Power of Chinese Ideographic Characters

Power of Chinese Ideographic Characters

In “Languages and Writing,” John P. Hughes claims that if alphabetic principle of writing was not invented, then, the history of mankind would be different” (716):

If we did not have the alphabet, it would be impossible to hope for universal literacy, and therefore (if Thomas Jefferson’s view was correct) for truly representative government.  Writing could have been kept a secret art known only to a privileged few or to a particular social class which would thus have an undue advantage over the others.  Information could not nearly so easily be conveyed from nation to nation, and the levels of civilization achieved by the Romans and ourselves might still only be goals to strive for. (716)

 In his essay, Hughes lays out the disadvantages of Chinese ideographic language, to support his above-mentioned claims.  He states that Chinese native scholars need seven years to learn to read and write Chinese and over 80 percent of the native speakers of Chinese are illiterate in their own language.  However, since the time of his essay (1962), China has undergone a drastic – political and economical – reformation and has become the focal point of the world’s attention.  Today, China’s national literacy rate certainly isn’t 20%; and contrary to Hughes claims, China’s non-alphabetic language has served its nation superbly by acting as a universal unifier among the different Chinese dialects.  China’s ideographic written language enables exchange of information and speeds proliferation of ingenious ideas among over a billion of its people, and is the prime reason for the nation’s successes in many fronts, nationally and internationally.

I lived in Taipei for five years learning Chinese from TLI Language Institute, and from the professors and classmates, I have learned the following personal observations: A study was done by TLI Language Institute of Taiwan and its results revealed interesting advantages to ideographic Chinese-characters.  The study involved two groups of students:  Chinese students learning English, and Native English speakers learning Chinese.  In this study, the point of interest was the speed of learning a foreign language by the two differing groups of students.

Chinese students learning English were extremely fast in the beginning, and slowed down remarkably after they have reached the intermediate level.  The ease of learning twenty-six alphabets and its seemingly logical grammar for the simple conversational sentences seemed scientific in the beginning.  However, continuation of further learning of English proved that English grammar and its morphology are far from being rational.  The students were daunted with the never-ending vocabulary lists that were resistant to long-term memory since the spelling of English words do not evoke mental pictures or emotions, nor does it have a logical explanation to why a certain group of alphabets mean what they claim to mean.  Therefore, the students found out that learning English is scientific only up to the phonetic level, but on a semantic level it was worst than superstition!  They must memorize, memorize, and memorize!  The intermediate level students learning English were proud that in such a short amount of period, they were able to make sounds out of unintelligible groups of alphabets, but soon were overwhelmed and often discouraged by the fact that learning a higher level of English, basically, meant pure memorization which they will forget the next day!

Not surprisingly, it was almost impossible for the Native English speakers to master 1000 Chinese characters in one year.  In fact, the school would not have been in business of teaching Chinese to foreigners if they had not heavily depended on the “Ping Ing” system (phonetics for foreigners).  However, the students, on their second year (on an average), upon their mastery of 500 Chinese characters, their speed of learning increased impressively; most of them were able to speak almost-fluent Mandarin.  Moreover, though most of them couldn’t remember all the strokes in Chinese characters yet, and still far from being able to write them manually, were able to recognize the correct characters from the word choices offered in the word processor and thus were able to write essays in Chinese with the help of the computer.  When the students were faced with an unfamiliar word, their trained mind in the history of ancient pictorial-representation of the Han Zi automatically leapt to form a mental perception of the word.  Thereby, the students didn’t have to rely purely on memorization; instead, because of the nature of Chinese Characters, their minds were involuntarily inspired to form images, ideas, and concepts to make inferences.  Hence, because Chinese characters were ideographic, after the students reached an intermediate level of Chinese, their speed of new word acquisition was much faster than that of their counterparts, whose learning of new English words primarily depended on one method – irrational memorization.

China, a nation rich in culture and history uses the non-alphabetic principle of writing yet its language in many ways is more efficient and powerful than the Indo-European Language: Information from one dialect to another, and from one nation to another are easily conveyed because its ideographic characters are indiscriminately accepted and understood by all dialects including Korea and Japan.  Why? Because historically, Korean and Japanese, as a language, were considered a dialect of Chinese, and not a foreign language: Korea and Japan, in their earlier part of history, had been using Chinese characters.  Korean’s Han Gul and Japanese’s Kan Ji are relatively a modern invention to simplify Han Zi (Chinese characters).  However Korean and Japanese are still very dependent on the original form of Han Zi to clarify meanings of homonyms in their language.  For example, approximately 30% (personal assessment) of Han-Gul printed on the newspapers must supply Han Zi in parenthesis to clarify and define the meaning of the word.  Therefore, Han Zi is still a required course for all Korean students (Junior high and above).  Consequently, Han Gul cannot stand alone as a complete alphabetic system of written language for Korean unless a better system is invented.  Meanwhile, Asia’s three economic giants, China, Japan, and Korea, amply enjoy the benefits of Chinese ideograms, the Han Zi, to freely exchange ingenious ideas to further fortify their amazing civilization of 5000 years.

China’s rising literacy rate proves that alphabetic principle of writing has no relevance to Hughes ideology of “no universal literacy without the alphabets”; rather, the statistics indicate that a nation’s economic well-being – though not exclusively – has a profound influence to the literacy of its citizens.  Figure 1, a chart by the World health Organization (World health Report 1999, pp.84-87) lists the literacy rate by countries in Asia; and strikingly, it shows China to be enjoying a high literacy rate of 80%!  Why?  Figure 2 and Figure 3 shows that China’s booming economy might be the main contributing factor to its rising literacy rate.  These charts clearly indicate that the literacy rate of China advances parallel to that of its nation’s economic growth – suggesting that for a nation to reach universal literacy, its economic standing must support it.

Figure 1:Asia Country (1)	Percentage of adults who are literate	Figure 6: Latin Am & Caribbean	Country (1)	Percentage of adults who are literate, 1995
Afghanistan	32		Anguilla	—
Bangladesh	38		Antigua and Barbuda	95
Bhutan	42		Argentina	96
Brunei	89		Aruba	—
Burma	—		Bahamas, The	96
Cambodia	65		Barbados	97
China	80		Belize	70
Taiwan	94		Bolivia	82
Hong Kong	94		Brazil	83
India	50		British Virgin Islands	—
Indonesia	84		Cayman Islands	—
Iran	71		Chile	95
Japan	–		Colombia	90
Laos	57		Costa Rica	95
Macau	–		Cuba	96
Malaysia	84		Dominica	—
Maldives	95		Dominican Republic	82
Mongolia	83		Ecuador	89
Nepal	36		El Salvador	76
North Korea	–		French Guiana	—
Pakistan	39		Grenada	96
Philippines	94		Guadeloupe	—
Singapore	91		Guatemala	65
South Korea	97		Guyana	98
Sri Lanka	90		Haiti	44
Thailand	94		Honduras	70
Vietnam	91		Jamaica	85
			Martinique	—
			Mexico	89
			Montserrat	—
			Netherlands Antilles	—
			Nicaragua	66
			Panama	91
			Paraguay	92
			Peru	88
			Puerto Rico	—
			Saint Kitts and Nevis	90
			Saint Lucia	—
			Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	82
			Suriname	93
			Trinidad and Tobago	98
			Turks and Caicos Islands	—
			Uruguay	97
			Venezuela	91
			Virgin Islands	—

The Figure 3 (from the UNDP statistical data 04/19/2000 on Human development index) further supports the link between a nation’s literacy rate versus nation’s economic standing: For example Canada, HDI rank of 1 (of 174), has the highest literacy rate of 99%; and Ethiopia, HDI rank of 171, only has 36.3% literacy rate.  Therefore, to simply claim that the reason Canada enjoys almost 100% literacy is due to its alphabetic language would be ignoring the obvious pattern.  The statistics (Figure 4 & 5) clearly demonstrate that there are undeniable links between the two factors: nation’s economic standing and its level of literacy. 

Figure 2 China: Social and Political Trends

China’s literacy rate has been rising rapidly and is by far the best of any developing region.

Figure 3

China: Economic Trends

(http://mars3.gps.caltech.edu/whichworld/explore/china/chinasoc.html).

 

Figure 4

 

Human development index
HDI rank (of 174)		Life expectancy at birth (years) 1998	Adult literacy rate (% age 15 and above) 1998	Combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio (%) 1998	GDP per capita (PPP US$) 1998	Life expectancy index	Education index	GDP index	Human development index (HDI) value 1998	GDP per capita (PPP US$) rank minus HDI rank
1	Canada	79,1	99,0	100	23.582	0,90	0,99	0,91	0,935	8
75	Saudi Arabia	71,7	75,2	57	10.158	0,78	0,69	0,77	0,747	-32
119	Egypt	66,7	53,7	74	3.041	0,69	0,60	0,57	0,623	-11
138	Kenya	51,3	80,5	50	980	0,44	0,70	0,38	0,508	18
143	Sudan	55,4	55,7	34	1.394	0,51	0,48	0,44	0,477	0
149	Djibouti	50,8	62,3	21	1.266	0,43	0,49	0,42	0,447	-2
159	Eritrea	51,1	51.7	27	833	0.43	0,44	0,35	0,408	0
171	Ethiopia	43,4	36,3	26	574	0,31	0,33	0,29	0,309	-1
UNDP statistical data 04/19/2000 on Human development index

 

Figure 5

Human development index
HDI rank (of 174)		Life expectancy at birth (years) 1998 rank	Adult literacy rate (% age 15 and above) 1998 rank	Combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio (%) 1998 rank	GDP per capita (PPP US$) 1998 rank	female economic activity rate (age 15 and above)		health indicators
						rate (%) 1998	as % of male rate 1998	doctors (per 100.000 people)	public expenditure on health as % of GDP 1996-1998	% HIV/AIDS (adults 15-49)
1	Canada	3	10	6	9	59.6	80.6	221	6.4%	0.33%
75	Saudi Arabia	64	116	126	43	20.1	24.9	166	6.4%	0.01%
119	Egypt	112	147	62	107	34.0	43.2	202	1.8%	0.03%
138	Kenya	146	107	134	155	75.5	84.0	15	2.2%	11.64%
143	Sudan	134	145	157	142	34.0	39.8	10	3.2%	0.99%
149	Djibouti	149	137	173	147	…..	…..	20	…..	10.30%
159	Eritrea	148	149	163	159	74.8	86.7	2	2.9%	3.17%
171	Ethiopia	168	168	166	170	57.5	67.3	4	1.6%	9.31%
UNDP statistical data 04/19/2000 on Human development index & UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS) and WHO (World Health Organization)

Finally, Guatemala’s relatively a low literacy rate of (65%) from figure 6. negate Hughes belief, that Alphabets are the precursors to universal literacy.  Though the country’s language is Indo-European (alphabetic), it is still far from reaching the level of literacy that China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore (all predominantly Mandarin speaking countries) now enjoy.  All the statistical data (Figure 1-6) and my personal observations from Taiwan resonate one truth: that alphabetic system of writing does not guarantee universal literacy.  China, a home of nearly a quarter of the world’s population, and the third largest and the fastest growing economy, still a poor country by any standard, has accomplished so much so quickly that one wonders whether the secret to its success is its unique principle of writing – the Han Zi, its ideographic symbols.

Sources:

World health Report. Chart. 1999, pp.84-87

http://mars3.gps.caltech.edu/whichworld/explore/china/chinasoc.html

China: Social and Political Trends. Chart.  http://mars3.gps.caltech.edu/whichworld/explore/china/chinasoc.html

 China: Economic Trends. Chart.

http://mars3.gps.caltech.edu/whichworld/explore/china/chinasoc.html

Human development index. Chart. UNDP statistical data 04/19/2000.

http://home.planet.nl/~hans.mebrat/eritrea-economy.htm