Feature

Character Assassination

by Tracy Pomerinke

The written language of China has the potential to create new international dialogue—but will the endangered script survive long enough to do it?

You know the feeling when you’re trying to retrieve a certain word from somewhere in your mind? The word seems like it’s right there on "the tip of your tongue" but you just can’t remember it? The Chinese have a name for the written equivalent: "forgetting characters upon lifting the pen." Just as traditional writing tools are being displaced by new technologies, Chinese characters are indeed facing the threat of elimination.

Last year, the University of Buffalo Art Gallery hosted a provocative exhibition illustrating the plight of China’s written language in the contemporary world. The exhibition — entitled Word and Meaning — featured the work of Chinese artists who are active in Canada, the United States, and Taiwan.

Of special note was the Great Wall of the New Millennium, erected by artist Wenda Gu. Tapestry panels were hung in the shape of a watchtower from China’s Great Wall and decorated with the script of a pseudo-language he synthesized from English, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi — but the writing was illegible to Chinese and English readers alike. The Great Wall offered a new take on the concept of a language barrier, portraying the role of words in the misunderstandings within and between cultures. The writing on the Wall also had something to say about the changing identity of written language in China.

Concern for the fate of Chinese characters extends well beyond the interest of artists alone. It’s become a topic of national and international debate — among scholars, businesses and everyday citizens. People are starting to wonder whether an elegant, complex script like Chinese can survive in a time of automation, efficiency, and Western pop culture.

An Ancient (Eastern) Script in Modern (Western) Times

The two most common writing systems in the world today — English in the West and Chinese in the East — bear little resemblance to one another. Written Chinese is not based on spoken language, is traditionally read from top to bottom, and doesn’t use an alphabet.

English words are written using only 26 different letters and most everyday English text is made up of the 2,000 most common words. But if you want to read the newspaper in China, you’ll need to have a working knowledge of three to four thousand Chinese characters or logograms. The written language is actually even more diverse — over 6,500 characters on the mainland, and double that in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The presence of a particular letter in an English word generally says something about how the word sounds. But the typical Chinese word comprises two characters — each written with an average of nine strokes — and contains phonetic as well as semantic information.

In form and function, English and Chinese just don’t seem to have very much in common. What happens, then, at the interface of these two distinct languages? What kind of dialogue takes place when East meets West in the land of words and symbols?

Foreign Influence

Until the last 100 years or so, all Chinese writing was formed in classical script, named after the Five Classics of Confucianism. Classical Chinese was also prestigious because it wasn’t based on everyday speech. Today, after decades of language reforms and character simplification, Classical Chinese is no longer the standard on the mainland, and the official language of instruction in schools is based on a vernacular form of writing that literally translates to "unadorned words."

At the UB exhibition, artist Zhang Hongtu presented a controversial perspective on how Western influences have affected Classical writing. Soy Sauce Calligraphy featured the script of esteemed Chinese texts written in soy sauce rather than ink. By transcribing important Classical works using a consumable medium that Westerners stereotypically associate with the Chinese, Soy Sauce Calligraphy speaks to the value and longevity of Classical script within a modern context.

To be more compatible with other language systems (especially English), Chinese characters must undergo a complete transformation. The process is called Romanization, so-named because the pronunciation of Chinese characters is written in terms of the Roman alphabet. The most popular Romanized system of Chinese is known as pinyin, adopted by China in 1958. Incidentally, it’s under the transcription of pinyin that China’s capital is no longer written as Peking but Beijing. The United Nations commonly uses pinyin to transcribe documents of international importance. What’s amazing is that schools in China use pinyin to help students learn pronunciation of Chinese — a western intermediary for learning their own language!

What is the long-term effect of using a system like pinyin? The experiences of Japan and South Korea may provide some insight. In these countries you’ll find text as a combination of Chinese characters and a phonetic system, and the result has been a decrease in the role of more complex characters.

Consider the format of Chinese typography; "westernization" is written between the lines. On the mainland, most text is now laid out like English along horizontal lines in a left-to-right orientation because this allows for the inclusion of English names and mathematical equations. In Taiwan you’re much more likely to see Chinese text laid out in the traditional format of vertical columns, but walking down the street you’re apt to find a confusing mix of signs—some left to right, some top to bottom. You might also notice a sign for Coca-Cola written as Ke Kou Ko Le. For the Chinese, the meaning of this phonetic spelling is "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice"!

Invasion of the "Electric Brain"

Advancing information technology represents another powerful and invasive influence of Western culture today. Even the word "computer" required the Chinese to create a new combination of characters, which literally translates as "electric brain." If it’s not the 26 letters of English challenging written Chinese, it’s the menacing 0s and 1s of a calculating machine.

But history may provide good reason to expect that the written language of China will remain intact, even with the surge of computer technology. After all, the invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s had a far greater impact on efficiency and mass communication in Europe than it did in China.

In part, this was due to the basic form of the languages. Chinese characters were difficult to standardize into a device of any reasonable size. Even with the benefit of 500 years, technology continues to address this problem. Computers operate to minimize memory requirements and optimize data transmission. It’s much easier to adapt a 26-letter alphabet to that kind of environment than it is to accommodate a language that uses several thousand characters. Not surprisingly, Chinese is one of the least computer-friendly languages.

Even more interesting is what the printing press example says about culture, and the difference in Chinese and Western attitudes toward "progress." It’s ironic that Chinese technology made mass communication possible in the first place. The Chinese invented rag-paper and refined the preparation of ink. They also developed block printing and movable clay type. These innovations were important to the development of the printing press and made it easier to disseminate information to far-reaching audiences. If the Chinese only knew where that technology would lead.

Chinese Characters Immigrate to the Web

Using computers, the printed word is transmitted to wider audiences with greater speed than Gutenberg (or the Chinese) could have ever dreamed. On the Internet, the printed word has taken on a new role as the language of real-time communication.

But this phenomenon favours certain languages, particularly English. Online news source clickz.com reports that about 48 percent of Internet users world-wide speak English as a first language, followed by 10 percent who speak Japanese, and 8 percent who speak Chinese. In terms of a second language, English is clearly predominant. The net result (forgive the pun) is that about 80 percent of the text appearing on the web is English. French President Jacques Chirac described the predominance of English on the web as "a major risk for humanity."

The Chinese are meeting the challenge. Development in computer technology is specifically aimed at improving the compatibility of computers with the Chinese language. And there is significant corporate support—after all, Internet businesses stand to gain a billion more consumers with the endeavour’s success.

At present, there are over 22 million Internet users in China. The number appears to have been growing exponentially over the past few years and analysts expect the trend to continue. As the world’s most populous nation, we’re likely to see China emerge globally as a major Internet presence.

It’s not surprising that new technology is facilitating the process. For over a decade, it’s been possible to type pinyin into standard a computer keyboard and have the words converted into Chinese text. But the pinyin software has enjoyed limited popularity, since it requires knowledge of a Western-language intermediary. In 1997, a small company called Zi revolutionized the "input problem" by producing a keyboard and supporting software that were able to break down and rebuild any Chinese character.

Software introduced earlier this year allows the input of Chinese characters using a mouse rather than a keyboard; any character can be entered with four clicks or fewer. The Xinhua News Agency reported the fastest input speed as a modest 30 characters per minute, but the software was still praised for its potential to help Chinese users surf the web. Up-and-coming technologies are sure to encourage customer satisfaction and make the web a more hospitable place for the Chinese.

Honouring the Essence

There’s no question that China has caught the computer bug — but the Chinese language has clearly resisted the capture of technology. It’s as if there were some power in these ancient symbols that surpasses everyday function and reaches beyond their form. Of course, this comes as no surprise to the Chinese, who’ve long held that the elegant script of Chinese calligraphy is endowed with some transcendent essence.

Western pop culture is starting to take notice. Chinese characters are said to have a Gestalt quality and are thus more visually interesting and memorable. Maybe that’s what makes them so appealing to Westerners. Or maybe it’s the attraction of something foreign and a bit mysterious. Whatever the draw, there is growing demand for products with Chinese writing, and in the spirit of "gotta have it," we’re claiming the characters as our own.

Chinese writing is appearing as decoration on all sorts of products — planters, wallpaper, keychains. We’re buying, wearing, and using items that have written messages whose content is, for the most part, unknown. But hey — if it looks good it doesn’t matter, right?

But isn’t that a perversion of the language, using it just for how it looks, separating aesthetic value from meaning? Doesn’t that cause an unnatural split between the form and function of words?

People admire the Chinese characters for "happiness," noticing how the strokes are combined to create a beautiful symbol. But, if we don’t know what the symbols mean, aren’t we just as likely to enjoy the aesthetic value of the characters for "hate" or "merciless"? The formation of lines in all of these characters is interesting, evocative, and beautiful—but without knowing what a symbol means, do we really want to put it on a T-shirt?

Socrates said in the Phaedo that "[t]he misuse of language is not only distasteful in itself, but actually harmful to the soul." W. H. Auden claimed that he and his fellow poets had a single political duty — to defend language from corruption. When language is corrupted, he admonished, people lose faith in the words and violence results.

Relax, some people say, it’s art. After all, the written Chinese of today began as art five to six thousand years ago — pictograph characters that formed a complete system for language much later. The Chinese have a long tradition of combining their written language with art in disciplines such as poetry, painting, and aesthetics. And Chinese calligraphy is a form of abstract expression, predating Western abstract art by thousands of years.

But there’s still something troubling. Language is essentially a system of shared meaning. When you take a Chinese character and slap it on a product to appeal to Western consumers, you’re extending the language to people who don’t share its meaning — and language deprived of meaning has been rendered lifeless, its essence lost.

Post-Script

Communication has to do with making something common, conveying information from one to another. The word "symbol" is derived from the Greek meaning "to draw together." Psychologist Rollo May observed that symbols bring together different aspects of our experience — conscious and unconscious, past and present, individual and social.

True to their role as symbols, Chinese characters transcend a great variety of spoken dialects. Today, the written language of China is literally a source of cultural unity for more than a billion people, and links them to Chinese poetry and prose throughout the ages.

But the influence of Westernization on Chinese characters is in a sense diabolic — running counter to the nature of symbols — and has a disconnecting, alienating effect. Artist Xu Bing illustrated this effect at the UB exhibition with his New English Calligraphy. The work featured a new English writing font made of deconstructed Chinese characters and written with a Chinese brush.

The gradual destruction of China’s written language is apparent. Modern software is taking Chinese characters apart stroke by stroke, and novelty art is blindly separating characters from their associated meanings. Not only are we pulling petals off the flower, we’re yanking the plant away from its roots.

New seeds, however, are planted with each generation. In fact, students in China spend about 30 percent of their primary school life mastering subtleties of the language. Yet with the expansion of human knowledge and the growing emphasis on technical skills in school curriculum, it’s likely that less time will be devoted to learning the art of writing Chinese. In that climate, proficiency in the written language can only deteriorate.

Chinese is experiencing a crisis of the written language, but the language itself offers some indication for hope. The word "crisis" in Chinese comprises two characters — one meaning danger, and the other opportunity.

With the rendezvous of English and Chinese there is a unique chance for communication. And if the exchange evolves to real intercultural dialogue, the process will have great creative possibilities. It might even give birth to a whole new way of relating to each other.

Tracy Pomerinke is managing language challenges of her own as a native English speaker living — and writing — in Germany. You can reach her at pomerinke@t-online.de.