Teaching Materials - Lesson - The China Seminar

THE CHINA SEMINAR

WHY ARE CHINESE LETTERS SO COMPLICATED?

Chinese characters are often criticized for being overly complex relative to other writing systems. One reason for the added complexity is the different information content of the characters. Roman letters give relatively precise information on pronunciation, but no information on meaning. In contrast, Chinese characters give less precise (and sometimes no) pronunciation information, but do give information on meaning. This is very important in Chinese because of the huge number of characters in Chinese, which sound the same but have different meanings.

More phonetic and semantic information could be contained in the characters with less complexity, much as the spelling of English could be both less complicated and more informative. For instance, all characters with the same pronunciation could be given the same phonetic component, with radicals used to differentiate meanings. The excess complexity arises because Chinese characters have gradually accumulated over several millennia, with only two major attempts at standardization.

Another reason for the excess complexity in Chinese characters (and in English spelling) may be that difficulty of learning Chinese allows affluent, educated people to distinguish themselves from their less fortunate compatriots, much as fancy clothes are an expensive and inconvenient way to show off wealth. Gradually simplification of writing is thwarted because the educated try to show off their skills by choosing to write in a difficult way. China's long system of writing has perhaps aggravated the problem by requiring standard use of difficult written forms.

This argument that character complexity is a system for limiting social opportunity was promoted by early 20th century language reformers. Interestingly, the Communist party has not followed this argument as a justification for character simplification. Instead the "party line" is that characters have been steadily simplifying over time without intervention. While there is little support for this position, it allows the 1950s simplification to be viewed as a "historical inevitability" determined by "material conditions."

While the complexity of the characters can be frustrating, their beauty is undeniable and their advantages are often more subtle than generally appreciated. It once seemed that if everyone wore simple blue clothes, valuable resources would be saved and the world would be a better place. Ironically, it turned out that giving each person the freedom to express themselves not only made life far more interesting but was more efficient in the long run. The same lesson might very well apply to Chinese characters.

HOW ARE CHINESE WORDS CREATED?

This dictionary deals with Chinese etymology of Chinese characters. Most Chinese characters are words by themselves with few exceptions, e.g. the characters in butterfly only have independent meaning as allusions to the two-character word. While most characters are words, most Chinese words are not just a single character, but rather are composed of at least two characters. Chinese has many hundreds of thousands of words, most of which are created by combining just a few thousand characters.

The etymology of these words is usually straight forward, e.g. "pirate" or "sea thief." Note that the word for "crisis" is often described as combining "danger" and "opportunity." Actually this word was imported from Japanese where it was created just the way Chinese words are created, but its real etymology is closer to "dangerous time."
Multiple character words are created by several methods. As in two characters might each contribute meaning, which in combination indicates the word's meaning. While this pattern is most common, in some cases two characters with essentially identical meanings are combined. Because of the many homophones in Chinese, this problem is particularly important when a word is just being spoken, not written.

HOW MANY CHARACTERS ARE THERE?

The early dynasty dictionary included nearly 50,000 characters, the vast majority of which were rare variant characters accumulated over the centuries. In contrast the late dynasty dictionary included only 9,353 characters. An educated person can probably recognize 6,000 characters while the most common computer encoding system in Taiwan and Hong Kong incorporates about 13,000 characters, and the standard system in China incorporates about 6,500 characters. Some of this difference reflects elimination of several hundred characters under character reform in China, though most of the difference probably reflects different writing styles.

In Taiwan knowledge of about 4,000 characters is necessary for reading a newspaper and for most other common purposes, while in Mainland China only 3,000 characters may be adequate. In 1952 literacy for peasants was defined as knowledge of 1,500 characters and literacy for workers as knowledge of 2,000 characters. Since Chinese words are generally composed of two characters, only a few thousand characters can be used to understand many tens or even hundreds of thousands of words.