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The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is a book written by John DeFrancis, published in 1984 by University of Hawaii Press. The book gives an introduction to some of the concepts underlying the Chinese language and writing system.
[edit] Main points
- There is no "Chinese language". There is a group of related ways of speaking, which some may call dialects, others call topolects (a calque of Chinese 方言, fāngyán; DeFrancis uses the term "regionalects"), and still others would regard as separate languages. One such variant, based on the speech of the Beijing area, has been chosen as the national standard in the PRC, and is now known as "Putonghua", or common language.
- The Chinese script has a heavy phonological basis, shown in the phonetic elements common in more than half of Chinese characters. Unfortunately they are missing from many common characters, causing many foreign scholars to miss the point that they are a necessary resource for Chinese readers. It is not a brilliant ideographic script; it is a lousy phonetic script.
- There can be no such thing as an "ideographic" script, where symbols stand for ideas unrelated to words. Human brains don't work that way. Therefore, Chinese isn't such a script either.
- The Chinese script, with its thousands of characters, is not a benefit to the Chinese society, and needs to be abandoned if China is to achieve the benefits of modernization.
[edit] Six myths
A good portion of the book is devoted to debunking what DeFrancis calls the "six myths" of Chinese characters. The myths are:
- The Ideographic Myth: Chinese characters represent ideas instead of sounds.
- The Universality Myth: Chinese characters enable speakers of mutually unintelligible languages to read each other's writing. (Also, to the extent this is possible, this is due to a special property that only Chinese characters have.) Furthermore, Chinese from thousands of years ago is immediately readable by any literate Chinese today.
- The Emulatability Myth: The nature of Chinese characters can be copied to create a universal script, or to help people with learning disabilities learn to read.
- The Monosyllabic Myth: All words in Chinese are one syllable long. Alternatively, any syllable found in a Chinese dictionary can stand alone as a word.
- The Indispensability Myth: Chinese characters are necessary to represent Chinese.
- The Successfulness Myth: Chinese characters are responsible for a high level of literacy in East Asian countries. (A weaker version of this myth is simply that despite the flaws of Chinese characters, East Asian countries still have a high level of literacy.)
All of these are dealt with in separate chapters, at length, in the book.
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