Why are Chinese characters still used?
<<In 1954, The Communist government simplified the Chinese characters a little bit in order to make literacy more accessable to the masses.>>
Why would they want to make literature available to the masses when literature is known to open minds against the government and be a source for counter-revolutionary anti-Bolshevism?
The simple reason chinese still uses pictographs is because there are more homophones in chinese than syllables. Roman scripts are primarily based on syllables, so it wouldn't fit at all. Take this chinese poem for example:
Chinese pictographs | Romanticized Chinese
石室詩士施氏， | Shíshì shīshì Shī-Shì,
嗜獅， | shì shī,
誓食十獅。 | shì shí shí shī.
氏時時適市視獅。 | Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
十時， | Shí shí,
適十獅適市。 | shì shí shī shì shì.
是時， | Shì shí,
適施氏適市。 | shì Shī-Shì shì shì.
氏視是十獅， | Shì shì shì shí shī,
恃矢勢， | shì shĭ shì,
使是十獅逝世。 | shĭ shì shí shī shìshì.
氏拾是十獅屍， | Shì shí shì shí shī shī,
適石室。 | shì shíshì.
石室濕， | Shíshì shī,
氏使侍拭石室。 | Shì shĭ shì shì shíshì.
石室拭， | Shíshì shì,
氏始試食是十獅。 | Shì shĭ shìshí shì shí shī.
食時， | Shí shí,
始識是十獅， | shĭ shí shì shí shī,
實十石獅屍。 | shí shì shí shī shī.
試釋是事。 | Shì shì shì shì.
English
Poet Shi, who lived in a stone den,
loved to eat lions,
and vowed to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to survey lions.
At ten o'clock ,
ten lions happened to appear at the market.
At this time,
Mr. Shi happened to arrive at the market.
He looked at those ten lions,
then, with the use of arrows,
caused those ten lions to die.
He bundled up the ten lion carcasses
and went to the stone den.
The stone den was damp.
He asked his servant to wipe the stone den.
After the stone den was wiped dry,
he then tried to eat those ten lions.
When he was eating,
he realized that those ten lions
were in fact ten stone lion carcasses.
Try explaining that!
(you can run this poem through a translator if you like.)
Obviously this poem makes no sense to anyone in roman script, but in chinese script, the words differentiate between the homophones.
Of course there would never be this many homophones in real speech, but if there are enough homophones in chinese to write a whole poem, it must be pretty hard to know what people mean when they write.
''Obviously this poem makes no sense to anyone in roman script,''
Of course it does, are you blind?
ì í ï î are different things
I think the Chinese should invent some sort of syllable-based alphabet like the Koreans did, that way they could still have some Chinese-looking characters without switching to the Latin script.
no, no, no!
Hangul is ugly!
It's a little mean to say that Hangul is ugly, but it does look monotonous to me compared to Chinese characters...
Does this poem make sence when recited at a poetry reading?
If it does, they need a better accent markup scheme, to better indicate what's really said.
Who cares about that stupid poem. It's a contrived example that isn't realistic. If you're gonna make up some nonsense like that I may as well suggest that English requires characters because of the ambiguity in sentences like the grammatically correct "buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".
As real Chinese, we don't think Chinese characters are too difficult to learn well, and actually, some foreign Chinese language experts can also master it well enough, even it seems just like they're native Chinese. Please believe me, Chinese is not so difficult, and characters isn't, either. There're great deal of "monosyllable homonym" words in Chinese, if one day Chinese articles are written in Latin alphabet, or Cyrillic, or Greek alphabet, that'll be much confused and hard to guess what it means. If you're not Chinese, maybe you'll NEVER understand what an important role Chinese characters does play within Sinosphere area.
Chinese language mainly consists of Monosyllabic Single Characters, instead of polysyllabic vocabularies of European languages, in daily conversation, both Chinese and Westerners communicate with each other by listening to the polysyllabic sounds, and then they can understand the meanings, and exchange the feelings, but usually, the written form of Chinese language isn't quite the same with colloquial form, the written form seems more succinctly, elegantly than colloquial form, and shorter or much shorter than European languages, too. But even so, written form can always convey its ideas. Written form contains 2 style, one is modern style, the other is classical style (Wenyan), especially the latter one must express its meanings by Chinese characters, of course, to a large extent, the former one also can't survive without characters in formal places. Japan even wanted to give up Chinese characters Kanji, but it ended up with failure for times, and korean gave up characters and just kept a little, actually it wasn't a successful action, and now korean experts repeated the importance and neccessarity of using Chinese characters. In brief, Chinese can't, & don't want to give up Chinese characters and choose Latin alphabet as standard, because it's not so hard for native Chinese, and for clever western learners. That is NOT kidding!
When Chinese people are reading an article, the most important way is visual reflection, not the analyzation of polysyllabic sounds. It largely means, when we see each character, we can understand what it means right away, sometimes, even without any hesitation or ambiguity. Chinese character is the best writting system which matches demands of the speciality of Chinese language, and Latin system won't be able to replace the characters in future.
China belongs to Japan. Don't forget it!
Empire Sat Jun 20, 2009 6:15 am GMT
China belongs to Japan. Don't forget it!
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You should retake history course after failing history exam. haha...
Empire Sat Jun 20, 2009 6:15 am GMT
China belongs to Japan. Don't forget it!
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shi*T!
I would like to point out that the Chinese language has unified the Chinese people for thousands of years, producing the oldest continuous civilization in the world (from ~2000 BC up until 1912). So excuse them for not wanting to change anything.
I mean, even Simplified Characters have generated some controversy. People in Taiwan and Hong Kong still often refer to Simplified Characters as a peasant language, a byproduct of the disastrous reforms of Mao Zedong, which culminated in the Cultural Revolution. I personally feel that although it was well-intentioned, it was perhaps badly executed (which is what happens when you kill or imprison all the intellectuals), which sacrifices cultural relevance for paltry gains in writing speed now obsolete due to computerized text.