CHINESE
ALPHABET SYMBOLS
Unlike all Western writing systems, the Chinese does
not possess alphabets per se. An alphabet is a set of symbols that
represent sounds. They do not have any particular meaning of their own.
People associate the different alphabets to make a word, which is a
concept they intend to communicate. On the other hand, the Chinese use
pictographs or ideographs. These are symbols that represent the concepts
directly. In other words, one symbol refers to one word.
The advantage of alphabetic systems is that there are
very few symbols to remembers (in most languages, it rarely goes above
50). However, in the Chinese system, the number of symbols is much
vaster. There are reported to be over 60000 Chinese symbols. To achieve
even minimal literacy (for example, just to be able to read a
newspaper), one needs to be familiar with at least 3000 symbols. A
student ending secondary school must have over 5000 symbols memorized
while someone finishing a masters’ degree would require over 7000
symbols.
Most of the Chinese characters currently in use date
back to 3500 years. There has been some simplification of the writing
style, but for most part someone from the Qin Dynasty could easily read
and write modern Chinese. At the beginning, there was a direct
correlation between the symbol and the concept it represented. For
example, the symbol representing a horse meant a horse. Over the years,
however, the meanings became more complicated. In fact, every Chinese
symbol held a deeper meaning than what it actually depicts. For example,
a Chinese character translates as: “plum trees and melon fields”.
However, the exact meaning of the symbol would read as follows:
“It is unwise to tie one shoe under a plum tree or
adjust one’s hat in a melon field as this may attract suspicion of
thievery.”
The sheer number of the Chinese characters was seen
as an impediment to literacy in the late 19th Century. The
Chinese Communist government then attempted a simplification of the
system. More than 2000 variant characters were eliminated and the
number of strokes required to write characters were reduced. However,
while these reforms enabled people to read and write easily, it made
communication more difficult. Indeed, simplification made pronunciation
more difficult, and it was difficult to differentiate between words.
Thus, recently, people have been returning to the traditional way of
writing all over again. Traditional Chinese can be seen everywhere in
China now, even in government communication.
Westerners argue that the overwhelming number of
characters makes Chinese language obsolete in the modern age of
computers. This is because, it is impossible to input so many characters
in the computer to be able to make a coherent text. This is a complete
misconception. The Chinese have developed a method of Romanization of
Chinese characters, called pinyin (literally: spelling the
sounds) which is very efficient for inputting information into the
computer. For example, the word “European Union” would require 18
keystrokes in English, while it could be input with just three in
Chinese pinyin.
 |
