View source for The Chinese Language: Fact and Fanstasy

{{Infobox book 
| name          = The Chinese Language
| title_orig    = 
| translator    = 
| image         = [[Image:Defrancis.jpg|Cover of the paperback edition]]
| image_caption = Cover of the paperback edition
| author        = [[:en:John DeFrancis]]
| illustrator   = 
| cover_artist  = 
| country       = 
| language      = English
| series        = 
| subject       = 
| genre         = Nonfiction
| publisher     = University of Hawai'i Press
| release_date  = 1984
| english_release_date =
| media_type    = Hardcover, Paperback
| pages         = 330
| isbn          = ISBN 0-8284-0866-5, ISBN 0-8248-1068-6 (paperback)
| preceded_by   = 
| followed_by   = 
}}
== Dominion Lede ==
{{TOCleft}} Cloned [[:en:The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy]]. See discussion page.

== English Lede 2010-01-29 ==

'''''The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy''''' is a book written by [[:en:John DeFrancis]], published in 1984 by University of Hawaii Press. The book describes some of the concepts underlying the [[:en:Chinese language]] and [[:en:writing system]], and gives the author's position on a number of ideas about the language.

==Main points==
* There is not a unique "[[:en:Chinese language]]". There is a group of related ways of speaking, which some may call [[:en:dialect]]s, others call [[:en:topolect]]s (a [[:en:calque]] of Chinese [[wikt:方言|方言]], fāngyán; DeFrancis uses the term "[[:en:regionalect]]s"), and still others would regard as separate [[:en:language]]s, many of which are not [[:en:Mutual intelligibility|mutually intelligible]]. One such variant, based on the [[:en:Beijing dialect|speech]] of the [[:en:Beijing]] area, has been chosen as the [[:en:standard language]] in the [[:en:People's Republic of China]], and is now known as "[[:en:Putonghua]]", or common language.
* The [[:en:Written Chinese|Chinese writing system]] has a heavy [[:en:Phonology|phonological]] basis, shown in the phonetic elements common in more than 95% of [[:en:Chinese character]]s. Unfortunately they are missing from many common characters, and were removed from numerous "simplified" characters, causing many scholars to miss the point that they are a necessary resource for Chinese readers. It is not a brilliant [[:en:Ideogram|ideographic]] script; it is a poor [[:en:Phoneme|phonetic]] script.
* Although there are characters in the [[:en:Written Chinese|Chinese writing system]] that visually represent concepts, such as 一 二 三 for ''one'', ''two'', and ''three'', Chinese writing is not ideographic in the sense that the symbols represent ideas divorced from language. There can be no such thing as a completely ideographic writing system, where there would be [[:en:symbol]]s to stand for all possible individual concepts and where [[:en:morphemes]] or [[:en:phoneme]]s would play no significant role in writing individual words. For instance, most Chinese words are written as [[:en:Chinese character#Phono-semantic compounds|phono-semantic compounds]] that include a non-ideographic, phonetic element.
* The Chinese script, with its huge number of [[:en:Chinese character|characters]], its complexity and its irregularities, is harmful to the [[:en:literacy]] improvement efforts of the [[:en:Chinese people|Chinese society]], and needs to be replaced by a more efficient [[:en:writing system]] if China is to achieve the benefits of modernization.

==Six myths==
<div>
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.

== Significance and Criticism ==

The book is significant in a number of fields of discourse, primarily linguistics of course, and its controversial theses have generated much criticism.  


== See also ==
* [[:en:Varieties of Chinese]]

== External links ==
* [http://www.alvestrand.no/books/chinese-language.php A review of the book] <!-- (note that the review author inserted the text above, so this is NOT a copyright violation) -->
* [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html Table of contents of the book and a sample chapter]
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