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Letter: The mythology of characters

Tennessee Gock's discussion (Letters, June 9, page 8) on whether traditional or simplified Chinese is better makes me think of two men, in an age of cheap, accurate quartz watches, furiously arguing about which are better: sundials or hour-glasses. It may be that one is better than the other, but who cares, when much better alternatives exist?

Similarly, it may be, as Gock argues, that traditional characters are better than simplified characters (I suspect the difference is minor), but who cares?

Both are clearly worse than the alternatives -- alphabets and syllabaries.

Language evolved over millions of years as an exclusively oral skill. Writing is an artificial addition bolted onto language very recently. Biologically, language is oral, not visual, and writing systems that don't honor this oral basis will inevitably be difficult to use.

The further a writing system moves away from the sounds of a language, the more difficult it will be to learn. Chinese characters fail miserably in this regard.

Gock states that "Chinese writing (pictograms or ideograms) immediately conveys the meaning of each character." This is nonsense. If Chinese writing immediately conveyed the meaning of each character, then why do students in Taiwan spend so much time learning them? Why can't non-Chinese speakers (or, for that matter, illiterate Chinese speakers) immediately grasp the meaning of an arbitrary piece of Chinese text?

The reason is simple -- there is no inherent meaning in Chinese characters, any more than there is inherent meaning the in the squiggles that make up English words.

The meaning must be learned. And because the relationship in Chinese between the written symbol and the spoken word is so tenuous, learning this relationship is exceedingly difficult.

Other common arguments about why Chinese characters must be retained -- they're beautiful, they're needed to read ancient texts, they're needed to disambiguate the many homonyms in Chinese -- are equally spurious. In the interest of saving newsprint, I direct interested readers to John DeFrancis' excellent book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.

The real debate about Chinese characters is not whether simplified or traditional characters are better. It's about when they should be replaced altogether by a much simpler system, and what that system should be.

Unfortunately, the chances of that happening are slim, because people cling to that which is familiar, regardless of its utility. As Ni Haishu said, "Habit is a very irrational thing. The force of habit of a billion people is a force to be feared."

Brian Schack
Taipei
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