Category Archives: linguistics

Korean university students show little knowledge of Chinese characters

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A group of 384 freshmen at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea were tested on their knowledge of hanja (Chinese characters, as are sometimes used in writing words in Korean). Although this sample isn’t particularly large, I haven’t seen any indication that anyone believes it is not representative of Korean university freshmen as a whole. The results — at least for those who believe that Chinese characters still play a major role in literacy in Korean — are fairly dramatic:

  • 20 percent couldn’t write their own names in Chinese characters
  • 77 percent couldn’t write their mother’s name in Chinese characters
  • 83 percent couldn’t write their father’s name in Chinese characters
  • 71 percent couldn’t write “new student” in Chinese characters
  • 96 percent couldn’t write “economy” in Chinese characters
  • 98 percent couldn’t write “encyclopedia” in Chinese characters

And as for reading Chinese characters?

  • 93 percent couldn’t read the word for “ambition” as written in Chinese characters
  • 96 percent couldn’t read the word for “honor” as written in Chinese characters
  • 99 percent couldn’t read the word for “compromise” as written in Chinese characters

Remember, this refers to students at a prominent university.

A pro-character editorial in response to this states:

Seventy percent of Korean words including most conceptual and abstract nouns are made of Chinese characters. Terminology used in humanities, social studies and natural science are mostly Chinese characters. It is difficult to understand the meaning of words by pronunciation alone, without learning about the meanings of the Chinese characters that represent them. Words such as “recurrence”, “repatriation” and “homing” contain the Chinese character that stands for “return.” Without knowing that character, you must memorize each of those words separately by sound.

Whoever wrote that needs to be sent to the board to write “Chinese characters are not words” one hundred times. But I don’t know what it would take for the author to realize that learning words by sound rather than Chinese characters is entirely normal — exactly what native speakers of languages the world over do.

For a little more information on the complications in the use of Chinese characters with Korean, see Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma by William C. Hannas, especially the sections on the so-called homonym problem and the supposed transitivity [of Chinese characters] across languages.

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See also Occidentalism’s thread on this, which already has more than thirty comments.

Percentage of China’s population that can speak Mandarin remains at 53%: PRC MOE

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A total of 53.06 percent of China’s population can “effectively communicate orally in Mandarin,” according to China’s Ministry of Education, which recently conducted a survey of half a million people. The rate in cities was 66 percent, while in rural areas it was 45 percent, the ministry said.

The survey also found that 56.76 percent of Chinese men can speak Putonghua, while 49.22 percent of women speak it. About 70 percent of people between the age of 15 and 29 speak mandarin, while only 30.97 percent between the age of 60 and 69 can speak standard mandarin.

Although the stories on this do not mention this, the results are essentially identical with those of a similar survey in 2004. According to that survey:

  • “nearly 53 percent of the 1.3 billion Chinese in the country” can speak Mandarin
  • 66 percent of the citizens in China’s cities and towns can speak Mandarin (This wording may be an indication that China’s large “floating population” was not included.)
  • 45 percent of those in rural areas can speak Mandarin

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Shanghainese are overusing English, says PRC academic

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From the China Daily a few months ago.

A linguistics expert has claimed Shanghainese are overusing the English language.

“It’s a blind worship of the English language,”said Pan Wenguo, dean of Chinese as a Foreign Language School at East China Normal University, at a conference held Monday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of promoting Putonghua, or Mandarin.

He added the business sector was particularly responsible for the trend, claiming many people used English “more for following others blindly than for practical needs.”

Pan said up to one-third of Chinese are studying or have studied English, while the number of English learners in Shanghai is even higher.

“English is not bad in itself, but the present mania of learning English is really too much,”said Pan.

Last Sunday, more than 50,000 Shanghai locals sat the English Interpreter Test of middle to high levels, an increase of 20 per cent on last year.

The time set a side for English learning has been on the rise for students at various levels….

In the increasingly competitive job market, the English Certificate has become one of the most important qualifications employees look for, ranking only behind diplomas.

Many employers, especially in the business sector, tend to hire only people with good English communication abilities….

source: Linguist criticizes ‘blind worship’ of English, China Daily, September 23, 2006

Y.R. Chao works being reissued

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cover of the book 'Linguistic Essays, by Yuenren Chao'The Commercial Press has begun issuing a set of the complete works of Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren / 趙元任 / 赵元任). This project, which will comprise some twenty volumes, will contain works in both English and Mandarin Chinese. All of the many fields Chao wrote about will be covered. Letters and journals will also be included, as will sound recordings. Wonderful!

For those who don’t want to wait for the whole series or don’t feel the need to buy all of them, the Commercial Press has also two volumes of Chao’s selected essays on linguistics: one in English and one in Mandarin. These are, respectively, Linguistic Essays by Yuenren Chao (ISBN: 7-100-03385-3/H·860) and Zhào Yuánrèn yǔyánxué lùnwénjí (赵元任语言学论文集) (ISBN: 7-100-03127-3/H·789).

cover of the book '赵元任语言学论文集 Zhao Yuanren Yuyanxue Lunwenji'Note how the cover of Linguistic Essays, a book printed just last year in China, uses “Yuenren Chao,” the traditional spelling and Western order of his name, rather than “Zhao Yuanren,” the spelling used in Hanyu Pinyin. Also note how the Mandarin title is given in traditional, not simplified, characters: 趙元任語言學論文集, not 赵元任语言学论文集. A nice surprise, on both counts. On the other hand, the botched romanization on the cover of the Mandarin-language collection, which gives “ZHAOYUANREN YUYANXUELUNWENJI” instead of “Zhào Yuánrèn yǔyánxué lùnwénjí,” is particularly inappropriate and painful to look at on a collection of the works of this brilliant linguist. But don’t judge this book by its cover.

Here are links to all the volumes in the complete works that I’ve been able to locate information on:

cover of the first volume of Y.R. Chao's collected works

IPA for Mandarin Chinese

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Another back issue of Sino-Platonic Papers has been released as a free PDF: Chinese Romanization Systems: IPA Transliteration (1.34 MB), by Warren A. Shibles. This was first published in November 1994 as SPP No. 52.

This work, whose rather dim view of romanization I do not share, is primarily a useful compilation of various published forms of IPA transcriptions for all the syllables of Mandarin. To these the author adds his own stab at applying the International Phonetic Alphabet to Mandarin. Moreover, a variety of romanization systems are shown, including that from Werner Rüdenberg’s Chinesisch-deutsches worterbuch.

Elsewhere, Pat Moran recently posted an HTML version of his own IPA chart for Mandarin.

I hope that the variety of approaches will provide a useful reminder that standard Mandarin is represented by a range, not a fixed point. And also that standard Mandarin is not the same thing as a caricature of a Beijing accent. Too often, in their quest for “correctness,” students of Mandarin end up with so many ers that they sound like they’re part circus seal. Emulating the sounds of the Beijing dialect of Mandarin is fine (though generally unnecessary); just don’t go overboard.

ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese — just released!

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image of the cover of the 'ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese'The University of Hawai`i Press has just released another title in its excellent ABC Chinese Dictionary Series: the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, by Axel Schuessler.

Here is the publisher’s blurb:

This is the first genuine etymological dictionary of Old Chinese written in any language. As such, it constitutes a milestone in research on the evolution of the Sinitic language group. Whereas previous studies have emphasized the structure of the Chinese characters, this pathbreaking dictionary places primary emphasis on the sounds and meanings of Sinitic roots. Based on more than three decades of intensive investigation in primary and secondary sources, this completely new dictionary places Old Chinese squarely within the Sino-Tibetan language family (including close consideration of numerous Tiberto-Burman languages), while paying due regard to other language families such as Austroasiatic, Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien), and Kam-Tai.

Designed for use by nonspecialists and specialists alike, the dictionary is highly accessible, being arranged in alphabetical order and possessed of numerous innovative lexicographical features. Each entry offers one or more possible etymologies as well as reconstructed pronunciations and other relevant data. Words that are morphologically related are grouped together into “word families” that attempt to make explicit the derivational or other etymological processes that relate them. The dictionary is preceded by a substantive and significant introduction that outlines the author’s views on the linguistic position of Chinese within Asia and details the phonological and morphological properties, to the degree they are known, of the earliest stages of the Chinese language and its ancestor. This introduction, because it both summarizes and synthesizes earlier work and makes several original contributions, functions as a useful reference work all on its own.

The work is 678 pages long and retails for US$62.
ISBN: 978-0-8248-2975-9

Simplified characters inside and outside of the People’s Republic of China

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The following is a guest post by Professor Victor H. Mair. All of the Chinese characters other than those in the scanned image are my own addition.

———–

A friend of ours from Taiwan who keeps a sharp eye out for new cancer medicine for my wife recently sent us the announcement of a new drug, and added the following handwritten note at the end:

scanned note of Chinese characters. description follows below

Wǒ xiāngxìn hái huì yǒu
I believe still can there is/are
         
gèng hǎod fāmíng    
more good invention    

“I believe that there will be even better inventions.”

Of the eleven Chinese characters in her note, four were simplified: xìn (亻 rén [“man”] on the left and 文 wén [“civil, writing”] on the right), hái (as on the mainland), huì (as on the mainland), and fā (癶 Kangxi radical 105 [bō] on the top as with the original graph, mainland 开 kāi [“open”] on the bottom]).

Here is the text as it would appear in traditional Chinese characters.

我相信還會有
更好的發明.

The text as it would appear in the PRC’s “simplified” Chinese characters, with the different characters in yellow

我相信还会有
更好的发明.

Note that, of the four simplified characters in this short note, two are nonstandard according to PRC orthography, which has rén (亻 “man”) on the left and yán (言 “speech”) on the right for xìn (信 “trust; letter”), i.e., the graph is unsimplified on the mainland, and a completely different form for fā (發/发 “emit, occur”). One might have expected that these nonstandard simplified forms would have derived from Japanese forms, since Taiwan has had close cultural ties with Japan during the past century. Yet Japanese orthography does not call for the simplification of xìn at all, and the Japanese simplification of fā, while similar to the simplified form in our friend’s note, has the bottommost strokes curving toward the left and right, whereas our friend has them going straight down. Our friend’s xìn is not an ad hoc invention by her, because I have often seen it used in informal writing, and it is fairly easy to understand how someone might want to substitute the four-stroke component wén (文 “writing”) for the seven-stroke component yán (言 “speech”) when thinking of the meaning “letter, missive” for this character. Our friend’s fā, on the other hand, probably is related to the Japanese form, but further simplified so that the effort to curve the last two strokes left and right is eliminated. In addition, the idea of “open, begin” for the bottom component (开 kāi) was undoubtedly in the mind of the person who devised this simplified form, since it comports well with the fundamental meanings of fā.

What is particularly interesting is that our friend is vocally opposed to the simplification of characters, decrying the mainland communist bandits as destroyers of Chinese civilization, yet she herself uses them regularly and casually, and in her own writing! Indeed, she uses more simplified characters in her writing than are called for by the PRC authorities. The same is true of Chinese writers the world over when they let their hair down and do what comes naturally. The simplification of Chinese characters has been going on for more than two thousand years (see, for example, the many simplified forms in the stele inscriptions of the Six Dynasties period and the profusion of simplified characters in the pinghua [“expository tales”] of the Song period).

I should not neglect to observe that there are also numerous unofficial simplified characters in widespread use on the mainland. For example 午 wǔ (“noon” – four strokes) is a common substitute for 舞 wǔ (“dance” – 14 strokes [!]), 江 jiāng (“[Yangtze] river” – six strokes) frequently replaces 疆 jiāng (“border” – nineteen strokes [!!]) in Xinjiang (the name of the Uyghur region in the far west), and so forth.

What does all of this boil down to? In a nutshell, people are not fools. They do not want to waste their lives writing a dozen* or more strokes for a single syllable when they can convey the same amount of information in four or five strokes. I contend that the natural process of simplification – without artificial (e.g., heavy-handed government) intervention – inevitably results in the development of a syllabary or an alphabet. In fact, this is what happened with Japanese hiragana and katakana, as well as with the nüshu (“women’s script”) of southwestern Hunan. Absent strong government controls and/or elitist models, the same would happen with mainstream hanzi (“sinographs”) in China, and we even see a tendency toward greater emphasis on phoneticization and de-emphasis on semanticization in the official writing system of the PRC. For instance, 云 yún is used both for “cloud” and “say” (ironically, the graph for “cloud” on the oracle bones started out with the simple form, and the “rain” radical 雨 was only added about a thousand years later with the seal form of the graph), while fā (“emit, occur”) and fà (“hair”) share the same graph. This is not, of course, to mention the hundreds of so-called “letter words” (zimuci) that are creeping into Chinese dictionaries, nor the thousands of English words that are invading Chinese speech and writing. But that is a matter for another essay.

==
*The average number of strokes per character is over a dozen for traditional forms and just under a dozen for the complete set of characters that incorporates the official simplified forms. The main reasons why there is not much difference between the two averages are: 1. the vast numbers of characters overall, 2. the relatively few characters that have been officially simplified.

Victor H. Mair
University of Pennsylvania
December 6, 2006

———–

see also Mystery of old simplified Chinese characters?, Pinyin News, October 7, 2005

85 percent of Japanese report weakening of ability to write kanji: poll

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I may have understated the headline by using “weakening.” Regardless, though, the figures are dramatic.

People are becoming accustomed to computer-aided input of kanji and thus forgetting how to be able to write them by hand. This is only going to get worse, not better.

For a brief English article on this, see the link below.

「パソコンを始めて漢字が書けなくなった70％、読める漢字が増えた15％」。
6月に行った調査 ではこんな結果が出ているが、最新の調査はどうだろうか。「漢字の日」である12月12日、ニンテンドー DS 用ソフト「 漢検DS 」が、漢字に関する意識調査の結果を発表した。

同調査は10～15歳の“こども”400名、35～40歳の“大人”400名を対象としている。

調査によれば、「漢字を書く機会が減ったと感じている」大人が93％、「ここ何年かで自分の漢字力が低下したと感じている」大人が85％にものぼり、多くの大人が漢字を書く機会が減り、漢字が書けなくなったと感じていることがわかった。

このような結果にもかかわらず、こども世代の過半数以上は「分からない漢字は両親に聞く」と考えている。一方の大人世代では、4人に1人が「漢字を書けなくて恥を書いたシチュエーション」として、「こどもなど、人に聞かれてわからなかった時」と答えた。「親は漢字が分かるもの」というこどもの期待と、親の能力には大きな乖離があるようだ。

漢字力が低下した原因について尋ねるたところ（複数回答）、最も多かった回答は「PC をよく使うから」で87.4％。続いて「携帯電話（携帯メール）をよく使うから」（43.8％）、「年齢をおうことによる記憶力の低下」（41.8％）の順となった。

早稲田大学笹原宏之助教授はこう分析する。「漢字教育が漢字についての応用力を育てるような体系的なものとして行われておらず、また日常生活でも本や新聞などの紙面よりも、テレビやパソコンなど画面の上で漢字を書いたり見たりする機会が増えたためだ」

自分の漢字力を知る方法としては、大人、こどもともに、1位「漢字検定」、2位「漢字勉強用ゲームソフト」、3位「漢字問題集」という結果となった。また、こどもが漢字勉強用ゲームソフトで漢字を勉強することについては、大人の48％が賛成と回答している。

笹原助教授は漢字力低下の要因を、PC などの普及による漢字を書く行為のデジタル化に見出したが、その低下した漢字力を向上させるための学習方法にもデジタル化の波が及んでいるのかもしれない。

ちなみになぜ12月12日が「漢字の日」かといえば、1995年に財団法人日本漢字能力検定協会が「いい（1）じ（2）いち（1）じ（2）」（いい字1字）の語呂合わせで設定したからだという。

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