One country, two systems
The coexistence of pinyin andChinese characters highlights the role of emotion in language decisions
FEWpeople live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as ZhouYouguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architectof pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to write Mandarin in the Roman alphabet.
Pinyinhas not, of course, replaced the Chinese characters. Rather, it is used as agateway to literacy, giving young children a systematic way to learn the soundsof the thousands of characters required to be literate in Chinese. Pinyin isalso used by most Chinese people to input Chinese characters into computers:type a word like wo (meaning “I”) and the proper characterappears; if several characters share the same sound (which is common inChinese), users choose from a short menu of these homophonic characters.
Inother words, the primary way that the Chinese interact with their language inthe digital age is via an alphabet borrowed by Communist China from itsideological enemies in the 1950s. The tale is an odd one. Mao Zedong (who wasMao Tse-tung before pinyin, under the “Wade-Giles” romanisation system) wanteda radical break with old ways after 1949, when the civil war ended in mainlandChina. He was hardly the first to think that China’s beautiful, complicated andinefficient script was a hindrance to the country’s development. Lu Xun, acelebrated novelist, wrote in the early 20th century: “If we are to go onliving, Chinese characters cannot.”
Butaccording to Mr Zhou, speaking to the New Yorker in 2004, itwas Josef Stalin in 1949 who talked Mao out of full-scale romanisation, sayingthat a proud China needed a truly national system. The regime insteadsimplified many Chinese characters, supposedly making them easier to learn—butcausing a split in the Sinophone world: Taiwan, Hong Kong and other overseasChinese communities still use the traditional characters.
MrZhou, who had been working for a Chinese bank in New York (he was largelyself-trained as a linguist), had returned home in a burst of patriotic optimismafter 1949. He was drafted by Zhou Enlai, Mao’s premier, in the 1950s to createa system not to replace, but to complement, the Chinese characters. After threeyears’ work, pinyin was ready. It used just the standard Roman letters and afew (often omitted) diacritical marks, especially over vowels to show the“tones”: steady, rising, dipping or falling pitch. People joked that Mr Zhou’steam had taken three years to deal with just 26 letters. But pinyin dealtneatly with all of the sounds of Mandarin with a minimum of tricky typography:even q and x were used (for what had been ch’ and hs in Wade-Giles). Theseletters do not always sound the same as they do in Western languages, butpinyin overall was a hit, credited plausibly with a huge boost in literacy inChina. Even the Taiwanese, who abhor Mao’s simplified characters, are graduallyadopting Mr Zhou’s pinyin (which they had also once abhorred), making the useof pinyin one of the few practical things the two countries can agree on.
Whydon’t the Chinese just adopt pinyin? One is the many homophones (though theseare not usually a problem in context). Another is that Chinese characters areused throughout the Chinese-speaking world, not just by Mandarin-speakers butalso speakers of Cantonese, Shanghainese and other varieties. These are asdifferent from each other as the big Romance languages are, but the writingsystem unifies the Chinese world. In fact, character-based writing is, ineffect, written Mandarin. This is not obvious from looking at the characters,but it is obvious if you look at pinyin. If China adopted it wholesale, thelinguistic divisions in China would be far more apparent.
Butthere is another reason for attachment to the characters. They representtradition, history, literature, scholarship and even art on an emotional levelthat many foreigners do not understand. Outsiders focus so much on efficiencyprobably because those who do try to learn the characters cannot help but bestruck by how absurdly hard they are to master.
Thereis a real trade-off between efficiency and culture. English-speakers haverejected most efforts to clean up the language’s notorious spelling, making coff,ruff, thru, tho and bow from cough, rough,through, though and bough. The Irish accept the expense ofkeeping Irish on signs and in classrooms, even if it isn’t efficient. Inlanguage, as in love, the heart is often the master of the head. Pinyin, whichhas helped the Chinese have a bit of both, will long outlast the long-lived MrZhou.
一个国家，两套系统
拼音和汉字并存的情况强调了情感在语言表达时的重要性。
111岁是罕见的高寿，更罕见的是像周有光先生这样对语言学做出巨大贡献的长者，周先生在1月14日与世长辞，他是汉语拼音的奠基人，是他开启了中国人用拉丁字母标注汉语的历史。
诚然，拼音并没有取代汉字，相对地它是识字的一个手段，让小孩子能够系统地学习汉字的发声规则，要达到识字水平得认识数千个汉字。大多数中国人也用拼音来打字，比如在电脑上输入wo（就是汉语中的“我”），相应的汉字就会显示出来；如果遇到同音字（汉语中非常普遍），就在选项菜单里选一个正确的。
换言之，如今中国人在互联网上使用的语言是中国共产党在50年代从“敌人”那里借鉴而来的拉丁字母。这背后有个离奇的故事。内战结束、新中国成立后，主席毛泽东（用威氏音标写作“MaoTse-tung”，而拼音写作“MaoZedong”）想与从前的做法一刀两断，中国文字优美、复杂，毛泽东跟一些人一样认为汉语的书写效率低，会阻碍国家的发展。著名文学家鲁迅就曾在20世纪初提出：“汉字不灭，中国必亡”。
不过2004年周有光先生在《纽约客》杂志采访时说，真正说服毛泽东主席全面推行拼音系统的是斯大林主席，斯大林表示中国需要一个真正意义上的全国系统来彰显实力。随后，中国简化了许多汉字，便于学习，可是也因此造成中文使用地区的一个差异——台湾、香港及海外华人社区仍旧使用传统的繁体汉字。
周有光先生曾就职于美国的一家中国银行（他的语言学知识几乎是自学的），在1949年之后怀抱满腔爱国热情，他回到了中国。1950年，受周恩来总理的委任，他着手创建一套汉字注音系统，其作用不是替代汉字，而是作为补充。历时三年，拼音系统始成，使用的就是标准拉丁字母和一些变音符号（时常省略），变音符号尤用于元音上来标记四声：平声、上声、去声和入声，不过拼音体系用了最简易的排字法标注了所有汉语发音——甚至q和x（威式音标中的ch’和hs）也用上了。这些拼音字母的发音跟西方语言中的字母发音不尽相同，但整体而言，拼音系统是成功的，它极大地促进了中国人的识字水平，连憎恶简体字的台湾人也逐渐启用周先生的拼音系统（当然一开始他们同样对此嗤之以鼻），这也使得拼音成了中国大陆和台湾之间少数意见统一的实用之事。
为什么中国大陆不用拼音彻底替代汉字呢？一个原因是汉字中多同音字（尽管在上下文里这个问题通常可以忽略），另一个原因是汉字是中文社区的通用语言，不仅仅是普通话地区，也包括了广东话、上海话和其他方言地区，这些地区的语言差异之大与罗曼语族中的各语言一样，但汉字实现了中文的统一。实际上一个字一个字地写拼音跟书面汉字的效果是一样的，这光看汉字可能并不明显，但看拼音的话就显而易见了。所以如果当时中国用拼音替代汉字的话，那么不同地区的中文差异就会更显著。
汉字不能被替代还有一个原因，就是它所承载的传统、历史、文学、学术，乃至艺术情感，这种情感之深外国人大多是不懂的。语言门外汉常把重点放在效率上，或许是因为他们想要学习汉字但往往苦学而无果吧。
在文化和效率的天秤上是能够找到平衡的。英语国家没有就很多“臭名昭著”的拼写问题做清理，比如没有把cough、rough、through、though和bough写成coff、ruff、thru、tho和bow。爱尔兰人的标识和教室里仍旧使用爱尔兰语，尽管这样做费时又低效。语言和爱情一样，往往跟随心意，而非理智。拼音系统帮助中文在效率和文化上达到了一定的平衡，长寿的周先生虽已离世，拼音必将走得更久远。