Chinese (was: Optimum number of symbols)

David G. Durand scripsit:

> I was referring to the larger group of languages. The claim is
> frequently made that the script enables communication across these
> groups. I can't comment as to how divergent the grammars really are,
> and how hard that learning process is.
Well, until about 1915 almost all Chinese writing was done in Classical
Chinese, using conventions utterly divorced from those of *any*
living Sinitic language.  The nearest Western analogy would be the 18th
century, when most learned works were still written in Latin, but read
-- by translation -- in the local vernacular.  Subject matter aside,
any written text of 1900 would be perfectly intelligible to a literate
Tang Dynasty person of more than a thousand years before.  Contrariwise,
it would be literally impossible to read any written document (except
for a few marginal cases) word for word in any modern language whatever
and produce anything but nonsense.

As one of the many knock-on effects from the collapse of the Qing Dynasty
in 1911, a widespread tradition of writing arose using the lexical and
grammatical conventions of modern Peking Mandarin.  This made life much
easier for the large majority who spoke Mandarin, and who had most of the
political and economic power as well.  The new baihua style, however, was
almost as artificial for Southerners speaking non-Mandarin languages as
Classical Chinese had been.  Rather than having to learn Middle Chinese in
order to become literate, they now had to learn modern Mandarin.  After a
period of confusion in language matters, the PRC government nailed down
the Mandarin language and the Peking pronunciation standard as official
in 1956.  It was optimistically renamed "the common language" (putonghua).

By the 1980s, knowledge of Mandarin had become widespread in the
South in all public matters.  It is the language of schooling past
the first year or two, and it is now possible for non-locals to get
along with only the standard language, which was certainly never true
before.  Learning the standard language, however, is not thought of as
"language instruction"; what is learned, explicitly, is reading and
writing: speaking and understanding are treated as a by-product of this.
Similarly, non-locals who must learn a non-Mandarin language think of it
more like adapting to local speech habits rather than learning a truly
foreign language like English.

Mixing in another thread, it's interesting to note that the native
alphabet of Chinese, Zhuyin Fuhao (or informally Bopomofo) was first
used to show pronunciations in the official post-dynastic dictionary
of Mandarin, the 1919 edition.  The spellings attempted to preserve as
many distinctions as possible, not only in the dialects of Mandarin,
but across the non-Mandarin Sinitic languages as well.  The result
was a sort of pseudo-Chinese that resembled nothing ever heard before,
and that no one except the great Chinese phonetician Yuen Ren Chao was
ever able to pronounce.  He made a set of records demonstrating the new
official pronunciation, but they were hopeless for pedagogical purposes.
In the end, the 1932 revision abandoned the attempt, and recorded the
actual pronunciations of the Peking dialect.

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_