Chinese Personal Names and Language Change

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Chinese Personal Names and Language Change

Language Change for Phonetic Writing

The difference between ideographic writing and phonetic writing, which are discussed in several pages listed in my web site [1][2][3][4], can be illustrated with Figure I:

The ideographic writing(HanZi) provides written forms to the currently used sounds only. The possible but not-currently-used sounds have no written forms in the ideographic writing. On the other hand, the phonetic writing has written forms for all possible sounds, which are their letter spellings. Another prominent fact is that the standard Chinese has become a rather homophonic language, and must rely on the graphically diverse ideographs to distinguish the homophonic words. Therefore, when a phonetic writing is intended for Chinese, it is necessary to effect language change by bringing in new sounds, to make it suitable for the writing.

The immediate big question is 'HOW?' No phonetic writing represents the homonymy of Chinese so well as does the ideographic writing. But the ideographic writing does not support language change towards the desired phonological diversity. Such change can be accomplished by appropriate projects of language planning.

This essay discusses a two-step approach to achieve the language change on target. The first step is to bring meaningless new sounds into the language, then associate them with concepts at the second step. At the first step, all members of a Chinese community will drop a syllable from their given names and replace it with a possible but currently-not-used one, while leaving the other syllables unchanged.

A Chinese given name consists of either one or two syllables. Chinese given names are different from their Western counterparts. Chinese parents do not pick up an item for the newborn from a pool of conventional given names. In stead, they create a new given name for the baby. There are no conventional given names in Chinese. But due to characteristics of the language, both spoken and written, many Chinese people do share given names, and full names, too.

Some Chinese given names carry semantic values. They are meaningful in the language. The meanings are usually associated with desirable social or physical features. But in essence, Chinese given names, same as those in many other languages, are merely phonetic identities of individual human beings. An individual's genuine social or physical traits has nothing to do with his/her name.

Chinese people change given names for a variety of reasons. When a person changes his name, he abandons his current phonetic identity, and picks up a new one. The people around will soon get used to it. The situation is quite similar to that women in the West change their last names when getting married. It will cause no substantial confusion or miscommunication. When a Chinese person replaces a currently used syllable with a currently-not-used one, a new syllable is consequently brought into the language. The more people pick up a particular sound, the more often this sound will be encountered and used, and the faster it will become part of the language. And the more sounds are picked up for given names, the more sounds will enter the language. With this approach, many new sounds can be incorporated into the language in a relative short period of time.

Assumption: CCP takes the Initiative

In modern Chinese history, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was the most enthusiastic and earnest organization working for an alphabetic writing. In 1930s, an alphabetic writing, the New Latinized Writing (latinxua sin wenz), was made the official script side by side with the Chinese characters, in the areas under CCP's jurisdiction. In 1950s and 60s, the CCP government fulfilled two great projects in language planning: the simplified characters and an alphabetic system, that is, Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet ( han⁴ yu³ pin¹ yin¹ fang¹ an⁴), or PinYin for short. These two projects have brought substantial linguistic and orthographic convenience to Chinese people.

Some of top CCP leaders took an active part in working out policies in language planning. Qu QiuBai, who for a short period of time presided the CCP, was a major creator of the New Latinized Writing (latinxu sin wenz). Mao ZeDong and Zhou EnLai made significant linguistic, orthographic and administrative decisions on the simplified characters (JianHuaZi) and PinYin. Mao ZeDong explicitly said that the Chinese writing should follow the common direction of phonetic writing in the world [5]. In conclusion, the CCP has genuine desire to create a phonetic writing for Chinese.

It is assumed in this essay that from the very beginning, the CCP leadership had realized that language change was an indispensable aspect for a phonetic writing, and bringing meaningless new sounds into the language was a feasible and effective strategy. Furthermore, they had volunteered to change their own names to implement the strategy. In fact, many communists did change their names after joining the revolutionary army, to demonstrate that their old life was over, and a new one was beginning. With these assumptions in mind, some of the new names could have been as in following Table I:

Table I: Personal Names in PinYin (1)
Names in HanZi language	Names in PinYin language	IPA
chen²yun²	chen²dzun²	[zun]
guo¹mo⁴ruo⁴	guo¹ mo⁴ dzuo⁴	[zuo]
li³ fu⁴ chun²	li³ fou⁴ chun¹	[fou⁴]
lin² bo² qu²	lin² bo² kü²	[k^hy]
liu² shao⁴ qi²	liu² shao⁴ ki²	[k^hi]
luo² rui⁴ qing¹	luo² rui⁴ king¹	[k^hiŋ]
mao² ze² dong¹	mao² ze¹ dong¹	[tsə¹]
nie⁴ rong² zhen¹	nie⁴ dzong¹ zhen¹	[zuŋ]
peng² de² huai²	peng² dei² huai²	[tei]
qin² ji¹ wei³	qin² ji¹ vei³	[vei]
wang² jia⁴ xiang²	wang² zia⁴ xiang²	[tsia]
xu² xiang⁴ qian²	xu² xiang⁴ kian²	[k^hian]
ye⁴ jian⁴ ying¹	ye⁴ gian⁴ ying¹	[kian]
zhang¹ wen² tian¹	zhang¹ ven² tian¹	[vən]
zhou¹ en¹ lai²	zhou¹ ngen¹ lai²	[ŋən]

It needs to point out that the new sound is not to replace the current sound for the Chinese character. It is only a meaningless sound that has no written form in the ideographic writing, so must be written in the phonetic script. The current sound of the Chinese character remains unchanged in this respect of language planning. Whether or not its sound will change, and what it will be, is determined in another process of language planning. An essay listed in my home page briefly discusses this topic [3].

Family names are not changed, either. A family name is shared by people who are assumingly related by blood. That some of the people change family name will cause familial, clannish, tribal, even social chaos. Some family names are homophones. With a phonetic writing, their sound or spellings may eventually change for the purpose of distinction, but not at this stage.

In Table I, only one syllable in each given name is replaced. But if people choose to change both syllables, they should be encouraged and properly rewarded for their decisions, because it helps expedite language change by bringing in more sounds.

Given Names with Single Syllable

Most Chinese given names consist of two syllables. The others have only one syllable. People with one-syllable given names can bring a new sound to their names by either of two approaches. The first approach is to drop this single syllable, and replace it with a new one. There is an example with this respect in Table I. The second approach is to insert a new syllable either before or after the current given name. This approach is more preferred.

li³ ping² is a popular Chinese full name, which can be taken by both male and female. The second syllable, ping², is given name. In this page, li³ ping² is used as a fictional name, but does not refer to any particular real person. In the following table, a new sound is inserted either before or after the current given name, to demonstrate feasibility of this approach.

Table II: Personal Names in PinYin (2)
li³ ping² bou¹			li³ bou¹ ping²
li³ ping² fao⁴			li³ fao⁴ ping²
li³ ping² vei³			li³ vei³ ping²
li³ ping² siao³			li³ siao³ ping²
li³ ping² kiang¹			li³ kiang¹ ping²
li³ ping² dzia³			li³ dzia³ ping²
li³ ping² ngen¹			li³ ngen¹ ping²
li³ ping² tuai¹			li³ Tuai¹ ping²
li³ ping² suai⁴			li³ suai⁴ ping²
li³ ping² dzuan³			li³ dzuan³ ping²
li³ ping² tü¹			li³ tü¹ ping²
li³ ping² kue⁴			li³ kue⁴ ping²
li³ ping² dzü⁴			li³ dzü⁴ ping²

The new sounds in both of above tables are not inferior to the currently-employed ones in any sense. They are equally qualified for representing any concept. They may sound peculiar because they are not currently in use and have no ideographic written forms. Such impression will change soon as people encounter and use them often, and become used to the sounds.

The Process

Everybody has a name. Theoretically, all members of a speech community participates in this project, thus contributes to the planned language change. Education on PinYin has to expand to cover the new sounds. Speakers need to spell out not only those sounds that have ideographic written forms, but also those that have no such forms. When encountered with the new spellings, they are supposed to pronounce the sounds correctly. When hearing such a sound, they need to be able to write the spelling out.

For instance, in this page I test changing my name from zhang¹ju¹li³ to zhang¹ zü¹ li³. The zü¹ is the new sound. I don't expect that most native speakers of standard Chinese can pronounce this sound accurately or unambiguously without proper training on the PinYin, nor write it out when hearing the sound. Intensive education on PinYin must be an integral part of this project of language change.

The government will provide a list of new sounds to the speech community, but not assign new sounds to the members. It is a personal decision. Each adult speaker will select a new sound for him/herself from the list. Parents or guardians will select for minors. Newborns are required to be named with a new sound in their given names. The list is not a static, but dynamic one. New phonemes may be recruited from dialects or revived from old standard languages.

In modern society, change of a personal name causes many events in chain. The name must also be changed on the identification card, driver's license, bank account, utilities bills, insurance records, case history in doctor's office, phone directory, paycheck, credit cards, and so forth. Just imagine that this involves not only a few people, but the whole population. The amount of work seems extremely huge. But in the age of computer technology, much of the work can be done paperless. A person can change his/her name on the web pages of appropriate offices. On the other hand, it is exactly these processes that will help reinforce the legitimacy of the new sounds.

The new names are supposed to be permanent, so the name changing is a one-time event for most of the people. Most of current sounds and Chinese characters can be used for personal names. Hence, it is reasonably deduced that most of the new sounds can be used in personal names, too. But some people may not like their new names, and will change again. The rule is that they must pick up another new sound.

Discussion

As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, this is only the first step of a two-step approach in the planned language change. The new personal names spread the new sounds among the speakers. The second step is to associate the sounds with concepts, to differentiate the homophonous words, and create new words. This topic is discussed in relative detail in [3].

The standard Chinese has experienced substantial Changes throughout history. It will change in the future, too. With a phonetic writing, native speakers of Chinese are able to manipulate the change to certain extent for their own benefits, because now all the possible sounds are in writing.

China has successfully implemented several projects of language planning in modern history. These are the transcription system of zhu⁴ yin¹ fu² hao⁴ (ZhuYin), the simplified characters and pinyin. All the projects are concerning the written form of the language, but not the speech. The ultimate goal for China's language planning is an independent phonetic writing system. This essay, and several others listed in my web site, proposes to fulfill the task by developing the speech, not only changing the writing.

Language can be changed without the method discussed in this essay. But after the language is changed by another way, the new sounds will be used in personal names anyway, as are the current sounds in personal names. So it's just a matter of time for the new sounds being adopted in personal names. The merit of this method is that the new sounds are brought in as meaningless ones, so that they will cause little miscommunication.

References

[1] Models for China's Language Planning
[2] Legitimate Chinese Sounds Not Written in Hanzi
[3] A Dictionary of the PinYin Language
[4] A Chinese Dictionary of Foreign Words
[5] Wu, YuZhang. 1978. Speech at the founding of the Association of Writing Reform of China (in Chinese). BeiJing: Press of the People's University of China.

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