Until the mid-19th century, progress in Western studies was slow because most shoguns of the Tokugawa family frowned on Christianity and the Japanese were discouraged from having contacts with the "barbarians". A few students were allowed to study such utilitarian subjects as medicine, smelting, gunnery, shipbuilding and cartography under the Dutch at Nagasaki, the only port open for foreign trade.
An epoch-making event took place in 1864 when the Chinese version of Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law was imported from the Middle Kingdom. It was translated by William A. Martin, an American missionary known as Ting Wei-liang in China, under the title Wan-kuo Kung-fa (萬國公法), or "All Nations' Public Law". Through this book the Japanese came to know something of the Western concept of public law. During the early years of the Meiji era, Japanese statesmen and diplomats regarded Wheaton as the most authoritative guide for their dealings with other countries. "International law" later was re-rendered into the three-character term of koksaiho (國際法), literally, "nation inter law", by Mitsukuri Rinsho, a Japanese jurist. This new translation (kuo-chi fa in Chinese) subsequently was accepted by both Japanese and Chinese scholars as a substitute for the wan-kuo kung-fa.
In addition to the wan-kuo kung-fa, the Japanese accepted the academic terms translated into Chinese by Western missionaries, as shown on the next page.
Inspired by these efforts of Westerners, such enlightenment movement leaders as Nishi Amane (1826-94), Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834-1901) and Maejima Hisoka (1835-1919) originated thousands of new Chinese terms based on Western concepts. Of these new terms, several hundred were accepted by the Chinese along with the kokusaiho. Some were re-rendered by the Chinese and others simplified because of overly strong Japanese flavor. Here are typical examples:
The Japanese equivalents for the English words of command "Attention!" and "Right turn!" are kiotsuke and migimuke migi, respectively. Until the early years of this century, physical education teachers in Chinese schools borrowed the Japanese terms in toto by saying ch'i-ao tz'u-k'e (奇奧次克). and mi-ni mu-k'e mi-ni (米擬母克米擬). The present Chinese equivalents are li cheng (立正 , stand right) and hsiang-yu chuan (向右轉, toward right turn). For "airplane", the Chinese simplified the three-character Japanese term 飛行機 (hikoki in Japanese and fei-hsing chi in Chinese) into a two-character 飛機 (fei chi).
Listed below are Chinese terms of Japanese origin in common use today:
English Translation
absolute 絕對
boom 景氣
cancellation 取消
deduction(logical) 演繹
economics 經濟學
fine arts 美術
gas 瓦斯
induction 歸納
logic 論理學
magazine 雜誌
occasion 場合
procedure 手續
standpoint 立場
The orthodoxy of written Chinese as the Esperanto of past Asia was challenged for the first time in 1866 when Maejima Hisoka, founder of Japan's postal system, suggested abolition of the Chinese ideographs to the Tokugawa shogunate. Maejima suggested that mastery of the complex characters was time-consuming and thereby hindered the spread of education and development of science. His proposal was not accepted. Nevertheless, it gave impetus to the writing of the spoken language through wider use of the kana syllabaries and eventually led to the written language reform of 1964. It also inspired the creation of the Mandarin phonetic symbols, a romanization movement in China and abolition of the Chinese ideographs in Korea.
These academic terms translated into Chinese by Western missionaries are still in use. (File Photo)
The romanization movement in China began in 1934 with the establishment of the Romanization Association in Shanghai by a group of progressive linguists. Six years later, the Communists experimented with teaching from romanized textbooks at Yenan, Shensi province. In 1943, this experiment became a character-recognition movement at the request of farmers who wanted to be able to communicate with landlords, officials and merchants in the conventional ideographs. The rural gentry and intellectuals also opposed the Communist experiment. They claimed the phonetic writing lacked the succinctness of the ideographic characters and thereby slowed down reading speed and comprehension. Additionally, Mandarin had not been accepted as the standardized spoken language and the romanization of the Mandarin dialect was unintelligible to the Yenan farmers. Romanization in the Yenan dialect could not be understood outside the province.
Since the fall of the mainland to the Communists in 1949, romanization has been carried out among such minority peoples as the Yi, Uighurs, Kazakhs and Mongolians who had rarely used the ideographs of the Han to transcribe their native languages. In 1955 the Communists announced a plan to simplify 798 characters, abolish 400 variants and establish principles for the simplification of the radicals. In the following year, 515 characters and 54 radicals were simplified. Of the 515 characters, 60 were identical with and 30 almost identical with those promulgated by the Japanese government in 1946. In 1964, the number of simplified characters was increased to 2,238.
As a result of simplification, many people, especially post office workers, took the liberty of creating additional simplified characters or of employing homonyms as substitutes to expedite routine work. This brought about great confusion in writing on the mainland. Examples are given in the table on the next page.
At the suggestion of the Provincial Assembly, the Chinese government on Taiwan set up a Simplified Characters Study Committee in 1953. To compare the time required to write ordinary characters and simplified forms, the committee had 157 primary school pupils write 100 characters of each style. The results ate as follows:
Grade Characters Fastest Slowest
6 regular 9'52" 23'30"
simplified 4'30" 8'12"
5 regular 11'20" 36'20"
simplified 7' 17'20"
4 regular 13' 27'5"
simplified 4' 16'
3 regular 10'40" 32' 41"
simplified 6' 20' 41"
In the following year, Lo Chia-Iuen, then vice president of the Examination Yuan, published an article urging government support of simplified characters. His proposal was rejected by the Legislative Yuan (parliament), and the study committee was subsequently dissolved.
Simplified characters became an issue again in 1965 when Lin Yutang urged overall inventory of the Chinese thesaurus. In April of 1969, General Ho Ying-chin, a member of the Kuomintang Central Advisory Committee, addressed the first plenary session of the Nationalist Party's tenth National Congress on the subject of simplification. He proposed that the Ministry of Education and the Academia Sinica jointly assume responsibility for simplifying characters widely used in daily communication. The general's suggestion was supported by Lin Yutang, who said that variants should be eliminated and that 3,500 characters should be sufficient for everyday use. The Ministry of Education organized an ad hoc committee to study simplification.
Arbitrary use of substitute characters on the Chinese mainland caused confusion in writing. (File Photo)
In North Korea, the Chinese characters were replaced by hangul in 1948. Information is lacking on how the North Koreans dealt with the problem of the many homonyms. Japanese linguists say the Korean language is so lacking in romantic expressions that boys and girls use broken Japanese when talking in whispers under the acacia. In combat with U.N. forces during the war of 1950-53, commanders of North Korean troops were reported to have given the order to "Charge!" in Japanese-totsugeki.
In 1948, the South Korean Parliament passed a bill providing for exclusive use of hangul in official documents. In view of technical difficulties, the bill included a clause permitting inclusion of Chinese characters when necessary. In October of 1968, President Park Chung Hee nullified this clause and instructed that the Chinese ideographs be eliminated as of January, 1970. This decree was followed by spirited public debate. Supporters of President Park's decision called the move a "Declaration of Independence for Korean culture". They maintained that emancipation from the Chinese way of thinking would enable the Koreans to invigorate their language and eliminate the language barrier between the young (educated in hangul) and the old (educated in Chinese). Opponents contended that homonyms transcribed in hangul to take the place of the Chinese characters making up 52 per cent of the Korean thesaurus inevitably will lead to much confusion. For instance, these two terms of contradictory meaning- 放火 (arson) and 防火 (fire prevention) are both pronounced panghwa. Defenders of tradition also assert that hangul is not as useful as the Chinese ideographs for creation of conceptional terminology and that scrapping of the ideographs will invalidate classical works and discourage those interested in the study of ancient Korea.
In the running debate on the future of the Chinese characters, those who favor extremes of change have stressed the importance of speed in learning and writing the characters and neglected a number of advantages that phonetic systems of writing do not have.
Because the Chinese characters are a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonograms, many of them are more intelligible than the equivalent words of a purely phonographic system. For instance, most characters having the' radical of "woman" (女) are related to the fair sex, "tree" (木) to the plant and "gold" (金) to the metal.
Speaking of her experience in teaching Japanese at the University of Washington in Seattle, Miss Matsuda Mayako said the progress of students depends on the degree of their interest in written Chinese. "Those who excel in Japanese are unexceptionally in favor of kanji," she said, "and those weak at that language are against it." When asked to read a text entirely in hiragana, those strong in kanji complained it was hard to read because the syllabary "does not provide meaning through the eyes".
When coining new terms, the Chinese employ characters already in use. New characters are rarely created except for translation or transliteration of chemical terms. In the alphabetical dictionaries of the West, new words are continuously added.
Such English terms as "United Nations", "World Health Organization" and "prisoner of war" can be abbreviated as "UN", "WHO" and "POW". Long Chinese proper nouns also can be shortened. But this will cause confusion in the phonetic writing of kana and hangul. For instance, the Japanese version of the Red Cross Society of Japan - 日本赤十字社 (Nihon Sekijuji-sha) - can be shortened into the two characters of 日赤 (Nisseki). If this abbreviated form is written in kana, it will be analogous to 日石 (also Nisseki), diminutive for the Nihon Sekiyu Kaisha (Japan Petroleum Company).
With variants eliminated and many characters simplified, it should be possible to write contemporary Chinese with a few thousand characters in a style as terse as that of the world-famous classics of ancient China.