Characters in Language
Anyone making a serious attempt to master Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua) has faced the daunting task of learning the written script. Because each character offers little – if any - clue as to pronunciation, or the correct tone to be used, the only way to master them is through hard work. This means committing to memory hundreds, if not thousands, of the key characters that make up fundamental literacy.
Just how many characters are there to learn? Perhaps as many as 50,000 in a comprehensive dictionary. However a highly educated person or scholar of the language might only know 10,000 characters, and, but for basic literacy, a working knowledge of about 2,000 characters is required.
For Chinese the process of memorizing characters begins at a young age – by rote – and remains a job for life. For foreigners tackling the language as adults, learning to read and write even a modest number of characters can seem virtually impossible. To make the job even harder, you may have to wrestle with two versions of each character; the simplified version (jiantizi) now used in the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, and the full form version (fantizi) still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and by overseas Chinese in other countries.
Given these astonishing difficulties, wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if written Chinese was romanised into an alphabetic form? In Vietnamthe quoc-ngu system of romanisation developed by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century eventually supplanted Chinese characters and has become the official written form of Vietnamese.
In the past century there have been two major attempts to romanise written Chinese. Yet neither has come close to replacing characters as the basis of the written language.
The first system was developed during the 19th century by Britons Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles. Both were Chinese linguists who worked as diplomats in China, and both also became Professors of Chinese at Cambridge. They created a phonetically-based system to assist in the learning of Chinese, which became known as the ‘Wade-Giles’ system. Wade-Giles became the commonly used system in the West.
After 1949, the People’s Republic of China began using Hanyu Pinyin, an alternative system of romanisation. Literally pin (spell) yin (sound) was officially adopted by the PRC government in 1979 and has also become the internationally accepted standard of Chinese romanisation. Today pinyin is widely used in schools and on official documents and in signage, but there is no sign of it replacing characters. Pinyin offers a more accurate guide to Chinese pronunciation – but pinyin cannot be read using standard English pronunciation. With training and practice however, once you master the pinyin phonetic system, you can pronounce any word written in pinyin accurately, as the pronunciation system is consistent.
Here some examples to illustrate the different results of the two common systems of romanisation of Chinese:
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Chong
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ch’ung
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Cong
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ts’ung
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Duan
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tuan
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Xu
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hsu
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Zhan
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chan
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With a pedigree dating to around 2000 BC and more native speakers (writers) of Chinese than any other language, we can safely assume that Chinese characters are here to stay. Hanyu Pinyin is a great alternative for language learners who do not wish to learn to read and write characters and a great aid to those who do. With practice, accurate pronunciation using this system will facilitate good oral communication, and help to win friends. However, for serious scholars of the language, like all Chinese, to be literate there is no escaping the tedious task of learning to read and write those characters!
For more background on Chinese Language, visit: www.chincommunications.com.au/chineselanguage.php |
