{"id":5993,"date":"2025-06-28T06:29:51","date_gmt":"2025-06-28T13:29:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5993"},"modified":"2025-06-28T06:29:51","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T13:29:51","slug":"los-angeles-review-of-books-the-undying-chinese-writing-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5993","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles Review of Books: The Undying Chinese Writing System"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In January 2016, the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum published a post at Lingua Franca<\/em>,<\/a> The<\/em> Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em>\u2019s blog on language and writing in academe, bemoaning \u201cthe awful Chinese writing system.\u201d To his mind, that system\u2019s thousands of \u201cdiscrete graphic symbols\u201d\u2014around 3,000 of which must be memorized \u201cjust to be able to read the morning paper\u201d\u2014constitute \u201ca millstone round the neck of the whole Sinophone world, and should have been ditched decades ago.\u201d The post drew enough attention that some of the lay readers to whom it circulated may have imagined the argument as the first of its kind. In fact, Pullum was making a minor, irritated contribution to a civilizational debate that had begun at least 120 years before. In 1896, a medical student in Shanghai named Shen Xue published a treatise declaring that Chinese characters \u201cblocked the telegraphic wires, clogged the arteries of the brain, and prevented the advancement of scientific knowledge,\u201d thus marching the once-mighty Qing Empire down the road to ruin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is with an account of this dubious but telling proposition that Ulu\u011f Kuzuo\u011flu opens Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age <\/em>(2023), a study of the efforts to reform the Chinese writing system that flowered amid the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Almost all such efforts had withered by 1986, the year that the State Council of the People\u2019s Republic of China officially put an end to script reforms with a declaration that characters (a few thousand of which the Communist Party had ordered simplified, ostensibly for the sake of nationwide literacy rates and education levels, in the 1950s and \u201960s), would not be replaced by pinyin, the approved system of rendering Mandarin in the Latin alphabet. Three decades thereafter, observers like Pullum were still ruing the fact that such an \u201cobvious alternative\u201d had been consigned to \u201cpurposes like teaching, writing foreign names, and machine-assisted character entry. It\u2019s the awful character system that is central and revered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In January 2016, the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum published a post at Lingua Franca, The Chronicle of Higher Education\u2019s blog on language and writing in academe, bemoaning \u201cthe awful Chinese writing system.\u201d To his mind, that system\u2019s thousands of \u201cdiscrete graphic symbols\u201d\u2014around 3,000 of which must be memorized \u201cjust to be able to read the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,72,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-language","category-los-angeles-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5995,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993\/revisions\/5995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}