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Several models for Chinese language planning are discussed in this page. Han4yu3pin1yin1fang1an4 (Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet), or PinYin for short, is employed to present the Chinese sounds. For the purpose of better display of tone marks, superscript numerals are placed at the right-hand upper corner of PinYin spellings to indicate tones. Investigation of these models starts from the difference between the ideographic Chinese characters (HanZi) and the alphabetic PinYin system in representing the language, as presented in following table:
| Sound | HanZi Writing | PinYin Writing |
|---|---|---|
| se1 | no HanZi | se1 |
| se2 | no HanZi | se2 |
| se3 | no HanZi | se3 | se4 | 色 瑟 涩 铯 塞 | se4 |
Readers of this page can move the cursor of your computer to a Chinese character in above table to see its English proximity. Chinese is a tonal language. Each syllable ramifies four different tonal syllables. In above table, all the four tonal syllables for the syllable se, i.e., se1, se2, se3, se4, are legitimate sounds in Chinese, but only the 4th-tone syllable, se4, has several written forms in HanZi, whereas the other three have none. On the other hand, all four tonal syllables have written forms in PinYin, which are their letter spellings.
Modern Chinese language is a sea of homonyms. It is common for a tonal sound being shared by five, six or more concepts. Many sounds are shared by dozens of concepts, hence are represented by that many homophonic ideographs. Therefore, Chinese words, to a great extent, are distinguished by their written forms, as are those listed in above table. An ideograph is written in a two-dimensioned square with up to quite a few manipulative strokes. This structure provides tremendous room for presenting homonyms with different graphic shapes. But the linear alphabetic writing is disadvantageous in distinguishing homonyms by varying the spellings.
The PinYin is not a writing system because it is unable to distinguish the homonyms so effectively as the ideographs. On the other hand, PinYin renders spellings to all possible sounds in the language, which the ideographs fail to accomplish. The pool of sounds available in the language thus becomes expanded with the advent of an alphabetic writing. After adoption of the PinYin, the natural and immediately next mission for China's language planning is to change the language by taking advantage of the alphabetic PinYin and making use of the sounds that so far have been prohibited by HanZi. This process can be demonstrated by Figure I:
A Chinese syllable consists of an initial, a final and a tone. The numbers of initials and finals in Chinese are counted slightly different by different authors. According to a counting [5:7], there are 22 initials including the zero initial, 40 finals and 4 tones. Therefore, there are totally 22 × 40 × 4 = 3,520 syllables in the sound system of standard Chinese. Only about 1,300 of these 3,520 syllables have written forms in hanzi. The rest don't. The rules of phonotactic constrains [11:135] may exclude some syllables as possible ones. But the number of possible syllables is definitely much larger than 1,300. These possible syllables, which have no HanZi forms, are exemplified by the three spellings, se1, se2 and se3 in the last column of above figure. It's worth mentioning that the sounds excluded by the phonotactic constrains, too, have written forms (spellings) in phonetic writing.
On the left-hand diagram in above figure, the static spellings represent the legitimate sounds whose availability is forbidden by the unavailability of written forms in the HanZi writing. When written in PinYin on the right-hand diagram, these sounds are freed or activated. The small circle on the left-hand diagram disappears on the right, which means the restriction on the language imposed by the ideographic writing is removed with the advent of phonetic writing. The solid border of the big circle on the left-hand diagram becomes dashed on the right-hand diagram, which means that a close system is opened. More elements can now flow in. This topic is discussed in detail in following two sections.
It is observed that Chinese language in the past had much richer sound system than current standard Chinese [1][2]. Many sounds have disappeared from the language. An important factor for the loss of sounds is the long interaction between the language and the ideographic writing. With a phonetic system, both old and new sounds will have different spellings instead of sharing same HanZi. This makes it possible for some old sounds to be revived.
Language revival is the major purpose of some language planning projects. A well-known successful case is that of Hebrew [3]. Language revival happened in Chinese language, too, but in a blind manner rather than through conscious language planning. The consonant initials tç, tçh, and ç were present in the Early Middle Chinese (EMC) around 601 A.D. They were absent from the Late Middle Chinese (LMC) and Early Mandarin, but re-appeared in modern Mandarin after more than 1,400 years [2]. These three initials are now represented in PinYin respectively by 'j', 'q', 'x'.
In an page listed in my web site [4], I propose to revive three consonant initials, i.e., [ŋ], [v] and [z]. Presence of these three sounds in the past three historical periods of development is list in Table II:
| [ŋ] | [v] | [z] | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Mandarin | • | ||
| Late Middle Chinese | • | • | |
| Early Middle Chinese | • | • |
The reason for the proposed revival is also that these three sounds are present in some mandarin dialects. For example, [ŋ] and [v] are in the Xi1an1 dialect, and [ŋ] and [z] in the Cheng2du1 dialect. They are also present in several southern dialects [5]. Interaction between the standard language (PuTongHua) and dialects will be discussed in next section. When language revival is brought into consideration, Figure I will become Figure II:
It is said that all modern Chinese dialects are ramification of same language in the Tang Dynasty [1]. In this perspective, incorporating sounds from the past and from modern dialects into the standard language will be substantially overlapped.
By definition, the dialect of BeiJing is the standard language (PuTongHua) in China. When native speakers of other dialects speak PuTongHua, usually they try to imitate it with disposing of peculiar sounds in their native dialects. But this is hard to achieve, particularly at the beginning. Their PuTongHua is what illustrated in the left-hand diagram in Figure III. In this way, speakers of other dialects are passively parroting the standard language, but still missing some elements, and mixing it with peculiar dialectal sounds.
In above figure, the circles for standard mandarin and dialect are partially intersected, indicating that they share certain elements. As an integral part of language planning, native speakers of various dialects should be encouraged to incorporate non-PuTongHua sounds into the PuTongHua. The dialectal mandarin is defined as complete standard mandarin plus sounds peculiar from the dialects. Following is an example.
The ending consonant 'm' is currently existent only in southern dialects of mei2xian4, guang3zhou1, yang2jiang1, xia4men2, and chao2zhou1. They existed in all the Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin [2], until the arrival of modern mandarin. Furthermore, the syllabic m (m̩) is widely current in many northern and southern dialects, including the bei3jing1 dialect. As testing, the final [im] is included in above Figure III. With dialectal sounds added to the standard mandarin, Figure II and Figure III unite. Figure IV is result of the union:
Figure IV is different from Figure II only by adding the final [im] to the right-hand diagram. The possibility for this type of change is same as that for language revival. In the HanZi writing, different sounds in different dialects share same graph. In the phonetic writing, different sounds carry different spellings, therefore both may become part of the standard language through interaction among different dialects.
With the ideographic writing, native speakers of various dialects are merely passive learners of the standard language. The conception of dialectal mandarins comes with the phonetic writing. The sound system of a dialectal mandarin is larger than that of the standard mandarin. The writing of the former is consequently more effective than that of the latter, as it contains more distinctive spellings. Various southern dialects such as wu2 and min3 don't have their own writings. Speakers of those dialects write a mandarin-style dialect rather than their own vernaculars. Writings for dialectal mandarins will contain more indigenous elements, thus is better than the pure mandarin style for speakers of various dialects.
In perspective of macro language planning, the goal of dialectal mandarins is to incorporate more distinctive sounds into the standard language, to make it more suitable for a phonetic writing. The role played by dialectal mandarins is to initiate, test and populate those sounds.
Another important source for language change is that of loan words from foreign languages [6]. Loan words are associated with the issue of language pollution and purification, thus warrant lengthy deliberation deviating from the models in this page. For the sake of concentration, I will not include that topic in this page.
It was argued in above sections that a phonetic writing for Chinese would facilitate language change toward sound diversification. After adoption of the PinYin, the sound system, as defined by the ideographs, would become a starting point for language change. However, five decades after promulgation of the PinYin, no language change has ever occurred. The Chinese language is still moving around in the irrational sound sphere represented by the ideographic characters, as illustrated in Figure V:
Comparing this figure with preceding ones, it can be seen that the alphabetic PinYin be taken by the Chinese language planners only superficially. The criterion of whether a sound is legitimate in Chinese depends on whether it has a written form in the ideographic writing system, instead of whether it is an element in the structure of the language.
At this juncture, it is necessary to distinguish two types of language change: spontaneous change and conscious change. Language can change spontaneously. This phenomenon happens all the time, even without the speakers realizing it. But if the change is intended, it must be achieved by the conscious efforts of the speech community , i.e., language planning. The change discussed in this page is the conscious, but not spontaneous change. An alphabetic writing for Chinese makes change possible for the language. But possibility is not reality. Language planning is needed to turn possibility into reality.
The spelling rules of PinYin Orthography (ZhengCiFa) [7] is to deal with the homonyms within the sound area restricted by the HanZi, that is, within the close circle in Figure V. Under these spelling rules, the tonal syllables are joined and separated by imitating the word formation of non-tonal languages. This is the very nature of these rules [8].
The phonetic relationship between tonal Chinese syllables is essentially different from that in non-tonal languages. The tones create phonetic distance between syllables which are consequently more autonomous morphologically and syntactically. Native speakers of Chinese create the language primarily with these highly autonomous tonal syllables. The western-style word formation accommodates this feature defectively. These rules have been proved unsuitable for Chinese.
It's worth noting that the style of 'joining and separating syllables' is also taken in another two alphabetic designs for Chinese, i.e., (latinxua xinwenz) and (GR) [9] [10]. The zhengcifa-style word formation is obviously not a fortuitous phenomenon. My comments on the PinYin's ZhengCiFa extend to those designs, too.
The ZhengCiFa style may be useful under certain makeshift circumstances, particularly when the tone marks are removed. After the word groups or phrases are created with the autonomous tonal syllables and standardized by the HanZi writing, transcribing them with no-tone-marked PinYin is a convenient way in non-Chinese scripts. The PinYin of this type is the dependent of the HanZi. But the ultimate object for romanization is an independent writing system for native speakers of Chinese.
China's language planning was immediately derailed after the PinYin was adopted in 1958. Possible language change availed by a phonetic writing is not taken into consideration at all. Instead, Eurocentric grammatical rules (ZhengCiFa) are enforced by all means to Chinese, a language substantially different from the European languages. No progress has ever been made towards an independent alphabetic writing. Until this malignant conception of ZhengCiFa is completely discarded, and language change made the appropriate priority on the agenda for language planning, no genuine alphabetic writing for Chinese will take the road.
REFERENCES
[1] Karlgren, Bernhard. 1949. The Chinese Language: An essay on its nature and history. New York: The Ronald Press Company.
[2] Pulleyblank, Edwin G. 1991. Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin. Vancouver: UBC Press.
[3] Kaplan, Robert B. and Richard B. Baldauf Jr. 1997. Language Planning: from practice to theory. Multilingual Matters Ltd.
[4] A Dictionary of PinYin Language
[5] . 2003. (2d ed., newly typeset). . .
[6] A Dictionary of Foreign Words in Chinese
[7]The Commission for PinYin Orthography, State Language Commission, PRC. 1988. English translation in: DeFrancis, John (Editor). 1996. ABC Chinese-English Dictionary. pp. 835-845. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
[9]Chao, Yuen Ren. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[10] Critique of the GR
[11] Admajian, Adrian, et al. 1984. Linguistics: an introduction to language and communication. 2d ed. The MIT Press.
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