The headline shrieked, the “UN’s action to recognize only simplified Chinese wreaks havoc on Chinese language, culture and history!” In March this year, international media reported that Chinese-language United Nations documents would begin to use only simplified characters in 2008. Although this news, originating from a Chinese linguist, was later discredited, since simplified characters replaced their traditional counterparts at the UN in 1971, a slurry of shrill rhetoric flooded the mass media and academic circles. The downpour of predictable prejudices that parted on either side of the issue were certainly not out of character.
The real devastation, if any, occurred in post-revolutionary China five decades ago. In the mid-1950s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduced easier ways to write frequently used characters, which eventually amounted to more than 2,000, in order to raise literacy rates and educate the masses. “Most of these simplified characters had been used by ordinary people and in folk literature for ages,” says Yao Rong-song, director of the National Taiwan Normal University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan Culture, Language and Literature. “The PRC’s simplification of characters just added a page to the long history of change in Han characters.” As a linguist specializing in Holo, the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group, he plays down the negativity aroused by character simplification lest its social and philological ramifications be easily dismissed.
After Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, Taiwan became the last major user of traditional characters in the Chinese-speaking world. “The fact is that there’s no place like Taiwan, with its obvious advantages in the standard-Chinese writing tradition,” says Dung Peng-cheng, secretary-general of the World Chinese Language Association.
The association was established in 1972 to promote Mandarin research and education at home and abroad, especially in Southeast Asian countries. At the end of this year, the group will hold its 8th global seminar on Chinese-language education in Taipei. Organizers of the triennial conference expect to see the number of participants exceed 300 from more than 20 countries this year. “Many Chinese-language teachers believe that those who know traditional characters well can quickly recognize their simplified versions,” Dung says.
Now, even those who care little about Chinese culture and history, or see them as just a part of the greater sum of Taiwanese traditions, find the use of traditional characters actually distinguishes the island from China. The once powerful symbol of Chinese heritage that was used to impress notions of unification these days indicates, paradoxically, difference and separateness.
In the broader context of the international use of Han characters, conflict between the two writing systems sheds light on how Chinese characters can be reshaped, through natural or artificial transformation, to write Holo and Hakka.
Writers have two choices if they want to express themselves in Holo or Hakka: to use Han characters or to romanize. The trouble is that Holo and Hakka are believed to contain considerable amounts of residual vocabulary from the languages of peoples in southern China. Following the long process of these peoples’ assimilation into Han culture, the notation of their languages remains disputed, so some vocabulary is difficult or impossible to record using Han characters. For this reason, such writers use a mixture of Han characters and romanized transliteration, which can be seen regularly in a column devoted to the mode in Chinese-language newspaper, The Liberty Times, as well as in a handful of periodicals.
In a society that for the last half-century has been bound by Han characters, however, the combination text can seem incomprehensible. For supporters of orthodox Chinese writing like Liao Hsien-hao, commissioner of the Taipei City Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs, such deviation is unnecessary. He says that minor modifications to the 37 phonetic symbols employed to teach Mandarin in Taiwan suffice.
Adopted by the Nationalist government in the 1910s, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also known as Bopomofo, came to the island with the regime in the late 1940s. “This system solved the old problem of indicating a character’s pronunciation with that of another,” Liao says. The pre-Republic method used two other characters, the first providing the initial consonant of the given character and the second indicating its final phoneme and tone.
Mandarin phonetic symbols have been used with traditional characters in Taiwan ever since the Kuomintang (KMT) began administering the island at the end of World War II, while the CCP adopted the Hanyu Pinyin system for China in the early 1950s. The International Organization for Standardization recognized Pinyin as the standard romanization for Mandarin in 1979 when Canton became Guangzhou and Peking Beijing. While Bopomofo is still the phonetic key to Mandarin for Taiwanese kids, some learn their mother tongues at schools through romanized texts.
Liao believes that it would be easier and less confusing for elementary students to learn just one phonetic system for both Mandarin and Taiwanese languages. Bopomofo seems, however, sorely suited to Taiwan’s aboriginal languages, for which the Ministry of Education (MOE) has announced plans for a romanized writing system.
Indeed, the history of the romanization of local languages in Taiwan started with the indigenous people. In the Dutch colonial period (1624-1662), Western missionaries transliterated the Siraya language spoken by Austronesian inhabitants of the southwestern plains. The Siraya people continued to use the romanized system on legal documents such as contracts and leases long after the Dutch left, and it was taken up again by Presbyterian missionaries in the late 19th century. Bibles, newspapers, dictionaries, essays and novels were published in romanized Holo, Hakka and indigenous languages. Until the 1970s, however, this writing system was forbidden by the KMT government, which promoted Mandarin as the one and only national language, and saw transliteration as un-Chinese, alien and somehow threatening.
By contrast, there is a certain comfort that those fixated with the Chinese cultural legacy find in Bopomofo--apparently it is compatible with the ideographic nature of Chinese writing--even though it is merely a set of phonetic symbols. Interestingly, while Taipei City casts itself as the world’s capital of traditional characters, it is the only place in Taiwan to adopt China’s Pinyin system instead of the Tongyong Pinyin system prescribed by the central government. This is even more ironic when one considers that the inventors of Hanyu Pinyin saw the romanization system as merely the first phase of their ultimate goal--the total obliteration of ideograms, or “square-block characters,” from the Chinese language.
Liao Hsien-hao points out that since the May Fourth Movement, a cultural movement that, among other things, advocated the use of the vernacular over classical Chinese in the late 1910s, Chinese characters had a bad name as the conveyors of the conservative and oppressive ideas of a perverted, elitist culture. In addition, their complex structure was deemed intimidating for native-speaker learners. “This is a Western viewpoint imposed on the Third World,” he says. “It does not do justice to the Chinese tradition.”
With a view to reevaluating Han characters, the Taipei City Government has hosted an annual Chinese Character Festival that includes seminars, calligraphy exhibitions and contests for the last two years. Attended by scholars from China, the event seeks to explore the educational, cultural and technological aspects of the usage of Han characters. “Along with the rapid progress of information and telecommunication technologies,” Liao says, “the potential of Han characters will be increasingly fulfilled.”
Liao points out that simplified characters remove much of the logical combination of recurrent parts in their orthodox counterparts. “Simplified characters might be easier to learn for beginners,” he says, “but the lack of logical connection within and between characters creates obstacles on the road to a subtler knowledge of the language.”
Dung Peng-cheng points out that China’s simplification of Han characters, aimed at educating the laborers and peasants who were the main supporters of the communist regime, was an authoritarian, radical effort that defied the natural laws of cultural development. “Now they’re still struggling to bridge the resultant gap with their own historical and cultural traditions.”
Yao Rong-song, director of Taiwan Languages and Literature Society, thinks that change in the usage and writing of language is a natural part of its development. He points out that, after further simplification came to a halt in the mid-1970s, the changes made are not as radical as they appear. “Many simplified characters are not so much the result of illogical restructuring as the reflection of common writing practices,” he says. “Creating new characters is nothing but a continuation of an age-old practice.”
Yet, he warns that in the expanded bank of character variants, those that were simplified arbitrarily may have severed some semantic connections with original forms and in this way cause confusion. In 2001, the MOE’s National Languages Committee, of which Yao is a member, published the Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants, which places the characters simplified by the Chinese alongside the antiques. The dictionary is one of the most comprehensive reference and research tools of its kind.
Yao is supervising the compilation of a Holo dictionary containing around 15,000 characters and phrases. This dictionary, scheduled for publication this year, enlists commonly used characters drawn from folk culture, for example, as well as those with clearer and cleaner philological lineage. “More often than not, there are no so-called standard characters,” he says, “only something approximating them.” Yao explains that the guiding principle of the dictionary, somewhat similar to that of China’s simplified characters, seeks to assure a level of understanding of Holo among sinologists the world over.
Yao believes that a phonetic writing system, free from Mandarin’s domineering influence, is essential for the education and preservation of Taiwanese languages. In contrast to users of romanized transliteration, however, he uses Han characters. “The partially romanized texts are still not well structured and lack grammatical consistency,” he says. “Yet the Taiwanese romanization is, after all, a way to address the inadequacy of Han characters,” he adds.
Perhaps, given the successful transition to complete romanization in Vietnam, what really matters in the development of writing systems in Taiwan and China is that they represent a plurality of thought. It is this lightening of the burden of tradition on the present that should be welcomed as truly out of character.