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Last week, I witnessed a palpable, powerful, poignant demonstration of tíbǐwàngzì 提筆忘字 ("forgetting how to write sinographs; character amnesia").  This happened in a colloquium where, during the discussion period, someone mentioned the standard eight-volume Historical Atlas of China (1982-1988) edited by the renowned geographer Tan Qixiang (1911-1992).  A member of the gathering requested that the name be written on the whiteboard in sinographs.  A colleague — a tenured professor of medieval Chinese history — popped up and said they could write the name in characters.

Already a little bit wobbly on the semantophore / radical on the left side of the first character (the surname), with a little bit of kibitzing from colleagues, the volunteer managed to produce the requisite semantophore after several false starts and erasures.  After that great achievement (producing the semantophore amid much embarrassment), they turned to the phonophore on the right side but were getting nowhere fast, even with suggestions from colleagues who were looking on.

Finally, someone looked up the name on their phone and presto digito*, the correct writing emerged:  譚其驤 / 谭其骧 (the group — scholars all — collectively preferred the traditional form over the simplified one).

—–

[*VHM:  I remember hearing this expression when I was young, but it barely exists on the internet, and I can't find it in dictionaries either.]

Judging from their rank on a list of the 9,933 most frequent characters, these are not even that "rare":

谭 #2145

其 #85

骧 #4475

As I explained in this post and have alluded to in other posts, few people know (i.e., can actively produce) more than three thousand characters, and basic literacy requires only approximately one thousand characters.  Given that the total number of existing characters runs to over 100,000 and that the standard character dictionary includes approximately 10,000 characters, those figures seem absurdly low.  Yet it is a fact of life that human capacity for memorizing characters (i.e., how to write them) seldom exceeds three thousand.  (This has been scientifically demonstrated by C. C. Cheng, emeritus professor of computational linguistics at the University of Illinois [for reference, see the 8th ¶ in this comment].)  Although some people may claim to know more and others may claim that they know someone who knows considerably more, these claims have not been repeated for numerous individuals under controlled conditions.

I want to stress explicitly:  it is not the least bit diūliǎn 丢脸 ("shameful; humiliating; 'face-losing'") to be unable to write a character like 譚 / 谭 (frequency #2145), much less 驤 / 骧 (#4475).  The scene described at the beginning of this post occurred in a group of about a dozen highly learned professors of East Asian languages.  They all laughed and said, "It happens all the time!"

Indeed it does.  Recently, a Ph.D. in Chinese literature forgot how to write xiǎo 曉 ("know; understand; dawn") (frequency #1357) during a formal job talk.  They were acutely embarrassed, but it was no big deal.  They got the coveted position anyway.

When I was a graduate student at Harvard, Professor Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013) (daughter of the famous Chinese linguist, Y. R. Chao [1892-1982], who taught Chinese at UC Berkeley and Harvard), often forgot certain characters when writing on the backboard.  That was more than half a century ago, long before the advent of computers and the rampant character amnesia brought about by them.  Now with most Chinese texts being input alphabetically via pinyin, the attrition rate in the ability to write characters has been further drastically reduced.

For where things are headed with regard to character competence in the Sinosphere, check out this video which shows where they are now in Singapore.

Yóuxì [jīhū] jiéshù 遊戲[幾乎]結束 ("game [almost] over").

 

Selected reading

• "Singaporean song supposedly in Chinese" (4/27/22)
• "Sinographic inputting: 'it's nothing' — not" (2/22/21)
• "The wrong way to write Chinese characters" (11/28/18)
• "'Spelling' errors in Chinese" (9/26/16)
• "Spelling mistakes in English and miswritten characters in Chinese" (12/18/12)
• "Mistakes in English and in Chinese" (2/13/18)
• "White dude challenges Chinese speakers in Shanghai" (5/5/17)
• "Writing characters and writing letters" (11/17/18)
• "Character Amnesia" (7/22/10)
• "Character amnesia revisited" (12/13/12)
• "Character amnesia redux" (4/22/16)
• "Spelling bees and character amnesia" (8/7/13)
• "Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia" (9/25/13)
• "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia" (10/18/14)
• "Character amnesia in 1793-1794" (4/24/14)
• "Japanese survey on forgetting how to write kanji" (9/24/12)
• "Kanji amnesia of the week" (7/25/20)
• "Phonetic and orthographic confusion of Chinese characters" (9/4/20)
• Pinyin in practice" (10/13/11)
• "Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)
• "The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14)
• "Firestorm over Chinese characters" (5/23/16)
• "Backward Thinking about Orientalism and Chinese Characters" (5/16/16)
• "Chinese character inputting" (19/17/15)
• "Stroke order inputting" (10/30/11)
• "Cantonese input methods" (1/20/15)
• "Google Translate Chinese inputting" (1/27/13)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
• "Chinese Typewriter" (6/30/09)
• "Chinese typewriter, part 2" (4/17/11)
• "Zhou Youguang, Father of Pinyin" (1/14/14)
• "Zhou Youguang, 109 and going strong " (1/13/15)
• "Swype and Voice Recognition for mobile device inputting" (1/22/14) — esp. ¶¶ 3-5
• "Language notes from Macao and Hong Kong" (6/22/14) — search for "Starbucks"
• "Easy versus exact" (10/14/17)
• "Writing characters and writing letters" (11/7/18)
• "Voice recognition for inputting" (10/22/17)
• "Voice recognition for English and Mandarin typing" (8/24/16)
• "Voice recognition vs. Shandong accent" (3/1/15)
• "The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages" (12/9/19)
• "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20) — with a long list of dozens of relevant posts
• "Character confusion: three-child policy" (6/1/21)
• "Pinyin in subtitles" (3/30/22)

April 28, 2022 @ 8:50 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Diglossia and digraphia, Language and computers, Language loss, Writing systems

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