The Chinese Language: Ancient World of Symbols

The Chinese language belongs to Sino-Tibetan family group and represents a national language of the Han nationality (汉族，hànzú), who are actually the ethnic Chinese, composing 94% of China’s population. One of the names of the Chinese language (汉语，hànyǔ，“The language of Han”), originates from the name of this ethnic group. Besides being an official language of PRC, the Chinese language is regarded as the language of inter-ethnic communication between people of different nationalities, living in China (there are more than 50 different nationalities there).

Moreover, the Chinese language is one of the most commonly used languages in the world and it is one of the official languages of UN.

  The Chinese language is based on the Chinese hieroglyphic script differing much from other systems of written languages. Unlike the letters of the most common phonetic writing systems, each hieroglyphic sign of the Chinese language corresponds to a word or syllable-morpheme. The total number of suchlike signs exceeds 50 thousands in the Chinese language. But in practice 5-8 thousand hieroglyphic signs are used only. 3-4 thousand hieroglyphs are enough for reading the contemporary literature and paper articles. By the way, this amount of hieroglyphs meets the full secondary school PRC requirements. (Note that it goes about the amount of hieroglyphs, but not words. Words in contemporary Chinese are mostly formed by two or more hieroglyphs, while the amount of recognizable words required for reading and usually formed by means of hieroglyph combinations, exceed 10 thousands).

 Chinese character script is one of the most ancient writing systems on earth and the only hieroglyphic writing kept safe till nowadays. It appeared four thousands, or, by some sources – six thousands years ago. At the very moment, Chinese script is being used by a quarter of our planet’s population.

The Chinese script is an ideographic writing system. Chinese characters, as writing signs of any other languages, have three basic characteristics: writing, reading and meaning. Each character’s graphic image (or its components) is to refer to some visual sign and further – to a picture. It makes possible a certain correlation between hieroglyph’s graphics and meaning. That is why any contemporary Chinese is able to read and understand the one- or even two-thousand-years-old text.

In the whole Asian region the Chinese script turned into a symbol of the Chinese culture, not only uniting different dialectic groups’ members (interacted through written characters being unable to understand the spoken language of each other) but connecting neighboring countries and creating so-called “sinocentric” area.

 It was the Chinese script that prevented appearance of local national identity in provinces. Chinese characters aroused ideas of cultural unity and superiority over the “barbarians”, saving China from splitting into dozens of independent countries.

In China, the hieroglyphic characters stood fast twice in the past – they resisted foreign invaders and the Chinese reformers, who considered that complicated hieroglyphic writing is too complicated and  stays like a bur in the throat of society modernization.

When the Mongolians conquered China at the end of 13-th century, they tried to eliminate incomprehensible and alien script by imposing the square alphabetic one. Nevertheless, lacking any cultural tradition roots, it had disappeared even earlier than Mongolian reign that lasted for fewer than one hundred years.

  In January, 1956, China adopted a law “Simplifying of characters”. According to this law, about 2000 thousands characters and their components were simplified. Introduced in the PRC simplified characters recognized by the UN as the standard for the modern Chinese language - one of the official and working languages of the organization.

  Simplified characters are now used in China and Singapore while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and most overseas communities (and increasingly again in southern and coastal China).

 ut nowadays there are still disagreements about “usefulness” of such complicated writing. Recently, people often talk about “rationalization” of the Chinese language through introducing some kind of alphabet like Japanese hiragana and katakana (but it is worth noting that syllabary in the Japanese language couldn’t replace hieroglyphs but got only supporting position, indicating grammatical endings, while basic words were still written in hieroglyphic characters). What else some people advice is “latinization”.

  Statements about disadvantages of Chinese script are more commonly viewed in literature, but counter views do still exist there. For example, a famous philosopher Alan Watts thinks that hieroglyphic writing is much better than the alphabetic one, because it keeps staying closer to nature. Here is what he wrote on this subject: "The alphabetic writing is representation of sounds, while the hieroglyphic writing is representation of images. Therefore, the hieroglyphic characters, being symbols for things, represent the world directly, rather than being symbols for sounds that are the names of things".

Besides everything mentioned above, Chinese script provides great amount of possibilities for designers. Because a character can be performed in a very interesting way, keeping at the same time the concise text. Let’s look through some examples:

The original character is 网商which means “cyber-shop”. And despite the fact that 2 graphemes were replaced by the symbol "@", the character still remained recognizable, and such simple name became authentic.

Or let us remember the symbol of Beijing Olympics –a running figure. In fact it is just a little bit changed character for “culture, cultural, virtuous”.

      =       文

But problems still remain there, regarding character writing. China faced one of them while stepping  the computer era. China had a great mess with “computerization” of such “bulky” language (the thing is that though commonly used characters amount equals 3-4 thousands, the total amount of characters overcomes 50 thousands).

But in the process of painstaking work, two basic character coding systems have been established, one in Taiwan, the other in mainland China. They are incompatible, but there are special programs which allow to read texts on both systems, and to shift from one system to another. In each system both simplified and traditional characters are available, and you also can use ancient styles of character-writing, if there are appropriate fonts. There are two basic input styles – graphic and phonetic. Chinese users think that despite of being rather hard to learn, graphic input style is more suitable and much handier than the graphic one.

By the way, Chinese keyboard looks quite ordinary, and does not consist of thousand keys with separate character on each key, as most people think.

  Thus, Chinese character writing successfully got adapted to computer era, and opened great amount of possibilities for China.

Nowadays every forth person in the world uses Chinese characters, and considering demographic processes, economic and technological achievements of “hieroglyphic” region, we should be waiting and get prepared to surprising linguistic changes.