Category Archives: China

PRC legislator calls for compulsory minority language education

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A member of the Standing Committee of the PRC’s National People’s Congress has called for members of China’s ethnic minorities to be educated in not only Mandarin but also in their native languages.

“Minority children today are reluctant to learn their own ethnic languages, and if the trend continues, these languages will disappear,” said Zhang Meilan, a member of the Hani minority group. Zhang made her comments on Sunday in an address to fellow lawmakers on the draft amendment to the Compulsory Education Law, which is in its final hearing.

Zhang also made the suggestion before the amendment was submitted to the legislature, but her proposal was omitted from the draft.

On Sunday, Zhang urged the legislature again to include an article in the amendment to make bilingual education compulsory for minority children in the nine-year free education from elementary school to junior high.

The legislature is expected to vote on the draft amendment on Thursday….

Zhang said that if her suggestion was accepted, the Ministry of Education and the Ethnic Affairs Committee should invest in bilingual education, providing a fund for minority language preservation.

Unfortunately, this will probably not be accepted. And even if it does pass, it will probably never receive much more than lip service.

source: Chinese lawmaker calls for compulsory minority language education, Xinhua, June 26, 2006

Taishan dictionary

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A recently published dictionary of Taishan — Táishān fāngyīn zìdiǎn (台山方音字典), edited by Dèng Jūn (邓钧) and Lín Róngyào (林荣耀) — has been selling relatively well, according to news reports. But I haven’t been able to find out much more, such as if the book is available for purchase online.

Zhou Enlai and others on script reform

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New on Pinyin Info is the nearly complete text of Reform of the Chinese Written Language, a booklet from the PRC that dates back to 1958. Most of the essays, however, contain misconceptions about Chinese characters, romanization, and the nature of script reform, so this work is placed here on this site not as a recommended reading but as a historical reference. So, with that in mind, here are the essays:

China’s Cultural Revolution, Pinyin, and other romanizations

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Some people have the idea that because during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards went about destroying much of China’s cultural heritage, they must have attacked Chinese characters and supported Pinyin. This idea is wrong. During that terrible time Pinyin was attacked, like so much else that was good in China.

With the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution upon us, this might be a good time to bring out this selection from The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, by John DeFrancis:

In view of the fact that separate alphabetic treatment for the regionalects has been a virtually tabooed subject since 1949, it comes as a surprise that among the revelations following the downfall of the Gang of Four is an account by Prof. Huang Diancheng of Amoy University of the adaptation of Pinyin to the Southern Min speech of Amoy and its use in the production of anti-illiteracy textbooks and other activities. Huang reports that during the Cultural Revolution people possessing materials in Min alphabetic writing were denounced as “foreign lackeys” and were forced to take the material out to the street, kneel down alongside them, set them afire, and reduce them to ashes. Elsewhere repression of Pinyin in any form was undertaken by xenophobic Red Guards, themselves staunch supporters of character simplification, who tore down street signs written in Pinyin as evidence of subservience to foreigners.

The Nazi-like book-burning episode and other acts against the use of Pinyin are fitting testimony of the repression exercised against activities concerned with fundamental issues in Chinese writing reform. In these actions the positive idea that China should stand on its own feet without demeaning reliance on foreign aid was expressed in its most xenophobic form as a sort of anti-intellectual blood-and-soil nativism that constitutes a danger, still present, of a Chinese-style fascism. The young student storm troopers who sought to humble the old-time intellectuals, far from following Lu Xun in embracing the one system of writing that would have done the most to equalize things between illiterates and all those who had received an education, supported instead the lesser reform of character simplification that might enhance their own position relative to the older generation.

evolution of simplified Chinese characters: dissertation

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Stockholm University’s Department of Oriental Languages has just released Long Story of Short Forms: The Evolution of Simplified Chinese Characters (10.4 MB PDF), a Ph.D. dissertation by Roar Bökset.

Here is the abstract:

A script reform was carried out in China between 1955 and 1964 by simplifying the shape of a number of characters. Most of the simplified forms adopted had already been in popular use for a long time before this reform, while a few were invented for the occasion.

One objective of this dissertation is to estimate the proportion of invented forms. To this end, use of simplified variants before 1955 was surveyed. Pre-reform writing turned out to be more heterogeneous than expected. In fact, already Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) handwriting differed considerably from the norms set up by contemporary dictionaries and model texts.

One aim of the script reform was to unify writing habits and make them conform better with established norms. To evaluate the Script Reform Committee’s success in this field, this dissertation surveys the use of different unofficial short forms even after the reform. Success turned out to be moderate. Many pre-1955 short variants survived, and, what was worse, new ones emerged after the reform. Particularly confusing was the use of different unofficial short forms in different parts of China. The existence of such local variants was confirmed by extensive reading of signs, advertisements, price tags and wall newspapers in twenty-one provinces, and by interviews with informants at four hundred localities. Results of that survey are displayed on twenty-four maps.

A few years earlier, even Japanese characters had gone through a reform which made many simplified forms official. Some of the new official Japanese forms differed from those which came to be official in China, creating a discrepancy which has at times been lamented. However, this dissertation compares the short forms used in pre-reform Japan with those of pre-reform China, and shows that most of the present discrepancies have roots in differences in Chinese and Japanese writing traditions, which bound the hands of reformers in both countries and enforced the decisions which were eventually made.

May Fourth remembered

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Today is the 87th anniversary of the demonstrations in Beijing that marked the beginning of what is now called the May Fourth Movement. What concerns me here is not the surge in Chinese nationalism (something the present-day PRC — and some would say Taiwan, too — could use rather less of) but the literary revolution that largely overthrew the use of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese).

This revolution, though, swift and remarkable as it was, unfortunately remains incomplete today. As Yin Binyong put it:

Ever since the beginnings of the May Fourth movement, many scholars — especially those who support the use of alphabetized writing for Chinese — have all advocated as the main goal of the modern Chinese language standardization movement that spoken and written Chinese should be the same. Unfortunately, this goal has remained primarily a subjective aspiration; as long as Chinese characters continue to be the sole writing system in China, this goal can never be realized. Despite the fact that literary Chinese is no longer used, nevertheless it has been replaced by a half-literary, half-vernacular style of writing, rather than a style based solely on the spoken language.

Even so, the literary movement should not be underestimated. The changes brought — for well or ill — by the introduction several decades later of “simplified” Chinese characters are practically nothing compared with the impact of the overall change from Literary Sinitic to vernacular Mandarin.

A good source of information on the literary aspect of the May Fourth Movement is The Chinese Renaissance, by Hu Shih (Hú Shì, 胡適), one of the main figures in this movement.

Finally, I’d like to direct people to Languagehat’s post yesterday on the somewhat analagous situation with classical Arabic and Arabic vernaculars, a subject I’d love to learn more about.

surname-spelling scrap

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Danwei has picked up on a story of someone in China with the surname of Xiè being issued an air ticket under the name Jiě. The reason behind the mixup is that the character used for this woman’s name, 解, is most often pronounced “jie,” as in jiěfàng (liberate; emancipate), jiějué (solve; resolve; settle), liǎojiě (understand; comprehend; find out; acquaint oneself with), and jiěshì (expound; interpret; analyze). Thus, it is but one of the many Chinese characters that has more than one pronunciation.

When she and some of her relatives went to the travel agency to get the matter cleared up, however, an argument broke out. Before long, people from the travel agency were using poles to beat the family.

(Maybe not my strongest entry, but there was no way I was going to pass up a chance to post on a story titled “Is personal safety another argument for Chinese romanization?”)

sources:

Zhou Youguang in the news again

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Guangming Ribao has a long piece this week on Zhou Youguang, one of the main people behind the creation of Hanyu Pinyin: Zhōu Yǒuguāng: bǎisuì xīngchén, wénhuá cànrán (周有光：百岁星辰　文华灿然, Guāngmíng Rìbào, April 23, 2006). This also has lots of photos.

For autobiographical material by him in English, see A devotion that goes beyond words, from the South China Morning Post in the late 1990s.

For a selection of writings by him, see The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts (中国语文的时代演进 Zhōngguó yǔwén de shídài yǎnjìn).