Foreign News: Revolutions in Language

If Red China’s leaders have their way, the Chinese will in time have an alphabet that looks like this. Gone will be all of the Chinese language’s 50,000 complex characters; in their stead will be a 30-letter Latin alphabet that includes every English letter except V, and five new letters to suit the Chinese tongue. This philological revolution, if it succeeds, may prove as sweeping in its own way as the Communist seizure of China.

At the dawn of civilization, so goes the Chinese legend, a wise man named Tsang Chieh took the signs of nature as his models and devised the first written words. Chinese script became a system of symbolic drawings, or ideographs, representing ideas and objects. For centuries its complexity has helped keep China isolated and illiterate. Although elegant and beautiful, script disregards such important features as grammar, logic and alphabet. Today only 20% of China’s nearly 600 million people have even a nodding acquaintance with script, and it takes six years just to learn 3,000 characters, barely enough to read a newspaper.

Long before the Reds took over, Chinese scholars labored to simplify their language−but most of them wanted to retain the ancient characters. The Reds found the old script an irksome disadvantage in training new technicians (terms such as calcium chloride and combustion chamber become nightmarish in script), in conducting efficient communications, and, above all, in spreading their message to the people. But the Communists could not make the leap to a Latin alphabet in one jump; they decided to streamline the old language first.

They trimmed the strokes (often more than 30) required to form each of nearly 800 commonly used Han characters. Now they are vigorously promoting Mandarin, the language of official and legal circles, as a substitute for China’s four major and 200 minor dialects. Housewives and workers alike are urged to study phonetics as an aid to pronouncing Mandarin correctly. No mean philologists (they studied language reform even while hiding out in the caves of northern Shensi), the Communists see such steps as necessary forerunners to the real job: doing away with the ancient script of Tsang Chieh.

Last week, as Red China tested its new Latin alphabet, there were still huge barriers of indifference and hostility in the way of Latinizing China’s complex and subtle language.