Wang Yongmin (Wáng Yǒngmín, 王永民), the developer of the much hyped “Wubi” input method for Chinese characters, seems to get a bit more shrill each time he has a chance to make it into the papers. The Wubi Chinese character input method works by assembling characters based on the shapes of elements within characters.
Here’s something from a recent rant:
近日，五笔字型的发明者——王永民教授在中国科学院研究生院演讲时发表了这样的观点。
王永民认为，汉字的形是“身”，汉字的音是“衣”；“弃形留音”等于“舍身取衣”。拼音输入离开了对汉字造字元素的直接思考和运用，汉字必然将因此而形神俱灭，汉字本身所固有的文化遗传基因，将因此而丧失殆尽。
王永民认为，从文化意义上说，中华民族的伟大复兴也是汉字文化的伟大复兴，没有汉字，就没有中华民族。他指出，汉字和汉语拼音的主辅关系是早有定论的。
source: Wáng Yǒngmín: Pīnyīn shūrù shì Hànzì wénhuà de jué [fen]mù jī[qi] (王永民：拼音输入是汉字文化的掘墓机), Science Web, March 17, 2006
It’s a rant, but he’s actually right. When hanji/hanzi/kanji/hontsi go down the tube, so does Chinese culture.
Good riddance. Ha!
I speak as an Asian.
This blog is killing China!
Hot dog! We may have just figured out how to persuade Taiwan’s anything-from-China-must-be-bad crowd to embrace Hanyu Pinyin!
Hahaha!
I’m absolutely convinced that lack of an alphabet seriously hinders technological progress. If people have to spend a huge effort memorising 10000 characters vs 26 letters, the emphasis is more on rote learning rather than creativity. Anything that’s efficient is good. Anything that’s counterintuitive and wastes unnecessary time and space is bad. This is an objective argument given today’s world system, as opposed to the subjective “culture” and “tradition” arguments.
Imagine how science would’ve developed if there were no such thing as an alphabet. The earliest computers could only disply the ASCII characters. It was only much later before computers were able to handle 10000 symbols for different characters. Imagine computer programming using characters. It would have to be done using a very limited character set (
P Tan:
learning the alphabet is not intuitive either, nor the words composed by letters in the alphabet. it requires rote learning too. what about the complex and counterintuitive grammatical rules of the english language? do u think the english grammatical rules are efficient? on the contrary, chinese grammar is much simpler and less confusing. nobody misunderstands one another even when there are no tenses or conjugations. according to your argument, “Anything that’s efficient is good. Anything that’s counterintuitive and wastes unnecessary time and space is bad,” then learning chinese must be good and learning english is bad.
also, the concept of “science” that we have today came from the west, it is of course natural that it was developed in their native languages and according to their worldview. thus it is natural that we cannot conceive of how different it could be outside their system of thought. so the point is, it is unfair to say that chinese or any other asian language is flawed just because it cannot fit into your eurocentric worldview.
Harumura:
No one here has said that “chinese or any other asian language is flawed”.
You are mixing up languages (e.g., English and Mandarin, which are not difficult to their native speakers, however trying they might be for others to learn) and scripts (e.g., the roman alphabet and Chinese characters, the latter of which are difficult even for native speakers of Sinitic languages). These are very different things.
And are you seriously trying to equate the amount of rote memorization involved in learning the roman alphabet (a few dozen characters) to that required for even basic literacy in Chinese characters (thousands)? Oh, come on now.
“And are you seriously trying to equate the amount of rote memorization involved in learning the roman alphabet (a few dozen characters) to that required for even basic literacy in Chinese characters (thousands)? Oh, come on now.”
learning a few dozen roman alphabet does not give basic literacy does it?
Chinese characters are at a layer between English letter
and English words.
It isn’t fair to compare English letters to Chinese characters, because each Chinese/Japanese characters bares semantic meanings. It is like comparing character strokes( 6 or 7 basic strokes) to 26 letters.