A radical proposal for sinographs
« previous post |
Letter to the editor of Taipei Times (4/29/25) by Te Khai-su / Tè Khái-sū:
Abolish Chinese characters
A few months ago, under the overhang walkway (teng-a-kha, or Hokkien architecture) of a Tainan side street, I saw a child — perhaps 10 years old — hunched over one of the collapsible tables of her parents’ food stall, writing columns of “hanzi” (漢字, Chinese/Han characters), each in their dozens.
A familiar, if rather sad sight in Taiwan — although not nearly as spectacular as Hugo Tseng’s (曾泰元) evocative account in this newspaper (“Rejuvenating ‘Chinese character,’” April 20, page 8), where he recalled the legend of Cangjie’s (倉頡) creation of hanzi, describing how “millet grains rained from the sky and the ghosts and gods wept at night.”
Tseng waxed lyrical about hanzi, calling it a “profound cultural significance,” a “monumental writing system,” and “one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements” — as if such ebullience could be taken for granted without evidence. The schoolchild might have no option, but adults like me have seen alternatives in other societies.
After just a couple of years of schooling in alphabetic script, including systems such as Korean “hangul,” all literature in that language becomes accessible to students. More importantly, they can express themselves readily in writing, and have time left over to explore other pursuits, such as learning another language, or start learning hanzi for historical interest. Instead, Taiwanese schoolchildren are burdened from an early age with long school days and years of tedious homework, much of it due to the demands of hanzi.
I am far from the first to criticize hanzi for being hard to learn and holding people back. Early 20th-century critiques — the great Chinese writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) being a pioneer — paved the way for the (albeit incomplete) language reforms in China after the Communist Revolution, resulting in the creation of simplified characters and “Hanyu pinyin.” In contrast, the (then) anti-communist Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan entrenched the use of traditional hanzi.
Such conservatism reminds me of Choe Man-ri 崔萬里* (d. 1445), a Confucian academic at the 15th-century Korean royal court, who opposed King Sejong the Great’s (1397-1450) invention of hangul. Choe fought against hangul in favor of hanzi, dreading that the innovation would “be to our shame in serving the great and in admiring China.”
National Cheng Kung University Department of Taiwanese Literature professor Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung (蔣為文) was right when he wrote in 1996 that Taiwanese “cannot achieve independence unless we abolish Han characters.”
Happily, most Taiwanese languages already have Latin orthographies in use, and we can learn from the successes of Korea and Vietnam.
Te Khai-su
Helsinki, Finland
[VHM: *See here for the Classical Chinese text and English translation of Ch'oe's 1444 protest against Hangul, which nonetheless was promulgated in 1446.]
Selected readings
- "The perils of literacy" (1/14/17) — Su Shi (Dongpo [1037-1101]
- "Hu Shih and Chinese Language Reform" (2/4/17) — also available here
- "English or Mandarin as the World Language?" (5/2/14)
- "Which is worse?" (1/21/16)
- Geoff Pullum, "There Was No Committee", Lingua Franca (4/30/14)
- _________, "The Awful Chinese Writing System" Lingua Franca (1/20/16),
Hill Gates said,
May 23, 2025 @ 4:27 pm
Apart from vaccination against infectious diseases, nothing but replacing hanzi with an alphabet or syllabary would make life more enjoyable for most the children who struggle toward literacy using Hanzi. Foreign grad students too.
On.the other hand, the kids won’t grow up having had the same memory training (and perhaps other skills) as hanzi learners.
On the basis of talking attentively with many,
many Chinese and Taiwanese adults who did not complete high school, I am certain that the great majority of them are functionally illiterate a few years later. That is true of English speakers as well. People who do not get reinforcement from reading (and writing?) and so do not do it regularly simply fforget how.
Should society expend the effort to change something until they have carefully researched its consequences for people? Happier children vs less focussed children? Should we change for the sake of the children themselves, or for people who will depend in future on their characteristics?
In the world we have now, I say eat, drink, be merry, and dump hanzi!
Hill Gates
Victor Mair said,
May 23, 2025 @ 5:55 pm
See also this post, "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye" (3/24/17), which features lengthy comments by Hill Gates.
Jon Forrest said,
May 23, 2025 @ 9:35 pm
One of my hobbies, now that I'm retired, is to try to convince Chinese and Japanese people that, in spite of having great historical, sociological, psychological, and maybe political value, characters are not linguistically necessary. Most of them think this is the stupidest thing they've ever heard. Some of them even take personal offense.
This mindset would have to change before any concrete changes are attempted.
Tom davidson said,
May 23, 2025 @ 9:53 pm
I’m left-handed, never had any difficulty learning to write simp/trad Han zi
KIRINPUTRA said,
May 23, 2025 @ 10:46 pm
These dudes want kanji abolished! top-down! b/c they lack the backbone to do anything about this plague in their own lives. They're addicted to kanji, and to (written) Mandarin; their outboxes & private correspondence are full of Mandarin, in kanji. They set their devices to Mandarin (and kanji), and most would likely read & write kanji'd Mandarin in secret if it was ever abolished.
What they criticise is invariably the Nationalist Chinese incarnation of kanji, which are non-secular (brahminical), and not traditional but, rather, untraditionally skewed towards complexity. They're hypo-critical of the mainland E. Asian exam culture (which, talk about a drag on society), while glossing over the role of the secular (non-brahminical) kanji in Japanese society. Are Japanese lives less fulfilling anyway than Korean or Vietnamese or even North American ones? There's not much of a basis for such a conclusion.
As a matter of political science, it would — theoretically — make more sense for Formosan society to run on kanji'd Hakka & kanji'd Taioanese than on romanised Mandarin. Might Tè Khái-sū prefer the romanised Mandarin, if he had to choose? I don't think he's ever written an "Abolish Mandarin" schpiel.
They yearn to be set free top-down; Tailam is "Tainan" to them till some act of God "abolishes 'Tainan'". But the successes of Vietnam & Korea show us the need to flip the script ourselves.
Robert T McQuaid said,
May 24, 2025 @ 1:26 am
I once spent a few months trying to learn Mandarin. What caused me to give up was the complexity of the writing system. I may not be the only one. Use of Chinese as a second language will be minimal until the writing is simplified.
Peter Cyrus said,
May 24, 2025 @ 4:33 am
Could one of you answer a historical question?
The first republicans, like Sun Yat-Sen / Zhongshan and the May Fourth/ New Culture movement, were all in favor of replacing characters with an alphabet, as were Mao Zedong and the early communists, following the 1916 proposal of Yuen Ren Chao. Among the romanizations developed in response were Gwoyeu Romatzyh and the Soviet Latinxua Sin Wenz. This agenda was advanced by forward-looking internationalists.
After Zhongshan's death in 1925, the power struggle was won by Chiang Kai-shek under a more conservative nationalist program, and the plan to replace characters was watered down to simplifying some of them and introducing Hanyu Pinyin in only an auxiliary role. I've always imagined the Nationalists would rather have forgotten about orthographic reform altogether, if it hadn't been so necessary.
My question is, when the Communists took over in 1949, why did they keep the Nationalist program? Why not oppose it and go back to their own roots by alphabetizing? That seems now like a lost opportunity. Maybe they feared being seen as less Chinese, but given the other huge disruptions they promulgated, that seems like a weak explanation. Anybody have an idea?