Timely Snow

A scholar at another university sends me this quote from a book by a journalist named Rob Gifford,

“The fact that the characters cannot change gives the whole language an inflexibility that even Chinese scholars admit can stunt originality.”

and asks for scholarly papers on the topic.

The idea that the fact that Chinese is written with characters leads to some kind of inherent lack of something (rationality, creativity, abstract reasoning, you name it), is something that I predict will dissipate within my lifetime.

For now, though, it’s worth pointing out that characters correspond to morphemes, and so to ask how often English comes up with new morphemes. Not knowing the answer, here’s a proxy.

Every year Merriam-Webster comes up with a set of new “favorite words not in the dictionary.” Here’s this year’s list. Looking at that list, almost all of them involve recombining morphemes (”ginormous,” “confuzzled” “slickery”, “phonecrastinate”). Possible exceptions are “woot” and “snirt” (the latter, or maybe both, involving a kind of internal modification that I don’t think Chinese can do). On the other hand, it does do something very analogous in character-formation, such as “街” (which sticks a phonetic(?) 圭 in the middle of 行).

The bottom line, for me is that

1. Writing systems do have consequences for learning and thinking, but they’re amazingly small and generally brief in developmental duration. The fact that English is written alphabetically means that we can, for example, turn “three” to “thir” in writing 13. I don’t know anyone who would argue that that’s a good thing, and I’m on record suggesting it isn’t.

2. People are very creative in how they use language, writing systems, spray cans, whatever, in getting their messages out and in taking in the messages of others.

3. The demands of writing systems and their acquisition, coupled with beliefs about learning, can have a much larger effect on how one learns and later uses a language. Traditionally, the way one learned Chinese was by spending a great deal of time memorizing passages and writing out the words of others. That’s becoming much less popular and is clearly not the only way to learn Chinese (it is not, for example, the way any foreigner learns Chinese), and with the decline of those pedagogical methods will come, I predict, the decline of any plausibility to the claim that the Chinese character orthography inhibits creativity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.