From: rsanders@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (RRobert M Sanders)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Re: What is the "big" idea?
Date: 30 Jul 92 15:43:23 GMT
Organization: The Ohio State University

In article <76789@ut-emx.uucp> joe@astro.as.utexas.edu (Joe Wang) writes:
>In article <1992Jul26.175501.1366@ulowell.ulowell.edu> cshi@cs.ulowell.edu (Ch
unde Shi) writes:
>>2. Another movement to replace Simplified Chinese Charactor with PingYing,
>>   like the one during 1920x, to replace ancient Chinese language to modern
>>   one(Wen1Yan2Wen, Bai2Hua4Wen2). 
>>   It is so hard to remember Chinese charactors, even after years of
>>   learning those things you still often forgot them(Did you often find
>>   yourselve forget a Chinese charactor when you wrote to china in Chinese?)
>
>Really bad idea.  Arguments against it are:
>
>1. Romanization will cut Chinese people off from their past and away
>from each other.  It's unlikely that all Chinese people all over the
>world will start using the same romanization.
>
>2. Nature of the Chinese language.  Chinese has a lot of words that
>sound exactly the same.  Hence in order to read pinyin, you need
>constantly be thinking about the context.  I personally find it very
>very difficult to read something that's longer than a sentence in 
>pinyin.
>
>The only two reasons that have been suggested are:
>
>1. literacy.  This argument won't work because literacy rate don't
>seem to coorelate much with phoenetization.  India, whose languages
>are phonetic, has a literacy rate of 40%, while Mainland China has one
>of 70% and Taiwan of 90+%.  Moreover, children who language Chinese
>characters seem to progress at the same rate as children in other
>places in the world.
>
>(I have some personal experience in this area.  Being an ABC, I was
>illiterate when I entered college.  From experience, I can tell you
>that the characters were one of the least difficult parts of learning
>the language.  Characters are easy to remember if you break them into
>parts and think of a story to remember the parts.)
>
>2. computer use.  The problem here is that I believe that you should
>change the machines to fit the people rather than to change the people
>to fit the machines.  It is much easier to type into computers in
>PinYin, but that's because computers were designed in places with
>phoentic alphabets.  
>
>

A similar discussion took place a little over a month ago on sci.lang.japan 
with regard to the issue of doing away with kanji (han4zi4).  Before people 
begin to react to Joe's comments it would perhaps be good to benefit from the 
wisdom of the sci.lang.japan experience.  First, it is important to distinguish
what is technically possible from what is culturally desirable.  It was argued 
by the defenders of kanji that written language without them would be 
impossible, because of the ambiguity which would arise due to homophony (sound 
familiar?).  This was countered by the observation that when people speak it is
sounds that come out of their mouths and not kanji.  Rarely, if ever, does 
ambiguity exist in conversations.  Context alone will eliminate most ambiguity.
Second, it was pointed out that the definition of 'literacy' varies 
considerably from country to country.  Thus it is very difficult to compare the
literacy rate in one country with the literacy rate in another country.  Any 
further discussion of this issue would benefit greatly from (1) someone 
providing the Chinese criteria for literacy, and (2) discussing the 
implications of these criteria (e.g. can they read a newspaper, can they read 
Lun2yu3?).

Robert Sanders