This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Li Xutong
The history of Chinese characters is extremely long and their origin extremely mysterious. Throughout the three thousand years covered by historical records, people in every generation have worked to solve this age-old riddle. Before modern times, the official histories recorded that the characters were created by Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor. In the modern era, “writing was created by the working people, not the product of one person at one time… and so on” became the standard answer in Chinese textbooks over the past several decades.
Of course, some will say: never mind how they were made; it is enough for us now to know how to read, recognize and write them, and let the pedants rack their brains over where Chinese characters came from. If we were tracing the origin of Chinese characters merely out of curiosity, we need not be so particular. But these two different views have very really affected how we learn Chinese characters and many aspects of our lives.
Language and writing express people’s knowledge, cognition and understanding of the world, which is what is called semantics. At present the scripts of the vast majority of the world’s languages are phonetic scripts. The various phonetic scripts achieve an abstract separation of letters, word formation and lexical semantics; that is, letters are related only to pronunciation and have nothing to do with meaning or with word formation.
When the word formation of phonetic scripts builds words from a limited number of letters, it carries only very limited meaning, such as the semantic content of prefixes and suffixes, Latin roots and so on. The bulk of the meaning is expressed in words made of a limited number of letters, and in the sentences and paragraphs composed of these words.
The vast majority of languages have only a few dozen phonemes, a hundred-odd at most. The few dozen letters of a phonetic script can spell the pronunciation of all the words of most languages. So once you know the sounds and the spelling rules, you can basically write the words. With these words expressing units of meaning, phrases and sentences can be formed, and thus all meanings can be expressed.
Chinese characters are very different. Several thousand Chinese characters have different spatial figures; these figures seem to have neither graphic symbols representing phonemes nor, in most cases, any easily understood direct relationship to their common meanings. So learning these characters usually relies on rote memorization, which makes Chinese characters universally acknowledged as the hardest script to learn among those humanity currently uses.
If Chinese characters are understood merely as the letters of a phonetic script, they have no value for existing at all. If people can build a script with a few dozen letters, why use several thousand characters? This view led several East Asian countries in modern times to abolish the Chinese characters they had traditionally used, and was also the main cause of, or justification for, the movement to romanize Chinese.
In the 1950s, after the CCP came to power, it began planning to replace Chinese characters with pinyin, and for a time many regions launched pinyin schemes based on their local dialects. Fortunately, these extremely ignorant actions were stopped by strong popular resistance. Imagine if this plan had been carried through: by now China might have at least several dozen mutually unintelligible languages, the Chinese nation would have been completely dismembered, traditional culture completely abandoned, and Chinese civilization would have ceased to exist altogether.
Although this extreme action was not carried through, an overall action in this direction has continued all along: the large-scale reform of the Chinese language and characters vigorously promoted by the CCP authorities over the past half century and more, called the modernization of Chinese.
The merits and demerits of this matter will be analyzed in detail in later chapters; from the plan to replace Chinese characters with pinyin alone, the consequences can already be glimpsed. In fact, after more than half a century of education in modernized Chinese, Chinese characters in the eyes of today’s users of Chinese differ little from symbols recording pronunciation. On seeing a character, most people react first to its pronunciation, then identify the meaning associated with that pronunciation, and what they understand is mostly the meaning as standardized and defined; they basically no longer understand the rich meaning and cultural content inherent in the form of the character itself.
(To be continued)
