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  1. #1
    Chukchi Salmon lexico's Avatar
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    Talking 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
    Last edited by lexico; May 13, 2005 at 03:37.
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  2. #2
    basketballman Dream Time's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by lexico
    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


    as a Chinese person, I am STRONGLY AGAINST this idea!

  3. #3
    Hullu RockLee's Avatar
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    Why just not throw away everything that makes Chinese so different from western people? ... What have they started...t'is sad
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  4. #4
    basketballman Dream Time's Avatar
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    there are plans to replace Chinese characters with Latin, it is true...
    and if it does happen, i don't know how i should feel.
    China has been going through Westernization..we are starting to lose our culture by bits and bits...some of our historical buildings have been destroyed by the Chinese Communist government, and now we are talking about replacing Chinese characters with Latin...STOP IT

  5. #5
    The Hairy Wookie Mycernius's Avatar
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    Is it me, but weren't the words used for the thread SPOOF NEWS?
    I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
    Remember the Siruis Cybernetic Corportations motto: Share and Enjoy

  6. #6
    basketballman Dream Time's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mycernius
    Is it me, but weren't the words used for the thread SPOOF NEWS?

    it is 'spoof news', but it is true that there are proposals to place Chinese characters with latin alphabet, and it is very dangerous for the culture

  7. #7
    ~‹óŽèŽÒ~ —À铠赞's Avatar
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    Talking

    Quote Originally Posted by lexico
    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


    100% disagee.....I hate pinyin....Hanzi is the most beautiful writing(My opinion)

  8. #8
    born in the USSR Void's Avatar
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    Question 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

    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 ) 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?

  9. #9
    Regular Member bossel's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Void
    It`s not for a first time when people in Linguistic`s treads said that language has not much to do with a culture.
    [...]
    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)
    Of course writing is part of the culture, but it is not the culture. When the writing system changes that does not mean that the culture itself is endangered.

  10. #10
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    Even though I do agree that it takes a lot of effort to learn hazi, I think it would be a real shame if they decided to stop using them... There are a couple of important points in this that should be considered such as homonyms and the great number of various dialects throughout China. Isn't it the case that with hanzi, people are able to read for example newspapers in Chinese despite dialect boundaries? Also, when you think about pictograms, why didn't pictograms in China change into an alphabet as they have elsewhere? I'm quite sure someone has an answer to that, though.

    I think that the more likelier change (as opposed to completely abandoning the characters) would be for the government to continue simplifying the characters but this is also slightly problematic as it makes the characters more arbitrary...

    Someone told me that learning hanzi prevents dementia - isn't that one more reason why people should continue studying them?
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  11. #11
    born in the USSR Void's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by bossel
    Of course writing is part of the culture, but it is not the culture. When the writing system changes that does not mean that the culture itself is endangered.
    yet, it is not clear in science how much does the language affects the culture. Certainly, it doesn`t make the culture, but besides many other functions it`s also an instrument to preserve many cultural achivements, to
    bequeath the culture to the descendants. And when the language is gone, what is passed over. Why then we have such notion as "extinct culture"?

    It is also said, that the world view imprinted into the language spire in a culture like a grain which turns into a wheatear...

  12. #12
    born in the USSR Void's Avatar
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    Talking returning to the topic

    i would vote for keeping with Kanji

  13. #13
    Regular Member bossel's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Void
    yet, it is not clear in science how much does the language affects the culture.
    IMO, not much. It's the other way round: Culture affects language.

    Certainly, it doesn`t make the culture, but besides many other functions it`s also an instrument to preserve many cultural achivements, to
    bequeath the culture to the descendants.
    Preserve many cultural achievements? Only insofar as to write down what's going on in culture, but that can be done in virtually any script adapted to the particular language.

    And when the language is gone, what is passed over. Why then we have such notion as "extinct culture"?
    Because people seem to need easy labels.

    Cultures may have gone extinct (though many, which may be called extinct by some people, probably simply evolved), but most probably not because the language was lost, & surely not because the script changed. Just because the Koreans changed from Hanzi to Hangul doesn't mean that this change of script ended Korean culture.


    If it comes to a vote regarding Chinese Hanzi, I would abstain. That's for the Chinese to decide.

  14. #14
    Comfortably Ignorant Faustianideals's Avatar
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    I was learning the Chinese characters at a public college too! Blasted, why would they do that to their language? It's almost like slaughtering it.

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