Does Computing Spell the End of Written Chinese?
It is not news that Chinese has been repeatedly voted around the world (even by the Chinese themselves), as the most difficult language to master. In addition to the weird pronunciation system involving for tones, the loose grammar rules, the most troubling of the language's characteristic to haunt the learners is the thousands and thousands of individual characters that must be memorized before basic reading and writing can be accomplished. With so many of these characters floating around, it is not surprising for even native speakers to forget the most commonly used ones.
The advent of computing seemed to resolve the problem. With the language turned into a Latin alphabet-based phonetic code called Pinyin, turning spoken Chinese into writing has never been easier. Just type in the sound with a regular keyboard, and a list of characters is automatically generated. Type in a combination of sounds to form vocabulary, and the character combinations are automatically narrowed down to those pairs that actually make sense. Writing has been reduced to simple process of elimination.
All is well until the writer is asked to pick up a pen and write some Chinese by hand. Having been writing so exclusively on computers by blindly picking the right characters on the screen, the writer generally loses the ability to come up with the correct characters off the top of his or her mind. The "multiple-choice" exercise on the computer has ruined the ability to do "free response." The frustration I felt the other day when asked to write down two sentences in Chinese was an evident realization of such grim reality.
As I ironically looked up unknown character on my computer to finish the handwritten note, a shocking thought suddenly struck me. Perhaps, because Chinese people everywhere are becoming "handwriting-illiterate" like I am, they will be less and less capable of producing Chinese without the assistance of a computing device. And perhaps, as the trend continues, Chinese as a written language will be the first one that will seek to exist in physical form. It will only become available in digital/virtual format.
Not being able to write a character in a pictograph-based language like Chinese is nothing like not being able to spell out a word in a alphabetical one like English. Due to the mind's innate unscrambling ability, a misspelled word, if all major letters (notably at the beginning and end of the word) are correctly included, can still be deciphered by the mind. And even if deciphering is not possible, by guessing what the word is based on context of what other words are near it, we can figure out what approximate meaning it is intended to express.
Knowing such capability of the mind, other pictograph-based languages have long ago moved onto pronunciation-based scripts. Most notably, the three languages that originally used Chinese characters (Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) all moved to their own scripts, with some (Vietnamese and North Korean) completely abolishing the use of characters. Even Japanese, where characters are still thoroughly used in everyday language, unknown characters in handwriting can easily be replaced with phonetic symbols for (albeit a bit childish) correctness.
Chinese Pinyin phonetic symbols, on the other hand, are simple learning instruments that are not designed to be part of the written language. Replacing unknown characters with Pinyin is only acceptable for elementary school students. All adults can do during writing is truly to write "around" the unknown characters by expressing the intended meaning in other ways (with known characters) or, if they are not embarrassed in public, look up the characters in a dictionary. Either way, there is no getting around actually writing down characters to one's best knowledge.
Yet, I am suggesting that Chinese move to a phonetic written system (as so many literati in the past suggested) or that any specific measures be taken to counter the "handwritten-illiteracy" of even the native speakers. With the increasing popularity of iPad and other handheld writing devices, maybe humanity will in the near future face a day where pen and paper become completely obsolete. When that day comes, the Chinese language will be ready to sustain itself even with existing level of complexity and difficulty.
The advent of computing seemed to resolve the problem. With the language turned into a Latin alphabet-based phonetic code called Pinyin, turning spoken Chinese into writing has never been easier. Just type in the sound with a regular keyboard, and a list of characters is automatically generated. Type in a combination of sounds to form vocabulary, and the character combinations are automatically narrowed down to those pairs that actually make sense. Writing has been reduced to simple process of elimination.
All is well until the writer is asked to pick up a pen and write some Chinese by hand. Having been writing so exclusively on computers by blindly picking the right characters on the screen, the writer generally loses the ability to come up with the correct characters off the top of his or her mind. The "multiple-choice" exercise on the computer has ruined the ability to do "free response." The frustration I felt the other day when asked to write down two sentences in Chinese was an evident realization of such grim reality.
As I ironically looked up unknown character on my computer to finish the handwritten note, a shocking thought suddenly struck me. Perhaps, because Chinese people everywhere are becoming "handwriting-illiterate" like I am, they will be less and less capable of producing Chinese without the assistance of a computing device. And perhaps, as the trend continues, Chinese as a written language will be the first one that will seek to exist in physical form. It will only become available in digital/virtual format.
Not being able to write a character in a pictograph-based language like Chinese is nothing like not being able to spell out a word in a alphabetical one like English. Due to the mind's innate unscrambling ability, a misspelled word, if all major letters (notably at the beginning and end of the word) are correctly included, can still be deciphered by the mind. And even if deciphering is not possible, by guessing what the word is based on context of what other words are near it, we can figure out what approximate meaning it is intended to express.
Knowing such capability of the mind, other pictograph-based languages have long ago moved onto pronunciation-based scripts. Most notably, the three languages that originally used Chinese characters (Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) all moved to their own scripts, with some (Vietnamese and North Korean) completely abolishing the use of characters. Even Japanese, where characters are still thoroughly used in everyday language, unknown characters in handwriting can easily be replaced with phonetic symbols for (albeit a bit childish) correctness.
Chinese Pinyin phonetic symbols, on the other hand, are simple learning instruments that are not designed to be part of the written language. Replacing unknown characters with Pinyin is only acceptable for elementary school students. All adults can do during writing is truly to write "around" the unknown characters by expressing the intended meaning in other ways (with known characters) or, if they are not embarrassed in public, look up the characters in a dictionary. Either way, there is no getting around actually writing down characters to one's best knowledge.
Yet, I am suggesting that Chinese move to a phonetic written system (as so many literati in the past suggested) or that any specific measures be taken to counter the "handwritten-illiteracy" of even the native speakers. With the increasing popularity of iPad and other handheld writing devices, maybe humanity will in the near future face a day where pen and paper become completely obsolete. When that day comes, the Chinese language will be ready to sustain itself even with existing level of complexity and difficulty.
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