Welcome to You Ask Andy

Dennis Sieber, age 14, of Vancouver, Wash., for his question:

DOES THE WRITTEN CHINESE LANGUAGE HAVE AN ALPHABET?

The Chinese language is written in characters that may be described as pictographic. Chinese is one of the oldest living languages and has been spoken and written since about 2000 B.C. It is a difficult language because it does not use an alphabet.

The characters in written Chinese each convey a complete idea and are treated as a single unit. They have only one syllable and are not inflected.

A student must learn to recognize about 3,500 different characters before he can read a simple novel written in Chinese. Scholars must know at least 10,000 characters in order to read classical literature.

Pictographic characters were originally simple pictures of the thing represented. But in the course of time, some of the pictographic characters developed forms that were less picture like.

Chinese characters are classified in a dictionary under 214 radicals, or meaning indicators. The radicals consist of groupings according to the number of strokes in each character. This number ranges from one to 17.

A student must learn the radicals thoroughly before he can hope to use a dictionary of the Chinese language with ease and any amount of speed.

Most of China's literature is written in classical Chinese, which is extremely concise, conservative and artificial. It differs greatly in syntax and style from any of the spoken dialects.

It takes many years to become an expert in classical Chinese. Even an educated person has difficulty understanding classical Chinese when it is read aloud unless he can see the written characters while they are being read.

Classical written Chinese is the same throughout China. But the spoken Chinese has many dialects that differ enough in pronunciation to be considered foreign languages.

The written classical Chinese, being the same throughout the country, actually unites the Chinese people in spite of the many different dialects.

The language is difficult to learn to read not only because it does not use an alphabet, but also there is no standard pronunciation. The language may be spoken in as many different ways as there are dialects.

In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist government introduced a new Chinese alphabet in an attempt to simplify the written language so that more people can learn to write. The Communists also hoped to unify written and spoken Chinese by the use of this new alphabet.

Many scholars have worked out systems of transcribing Chinese speech sounds into the Roman alphabet, with additional phonetic symbols. In English speaking countries, the system most widely used to transcribe Chinese is the Wade Giles system, devised by Sir Thomas Wade and modified by Herbert Giles.

A revised draft alphabet for the phonetic transcription of Chinese characters has been issued. The alphabet uses all 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. The purpose of this new alphabet, according to the government, is not to replace ancient Chinese writing but to make it easier for the masses to learn to read. Another objective is to gradually unify the spoken language of China.

 

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