Bad Language

There was an interesting article recently on Chinasmack about a post on 'sexist' Chinese characters purportedly written by a Chinese lawyer, which recommended that certain offending characters be rewritten. The claim that this would 'reduce rape by 2o%' presumably means that the post is not meant to be taken entirely seriously, but I do think it points towards some of the bizarre ideas about the Chinese language that have floated around, both in China and the West, over the years.

Many of the old characters denoting what we now call 'ethnic minorities' or 'minority nationalities' in China were written with a dog or insect radical. For those not familiar with Chinese characters, the effect of this is akin to filing those particular peoples under the dog or insect section of the encyclopedia. While this is fine in Imperial China where there is Chinese civilization and then there are barbarians, it is obviously a bit embarassing once you get to the twentieth century and Communism. So the bestial elements of these characters were removed and replaced by the radical for 'man'. Whether this changed the position of minorities within Chinese culture is debatable.

The poor Chinese language must have had more nonsense written about it than any other. This week it was Paddy Ashdown's turn in the Guardian. His introduction to their 'Learn Mandarin Chinese' pullout got a few things wrong: Chinese is not the only tonal language in the world, nor is it monosyllabic. I can see what he is trying to say - each character is a monosyllable and a semantic unit (though even this is not entirely correct) - but that does not mean that the language is monosyllabic.

Misconceptions about Chinese have a long history. In the seventeenth century scholars often (mis)used it in their debates about language, with some even claiming that it was the language spoken by men before Babel. This was at a time when English radicals were rewriting English words to show their true, divine meaning; so 'crystal' became 'Christ-all' and 'spiritual' became 'spi-right to all'. Geddit? This wasn't mere bad punning but rather an attempt to find a holy power in language that overcame the separation between sign and referent. While we may sneer at this from our post-Enlightenment heights, similar ideas about language are still with us. Look at the Supreme Alphabet of the Nation of Gods and Earths (an offshoot of Nation of Islam).

Even now the Chinese language is credited with a quasi-mystical power. Think of all those people who get Chinese tattoos, which, even if they in fact read 超市 (supermarket), are believed to have spiritual significance. The idea that Chinese is entirely logographic - each character is a little picture of the thing it denotes - still persists.

The Chinese language is indeed wonderful, but its pictorial element, as well as its powers to reduce rape or ward off racism are exaggerated.