They Wanted to Write the History of Modern China. But How? - The New York Times - 0 views
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this is the key message of Tsu’s book: The story of how linguists, activists, librarians, scholars and ordinary citizens adapted Chinese writing to the modern world is the story of how China itself became modern.
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Following the history of the script helps explain China’s past, present — and future. “More than a century’s effort at learning how to standardize and transform its language into a modern technology has landed China here,” writes Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale, “at the beginning — not the end — of becoming a standard setter, from artificial intelligence to quantum natural language processing, automation to machine translation.”
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With their “ad hoc efforts to retrofit Chinese characters” to typewriters and telegraphs, Chinese inventors sought to resolve the difficulties “that accompanied being late entrants in systems intended for a different kind of written language. But many wondered if the Chinese script itself was the problem.”
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Tsu weaves linguistic analysis together with biographical and historical context — the ravages of imperialism, civil war, foreign invasions, diplomatic successes and disappointments. This approach not only adds background and meaning to the script debate, but also terrific color to what might have otherwise read like a textbook.
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By examining these questions closely, Tsu helps the novice to Chinese understand both the underlying challenges and how they were conquered.
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Each step of the way, these innovators had to ask questions like: How can the Chinese script be organized in a rational way? Could the language be written with an alphabet?
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Mao, Tsu notes, “went down in history as, among other things, the political figure who guided the Chinese language through its two greatest transformations in modern history.”
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With more than 90 percent of the population illiterate, Mao embraced the movement to reduce the number of strokes in more than 2,200 characters to render them easier to learn and write. (Taiwan, rejecting simplification, still sees itself as the guardian of traditional Chinese culture.)
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Mao also spurred the creation of Pinyin, a phonetic, Romanized Chinese alphabet designed as an auxiliary aid to learning Chinese script, rather than a replacement.
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in the end, the Chinese script did not die; instead, it flourished. As Tsu writes, “Every technology that has ever confronted the Chinese script, or challenged it, also had to bow before it.”