Tidbits From the World

At my University, there are a lot of evangelical christians studying Chinese. Some of them are active missionaries, while others prefer to keep their faith to themselves. I talked to one of my classmates, who is a University professor in Brazil, and he told me the reason why he studies Chinese. He said that many Chinese now immigrate to Brazil. The parents have a business while the children go to school. Those of age to attend college are “forced” to study some practical majors that they might not be that much interested in, for instance Medicine, Law, International Business, etc. As a result, many Chinese students are depressed and lost, some of them even have suicidal thinking. My classmate, being a professor at a Sao Paolo University and a student counselor, found a way to appease his Chinese students, to make them cope better with the pressure put onto them by their family. Of course, as a Christian, he used a religious method of appeasing. His rationale is that if these students become Christians themselves, they should cope better with pressure, having the lord behind supporting them and giving them strength to go forward in their lives. But now the question is: how do you convert a Chinese to Christianity? The Chinese being largely a “godless” people as I’ve heard many people say, pragmatic and proud atheists, it seems a little more difficult to convert them to any religion. So, the method my classmate found consists in using some Chinese characters to “prove” his Chinese students that the Chinese people believed in the same God 3000 years ago as the Christians do today. Let’s take a look at his selection of characters that, arguably, prove that the Chinese people are actually unsuspecting Christians…

I will start here with the most explicit one, the one that most captures the imagination, the traditional character for the verb “to come; to arrive”.

This ancient character was created well before Jesus’ arrival on earth, yet it seems to depict a man being crucified along with two other people (the two thieves who were crucified at the same time as Jesus). Let’s take a closer look:

There seems to be a “cross” from which two “legs” are protruding on the bottom. And here is the interesting part:

Each one of these red parts on this character means “people; person”.

Here is the character that means “person”. So, for my classmate, the traditional character which means “to come, to arrive”, is a pictogram depicting the Christ being crucified along with two other people (the two thieves). To him, this character was prophetic: it was created one or two millenia before Christ’s arrival on earth, thus the ancient Chinese, according to him, believed in Jesus as their saviour. His Chinese students back in Brazil seem to be receptive to his ideas.

Now, the character for “righteousness”. It depicts:

A lamb and

“me; I”. Thus, “I, the lamb“. In the Book of Revelation, the lamb is used as a metaphor for referring to Jesus (the Sacrificial lamb). So if you analyse this character,

who is “righteous”? “Me”, the “lamb”, Jesus Christ.

Now let’s take a look at this very rare character:

This character, made up of two trees and a woman, means “avaricious; greedy; never satisfied”. For my classmate, this is a clear reference to Eva in the Garden of Eden, who commited the original sin. “She” was “greedy” in a garden containing two “trees”…

Another example he gave me:

This character means “boat; ship; vessel”. The right part of the character is made up of two elements:

“Eight”, which according to him, was written differently inside the character “boat”, where both lines of this character are joined by a horizontal line (the upper-right part of the character).

And underneath, there is a “mouth” or “people”. Therefore, in the character for “boat”, there are “eight people”, a reference to Noah’s Ark, which saved eight people from the great Flood…

All this to me sounds a little like the “Da Vinci Code”, or the hidden code in the Torah. One can take any selection of Chinese characters and interpret them as they wish. This was the first time I heard a religious interpretation from the characters, but many times before have I read or heard interpretations (mostly false) concerning the construction and origins of the Chinese characters. But the fact is that only about 10% of the simplified characters currently in use in China are pictographic, that is they carry a meaning within their structure. The rest, roughly 90%, is made up of phono-semantic compounds, wherein one part of a character describes a very approximate idea, while another part describes an approximate sound. (This system was more accurate in older times, but today, both the pronounciations and meanings of the characters have evolved).

Here is an example of a phono-semantic compound:

This is a ideogram meaning “forest”. It is composed of two “trees” each represented by four strokes. The pronounciation of this compound, in mandarin Chinese, is “lin”.

This is a radical meaning “heart”. It is not a caracter and it can only be used as a particle inside a character. It is used to convey meanings pertaining to feelings, mood, spirit, etc.

And now, this combination of the aforementioned two particles forms a phono-semantic compound. The right part of the character describes the pronounciation (lin), while the left part gives an approximation of the meaning. (It has to do with feelings). This is the only etymology that one can take from this character. General meaning + pronounciation. The ancient Chinese used this method to conveniently invent new characters (a writing system uniquely composed of ideograms or pictograms would be impractible). This character is a synonym to the one we saw earlier:

“Avaricious; greedy; never satisfied”. Both characters are phono-semantic. In this case, the upper part gives the pronounciation (this time, “lin” is an approximation to the actual pronounciation “lan”, an example of how the Chinese writing system can be inconsistent). The lower part is a “woman”. The “woman” radical is often used in characters having a bad connotation, for instance: the characters for “slave”, “anger”, “to pout”, to only state a few. Now, that’s very far from the Garden of Eden!

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Language Reforms (the simplification of the Chinese, Mongol and Russian languages during the 20th century)

One of the first actions that the Soviet government took, after the Bolshevik Revolution, was to reform the Russian language by removing 4 letters from its alphabet. This reform was aimed at making the language simpler, hence making it more accessible to the masses and in the meanwhile, breaking up from the bourgeois Tsarist Russia. In 1922, after the civil war in Russia, at the time of the USSR’s foundation, Russia was unified and the Communist Party controlled its entirety. Therefore all Russians started using the new spelling. The only resistance came from the former members of Tsarist Russia who had emigrated to foreign countries and did not represent any political power anymore, therefore the four removed letters were forgotten by almost everybody and fell in disuse.

However, after the collapse of the USSR, the letters made a comeback on occasional instances, for example in marketing. Here we have an advertisement for a hotel in St-Petersburg. The letter “yat” that was abandoned in 1918 is used here to give the hotel an ancient effect. This letter (the second one in the second red word; the letter located after “B” and before “H”) was replaced in modern orthography by “и” or “е” according to the pronunciation. The red words should read, according to today’s orthography, as: Старая ВЕНА.

Mongolia, before becoming a sovereign State had been a long time a Chinese province. Yet, when the last Chinese dynasty was overthrown by the Revolution in 1911, Mongolia declared its independence and, with help from the Soviet Union, they got international recognition. Thus, Russia later maintained a significant influence over Mongolia and when the Mongolian decided to reform their orthography, they pretty much went through a process of “Russification”, that is the introduction of a modified Cyrillic alphabet. On this Mongolian train (part of the Trans-Siberian railway), on the left you can see a word written in traditional Mongolian script, and on the right you can see probably its transliteration into the Cyrillic alphabet, the word “Restaurant”.

Someone wrote on this guestbook in Traditional Mongolian Script. I do not know how much this script is still used in Mongolia or even understood there, however today the official script for writing the Mongolian language is the Cyrillic alphabet. There also seems to be a tendency for teenagers and young adults to switch to the Latin alphabet, especially when using the Internet in chat rooms.

This leads me to the Chinese case. China also has had their share of reforms. Their first reform, in 1911, transformed the whole written language by switching from Classical Chinese (the equivalent of Latin in Europe), unintelligible to most Chinese, to Vernacular Chinese (that is, the Chinese spoken language), understood by all. By analogy, instead of writing “Ave Caesar”, after the reform one would write “Hello Caesar”  instead. This change enabled a lot of Chinese to read (if they were even familiar with Chinese characters).

The Chinese intellectuals at that time considered the thousands of Chinese characters as obstacles to the evolution of China and many of them spoke out in favor of the complete abolition of all the Characters and their substitution by an alphabetic system similar to the Korean or Japanese systems or even by adopting the Latin alphabet (as the Turks did in 1928). An article from the New York Times from December 12 1912, that is 14 months after the last Chinese Emperor’s deposition and 12 months after the proclamation of the Republic of China, tells that a Chinese scholar from Hong Kong had invented an alphabet composed of 44 letters that were to be used to replace the 40.000 characters. This project of replacing 40.000 characters by just 44 letters appealed to the ruling party at the time, the Kuomintang. Using a 44-letter alphabet would be easier to teach to children, which would drastically reduce illiteracy. But a succession of wars in China, civil wars, World War II, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the debacle of the Kuomintang at the hands of the Communists shelved this project of alphabetization of the Chinese language, while postponing the projects for its simplification.

In 1949, Mao’s Communist Party defeated the Kuomintang which took shelter in Taiwan. China then became a stable country, the specter of civil war had vanished, while the Communist Party were starting to find a solution to reduce illiteracy. The first step that they took was to simplify the Chinese Characters. ie The number of strokes needed to write a given Character would be reduced. Here are some examples:

Here is the Traditional Character for “vehicle”. It had been written in this shape for more than 2000 years. It is made up of 7 strokes.

Here is its simplified form, adopted in 1956. It is made up of 4 strokes an economy of 3 strokes.

Here is one of the most complex words in Traditional Chinese (which is also used in Japanese). The first character is made up of 15 strokes, while the second is made up of 29 strokes. In total, there are 44 strokes.

And here is the simplified form of the same word. The first character is made up of 7 strokes, while the second one is made up of 9 strokes for a total of 16 strokes, thus an economy of 28 strokes. So far so good, some awfully complex characters were simplified to more handwriting-friendly ones, while retaining some aesthetics.

The red character on the left here means “heart”. The blue one means “to receive”.

This third character is made up of a combination of the two colored ones.  A combination of the verb “to receive” and the noun “heart”. Try to guess the meaning… got it! Love! “To receive one’s heart”. This traditional character is made up of 13 strokes.

Here is the character that means “friend”.

And this character, “love” simplified in 1956, is made up of a combination of the character for “friend”, under a roof. Perhaps the meaning is “before falling in love, you must be friends first”? Whatever the meaning, this character is far less poetic than its traditional form. Some opponents to the simplification of the characters argue that : “Love without a heart, what is it? The Communists have no heart!”. This character is made up of 10 strokes, that is an economy of 3 strokes.

The Chinese Communist Party did not have the same chance that the Soviet Party had in Russia: the chance to exercise sovereignty over a completely unified nation. China was, indeed, divided in many parts: Hong Kong was a British colony, Macau was a Portuguese colony and Taiwan was under the control of the Kuomintang. These three territories to this day still haven’t introduced the simplified characters to their written language yet.

Originally, the simplification of the characters was meant to only be a transitional state before the complete Romanization of Chinese. One of Mao Zedong’s advisers told the chairman, who was looking for a solution to his fight against illiteracy, about the Vietnamese case. He mentioned that the French who had been controlling Vietnam for some time had ditched the Vietnamese characters (derived from the Chinese characters) to replace them by alphabetical letters. The result was described by the adviser as a complete success at reducing illiteracy. Mao listened to this advice and decided to follow this path. In 1958, Pinyin (a phonetic transcription using the Latin alphabet) was invented. A CIA report declassified in 1993 studied the Romanization of Chinese. They wrote in their introduction:

If the Communists have their way in China, the age-old characters of the Chinese language will finally join the Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics and the more recently buried Vietnamese ideographs in oblivion. Like Kemal Ataturk’s a few decades ago, the Communists’ effort to remold the nation includes a drive for drastic changes in a language ill suited to science and technology, to education of the masses, to the communications of a directed economy, to their international purposes. Much of the heritage that was dear to Old China, obnoxious to the new, will also be buried with the old language: future generations of school children taught from latinized textbooks, will not be able to read the undesirable ancient classics. The gentility of the cursive characters will be replaced by the classlessness of proletarian typefaces.

According to this document, a complete plan was elaborated to engage in the complete latinization of the Chinese language. First, in 1958, Pinyin would be taught in primary schools, High Schools and Universities, and then, gradually, publications such as newspapers and books, would be written exclusively in Pinyin. The small town of Wanrong Xian （万荣县） in Shanxi Province （山西） was chosen as an experimental farm to evaluate Pinyin. The Romanization of Chinese was under way. It was all a matter of time for the characters to completely disappear… until Mao reportedly said “That’s too foreign!” and stopped the process. Therefore pinyin was never adopted as the sole script for writing Chinese, but only used as a complement to the study of the characters, to help children learn the pronunciation.

This is the word “restaurant” in Traditional Characters. The first character is made up of 16 strokes, while the second one is made up of 25 strokes, a total of 41 strokes.

The same word, written after 1956 in simplified characters. Total of 20 strokes, an economy of 21 strokes. So far so good, the Chinese language was now simplified and in the meantime, illiteracy was also reduced… but then came the Cultural Revolution in the years 1966-1976. To make this long story of successive catastrophes short: “Old China” was going to be destroyed to give way to the “New China”, free from all ideological pollution originating from the former political orders (capitalism and feodalism). Most traditional characters can be broken down into subunits each having a meaning, as we saw with the character for “love” (to receive one’s heart). Mao and his team thought that these subunits carried non-Marxist-Leninist ideas and that they represented a danger to communism in China. Therefore, they had to be eliminated. A second wave of simplification of the characters was prepared during the Cultural Revolution and put forth on December 20 1977, one year after Mao’s death.

This is the same word, “restaurant”, simplified for a second time. Total of 9 strokes, an economy of 32 strokes from the traditional characters and 11 strokes from the simplified characters of 1956. These characters from the second wave become almost as simple as letters, which led the language to an inevitable consequence: the characters lost of their precision. One oversimplified characters could bear the meanings of two traditional characters, which were already bearing many meanings themselves. The second wave of simplification was badly welcomed and met with strong opposition.

Here, I will briefly digress: this is how the word “restaurant” would look  like if pinyin had been adopted as the sole writing system in China. Simple, isn’t?

Here is another very common example: this word means “to park (a car)”. 18 strokes.

First simplification (1956). 15 strokes (an economy of 3 strokes).

Second simplification (1977). 8 strokes (an economy of 10 strokes in comparison to the traditional characters or 7 strokes compared to the simplified ones). Then, something very rare in China happened: after years of constant opposition from everywhere in the society, from within the Party as well as from some scholars, the government finally backed off and ditched the oversimplified characters on June 24 1986. The second wave of simplification had been officially used in China for only 9 years. Today, the characters that are in use in the People’s Republic of China are the simplified characters from the first wave (1956).

To sum up, there have been four writing systems in use in China in the last 60 years (Traditional, Simplified, Pinyin and Simplified (2nd wave)). Nowadays, there are only two official systems in China: the simplified characters from 1956 and pinyin, although all four systems are concomitantly being used by the Chinese people, most of the time the characters that one uses reflect the age of the writer.

Here, you can recognize two of the three red characters on top: the second one and the third one: “vehicle” and “ting” (in the word “restaurant”). Both characters are used in their traditional form in this bus terminal in Sichuan province. Maybe was it written this way for aesthetics or maybe because the terminal is older than 60 years… The message below, in white, is written in simplified Chinese.

The official simplified characters. Here you can recognize the word “to park a car” (停车).

And finally, this message “No Parking” written in oversimplified Chinese. Probably written by someone who got his education between 1977 and 1986.

And here is pinyin. “Xin da jing pin”… “Saijun”.

Click here to download the New York Times Article from 1912.

Click here to download the CIA report on pinyin.

Final exams next week… Monday: Listening Comprehension; Tuesday: Reading Comprehension; Wednesday: Writing; Thursday: Spoken Chinese.