By Liu Shih-hong
Eurasia Book Co., Taipei (100-1 Sec. 3 Hsin Sheng S. Rd.)
1969, 108 pp., US$3.50
Reviewed by Arthur lee
This small but useful work is subtitled "Their Impact on Other Languages of East Asia" - and therein lies its principal value. Not a great deal has been written in English on the contributions of the Chinese characters to the Hangul of Korea, the Chu Nom of Annam and the Kana of Japan.
Liu Shih-hong is the managing editor of the Free China Review and his book is an expansion of five articles that appeared in this magazine from February through June. He says it was his intention to help Western students gain a general understanding of the oldest system of writing still in use. Although the goal is not an exhaustive consideration of the characters, Chinese-English lexicographers may find some chapters of interest.
Liu's life has been one long adventure - and sometimes struggle - with languages. He started out with Japanese and Hakka, then went on to Mandarin, English and French. He learned Chinese from Japanese and French from English and this experience persuaded him of advantage of understanding the differences and similarities of languages with the same cultural roots. His story is not unlike that of the founder of the Berlitz Schools. Born into a internationalized European family, the first of the Berlitzes heard six different languages as a child, thought all adults had their own language and proceeded to learn them all with ease and dispatch.
The author has a dry sense of humor that might have amused Berlitz, who didn't number Chinese among his linguistic accomplishment. In the Introduction, Liu points out the genius of Chinese for representing both a foreign sound and its meaning. Thus Coca Cola becomes k'o-k'ou k'o-lo, which gets pretty close to Coke and expresses a meaning of "may it be palatable to your mouth and may it please you". That is not so far from the most famous of the Coke slogans, "The pause that refreshes", which is certainly to be preferred to "Things go better with Coke". As for DDT, that comes out ti-ti ti with the beautiful meaning of "drop, drop enemy, each drop kills the enemy".
After such beginnings, Liu goes on to the origin of the characters and gives examples of the simple original pictograms, the oracle bone and metal inscriptions, seal script and the far more sophisticated writing of today. It's easy to follow the evolution of sun from the Egyptian-style original into 曰 but he doesn't explain why man should be 人 today while woman is 女 Maybe some readers who don't know Chinese could guess, though.
For the beginner, the chapter on the development of the simple ideographic representations is enlightening without being confusing or pedantic. How do you get to the abstract? No trouble. If the sun and the moon should shine together, everything ought to be bright and clear. So-the two characters together mean "bright", "clear", "understand" and "intelligent". The author goes on to point out that the sun radical (basic character) is to be found in some 150 characters and the moon character in about 20. If the sun is thought to be the center of the universe, it may be well to stop and consider that woman is the radical for more than 200 characters and rules the roost in Chinese lexicography, just as in real life.
For example, the character for marry is woman plus house. Housewife is a woman plus a broom. Good is woman and child. Maybe the West of today wouldn't go along with the character for fascinating: woman plus eyebrow. However, the Michelangelo of the Mona Lisa certainly would have.
How do words grow? Chinese is the oldest living example. One of the first Chinese dictionaries of about 2,000 years ago contained some 3,300 characters. A millennium later the total had risen by about three times. The largest dictionary ever published (1716) came close to 50,000 characters. How many are required for the educated man today? Maybe around 10,000 for the pedant and perhaps 3,000 for basic communication. Some 6,000 should provide a happy medium of nearly total comprehension without any bogging down in scholasticism.
Characters invented in Japan and on the mainland in this century are discussed and listed. Many of these served either the special purposes of the Japanese or represented scientific nomenclature and other importations from Occidental culture.
One of the most interesting chapters concerns variants and the simplification of characters. Those who have opposed meaningful simplification are hoist by the petard of the fact that characters have a tendency to become simpler with the passing of the centuries. But simplification should not be confused with the butchering and attempted romanization of the language that took place on the Chinese mainland. The Communists have now all but abandoned that futile undertaking.
For beginners, the chapter on "How the Chinese Characters Are Written" explains the radicals and sets forth examples of character construction. A table ennumerates the number of radicals for 7,846 characters. The range is from one radical (two characters) to thirty-three radicals (one character). The largest group of characters (704) has 12 radicals each (9.19 per cent of the total).
After taking up calligraphic styles and the printing of the characters, the author proceeds to the dissemination to Korea, Japan and Annam. Etymologically, Chinese is estimated to make up some 50 per cent of Korean words, 40 per cent of Japanese and 33 per cent of Vietnamese. Pronunciations may be close or quite different. For example, "attention" is chui in Chinese, chuui in Korean, chu y in Vietnamese and chui in Japanese. But "problem" is wen t'i in Chinese, munje in Korean, van de in Vietnamese and mondai in Japanese. Separate chapters are devoted to the linguistic influence of Chinese in the three neighboring lands. Also considered is Japan's contribution to Chinese.
In his concluding chapter, Liu takes up the simplification movements on the mainland and in Taiwan as well as the development of unique writing systems in Korea and Japan. He concludes: "With variants eliminated and many characters simplified, it should be possible to write contemporary Chinese with a few thousand characters in a style as terse as that of the world-famous classics of ancient China."
For those with advanced interest, there is a bibliography. The index is detailed. Reproduction is by photo-offset because no printer in Taipei has matrices for all the languages involved.
MODERN CHINA'S SEARCH FOR A POLITICAL FORM
Edited by Jack Gray
Oxford University Press, London 1969, 379 pp, US$10.50
Reviewed by Charles C. Clayton
Much of the material relating to mainland China now being published is a digest of scholarly papers presented at symposia sponsored by universities and learned societies. The obvious advantage of this method of treatment is that it offers a variety of viewpoints by men who have some claim to authority in their specific fields. The obvious drawback is the time lag between the presentation of the papers and their collection in print. This disadvantage is offset in part by the work of the editor, who tries to update the material and put it in the perspective of more recent developments.
The symposium from which this collection of papers is taken was held in England under the sponsorship of the Working Group on China and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Each year a general theme is selected. The theme which provides the title of this book was that of the pr9gram for 1965-66. The contributors are English with the exception of Jean Chesneaux of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, who writes on the "Federalist Movement in China, 1920-1923". The editor, Jack Gray, is a senior lecturer in Far Eastern History at the University of Glasgow. With Patrick Cavendish, one of the contributors, he is the co-author of Chinese Communism in Crisis published last year.
Gray explains in his foreword that the essays presented are historical rather than analytical. He justifies this approach on the thesis that history has conditioned the course of Chinese Communism. He adds: "The most radical changes in China cannot wholly destroy ... the greatest moral, political and scientific tradition outside of Christendom."
Since the approach is historical, much of the material is familiar to Taiwan readers. The contributors whose papers make up the first nine chapters discuss various aspects of Red China's search for a political form. The opening chapter by Jerome Chen, lecturer in economic history at the University of Leeds, reviews the historical background of China in this century. Mark Elvin, who holds a similar post at the University of Glasgow, discusses "The Gentry Democracy in Chinese Shanghai, 1905-14". Martin Bernal, a Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, writes of "Chinese Socialism before 1913". Chesneaux discusses "The Federalist Movement in China" and Patrick Cavendish, recently named assistant professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz, writes of "The New China of the Kuomintang"
In one of the more penetrating studies in the book, James MacDonald, lecturer in politics at the University of Leeds, analyzes the problems and the failures of the Chinese Communist cadres. His material, taken largely from the reports in the People's Daily, reveals the shortcomings that culminated in the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by which all cadres were required to be baptized into a condition of permanent self-revolution".
One of the traditional elements in Chinese governmental history, the frontier regions, is the subject of the paper of George Moseley, a graduate student at Oxford University and a frequent contributor to the China Quarterly and the Far Eastern Economic Review. This chapter is of current interest in view of Peiping's continuing confrontation with Russia along the Ussuri river and on the border between Sinkiang province and the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. The concept of vassal states, imperial dependencies and native districts, begun under the Ch'ing empire, he points out, is involved in the invasion of Tibet, the Vietnam war and the continuing activity in Thailand. Peiping seeks, he writes, "to weld the adjacent states of Asia (other than the Soviet Union) into a new Chinese family of nations". However, he adds, "It has since become apparent that in this venture the Chinese Communists overreached themselves. Following a series of severe setbacks in the foreign field, prominent among which was the thrashing taken by the Indonesian Communist Party, the Chinese Communists have taken up a defensive position in their immediate frontier regions."
Gray sums up the conclusions of the contributors in the final chapter. He concedes that it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict the future form of government under Chinese Communism. He suspects that "Perhaps it is impossible that any revolution in China can succeed in avoiding the creation of a new elite" and it may also be that Mao's political aims conflict with economic rationality, "not only in the sense that the cultural revolution has in the short term been economically costly, but that the policies it represents are finally incompatible with the rational pursuit of China's defined economic aims".
It should be pointed out that since the contributors to this book represent nations which have recognized Red China, the views expressed are generally more favorable than those of China scholars in the United States. Recent developments, particularly in the worsening relations with Russia, date some of the conclusions. The book is important primarily for the historical background it offers for the first half of this century.