could be made to save space in Western written articles.

Justthinkhowmanytreescouldbesavedifweallwrotelikethis,butireallydontthinkitseasiertoreadthisway.
Especially,asicebearpointedout,whenitcomestopropernouns.

or if you want to do it syllabically:

Just think how ma ny trees could be saved if we all wrote like this, but I rea lly dont think it's ea si er to read this way. Es pe cia lly, as ice bear poin ted out, when it comes to pro per nouns.

(ac tua lly this way is pre tty ea sy since it con tains many sin gle sy lla ble words, but I i ma gine if you did it this way in a com pli ca ted ar ti cle you would soon get a head ache?!)

Once you're reading English at a native level, you can read all sorts of stuff pretty fluently - just think of that email that you get once every year or two with the paragraph in which all of the words are jumbled up in the middle but the first and last letters are the same; you just read right through it as if there were nothing wrong.

As for spacing with characters, since characters are generally pretty distinct, it's not a real issue of needing them separated, and for someone who's read Chinese for a while spacing becomes a bit of a headache as the flow of the passage is constantly interrupted. I do think that this would make more sense for early learners, and I think it would be moot if it were the standard method for writing in characters, since the flow wouldn't feel interrupted if it were the standard paradigm.

I think inconsistent transliterations is a huge problem for Chinese. I admire the Japanese having a they use to consistently transliterate stuff.

这两天都在思考着在词间留空格的问题。尝试着把不同的句子分割為單詞，然后试读一下看看效果如何。这就发现了一个有趣的现象。就是虽然很久以前我曾经学过怎样分割单词，可是现在已经完全忘记了。还有分割的结果跟书本上说的也很不一样。这就使我明白到，在阅读的时候，我已经把分割单词的这个程序完全地交由潜意识去处理了，而潜意识也不是跟着书本上所说的来分割。在阅读人为地留空的句子时，问题就来了。我又要从新运用意识的脑袋来处理那些句子，这就大大的加重了脑袋的工作量。而且眼睛所看到的单词跟潜意识中所分割成的单词不一样，这些又要运用脑袋去协调一番。DaXia 所说的“很不通顺，又很别扭。读起来也咔咔的 ”和FatDragon所说的“the flow of the passage is constantly interrupted ” 的原因就在这里。结论就是在词间留空格会降低阅读效率。无效率的东西自然会被淘汰。所以不会存在。