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Do most Chinese care enough about their own language?
By Wan Lixin |
August 23, 2012, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THIS Sunday on a bus serving a suburban destination I noticed a Western couple and their two children. The young man, with the aid of a map and simple Chinese, tried to ask the bus conductor how to get to where he wanted to go.
Apparently they were quite conspicuous. Expatriates can blend in with the crowd in Xintiandi, Nanjing Road or Huaihai Road, but not on a suburban bus. After the family had got off the bus, the conductor kept looking back, curious to see where they were going.
To think, a Westerner speaking Chinese in China! Typically a Westerner can stay in China for years without ever feeling the need to speak more than taxi Chinese. This impression may be well founded.
As Thorsten Pattberg commented on this page on Monday, "Many Western observers remain blissfully ignorant about the Chinese language and refuse to adopt Chinese terminologies in their China reports. They describe and interpret Chinese culture on the back of their own Western taxonomies and concepts. As if the West was the end of history." (What's wrong with Western 'China studies')
What he refrains from pointing out is to what extent modern China is responsible for this deplorable condition.
It has been blogged recently that Richard Sears, an elderly American gentleman who loves how Chinese characters are constructed, is in trouble. He has spent the past 20 years making Chinese character etymology information available online. Now bankrupt in Tianjin, he offers himself as a teacher or interpreter to avoid being expelled from China. His supplication draws him sympathy and scorn. A scathing comment in Oriental Morning Post on Monday claimed it's all a scam by Sears to extort donations.
In this glorious age of iPads, nuclear weapons, and LV handbags, many of my Chinese compatriots are unlearning the art of writing cumbersome Chinese characters while one American who once worked in Silicon Valley is trying to delve into the mysteries of Chinese words dating back 2,000 years.
A few years ago, a pedicab peddler with a high school education was accepted as a PhD candidate in the study of ancient Chinese characters at prestigious Fudan University. Some cited this as the triumph of application and perseverance, some pointed to the revelation of wooing talent in an unconventional way. At the same time, everyone pretended to ignore the manifest sign of the degradation of classical Chinese studies in China.
Back to Pattberg's query. Could the soul of Chinese culture be mediated, not to say appreciated, via an alien tongue? Linguists have proved that people who speak different languages think differently and the different concepts represented by our native words can have a definitive influence on how we perceive the world around us.
By dictating our mode of thought and mental equipment, our language makes us distinctly Chinese. That's why the Confucian temple had to be smashed to smithereens during the May 4th Movement of 1919 as a prerequisite to the introduction of Western democracy and science. The movement of making the vernacular the basis of written form at that time gradually estranged the average Chinese to the archaic Chinese style that represented the acme of subtlety, elegance and sophistication.
By and by Chinese language has become elevated into something little more than a tool of communication, particularly fit for shouting over mobile phones. For a Westerner to try to understand modern Chinese is a herculean task, just as very few Chinese today can truly appreciate the beauty of written Chinese in its pre-1919 state.
The difficulty is two fold. One is that the characters used on the Chinese mainland have undergone successive simplifications. A more unyielding difficulty is the incompatibility between modern industrial and consumerist values and the traditional emphasis on thriftiness, integrity and respect for Heaven. As Pattberg said, this Heaven simply cannot adequately convey what is intended by the Chinese character tian. When I was young, whenever I complained about the weather, my mother would rebuke me for being sacrilegious.
The true understanding of another culture should be predicated on a common bond of humanity and fellowship, informed by an awareness of the limitations and frailty of human existence. That would lead to toleration of, and sympathy with, alternative views and outlooks.
By comparison it is much easier to judge other cultures from the moral, democratic, or scientific high ground. That attitude inclines many Westerners to view cultures under-industrialized and over-spiritualized as despotic, uncivilized and vicious. They forget that industrialization is a fairly recent affair in human history and its future has yet to be objectively assessed.
When the aspirations for a good life are crystallized into such brand names as BMW, Coca-Cola, or Disney, anybody not so materially sensitized are objects for pity. Yes, such concepts as Tian Ren He Yi, Datong, Shengren, or Junzi cannot be competently rendered into English. It is also getting difficult to teach them to modern Chinese.
If anything, the overrated May 4th Movement did succeed in one thing: it induced the great cultural rupture that in a sense finished traditional China.
Apparently they were quite conspicuous. Expatriates can blend in with the crowd in Xintiandi, Nanjing Road or Huaihai Road, but not on a suburban bus. After the family had got off the bus, the conductor kept looking back, curious to see where they were going.
To think, a Westerner speaking Chinese in China! Typically a Westerner can stay in China for years without ever feeling the need to speak more than taxi Chinese. This impression may be well founded.
As Thorsten Pattberg commented on this page on Monday, "Many Western observers remain blissfully ignorant about the Chinese language and refuse to adopt Chinese terminologies in their China reports. They describe and interpret Chinese culture on the back of their own Western taxonomies and concepts. As if the West was the end of history." (What's wrong with Western 'China studies')
What he refrains from pointing out is to what extent modern China is responsible for this deplorable condition.
It has been blogged recently that Richard Sears, an elderly American gentleman who loves how Chinese characters are constructed, is in trouble. He has spent the past 20 years making Chinese character etymology information available online. Now bankrupt in Tianjin, he offers himself as a teacher or interpreter to avoid being expelled from China. His supplication draws him sympathy and scorn. A scathing comment in Oriental Morning Post on Monday claimed it's all a scam by Sears to extort donations.
In this glorious age of iPads, nuclear weapons, and LV handbags, many of my Chinese compatriots are unlearning the art of writing cumbersome Chinese characters while one American who once worked in Silicon Valley is trying to delve into the mysteries of Chinese words dating back 2,000 years.
A few years ago, a pedicab peddler with a high school education was accepted as a PhD candidate in the study of ancient Chinese characters at prestigious Fudan University. Some cited this as the triumph of application and perseverance, some pointed to the revelation of wooing talent in an unconventional way. At the same time, everyone pretended to ignore the manifest sign of the degradation of classical Chinese studies in China.
Back to Pattberg's query. Could the soul of Chinese culture be mediated, not to say appreciated, via an alien tongue? Linguists have proved that people who speak different languages think differently and the different concepts represented by our native words can have a definitive influence on how we perceive the world around us.
By dictating our mode of thought and mental equipment, our language makes us distinctly Chinese. That's why the Confucian temple had to be smashed to smithereens during the May 4th Movement of 1919 as a prerequisite to the introduction of Western democracy and science. The movement of making the vernacular the basis of written form at that time gradually estranged the average Chinese to the archaic Chinese style that represented the acme of subtlety, elegance and sophistication.
By and by Chinese language has become elevated into something little more than a tool of communication, particularly fit for shouting over mobile phones. For a Westerner to try to understand modern Chinese is a herculean task, just as very few Chinese today can truly appreciate the beauty of written Chinese in its pre-1919 state.
The difficulty is two fold. One is that the characters used on the Chinese mainland have undergone successive simplifications. A more unyielding difficulty is the incompatibility between modern industrial and consumerist values and the traditional emphasis on thriftiness, integrity and respect for Heaven. As Pattberg said, this Heaven simply cannot adequately convey what is intended by the Chinese character tian. When I was young, whenever I complained about the weather, my mother would rebuke me for being sacrilegious.
The true understanding of another culture should be predicated on a common bond of humanity and fellowship, informed by an awareness of the limitations and frailty of human existence. That would lead to toleration of, and sympathy with, alternative views and outlooks.
By comparison it is much easier to judge other cultures from the moral, democratic, or scientific high ground. That attitude inclines many Westerners to view cultures under-industrialized and over-spiritualized as despotic, uncivilized and vicious. They forget that industrialization is a fairly recent affair in human history and its future has yet to be objectively assessed.
When the aspirations for a good life are crystallized into such brand names as BMW, Coca-Cola, or Disney, anybody not so materially sensitized are objects for pity. Yes, such concepts as Tian Ren He Yi, Datong, Shengren, or Junzi cannot be competently rendered into English. It is also getting difficult to teach them to modern Chinese.
If anything, the overrated May 4th Movement did succeed in one thing: it induced the great cultural rupture that in a sense finished traditional China.
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