Several Drawbacks of Chinese Writing System

By: Charley Pein
Submitted: 2007-01-17 10:58:53
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As faster and faster development of china’s economy, more and more foreigners are going to learn Chinese language; this makes Chinese people proud, even to the extent that some people are considering whether they should learn English. It seems a good phenomenon, but you will see below that this phenomenon is generated by economic development; the language still has great drawbacks which make its further expansion impossible.

Because written language determines spoken language, as stated in my previous article ‘Written Language versus Spoken Language’, Chinese language’s drawbacks lie exactly on its writing system, the Chinese writing.

There are over a billion Chinese persons, most of them older than schooling age are able to use Chinese writing system, and probably all of them will think Chinese writing is beautiful. I am sure Chinese writing is very beautiful, thousands of years Chinese calligraphy continuingly attracted the nation. Unfortunately, it is not a logical system; its illogic has made Chinese people difficult in thinking and communication, although they maybe not aware of this.

Modern Chinese writing system has several fundamental drawbacks:

First, Chinese character’s formation has no logical way. Although six ways of formation exist in Chinese characters, i.e. Pictogram, Ideograph, logical aggregates, pictophonetic compounds, borrowing, and associate transformation [1], these formational methods are too complex, today few people take account of these when they read. Not knowing its formation, Chinese people can not coin more new characters; in fact, the number of Chinese characters used today is much smaller than that in ancient time. Generally, Chinese people coin new words, which include two or more characters, to represent new knowledge, mainly by translating from foreign language words.

Second, words have led to non-simplicity in terms of knowledge representation. Although new word is coined to represent new meaning, the new meaning is based on the old meanings of the characters which comprise the word. In this sense, it can be said it is an explanation using old characters rather than coining a new word. Word formed in this way is not simplified.

Third, Chinese writing is employed to represent sound. This fault is fundamental, because it opposes the ‘writing determines speaking’ principle, as speaking can represent small quantity of knowledge in comparison to writing, using writing to represent speaking results in knowledge poverty of Chinese writing system. This phenomenon is nationwide and, it reflects the mixture and conflict of visual logic and auditory logic. Using writing to represent speaking also lead to using fewer characters, when characters have the same sound, people generally select the one having fewer strokes to represent that sound.

Fourth, it is unclear whether word (consists of two or more characters) or character is meaning unit. In ancient time Chinese character was mainly meaning unit. Influence by western language, knowledge increase, and oral communication led more and more words become meaning units. However, Chinese words are not made in a logical way; many words are conflicting in meaning. Moreover, using word as meaning unit has lost the simplicity and nature of ancient Chinese. Two hierarchical meaning representation make it meaning searching inefficient and produce eye tiredness.

Fifth, there are equal spaces between words and non-meaning-unit characters. Today, more and more people use word as meaning unit, but each space inside word, i.e. between characters in a word, is equal to space between words. Thus meaning becomes three hierarchical, generating more inefficiency and tiredness. This is also a factor to short sight.

Sixth, resolution variation. This has been mentioned in my previous article ‘How Chinese Character Account for Short Sight’, also generates inefficiency and tiredness.

Above six drawbacks make people can not think in a logical way, their minds are therefore unorganized, communication between people becomes difficult, learning and working in a low speed and so on. The most serious outcome may be some people are in the charge of Chinese writing system such that they consider it as equivalence of knowledge. In their eye, anything must be represented by Chinese writing, they are opposing the principle: language conforms to real world, not vice versa.

[1] http://www.answers.com/chinese

Article source: Expert Articles