A radical proposal for sinographs
« previous post | next post »
Letter to the editor of Taipei Times (4/29/25) by Te Khai-su / Tè Khái-sū:
Abolish Chinese characters
A few months ago, under the overhang walkway (teng-a-kha, or Hokkien architecture) of a Tainan side street, I saw a child — perhaps 10 years old — hunched over one of the collapsible tables of her parents’ food stall, writing columns of “hanzi” (漢字, Chinese/Han characters), each in their dozens.
A familiar, if rather sad sight in Taiwan — although not nearly as spectacular as Hugo Tseng’s (曾泰元) evocative account in this newspaper (“Rejuvenating ‘Chinese character,’” April 20, page 8), where he recalled the legend of Cangjie’s (倉頡) creation of hanzi, describing how “millet grains rained from the sky and the ghosts and gods wept at night.”
Tseng waxed lyrical about hanzi, calling it a “profound cultural significance,” a “monumental writing system,” and “one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements” — as if such ebullience could be taken for granted without evidence. The schoolchild might have no option, but adults like me have seen alternatives in other societies.
After just a couple of years of schooling in alphabetic script, including systems such as Korean “hangul,” all literature in that language becomes accessible to students. More importantly, they can express themselves readily in writing, and have time left over to explore other pursuits, such as learning another language, or start learning hanzi for historical interest. Instead, Taiwanese schoolchildren are burdened from an early age with long school days and years of tedious homework, much of it due to the demands of hanzi.
I am far from the first to criticize hanzi for being hard to learn and holding people back. Early 20th-century critiques — the great Chinese writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) being a pioneer — paved the way for the (albeit incomplete) language reforms in China after the Communist Revolution, resulting in the creation of simplified characters and “Hanyu pinyin.” In contrast, the (then) anti-communist Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan entrenched the use of traditional hanzi.
Such conservatism reminds me of Choe Man-ri 崔萬里* (d. 1445), a Confucian academic at the 15th-century Korean royal court, who opposed King Sejong the Great’s (1397-1450) invention of hangul. Choe fought against hangul in favor of hanzi, dreading that the innovation would “be to our shame in serving the great and in admiring China.”
National Cheng Kung University Department of Taiwanese Literature professor Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung (蔣為文) was right when he wrote in 1996 that Taiwanese “cannot achieve independence unless we abolish Han characters.”
Happily, most Taiwanese languages already have Latin orthographies in use, and we can learn from the successes of Korea and Vietnam.
Te Khai-su
Helsinki, Finland
[VHM: *See here for the Classical Chinese text and English translation of Ch'oe's 1444 protest against Hangul, which nonetheless was promulgated in 1446.]
Selected readings
- "The perils of literacy" (1/14/17) — Su Shi (Dongpo [1037-1101]
- "Hu Shih and Chinese Language Reform" (2/4/17) — also available here
- "English or Mandarin as the World Language?" (5/2/14)
- "Which is worse?" (1/21/16)
- Geoff Pullum, "There Was No Committee", Lingua Franca (4/30/14)
- _________, "The Awful Chinese Writing System" Lingua Franca (1/20/16),
Hill Gates said,
May 23, 2025 @ 4:27 pm
Apart from vaccination against infectious diseases, nothing but replacing hanzi with an alphabet or syllabary would make life more enjoyable for most the children who struggle toward literacy using Hanzi. Foreign grad students too.
On.the other hand, the kids won’t grow up having had the same memory training (and perhaps other skills) as hanzi learners.
On the basis of talking attentively with many,
many Chinese and Taiwanese adults who did not complete high school, I am certain that the great majority of them are functionally illiterate a few years later. That is true of English speakers as well. People who do not get reinforcement from reading (and writing?) and so do not do it regularly simply fforget how.
Should society expend the effort to change something until they have carefully researched its consequences for people? Happier children vs less focussed children? Should we change for the sake of the children themselves, or for people who will depend in future on their characteristics?
In the world we have now, I say eat, drink, be merry, and dump hanzi!
Hill Gates
Victor Mair said,
May 23, 2025 @ 5:55 pm
See also this post, "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye" (3/24/17), which features lengthy comments by Hill Gates.
Jon Forrest said,
May 23, 2025 @ 9:35 pm
One of my hobbies, now that I'm retired, is to try to convince Chinese and Japanese people that, in spite of having great historical, sociological, psychological, and maybe political value, characters are not linguistically necessary. Most of them think this is the stupidest thing they've ever heard. Some of them even take personal offense.
This mindset would have to change before any concrete changes are attempted.
Tom davidson said,
May 23, 2025 @ 9:53 pm
I’m left-handed, never had any difficulty learning to write simp/trad Han zi
KIRINPUTRA said,
May 23, 2025 @ 10:46 pm
These dudes want kanji abolished! top-down! b/c they lack the backbone to do anything about this plague in their own lives. They're addicted to kanji, and to (written) Mandarin; their outboxes & private correspondence are full of Mandarin, in kanji. They set their devices to Mandarin (and kanji), and most would likely read & write kanji'd Mandarin in secret if it was ever abolished.
What they criticise is invariably the Nationalist Chinese incarnation of kanji, which are non-secular (brahminical), and not traditional but, rather, untraditionally skewed towards complexity. They're hypo-critical of the mainland E. Asian exam culture (which, talk about a drag on society), while glossing over the role of the secular (non-brahminical) kanji in Japanese society. Are Japanese lives less fulfilling anyway than Korean or Vietnamese or even North American ones? There's not much of a basis for such a conclusion.
As a matter of political science, it would — theoretically — make more sense for Formosan society to run on kanji'd Hakka & kanji'd Taioanese than on romanised Mandarin. Might Tè Khái-sū prefer the romanised Mandarin, if he had to choose? I don't think he's ever written an "Abolish Mandarin" schpiel.
They yearn to be set free top-down; Tailam is "Tainan" to them till some act of God "abolishes 'Tainan'". But the successes of Vietnam & Korea show us the need to flip the script ourselves.
Robert T McQuaid said,
May 24, 2025 @ 1:26 am
I once spent a few months trying to learn Mandarin. What caused me to give up was the complexity of the writing system. I may not be the only one. Use of Chinese as a second language will be minimal until the writing is simplified.
Peter Cyrus said,
May 24, 2025 @ 4:33 am
Could one of you answer a historical question?
The first republicans, like Sun Yat-Sen / Zhongshan and the May Fourth/ New Culture movement, were all in favor of replacing characters with an alphabet, as were Mao Zedong and the early communists, following the 1916 proposal of Yuen Ren Chao. Among the romanizations developed in response were Gwoyeu Romatzyh and the Soviet Latinxua Sin Wenz. This agenda was advanced by forward-looking internationalists.
After Zhongshan's death in 1925, the power struggle was won by Chiang Kai-shek under a more conservative nationalist program, and the plan to replace characters was watered down to simplifying some of them and introducing Hanyu Pinyin in only an auxiliary role. I've always imagined the Nationalists would rather have forgotten about orthographic reform altogether, if it hadn't been so necessary.
My question is, when the Communists took over in 1949, why did they keep the Nationalist program? Why not oppose it and go back to their own roots by alphabetizing? That seems now like a lost opportunity. Maybe they feared being seen as less Chinese, but given the other huge disruptions they promulgated, that seems like a weak explanation. Anybody have an idea?
Jerry Packard said,
May 24, 2025 @ 7:32 am
“Why not oppose it and go back to their own roots by alphabetizing?”
I think they were too busy with the survival of the population to mess with something as large as national script reform. After all, the US writing system cries out for script reform, given how terribly inefficient our script is at reflecting spoken language. Many people are left by the wayside in trying to acquire our orthography. Given the current state of our country, would now be a good time to implement national script reform? Project the answer to this Q back to the Chinese world of the 1950s. They had many more severe things to worry about than script reform.
Chris Button said,
May 24, 2025 @ 10:02 am
Putting aside the characters vs alphabet discussion, the formal introduction of simplified characters was surely misled for several reasons:
1. The Japanese simplified some differently, so we now have three official versions instead of just one.
2. The simplification destroyed the logical structure of some characters by removing their phonetic components.
3. Many of the simplified forms represented nothing more than a formalization of cursive forms, which people would have continued to use in any case.
David Marjanović said,
May 24, 2025 @ 11:24 am
Yes, but in some cases it replaced extremely obscure phonetic components with more or less straightforward semantic components.
Some simplifications may also have had ideological purposes: simplifying the "heart" in "love" to a single stroke suddenly made a "friend" appear…
Jonathan Smiths said,
May 24, 2025 @ 4:39 pm
“Why not oppose it and go back to their own roots by alphabetizing?”
In fact script reform was a major concern throughout the 1950's. Mao Zedong wavered minimally: he favored using the Roman alphabet and felt that resistance to such a change — among cultural elites, of course — was irrationally nationalistic. But things got stuck in committee: focus turned to (1) popularization of the national language; (2) simplification of the script; and (3) development of pinyin as a transcriptional tool, with these three presented as necessary groundwork for the thoroughgoing Romanization of the script which … might … follow … eventually .. but was … not urgent (quoth esp. Zhou Enlai).
Incidentally, these debates of the 50's are a classic example of "too many cooks," in which literally hundreds of people come up with Totally Awesome ideas for phonetic scripts half of which would have been totally fine but none of which ever went anywhere. Less serious but also illustrative parallel cases affect e.g. Korean and Taiwanese, where superficial consideration might suggest that the problem is "too many people care too much" but deeper reflection reveals the real problem to be "far too few people care at all."
Jonathan Smith said,
May 24, 2025 @ 4:47 pm
Also — the notion that one of the P.R.C. Simplified or (e.g.) the Taiwan Zhengti script for Mandarin might be "better" or "worse" than the other is for nincompoops / Facebook Grandpas. It makes zero difference; a reader of the other gets used to reading the other in an afternoon or so. And incidentally there are more possibilities than this — e.g. "Zhongwen" articles on Wikipedia offer 大陆简体 / 香港繁體 / 澳門繁體 / 大马简体 / 新加坡简体 / 臺灣正體.
Chris Button said,
May 24, 2025 @ 6:23 pm
@ David Marjanović
愛 becoming 爱 is simply a case of a shorthand/cursive form being formalized.
A Cantonese-speaking friend of mine, who was of Hong Kong descent and schooled in traditional characters, often used to joke how simplification took the very heart out of love. She was right, but its loss (just like any notions of "friend" then replacing it) had little to do with ideological or semantic considerations.
LW said,
May 24, 2025 @ 11:23 pm
most of these arguments for or again abolition of Chinese characters seem to be based on either geopolitical or economic considerations—the former regarding the relationship between Taiwan, China, Korea, etc., and the latter being that's in some sense “more efficient” to write in an alphabetic script.
i can accept that, in an objective sense, it might be “more efficient” to write in Pinyin rather than Hanzi, but i'm not really convinced this is an actual argument against Hanzi. the only reason we care about things like “efficiency” is that modern society tells us we should—being more efficient lets us study more so we can work at a better job for some capitalist company; being more efficient lets us get more work done in a day at that company.
if we instead took a more radical approach, i.e. removing the root causes of this drive for efficiency (such as capitalism and the market economy) perhaps we'd be able to consider the choice of script on a more reasonable basis, such as which is more pleasing or more beautiful.
(i don't intend to argue that Hanzi is “more pleasing” than Pinyin, only that we will never really know until we remove the compounding factors.)
KIRINPUTRA said,
May 25, 2025 @ 5:48 am
Doubt switching to romanisation would make Mandarin a language of first resort outside the spread of Chinese empire (& the diaspora, of the empire). See Hindi-Urdu & Russian; see also Vietnamese & Korean.
Also, people are already learning Mandarin sans sinographs. Such books are sold in Thai bookstores, etc. Young people that speak some Mandarin are popping up in retail, etc., throughout S.E. Asia in places that get Chinese tourists.
As for the (relatively) few that learn Mandarin only b/c it's sexy, a wide switch to Pinyin would probably turn most of them off.
David Marjanović said,
May 25, 2025 @ 5:50 am
It makes an enormous difference to handwriting – admittedly less of a concern than it used to be.
Ah, I really should have figured.
The root cause in the general direction of drives for efficiency is basic human laziness. That's not going away regardless of such superficialities as political economy.
Robert T McQuaid, above, gave up after a few months. I gave up after about two years of low-intensity study because I felt I couldn't afford the time. Native-speaking schoolchildren in officially sinophone places are made to afford the time because the state and its economy say they have to…
David Marjanović said,
May 25, 2025 @ 5:55 am
Tens of thousands of businesspeople-and-vaguely-adjacent in the West would have learned it from the 1990s onwards. But they would have needed to read & write, not just to talk, and almost all of them couldn't.
(I actually hoped to read scientific articles.)
David Morris said,
May 25, 2025 @ 6:53 am
In 2006 I gained a certificate in English language teaching and decided to apply for jobs in South Korea rather than China or Japan. The writing system was one factor, but not the only one. Although my speaking and listening is still poor, I can read (but not always understand) written Korean, to the point of spotting mistakes in textbooks.
Peter Cyrus said,
May 25, 2025 @ 1:19 pm
The efficiency isn't in reading or writing (although a better writing system also achieves that). It's in learning. That's where the real benefit accrues.
TonyK said,
May 25, 2025 @ 4:16 pm
Two factors mitigate against replacing hanzi with an alphabetic script. Firstly, the script is so beautiful! Nodody can claim that for the prosaic roman alphabet. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it is an integral part of Chinese culture, of which the Chinese are justifiably proud. It would be a great loss to the world if it disappeared.
Philip Taylor said,
May 26, 2025 @ 2:08 am
Hear hear, Tony. Good to see a defence of hanzi here, one I fully support. The downside is that (a) there are far more hanzi than there are letters in even the most diacriticised variants of the roman alphabet, and (b) learning to read and write hanzi is considerably more time-consuming (and, arguably, stressful) than learning to read and write an alphabet. But approximately one billion Chinese can attest that the former is possible, even if not all are functionally literate in their native script.
Jenny Chu said,
May 27, 2025 @ 3:02 am
Switching to an alphabetic system would potentially have geopolitical/cultural isolation consequences, because once (say) Chinese became easier to read. it would become easier to learn, and more foreigners would do so, and they would more easily integrate with local people.
I'm now in Portugal after many years in Hong Kong (Vietnam before that). I learned Cantonese only after years of struggle. Now that I am learning Portuguese almost without effort – I learn passively just by reading labels and subtitles and advertising! – I'm remembering how much easier it was when I was in Vietnam and doing the same.
I made many Vietnamese friends. I'm making Portuguese friends now. It was only after a long time that I managed to make HK friends. I believe the alphabet has a lot to do with it.
So what would this mean at scale? All the foreign people in China or Japan as ready to speak those languages as foreigners in France are to speak French? A totally different exchange of ideas would happen.
Philip Taylor said,
May 27, 2025 @ 9:58 am
Solely on the basis of personal experience, Jenny, I do not think that the script (qua script) is an obstacle to foreigners attempting to converse in Chinese with the locals. I studied spoken Mandarin, with zero reference to the Hanzi potentially associated therewith, and as a result will now do my best to converse with the locals in spoken Mandarin whenever I vist China.