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A Language That Is Radically Different

BY “AWAKE!” CORRESPONDENT IN HONG KONG

INSTEAD of simply learning twenty-six letters as in the English alphabet, how would you like to memorize thousands of picturelike characters? How would you like to write a letter, not by typing at speeds of fifty to eighty words per minute, but by laboriously drawing each character by hand? This is part of learning Chinese, both written and spoken.

Chinese is reputedly one of the oldest languages in the world, and perhaps the most difficult. The difficulty lies mainly in the fact that the Chinese language does not have an alphabet. Instead, it has thousands of different characters. While a standard dictionary for high school students may contain only about 10,000 characters, a comprehensive dictionary contains over 40,000. However, it is generally estimated that if a person knows from 3,000 to 4,000 characters, he should do reasonably well in reading publications of general interest.

Characters are the basic units or symbols of the written language and are all monosyllabic. While each has its own meaning, two or more characters may be combined to form new words. For example, the character “ren” [Art Work​—Chinese Character] by itself means “a human”; when combined with the character “min” [Art Work​—Chinese Character], the resulting word “ren min” means people of a country. “Ren” can also be combined with two other characters “jiann” (see, [Art Work​—Chinese Character]) and “jeng” (prove, [Art Work—​Chinese Character]) to form the word “jiann jeng ren” [Art Work​—Chinese Characters], meaning a witness. In the language spoken today, usually two or three separate characters are required to denote a single concept or term.

Most Chinese characters are made up of (1) the radical, which often provides a hint to the meaning, and (2) the phonetic, which gives a key to pronunciation. For example, the “heart” radical [Art Work​—Chinese Character] or [Art Work—​Chinese Character] is found in characters that express thoughts, emotions, personal characteristics and the like. There are 214 radicals listed in most dictionaries, while the number of phonetics varies according to the preference of the individual scholar. Though such phonetics originally were used to indicate the pronunciation of the word, owing to changes in pronunciation over the years, these are no longer reliable. Thus you may find that two characters with the same phonetic part have no similarity at all in their pronunciation nowadays.

The Chinese Writing

Though living in a land where another language is used, you may very well have seen Chinese writings somewhere, perhaps on signs outside a Chinese shop. To you, they may look like some weird drawings. As a matter of fact, a number of characters were originally drawings or pictographs of things they represent, although today the resemblance cannot be seen. For example, the word for sun was originally a circle with a curved line across it [Art Work​—Chinese Character], while the present form is a rectangle with a stroke across the middle [Art Work—​Chinese Character]. The character for river was originally three curved lines [Art Work​—Chinese Character], obviously depicting the meandering of streams, but now the character has become just three straight lines. Sometimes two characters written in proportion are combined to form a new character representing abstract ideas. Thus the one character for brightness [Art Work​—Chinese Character] is formed by combining the two characters for sun [Art Work—​Chinese Character] and moon [Art Work​—Chinese Character]. The word for “good” [Art Work​—Chinese Character] is made up of the characters for female [Art Work—​Chinese Character] and child [Art Work​—Chinese Character], thus revealing the high regard the ancient Chinese had for family life. But the majority of the characters are formed by combining a radical with a phonetic.

When you examine the Chinese characters, you may notice that they are made up of different strokes. According to W. Simon in his book How to Study and Write Chinese Characters, there are at least fifteen different strokes. The number of strokes in a character can be as few as one to as many as thirty-five or more.

Using a Chinese Dictionary

Since one usually has little idea of how an unknown word should be pronounced, the best way to make sure is to consult a dictionary rather than making a guess. A number of different systems for arrangement of characters are in use. The most popular system arranges the characters according to their radicals and number of strokes. Thus you must first be thoroughly familiar with writing the characters and recognizing the radicals.

The characters in the dictionary are arranged under the radical they contain and the radicals are arranged according to the number of strokes, which may be from one to seventeen. So, you first must decide which of the 214 radicals is contained in the word and then count the number of strokes in the radical. Complicated? Well, finding the radical is not always a simple matter either, so most dictionaries give a list of characters the radicals of which are difficult to find. These are arranged according to the number of strokes they have.

Another difficulty is that some words may contain two or even three parts, each of which is a radical. So after trying in vain to locate it under one radical grouping, you must look under another radical grouping. The matter of finding the right radical is further complicated by the fact that the position of the radical in characters varies. It can be at the right, left, top, bottom or even right in the middle.

Once you have found the right radical, then you count the number of strokes in the rest of the character, as all characters having the same radical are arranged according to the number of strokes they have, excluding the strokes of the radicals. This is further complicated when one stroke appears to be two. Thus it can readily be seen that it is quite a laborious task to look up words in a Chinese dictionary.

The Spoken Language

Foreigners learning to speak Chinese often have trouble with the so-called tones, which are inflections of the voice, serving the purpose of distinguishing one word from another. In the national language of China, called Mandarin, there are four tones, namely, the upper even, lower even, rising, departing, though some authorities add a fifth, the entering.a But in Cantonese, a dialect spoken in Canton and Hong Kong, there are nine tones. The difference between one tone and another is usually very small and difficult for foreign students to distinguish. However, the slight difference in pronunciation sometimes can mean a world of difference in meaning. For example, in Mandarin the word for “lord” is “chu³,” while the word for “pig” is “chu¹.” So when a foreigner wants to say “tien chu³” (heavenly lord, the term Chinese Catholics use to refer to God), if he is not sure of the right tone, he can easily say “tien chu¹” and refer to a heavenly pig instead, much to the puzzlement or amusement of the Chinese listener. Understandably, a foreigner learning the language must keep his sense of humor to avoid discouragement.

This peculiarity of the Chinese language​—a great number of words having very similar or identical pronunciation—​makes it very difficult for foreigners to master. For example, in Mandarin there are 69 words pronounced as i (short), 7 of which are in tone 1 (upper even), 17 in tone 2 (lower even), 7 in tone 3 (rising) and 38 in tone 4 (departing). While in English two different words with identical pronunciation, such as dear and deer, are exceptions, in Chinese they are extremely common. So when listening to Chinese being spoken, one has to rely heavily on the context to decide the meaning of the words used.

As expected in a big country like China, there are scores of dialects spoken by the people in different parts of the country. In some parts of the country, especially in the south, a traveler may come across different dialects in villages only a few miles apart. Sometimes even people of neighboring villages may have difficulty in understanding one another. Some dialects are similar to one another, such as the ones spoken in northern China, while others do not even sound remotely similar, such as the Cantonese dialect and the Shanghai dialect. These two dialects are completely different not only in their vocabulary, but also in the pronunciation of various characters used in the written language. Also, some dialect words are only spoken but have no written form. Indeed, but for the written language, people from different parts of China would have serious difficulty in understanding one another. Fortunately and amazingly, although the Chinese speak many widely different dialects, they all read one common language, the written Mandarin. With the exception of the Mandarin-speaking persons, all Chinese speak one way and write another way. But if two Chinese cannot speak with each other understandably, they can at least communicate in writing.

Efforts at Reform

Because the Chinese is such a difficult language to learn, especially for foreigners, in modern times efforts have been repeatedly made to simplify it by various methods. Some advocate simplifying the characters, as Communist China has done, so that they can be learned more easily. However, such effort is not at all favored by the Nationalist government in Taiwan, nor by the more conservative-minded and older Chinese. Others have tried romanization, replacing the characters with romanized letters. The first ones to do this were the Catholic missionaries who came to China during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 C.E.). But the literature they wrote in romanized letters was used only by the missionaries themselves. In the nineteenth century, missionaries of Christendom translated the Bible into a number of dialects, such as the Soochow, Shanghai, Ningpo, Amoy and Cantonese dialects, in romanized letters. In 1867, the English scholar T. F. Wade published his own system of romanization, which has been widely used by writers of Chinese textbooks and dictionaries.

Then in 1918 the Chinese government published a set of forty phonetic symbols to help readers to pronounce the characters correctly. These are printed alongside the characters instead of replacing the latter. This phonetic system is used simply as an aid to pronunciation and is not meant to take the place of characters.

In 1934 a Latinized Chinese alphabet was published. It was a rather simple system without any attempt to indicate the particular tones of the words. As a result, it could easily cause confusion and did not prove to be very popular with the people. It has since gone into complete oblivion. Attempts have also been made by Communist China to Latinize the Chinese language, but the matter is still very much in the experimental stage.

Future Prospects

Though repeated efforts have been made to simplify the Chinese language or even change to an alphabetic style, so far such efforts have not achieved any great success. The one peculiarity of the Chinese language mentioned previously, that it has so many words with very similar or even identical pronunciation, certainly makes it very difficult to be expressed clearly and accurately in an alphabetic style. Besides, it would understandably be a formidable task to change the vast amount of classical literature into a romanized language, not to mention teaching 800,000,000 persons a new method! This may partly explain why the Chinese people are still content to use their very difficult language and have their children spend many long hours copying, reciting and memorizing the thousands of characters needed to be literate.

Looking at the hundreds of languages spoken in different parts of the earth, one can readily see how all these different languages have been a divisive force in preventing free communication among the inhabitants of the earth. One only needs to travel to a foreign land without knowing its language to realize how helpless and frustrated one can feel when not able to understand what people say and when not understood by them.

In the interest of free communication among all men, it would certainly be a great blessing if all mankind would speak just one common language. But how could this be done in a world that is becoming increasingly nationalistic and divided?

Happily, though such a task seems to be beyond man’s ability to accomplish, it is not impossible for mankind’s Creator, Jehovah God, to achieve. In fact, it is his expressed will that, in the very near future, all mankind will be united under the righteous and perfect government of God’s kingdom in the hands of his Son Jesus Christ. Then we can reasonably hope to see all mankind speaking one common language that can express their thoughts and feelings perfectly.

[Chart on page 10]

(For fully formatted text, see publication)

CHINESE CHARACTERS WITH ALPHABETIC EQUIVALENTS AND ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Yeh¹ Ho² Hua² shih⁴ wo³ ti¹

Je- ho- vah is my

muh⁴ jeh³ wo³ bih⁴ pu¹ tsyh⁴

shep- herd, I shall not

chiue¹ far² Shyh¹ pian¹ 23:1.

want. Psalm 23:1.

[Footnotes]