Spoof News: China Plans to Phase Out Chinese Characters ?
What if you were to vote on this plan:
Should China discontinue use of Hanzi (Chinese characters) and gradually move on to Pinyin Romnazation ?
In order not to give you the wrong impression that this has actually been decided in China, below is quoted the "spoof" article with disclaimer.
Chinese characters to be phased out in China
Quote:
Originally Posted by Language news
Chinese characters to be phased out in China
By Wen Gaige
Beijing, China
Thursday, 1st April 2004
The Chinese government announced today that it plans to phase out Chinese characters and replace them with Hànyŭ Pīnyīn, a system for writing Chinese with the Latin alphabet. This change will be incorporated into the five year plan commencing in January 2005 and should be completed by the end of 2010.
A spokeswoman for the Latinisation Committee (Lādīnghuà Wĕiyuànhuì), which has been set up to oversee the change, told our reporter that Hànyŭ Pīnyīn will be introduced first in schools, then in official publications, and then in all other printed materials. She went on to say that the switch to the Latin alphabet will dramatically reduce the amount of time children need to spend learning to read and write Chinese, and will help to increase literacy among adults.
The form of language used will be based on the Mandarin spoken by educated people in northern China. Written standards will also be established for other major varieties of Chinese, such as Cantonese, Min, Wu and Hakka.
A spokesman for the Chinese Character Preservation Society (Zìbăohuì) claimed that abolishing the characters would cut the people off from over 3,000 years of literary heritage, and that the large number of homophones in Chinese would make any system based on the Latin alphabet difficult to read.
The Latinisation Committee responded to these points by stating that Hànyŭ Pīnyīn versions of the major literary classics will be produced, and that grouping syllables into words will help to reduce the ambiguity of homophones.
The progress of these changes will be observed with interest by the people of Taiwan and Singapore, though they are not planning to abandon Chinese characters just yet.
Note: This article is a spoof intended for your amusement. The organisations and individuals mentioned are figments of the author's imagination. Various proposals have been made to replace Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet, though none have met with widespread support yet.
Copyright © Simon Ager 1998-2004
i am, probably, inarticulate, but...
It`s not for a first time when people in Linguistic`s treads said that language
has not much to do with a culture. Why it is believed so?
Since we are talking about written language i'll try not to digress much to
the spoken one and to be short :D
Besides many other differences between spoken and written language there is one very important - origin and therefore different psychological makeup. People are being taught to write.
What does it mean "to write"? To express spoken language (one`s thoughts as a fact) in a set of special symbols. Then what is "to teach to write"? A complex process explaining how to put sounds, letters, words, phrases, ideas into the paper, how to correlate spoken language with a symbol, which represents it.
And a way (technique, methodology) is not an inherent part of a culture? A symbol itself is not a part of a culture? (no matter what are we talking about - phonetic alphabet or hieroglyphs)
why some nations use such complex characters? Can you easily answer? Here is wild guess (don`t kick with the boots too hard, though :D) There are always talks about differences in eastern (asian) and western mentality. Well, what if at ancient times due to some causes creative thinking prevailed over analytical. And there was no other way for the mind than to create a number of pictographs. Later situation changed, but hyeroglyphs became an innate part of a nation, making it almost impossible easily to reduce the variety of elements of a spoken language only to a finite set of symbols. It meant to change (quite radically, i think) the patterns of thinking, even the way a state was organized (ecpecially if it already had a great archieve of documents). And a second - if these writing - "invention" of that nation and was not introduced from outside (by more powerful country) - why to abolish?
:souka: