The Chinese Language: Fact and Fanstasy: Difference between revisions

{{Infobox Book

| author        = [[John DeFrancis]]

== Local Lede ==

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[[:en:The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy]]

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

* There is not a unique "[[Chinese language]]". There is a group of related ways of speaking, which some may call [[dialect]]s, others call [[topolect]]s (a [[calque]] of Chinese [[wikt:方言|方言]], fāngyán; DeFrancis uses the term "[[regionalect]]s"), and still others would regard as separate [[language]]s, many of which are not [[Mutual intelligibility|mutually intelligible]]. One such variant, based on the [[Beijing dialect|speech]] of the [[Beijing]] area, has been chosen as the [[standard language]] in the [[People's Republic of China]], and is now known as "[[Putonghua]]", or common language.

* The [[Written Chinese|Chinese writing system]] has a heavy [[Phonology|phonological]] basis, shown in the phonetic elements common in more than 95% of [[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 [[Ideogram|ideographic]] script; it is a poor [[Phoneme|phonetic]] script.

* Although there are characters in the [[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 [[symbol]]s to stand for all possible individual concepts and where [[morphemes]] or [[phoneme]]s would play no significant role in writing individual words. For instance, most Chinese words are written as [[Chinese character#Phono-semantic compounds|phono-semantic compounds]] that include a non-ideographic, phonetic element.

* The Chinese script, with its huge number of [[Chinese character|characters]], its complexity and its irregularities, is harmful to the [[literacy]] improvement efforts of the [[Chinese people|Chinese society]], and needs to be replaced by a more efficient [[writing system]] if China is to achieve the benefits of modernization.