One country, two systems

JOHNSON

The coexistence of pinyin and Chinese characters highlights the role of emotion in language decisions

Jan 21st 2017

FEW people live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as Zhou Youguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architect of pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to write Mandarin in the roman alphabet.

Pinyin has not, of course, replaced the Chinese characters. Rather, it is used as a gateway to literacy, giving young children a systematic way to learn the sounds of the thousands of characters required to be literate in Chinese. Pinyin is also used by most Chinese people to input Chinese characters into computers: type a word like wo (meaning “I”) and the proper character appears; if several characters share the same sound (which is common in Chinese), users choose from a short menu of these homophonic characters.

In other words, the primary way that the Chinese interact with their language in the digital age is via an alphabet borrowed by Communist China from its ideological enemies in the 1950s. The tale is an odd one. Mao Zedong (who was Mao Tse-tung before pinyin, under the “Wade-Giles” romanisation system) wanted a radical break with old ways after 1949, when the civil war ended in mainland China. He was hardly the first to think that China’s beautiful, complicated and inefficient script was a hindrance to the country’s development. Lu Xun, a celebrated novelist, wrote in the early 20th century: “If we are to go on living, Chinese characters cannot.”

But according to Mr Zhou, speaking to the New Yorker in 2004, it was Josef Stalin in 1949 who talked Mao out of full-scale romanisation, saying that a proud China needed a truly national system. The regime instead simplified many Chinese characters, supposedly making them easier to learn—but causing a split in the Sinophone world: Taiwan, Hong Kong and other overseas Chinese communities still use the traditional characters.

Mr Zhou, who had been working for a Chinese bank in New York (he was largely self-trained as a linguist), had returned home in a burst of patriotic optimism after 1949. He was drafted by Zhou Enlai, Mao’s premier, in the 1950s to create a system not to replace, but to complement, the Chinese characters. After three years’ work, pinyin was ready. It used just the standard Roman letters and a few (often omitted) diacritical marks, especially over vowels to show the “tones”: steady, rising, dipping or falling pitch. People joked that Mr Zhou’s team had taken three years to deal with just 26 letters. But pinyin dealt neatly with all of the sounds of Mandarin with a minimum of tricky typography: even q and x were used (for what had been ch’ and hs in Wade-Giles). These letters do not always sound the same as they do in Western languages, but pinyin overall was a hit, credited plausibly with a huge boost in literacy in China. Even the Taiwanese, who abhor Mao’s simplified characters, are gradually adopting Mr Zhou’s pinyin (which they had also once abhorred), making the use of pinyin one of the few practical things the two countries can agree on.

Why don’t the Chinese just adopt pinyin? One is the many homophones (though these are not usually a problem in context). Another is that Chinese characters are used throughout the Chinese-speaking world, not just by Mandarin-speakers but also speakers of Cantonese, Shanghainese and other varieties. These are as different from each other as the big Romance languages are, but the writing system unifies the Chinese world. In fact, character-based writing is, in effect, written Mandarin. This is not obvious from looking at the characters, but it is obvious if you look at pinyin. If China adopted it wholesale, the linguistic divisions in China would be far more apparent.

But there is another reason for attachment to the characters. They represent tradition, history, literature, scholarship and even art on an emotional level that many foreigners do not understand. Outsiders focus so much on efficiency probably because those who do try to learn the characters cannot help but be struck by how absurdly hard they are to master.

There is a real trade-off between efficiency and culture. English-speakers have rejected most efforts to clean up the language’s notorious spelling, making c off, ruff, thru, tho and bow from cough, rough, through, though and bough. The Irish accept the expense of keeping Irish on signs and in classrooms, even if it isn’t efficient. In language, as in love, the heart is often the master of the head. Pinyin, which has helped the Chinese have a bit of both, will long outlast the long-lived Mr Zhou.