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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, bring language as my plus one.
Today’s episode is about how the Chinese writing system has adapted, or been adapted, to contend with all the obstacles in its interactions with the rest of the world, as technologies like typing machines, telegraphy, computer programming, have been designed with the relatively tiny Roman alphabet in mind - so how does Chinese, a completely different writing system, negotiate that? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT!
I’ll be doing something a bit different in two weeks instead of a new episode in your podfeed, I’ll be livestreaming at Youtube.com/allusionistshow to talk about how the show is made - what things like the inwhiches and the randomly selected words are for, how the show has changed during its nearly 7.5 years of existence, how a topic goes from a little germ to an idea in full bloom (or at least partial bloom) and I can even go into how a specific episode came about if there are ones you’re interested in. So if you’re curious about this show or about making podcasts yourself, join me for behindsceneslusionist at Youtube.com/allusionistshow on 1 May 2022. There’ll be two showings, 10.30am UK time to catch the awake hours of people east of the Atlantic, and 7pm UK time for those more westerly. The videos will also be available after, but if you’re there live, you get to participate in the chat, which to me is the funnest part of a livestream. 1 May at Youtube.com/allusionistshow. And the usual audio pod will be back in your feed mid-May.
On with the show.
JING TSU: Chinese is the oldest still living language spoken by people. And this was somebody that the Westerners, outsiders, really admired when it first came to China: this one complex, enormously accomplished writing system, not to mention this massive literary tradition that went with it. So all these extraordinary things; but then, depending on how China's relationship was to Europe or the US, the opinion of Chinese characters or writing system also went through its ups and downs. So in the 18th century, it was absolutely adored, admired, idealized, even fetishised. The 19th century, the age of imperialism and justification of the strong against the weak - and language kind of got dragged in there too, with the theory of evolution where it became kind of primitive and backwards, like an impediment. So what was once admired as its complexity and artistry became kind of like a cumbersome, outdated relic.
JING TSU: My name is Jing Tsu. I teach at Yale University; I'm a specialist of modern China studies, from literature, politics, history, and and science and technology, and the author of Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern.
I think it's really a book about what happened to the written Chinese script and the age of the Western alphabet. Because we think of all the important transformative game-changing global technologies in communication, like telegraphs, typewriters and computers: none of it was really designed with Chinese in mind. They were all for alphabetic, precisely English language.
HZ: It seems a bit unfair for China to be left behind by writing technologies, given that China had the movable type printing press centuries before Europe.
JING TSU: A fact they will continue to flaunt! That is the question; that's why the catching up was doubled with this memory of “How did we get to this point? We were leading, how do we now end up chasing someone else's writing system from behind?”
HZ: Peaked too early?
JING TSU: And I think it is true, yeah, there is such a thing. When we look at the history of science and technology, there is such a thing as peaking too early; or that you invent something, but the other conditions are not there. And I think with the 20th century or late 19th century, it is really about the dominance of alphabetic languages, and they made these incredible strides. Telegraphy was critical in the Industrial Revolution. And so really it sort of had the first movers advantage. So all of a sudden China found it had to catch up to this infrastructure that's there, but not designed in their own language.
HZ: What was China’s impetus to do try to adapt to these technologies, or to try to transliterate the language to the Roman alphabet?
JING TSU: It's really a great question. And this is really at the heart of China's longing, modern China's longing throughout the 20th century, which was to join the world. Outside of China, even to this day, you know, we say that more people speak Chinese and the Chinese is the most spoken, used language in any of the language. Which is true, but that's because there's 1.3 billion Chinese people. So Chinese tends to be still used by predominantly Chinese. And the issue is, if you internationalize, you obviously have to adapt to the system that's out there. To create it from scratch, based on your own image - which had been talked about in the 1970s when China was trying to get into the computing age, China thought very long and hard about it - it would just simply be too costly, too inefficient, and take too much time to try to create the entire ecosystem of Chinese computing, in Chinese language with Chinese software, so on and so forth. So, to integrate with a world that was so much more expedient way and modernization, which is really what going out in the world meant for China: it is a way of revitalizing, modernizing and strengthening the country.
HZ: Here’s one essential problem that the Chinese language had to wrestle with: alphabetisation. As a primary English speaker, I take for granted that the 26 letters of the English alphabet are arranged in a particular sequence - A being followed by B is right there in the word ‘alphabet’, from the Greek letters alpha and beta. The ordering of the letters, which is of unknown provenance, is then used to organise information - although that was a point of contention for quite a while, for instance the Doomsday Book of 1086 listed all the land values in England by the owner’s social ranking first, then geography; medieval encyclopaedias were ordered by theological importance, D for Deus as in God first, not A for angels - so the imposition of alphabetical order was controversially non-hierarchical, because alpabetisation was supposed to be neutral, dammit! But it wasn’t for Chinese, because how do you alphabetise that kind of writing system?
JING TSU: Chinese characters are importantly not made up of letters. It's not in 26 units that you can then recombine and thusly to form any word you like. The Chinese language is really made of individual characters, where some people call it ideographs or logographs. There's a number of misnomers and proposed names to describe it. But I just use ‘character’, because that's the most familiar one. Characters are not made of letters; they're made of, fundamentally, strokes. One of the reasons that ‘ideograph’ or ‘logogram’ tend to be misleading, or ‘pictograph’, even worse, which is the biggest misnomer of all: it's really because it's not just pictographic. There's actually phonetic property in Chinese characters as well, but it's more faint. And so it’s a combination of semantic and phonetic cues that you get from a character.
Now, going back to the other side - I feel like I'm in a boxing ring, now, back to the other corner, talking about English alphabet! Voila: you have 26 units: simple, clean, easy to write - what’s the most complicated a letter you can write? The capital letter E has four strokes, so maybe that's the most complicated in terms of number of strokes.
HZ: All seems very banal when you think, "Wow, the most complicated one is E."
JING TSU: I know! Whereas in Chinese, I think there's like 64 stroke counts. I think some people that came up with more than a hundred or something like that; but yes, there are many, many more. Also - this is the one problem in Chinese that's just maddening for many - is that when you look at a character, it is made up of parts, and it’s kind of clustered together, and the way they cluster are in different patterns. So some can be split into two halves, so there's a part on top and the top part on bottom, there's also a side by side; but then it gets a little more complicated where you have diagonals and you have to kind of layer like a Christmas tree. Or simply one giant unit that cannot be broken down. So the positionality within the character, which was part of compositional logic, is also incredibly challenging for any attempt to put it via mechanical print or let alone digitization.
The tricky part is actually the size. There's the complexity of the characters themselves, and there's the size, the number of characters, which at some point was counted around 80,000, even though, you'd be relieved to know, that for decent average literacy, to read newspapers and so on and so forth, you probably need about between 3,000 to 5,000 characters. On top of there being so many characters, and each hard to learn, there's also the problem of tones. Now in English, we also have tones. My tone is modulating all the time, and so is yours; it is different between when we say “Yes?” and “Yes.” But of course, it is not just a question of being interrogatory or affirmative: in Chinese, those tones actually designate complete different characters. And so the only way you can tell them apart, that's why the tones are formalized in Chinese and standard speech: you have basically four, in Mandarin speech you have four, or what we call Putonghua, common speech, now, you have maybe five tones sometimes, but maybe four predominant tones. When you get to the south, you have many more, a range of six to nine. But those are more kind of dialects. So standardization is also a big plot, because without the force of standardization, China could not have modernized or integrated or turned its writing system into technology.
HZ: It's an extraordinary tension, because so much is lost if you have to convert the language into a totally different writing system.
JING TSU: It really is. And actually one of the best demonstrations that I thought a very one of the most clever demonstrations this one where this very clever and probably the most important linguist the 20th century in China, Zhao Yuanren, told the story of the stone lions.
HZ: It’s a short poem from the 1930s called in English "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den". A poet called Sir Shi likes to eat lions.
JING TSU: And he went to the market and picked out these 10 lions that he bought them and take them home to eat them. Then he realized they were actually made of stone.
HZ: Whoops!
JING TSU: And he told it with Chinese characters and then he told it in Romanised characters. All the characters are spelled S H I, and it’s just “Shi shi shi shi shi” 92 times.
HZ: The point being that the poem works when you read it written in Chinese, but because the words are all homophones, it’s incomprehensible when read aloud and therefore also when it is transliterated into the Roman alphabet.
JING TSU: And the point he demonstrates is several things. One is Chinese actually makes great sacrifices in order to communicate with the world, because what you lost in Romanisation is the visual complexity and distinctiveness of Chinese characters, because there's a lot of homophones in the Chinese language. So actually bizarrely, in some ways it should have evolved exactly the way it had, because without these complex structures, you actually wouldn't really know immediately, which characters meant, which “shi” is meant. But when you look at Romanisation system alone it’s just “shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi” and no tone to distinguish which characters meant so on and so forth because in Chinese, many, many characters can have the same tone, so on and so forth. So he wrote that just to demonstrate how extraordinary the Chinese writing system is and the expressivity that's lost when you Romanise it.
HZ: As well as writing this antanaclastic poem about lion-eating, Zhao Yuanren had been part of a group of linguists who in the 1920s invented a Romanisation system called GR, with spellings that tried to capture the tones of speech. In 1928 the government made it China’s official Romanisation system - but it was not popular with the general public, and instead in 1958 Pinyin was made official by the Chinese government, and worldwide that was eventually the dominant Romanisation system invented by Chinese people - there had been several made outside of China. Of those, the most widespread from the mid-19th century had been the Wade-Giles system. Ding ding, double eponym!
JING TSU: Wade-Giles. Wade Giles named after Thomas Wade, a British diplomat who was also involved in the Opium War and Herbert Giles, his later colleague who improved upon his system. Wade-Giles is basically these standard Romanisation system before Pinyin. But it had these odd quirks, because it's developed by Westerners for mostly their own speaking habits. It had these apostrophes, which are kind of like weirdly used. It had these spellings which are not guttural stops as the linguists would say, which were not really natural for the Chinese. It was in essence not really made for the Chinese, but because it was used by foreigners, it also became kind of catchy.
Pinyin was the final move, the final transformation where Chinese said, "okay, we lived with Wade-Giles long enough. It doesn't really work for us. We need our own system. So we're going to go back." So they reviewed all the previous missionary schemes. They reviewed the Latin new script, reviewed national organization, even Wade-Giles. They looked at all these prior Romanisation systems and decided, okay, this is what we need to come up with. What do you use? Just the 26 letters. We're not going to add diacritical marks. We're not going to add anything because we want to integrate as seamlessly as possible. And there you have it.
And actually, just as a way of illustrating: my name is in some ways a perfect summation of the different histories of Romanisation, because my first name J I N G is Pinyin; but my middle name, which I never use, Y U E N, is actually Wade Giles. And my last name, TSU, really just defies all Romanisation schemes because it’s something that my mother made up. When we came to the States and we went through immigration, they knew my mother's last name, which was already spelled H S U, her maiden name. But my last name, our last thing was of course my father's and it was Tsu, which actually, remember the story about the stone lion: I share the same last name as Sir Stone. And so my last name T S U, according to Romanisation and the proper Pinyin spelling, should be S H I; but we kept it because it's memorabilia so to speak from how we migrated through three different contexts. But I am very glad for my name. There's certainly no other person with my name.
HZ: What other benefits were there of writing the Latin script? It was quicker, right?
JING TSU: It's true. In fact, the Chinese themselves, very early on in the late 19th century, they thought this is a much easier way to notate Chinese and you can use this to teach it to Chinese much more readily. For instance, I learned Chinese basically under the national system, cause I grew up in Taiwan, at least first half of my childhood. And I remember every night just going home and practicing writing these characters I learned, each for about 30, 40 times depending how complicated the character was. It was obviously very time consuming. If I learned it by Pinyin, I probably would have learned it in alphabet letters first, and then trying to use the sound to then bridge the gap to recognizing how the characters were written. So they considered it faster, and the Chinese script reformers of the late 19th century certainly thought so. And they were actually incredibly radical and progressive, actually much more so than later decades because the late 19th century, the Chinese nation had not yet been founded. That doesn't happen till 1912. And these late Qing reformers were late 19th century. The last dynasty is called Qing, which is why I call them late Qing reformers. And they're really living in a time where almost anything goes because the last empire was teetering and they were just embracing this influx of Western ideas and technology and science and anything from like toothpaste to face powder. And they were experimenting and taking cues from the Western alphabet; they were adapting the alphabetic letters, so they use 26 plus some to like fit their own dialect and so on and so forth. And they were actually incredibly cavalier about Chinese written languages, and said, "Why don't we just do without it?" So that generation, that first generation of reformers were actually prepared to live without the Chinese script.
HZ: They were also hoping that it would make it easier for people around China to learn to read and write - at the beginning of the 20th century, only an estimated 10-15% of the populace was literate. And having to rote-learn thousands of characters was standing in the way.
JING TSU: But then everything changed once you have the Chinese nation, because as a nation, unity was absolutely key. So gradually the idea of actually abolishing the Chinese script was taken off the table. If anything, they knew that they needed maybe an auxiliary system like Romanisation, but only to, in some ways, supplement the written Chinese language, which they decided they would keep and preserve at all costs. These individuals who took up their role in this revolution, against all odds, in many circumstances, and decided, hell or high water, the Chinese script is going to survive.
If you ask anyone what do they know about Chinese characters, they're very likely to know one of two things: that there's this Romanisation called Pinyin, and then that there's some simplified characters and these long complicated forms of characters. And both of these were institutionalized and formalized in the 1950s under Mao, which I think is one of the reasons why people tend to associate it with modern China. But there's a backstory to this that's actually vitally important because of course, the first Romanisation was really brought in by Western missionaries in the 1560s, when these Jesuit missionaries came to China and compiled the first Chinese western language dictionary, which was Portuguese. They were making up dictionaries for their own use. They were creating cheat sheets about how to pronounce these words. Because the missionaries were sent to whichever corner of China they were sent to, and they had to immediately try to pick up the local local speech patterns and sounds. They basically brought in a way of notating how Chinese sounded to their ear, that is to say a foreign ear, that this system really kind of struck Chinese as quite remarkable.
The problem with that, of course, was that there were many examples of these, and back then there was not one system of Romanisation. And depending on whether you're French, German or Italian, you also Romanised Chinese differently because you tend to filter it through your own ear.
HZ: So although Chinese had been Romanised for centuries, there was no standard system, no consistency, and all with their flaws in approximating the sounds of Chinese using the Roman alphabet.
JING TSU: And then in the 1920s, the Chinese themselves started to develop what came to be these two major systems. Because it was very much a struggle internationally of deciding who gets to set the standard for how Chinese is represented to the outside world, but also internally between the Communists and the Nationalists, the two parties that were fighting for power. So that would be the Communists, a pretty young party at the time, founded in 1921, and the national Romanisation system, which was championed by the Nationalists, who later were defeated and retreated to Taiwan.
These two systems were vying for dominance because they very much realized that their chance that political control is very much to win over the hearts and minds of the people, who desperately needed literacy. China was an agrarian society for, for a very long time to the, probably to mid 20th century and the population, there was always a struggle to try to teach and to make the population literate. And so that was critical. But then, you know, we're talking about wars. There was civil war, fights between Communist and Nationalist, but also there was the Japanese invasion, that then kind of merged with World War II.
HZ: What kind of impact did the Japanese invasion have on the cause of Romanising Chinese?
JING TSU: If anything, it hardened the Chinese resolve to build itself up and to modernize and to refute Japanese influences. In other ways, the Japanese invasion of China really disrupted, but it also galvanized the Chinese to make sure that their language reform survives. That's actually, when I talked about these two major systems that were launched by the nationalists and communists: during Japanese invasion, that's where they fought the hardest. They were trying to hardest to propose their system to people who were in occupied zones, running from one place to another. It was actually pretty extraordinary they were doing all this while there was a war going on. You would think the last thing that people think about is, “Should I write Chinese in this Romanisation or the other Romanisation?” But it was a completely subsumed under the imperative of national survival.
So all these difficulties, eventually the system never had a resolution until the 1950s, basically very soon after new China, what we know today as PRC, was founded, October 1949. Just months after, Mao summoned a team, a committee that he appointed to just deal with the Chinese script reform. And they basically had two main mandates. One was to standardize Romanisation. And the other was to simplify characters. And standardized Romanisation was really important because the Chinese felt we have to be able to have a say and to decide how we Romanised our language, the outward facing side of how we communicate with the world, like whether you are sending mail abroad or receiving, that means you need to have street names I can be delivered to, and all this needs to be standardized.
HZ: I was sort of surprised at how Mao Zedong seemed very pro Latinisation.
JING TSU: I know, that was very counter-intuitive, right? China's Romanisation, Mao's Romanisation, was really also part of this larger Eurasian wave of Romanisation. And it does seem kind of paradoxical, doesn't it, this communist country saying that about Western alphabet, isn't that pandering to westernization? Isn't using alphabet letters while we're trying to fight and kick out Western imperialists, is there some contradiction here? But what they saw was different, or at least the way they came to justify was: the alphabet is a tool. And if we can use it to help us achieve our ends, like literacy, technology, unity, whatever it is, then why not? It is just the tool.
And in any case, they thought they were basically bending the West to serve China. Because they were not going to let go of the Chinese writing system. Characters are going to survive. But what the alphabet was going to do is be basically kind of almost like a plugin. It was going to help translate to the outside world, but by no means replace it.
HZ: Because when it came to the outside world’s new communication technologies, if China wanted to participate then it had to adapt its language or pay a heavy price - often literally. For instance when telegraphy was developed.
JING TSU: Yeah. Well that was a hard lesson learned. Telegraphic code for Chinese was not developed by the Chinese. It was actually first developed by the Danes. Denmark was a powerhouse and colonial power back then, it was a magnet in telegraphy, and wanted to push into the far Eastern market. Its only rival competitor were the British. And in the 1860s, countries that come to China and knock on its door, trying to lay cables, propose different ways of doing so, but China was a bit gun shy from the Opium War and remembered how the Westerners knock on doors pedaling certain goods like opium. When the Russians came they said, no thank you; when the French came, they also said, no thank you. Its answer was always, we have good men on horseback who can relay letters from one post, one town to the next. But the Danes were not going to take no for an answer. So they basically just secretly put down a cable line - this was on a moonless night, they just came, they snuck in, lay down the telegraph cable and left before dawn and it was done.
HZ: That doesn't seem like the easiest thing to do sneakily does it?
JING TSU: Well, there's a lot of sneaking around back then. I think that's how empires are built, you know, it's not really always definitely not by the highway. A lot of shenanigans and forcing a downright piracy if you ask me. But the point was that the Danes also recognize, “Okay, so we don't want to just force this down their throats because we might also get a lot of pushback from the Chinese populace,” which they were, because the population was very averse to building telegraphic lines. Because why? And this is where a cultural difference cultural religious difference is so important: because they were buried underground. And the Chinese had their ancestors buried underground. And I was actually incredibly, um, is really bad feng shui if you disturb the ancestral spirits. And he thought the Western just came in, lay their cables whichever which way, cutting through fields and through burial grounds with utter disrespect. And they said this: they said that the Westerners know of Jesus Christ, but they know nothing of reverence for your ancestors. And I thought that was so remarkable, because their objection was not just the intrusion of Western science technology, but also the total disregard of the native culture, the indigenous cultural system, which has its roots for millennia, and the Westerners want to upend that within weeks, if not just years.
And so the Danes aren't trying to overcome that, they say, "What if we just make it easier for them to use?" What they came up with was, because there was no alphabetic letters in Chinese, you can't really use Morse code; but you can use Morse code for numbers. So they decided they would just randomly assign these four-digit codes to each Chinese character. But of course there's a lot of drawbacks to that. First of all, you have to memorize which four digit code went with which character, which itself was prone to a lot of mistakes. And you had to look it up, because operators can't memorize the way they can as easily with 26 letters and their Morse code configurations of dots and dashes. Also this is the killer here: numbers, any number you sent is actually more expensive. It takes more dots and dashes to send numbers than alphabet letters.
HZ: In Morse code, Roman alphabet letters are between one and four dots or dashes; whereas one numeral is five dots or dashes - and it took four numerals to signify one Chinese character, so just to send one word in Chinese cost much more than the equivalent in the Roman alphabet.
JING TSU: So China was immediately disadvantaged from the beginning from having to use Morse code as numbers. Italian could basically be Italian or French can be French, English could English; but Chinese language had to be something other than what it was in order to be represented in telegraphy. And had to pay for that! Real downer. And it took them about 40, 50 years just to get International Telegraphic Union - which was of course Europe-led - to recognize that Chinese had to be an exception to their rules, pricing rules. But then the Chinese also thinking, you know, okay, we fought this hard to become an exception, but why should we be an exception in having to use our own language? So this was the 1920s, the Chinese knew, okay, we’ve got to do something else. We got to Romanise, we have to standardize, we have to take charge of standardization. And I would say that was probably the China's first experience with international organizations and what it had to do in order to intercept and to give power back to itself through standardization.
HZ: But then when computing came in, it was the same old kinds of problem for Chinese.
JING TSU: From telegraphy onwards, it's been really a process of breathless catching up. This pivot towards a computing age was kind of like a whole other question, right? That whole other revolution, because you cannot represent Chinese easily in computer language, which is zeros and ones. In the 1960s, pretty early on, and even 1950s, people in the West and in Silicon valley were recognizing that these giant machines that were used to crunch numbers, the original mainframe computers which were like the size of a room: oh, they're not just good for that. We could actually maybe use them to process information. And of course the first information is actually human language. That's the kind of information that needs to be communicated.
And at the time, one of the earliest standardizing codes, ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code Information Interchange - and as the title suggests, American - you can use ASCII to code English letters and that's what they were for. So each alphabet letter would be encoded in a string of binary numbers. So for instance, the letter A would be 1 0 0 0 0 0 1. A letter B would be 1 0 0 0 0 1 0. So you can imagine from that, it's almost like the Morse code, these are like the new dots and dashes in the computing age, you string them together to spell the word ‘cat’ or whatever you like. But for Chinese, of course, again, no alphabetic letters; so how are you supposed to represent it in computer codes?
HZ: You have to give every character its own code, but that is further complicated by some of the Chinese characters being used differently in languages elsewhere - for instance in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam...
JING TSU: They kind of differ slightly. So massive problem when it comes to coding and computers like, “oh my God, we're supposed to encode one character five different times?!” So it's like having the letter A encoded five different times. And that was a huge issue.
HZ: It takes up space, and it requires so much decision-making! Trying to deal with it is the Ideographic Research Group.
JING TSU: Whose sole job - they meet, like, I don't know, twice a year or something, they work in collaboration with Unicode - is to vet characters and figure out, okay, is this a character that we've encoded before? Should we encode as a separate character or should be the same and so don't take up an extra space.
HZ: They can't get all of that done in a human lifespan.
JING TSU: No, they can't. Exactly. They do this only because they love the Chinese ideographic language and they find it endlessly fascinating.
Any linguists will tell you all languages tend towards simplification and given the pressure on the simplification of language, like in modern days in our age, everything's about speed, precision, technical precision, and you know, efficiency and who can afford to have a language system to have to learn rotely like Chinese? And yet it survived. And not only that, I think being able to develop Chinese language in the digital form has also allowed China to develop this edge in natural language processing and to find its own niche. They managed to keep this language against all odds; and it was really the sheer force of will, the cultural value that's placed on their writing system. And I think that's why it makes this history so extraordinary.
HZ: Jing Tsu is professor of modern China studies at Yale University, and the author of the new book Kingdom of Characters, the Language Revolution that Made China. We barely scratched the surface of all that’s in there - there’s so much more about simplifying Chinese, typography, telegraphy, Romanisation, computerization, political squabbles, plucky individuals trying things against all odds. I’ll link to it at theallusionist.org/character.
As aforementioned, join me at youtube.com/allusionistshow on 1 May for behindsceneslusionist, and if you’re a patron of the show you get regular livestreams with me and my dictionary collection and the contents of my brain. Plus you get behind the scenes info about every episode, and a Discord community with your lovely fellow patrons. This week, Janell shared her dad’s beautiful handwritten list of homophones, compiled over a decade. And Sweth shared my new favourite word game Redactle. Come and join us at Patreon.com/allusionist.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
rale, noun (usually rales), medicine: an abnormal rattling sound heard when examining unhealthy lungs with a stethoscope.
Try using ‘rale’ in an email today, although I hope in an abstract way and that your lungs are not troubled by rattling.
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