Language reform and script reform
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Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there were countless Chinese intellectuals and common citizens who perceived that their nation was in such desperate straits that something drastic had to be done or it would collapse altogether. Many of these concerned citizens focused on the archaic script as unsuited for the purposes of modern science. Others concentrated on the "unsayable" classical / literary language (wényán 文言) as primarily responsible for China's backwardness, which resulted in Japan's defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). There were scores upon scores of reformers, the best minds of the country, who put forward a broad variety of proposals for language and script reform.
A Chinese colleague who is writing a dissertation about the eminent scholar and philosopher Hu Shih's (1891-1962) agenda for language reform recently wrote as follows:
John DeFrancis argued that Hu Shih made a major mistake by comparing his idea of vernacular Chinese (baihua) to Dante’s use of Italian. He believed Hu misunderstood the nature of the comparison, claiming that promoting baihua as similar to Italian was misleading. DeFrancis thought that Hu’s suggestion to follow the style of Ming dynasty novels, like Water Margin, was like telling modern writers to abandon Arthurian English and write in the style of Shakespeare. He also said that comparing Italian to Chinese vernacular writing was flawed—the proper comparison should be Italian written in an alphabetic script versus Chinese also written in an alphabetic script.
I chimed in:
The problem is that Hu Shih and his Chinese colleagues who were language reformers had to deal both with changing from Classical Chinese to Vernacular Chinese and from characters to a phonetic script. They had two tasks, and I think they felt that changing the language was a prerequisite for changing the script.
To which, J. Marshall Unger replied:
Well, Dante, Bocaccio, and Petrarca wrote in both the Tuscan Italian of their day and in Latin. They chose the language for a particular work depending on their intended readerships. A recent article on Bocaccio in the New York Review about why his Decameron argued that if the readership was to include or be primarily "the ladies," Italian was chosen because Latin was for scholarly stuff, presumed to belong to the domain of males. And some people knew Latin well enough to speak it if necessary: the Hungarian Diet used Latin as its official language up to 1844, with German briefly imposed 1784–1790; Magyar became the official language of the Diet in 1844, and German was re-imposed only from 1849 to 1860. The proific Gauss wrote his first paper in German in 1804, but also produced papers in Latin as late as 1841.
When Italy was unified in the 19th century, it took only a few years for the government to decide that the Tuscan Italian of Dante should be the standard national language and the language taught in schools. Of course, dialects (some would call them distinct languages) have flourished on the peninsula notwithstanding the official policy. I bring this up not only because it shows that a major political change was needed to make Dante's language a national standard but also to contrast Italy with Japan, which also went through a major political change (the Meiji Restoration) at roughly the same time: in Japan, the Ministry of Education dawdled until 1902: it couldn't decide whether to choose the high-prestige kamigata speech of the Kyōto region or the much widely distributed variety of Edo Japanese that generations of samurai from all over Japan had picked up during the many decades of required sojourns in Edo. In the end, the fact that higher-class mean all over the country had some knowledge of the language used in the old mansions of the warlords in Edo won out over traditional prestige.
I am no Chinese expert, but I would imagine that, although there were classics of non-wenyan literature circulating for centuries, what was 'vernacular" in the Ming must have been rather different from what is now considered baihua. To this, add the differences among Sinitic languages, which are surely at least as great as the difference between, say, Venetian and Sicilian or between Kagoshima and Ōsaka. (And of course, there were non-Sinitic languages, though I get the impression few Chinese were any more concerned about them than the Japanese were concerned about Ainu-itak.) At any rate, I think DeFrancis was right: centuries of Italian history were a poor basis for thinking about policy changes in China to be implemented in a matter of a few years.
Which will it be — language or script? You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Selected readings
- "Hu Shih and Chinese language reform" (2/4/17) — must read for what he says about language and script reform
[Thanks to Jing Hu]
wgj said,
December 16, 2025 @ 10:21 am
I find it very telling that a century ago, many (but certainly not all) of the best minds in China believed that their language needed urgent and drastic change, but today, there's not one prominent intellectual holding that view. To be fair, the language has undergone drastic changes already – some would even argue that it was overdone. The writing however, not much and I'd say if the first round of sinograph simplification hadn't gone through, there wouldn't be any appetite for it today – in other words, the idea of simplifying Chinese characters would be even less popular in Mainland China today than it currently is in Taiwan.
What that tells me is that the reason so many people felt the urgency for language reform had very little to do with the Chinese language, but a lot to do with national power, and they were obsessed with the language because the bookish intellectuals were incapable of facilitating changes in other, arguably more direct and more relevant fields, like military reform, industrial reform, or even agricultural reform. The language reform craze was merely a symptom of the inadequacies of the overall modernization and reform movement. A few – arguably less intellectual – people dared to do more than diddling with the language, and forced real change: people like Sun Yat-sen.
Another thing the comparison between then and now tells me is that, as is often the case, technology is a big equalizer, in the long term. People were freaking out during the 1080s that the Chinese writing will cause the country to miss out on the information age. Again, I think this anxiety says more about China's socioeconomic standing at the time than anything about the language. But those FOMO turned out to be unfounded, because technological advances, both inside China (Founder typesetting systems, Wubi, pinyin IMEs) and globally (Unicode and its adoption in Windows) made Chinese as easy to use on digital devices for the average person as any Western language. In fact, even harder languages like Arabic has become almost fully integrated in the digital world.
The Marxist principal that socioeconomic factors, or material basis, decides over ideological perceptions, seems to me to be vividly validated in this case.
Scott P. said,
December 16, 2025 @ 11:59 am
Again, I think this anxiety says more about China's socioeconomic standing at the time than anything about the language. But those FOMO turned out to be unfounded, because technological advances, both inside China (Founder typesetting systems, Wubi, pinyin IMEs) and globally (Unicode and its adoption in Windows) made Chinese as easy to use on digital devices for the average person as any Western language.
It seems to me that hundreds of posts by Victor here are demonstrating the opposite — technological advances are driving Chinese to increasingly use romaji when they interface with devices.
Philip Taylor said,
December 16, 2025 @ 2:14 pm
"higher-class mean all over the country had some knowledge of the language" — presumably "higher-class men" rather than "higher-class meant", since the latter would appear (to this reader, at least) to make no sense.
anon said,
December 16, 2025 @ 2:17 pm
@wgj Another factor that probably make Chinese characters still useful is Chinese being a pre-categorial language, or a language that lacks distinctive word classes like nouns vs verbs vs adjectives. Any monosyllabic semantic base can possess all referential, predicative, and attributive functions, and they only need to combine with other morphemes/semantic bases to outrightly express their specific function in a specific context, whether referential, predicative, or attributive.
Simplicissimus said,
December 16, 2025 @ 9:02 pm
There's famously a specific reason why Latin remained the working language of the Hungarian diet for so long: the Kingdom of Hungary was still (at least nominally) the personal union of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Croatia, and the Croatian delegates weren't about to let anyone forget it.
Student said,
December 16, 2025 @ 9:03 pm
@anon First I must clarify what you mean by Chinese. Do you mean the Mandarin language, the Cantonese language, or some other modern language descended from Old Chinese? There hasn't been one sole Chinese language in at least a thousand years. Maybe you meant the solely written language called Classical Chinese, which while originating from Old Chinese incorporated so many "dialectal" (foreign?) and write-only expressions that it could no longer be understood aloud by any contemporaneous descendant language in at least the past several centuries. Classical Chinese has not been written by anyone except learned scholars in the past century.
Second, Old Chinese, its modern descendant languages, and Classical Chinese actually have word categories. All languages can to various degrees "convert" (use) a word of one kind in the role of another kind, like how we can say "run" as both a noun and a verb; maybe you mistook this feature as unique to Chinese? Regardless, while the word might seem the same, its grammatical properties and its effects on neighboring words will still differ, and these differences will show in all languages, even if some rare languages have only a few differences between their word categories.
While it is true that a monosyllabe can be used referentially, predicatively, or attributively, conventions must make clear which is intended. Since certain conventions harmonize with certain other conventions, not all possibilities will be used, so monosyllables cannot be used as all three unless other things make it clear how it is being used, like you said. Chinese characters can be used an ambiguous way, but that does not mean they are not being used a specific way. The morphs represented by the Chinese characters do belong to grammatical categories; it merely appears without a category because the syntax is encoding additional interpretive conventions that are not immediantly obvious to non-native readers.
The Wiki(-book?) page for Classical Chinese Grammar (Classical Chinese sometimes uses conversion) still distinguishes between and content and function words, which while not noun and verb, is still a category distinction, so I think your comment about Chinese being a pre-categorical language is mistaken.
Koba said,
December 17, 2025 @ 3:50 am
> The Marxist principal that socioeconomic factors, or material basis, decides over ideological perceptions, seems to me to be vividly validated in this case.
It’s not clear what the Marxist analysis here is. Stalin argues that language is not a superstructure on the base.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1950/jun/20.htm
Jerry Packard said,
December 17, 2025 @ 8:56 am
I agree with Student that the comment about Chinese being a pre-categorical language is mistaken. Speakers of all languages assign words to form class categories at least implicitly – otherwise how could speakers produce meaningful utterances?
David Marjanović said,
December 17, 2025 @ 10:31 am
That's quite an exaggeration. There is no language of which this is really unreservedly true.
Well, that was Arnold Chikobava (an actual linguist), but of course with Stalin's approval.
Mike Ryan said,
December 18, 2025 @ 10:35 pm
Scott wrote, "It seems to me that hundreds of posts by Victor here are demonstrating the opposite — technological advances are driving Chinese to increasingly use romaji when they interface with devices."
→ Yes, but what appears on the screen will be the Chinese characters, right?
Victor Mair said,
December 19, 2025 @ 6:51 am
@Mike Ryan
"…what appears on the screen will be the Chinese characters, right?"
Wrong. As John DeFrancis long ago predicted and as Mark Hansell demonstrated and as I've written many posts about, digraphia is steadily advancing.
David Marjanović said,
December 20, 2025 @ 11:14 am
David Marjanović said,
December 20, 2025 @ 11:15 am
The second paragraph should be outside the blockquote…
*screaming "BLOCKUQOTE!!!" at the heavens*