Mandarin: English in sinographic clothing
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"Why Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’,Hanzi Shells, English Souls: The Europeanization of the Chinese Language", by Jingyu, Old North Whale Review (2/09/26)
Learning Chinese is widely sold as the ultimate linguistic challenge. Students are warned that they must rewire their cognitive faculties entirely to grasp an alien logic. But there is a reality that few textbooks admit: The Chinese language has been Europeanized.
Beneath the intimidating surface of the Chinese Characters (汉字, Hanzi), the operating system has been quietly swapped out. If one strips away the characters and the tones, what remains is not the mysterious, ancient syntax of the Tang Dynasty poets. It is a structure that is shockingly familiar.
After all what kind of language is Chinese?
Bìjìng, hànyǔ jiùjìng shì shénme yàng de yǔyán ne?
畢竟，漢語究竟是什麼樣的語言呢？
While linguists technically classify Chinese as an “isolating” language, a century of Western influence has pushed it to adopt “inflection-like” syntactic and rhetorical patterns. Conversely, English has shed much of its historical inflection and behaves as the most analytically simplified European language. As the two have moved toward one another, Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage.
This is an invisible revolution. Most modern Chinese speakers cannot truly comprehend Classical Chinese (文言文, Wenyanwen); the texts of their ancestors are nearly as alien to them as they are to a foreign learner. Modern Mandarin is effectively a creole, a hybrid tongue born from a collision between East and West.
The Ghost in the Syntax
The phenomenon is known among linguists as “Europeanization” (欧化, Ouhua)
Looking at the fundamental architecture of language. Traditional Chinese is a language of parataxis (意合, idea-joining). It is like a traditional landscape painting; elements are placed side by side, and the relationship between them is inferred by context, intuition, and white space. There are few connectors, no strict tenses, and subject-verb agreements are loose.
English, and other Indo-European languages, are languages of hypotaxis (形合, form-joining). They are architectural blueprints. They require conjunctions, prepositions, relative clauses, and tense markers to lock every piece of information into a precise, unshakeable hierarchy.
Over the last hundred years, Chinese has moved from the fluid landscape painting to the rigid blueprint. The Indo-European grammar have been imported and forced into the fluid body of Hanzi.
How the Update Was Installed
The linguistic update was installed in two waves. The first came from 19th-century missionaries. To translate the specific theology of The Pilgrim’s Progress (translated by William Chalmers Burns,《天路历程》), they forced the English plural “We” onto the character men (们), injecting mandatory number-specificity where context once sufficed.
The second, and larger, wave came via Japan. During the Meiji Restoration, Japan encoded Western concepts: democracy, science, economy, into Wasei-kango (和制汉语, Japanese-made Chinese words). These “returnee” words were Western souls in Hanzi shells. They flooded back into China, importing not just vocabulary, but the Indo-European logic of abstract nouns and categorization.
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Archaic Borrowings with Re-assigned Meanings: Taking existing terms from ancient Chinese classics and assigning them modern Western conceptual definitions. These terms were adopted by Japanese scholars to translate Western ideas during the 19th century and subsequently reintroduced to China through translated literature and returning overseas students.
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Society (社会), Economy (经济), Civilization (文明), and Revolution (革命)
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Japanese Neologisms / Wasei-kango: The creation of entirely new compounds using the inherent word-forming logic of Chinese characters (Kanji) to serve as direct equivalents for Western technical and academic terminology. Developed primarily during Japan’s Meiji Restoration, these terms were later imported directly into the modern Chinese lexicon as ready-made vocabulary for modernization.
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Telephone (电话), Science (科学), Philosophy (哲学), and Aesthetics (美学)
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Phono-semantic Transliterations: Selecting Chinese characters based on both their phonetic proximity to the source word and their relevant semantic meaning. These were largely the creative output of Chinese translators during the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican era.
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Club (俱乐部 – jùlèbù, meaning “a place for gathering and joy”) and Utopia (乌托邦 – wūtuōbāng, meaning “a non-existent land”).
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The May Fourth Surgery
If the missionaries and the Japanese provided the bricks, the intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 provided the blueprint. This generation did not just want to change politics; they wanted to rewire the Chinese brain.
On one side was the “Hard Translation” (硬译, Yingyi) of Lu Xun 鲁迅. He argued that Chinese vagueness was a national defect. To fix it, he believed translators should import the complex, convoluted sentence structures of German and English directly—even if it made the Chinese painful to read. His logic was brutal: the pain means it is working. The goal was to physically alter neural pathways, forcing Chinese readers to navigate the rigorous logic of a Western scientist.
But while Lu Xun was importing the hard bones of Western logic, the poet Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 was importing the soft flesh of English Romanticism.
Xu, who had fallen in love with the works of Keats and Shelley while studying at Cambridge, felt that Classical Chinese poetry, with its rigid grid of 5 or 7 characters per line, was too constrictive for modern emotion. He introduced the “New Moon” style, which mimicked the natural, flowing meter of spoken English.
Take his most famous poem, Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again (再别康桥). In Classical Chinese, a farewell to a river might be compressed into four dense characters: Liu shui, li ren (流水，离人 | Flowing water, departing person). But Xu wrote:
Softly I am leaving,Just as softly as I came;I wave my sleeve,Not taking away a single cloud.
(轻轻的我走了，正如我轻轻的来；我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩)
Syntactically, this is pure English. The constant use of “I” (Wo) is a modern invention; classical poetry usually omits the subject to create a universal feeling. Xu anchors the poem in the Western ego. He writes “not taking away a single cloud” (Yi pian). In Classical Chinese, the “one piece” is redundant; the noun “cloud” implies the object. Xu forces the Chinese quantifier to act like the English indefinite article “a/an,” creating a rhythm that matches English iambics rather than Chinese tonal patterns.
Selected reading
Cornelius C. Kubler, A Study of Europeanized Grammar in Modern Written Chinese. Taipei: Student Book Company, 1985.
Other recommendations from Old North Review
Why Chinese Didn’t Become an Alphabetic Language
The Structural Reconstruction
Modern Chinese now rests on several Indo-European pillars that distinguish it from its classical ancestor:
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Pseudo-Suffixes: Chinese is traditionally isolating, but Modern Mandarin mimics English morphology.
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ize (化 Hua): Modern becomes Modern-ization (Xiandai-hua). Nouns are forced into processes.
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ness (性 Xing): Adjectives are turned into abstract entities. Possible becomes Possibility (Keneng-xing).
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Explicit Connectors: It mimics the English syntax that demands causal relationships be spelled out.
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Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”.
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Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。”
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Introduction of Subjects and Copulas: The “Subject-Copula-Complement” (SVC) structure inherent in Indo-European languages has exerted a profound influence on Chinese grammar.
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Traditional Chinese: adjectives often function directly as predicates and subjects are frequently omitted:
“The flower [is] red.” “花红”
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Modern Chinese: the use of formal subjects (dummy subjects) and transform descriptive sentences into copular (judgmental) sentences.
“This flower is red.” “这花是红色的”
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The “Bei” Trap: Traditionally, the passive marker Bei (被) was reserved for suffering (arrested, killed). Modern Chinese has adopted the neutral English passive voice: “He was elected class monitor.” “他被选为班长。” The language has adopted the Western “objective stance.”
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The Sausage Sentence: English stacks relative clauses. Modern Chinese attempts to shove that complexity into a single pre-noun modifier using de (的), creating bloated, breathless sentences that tax the memory.
A Wrapper Language
The transformation goes deeper than mere vocabulary or sentence length. It touches the very way actions are conceptualized. The result is that Modern Mandarin has become isomorphic to English. It acts as a “wrapper” language. The most obvious symptom is the proliferation of “Empty Verbs.”
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English: “We need to make a suggestion.” (Noun-heavy structure).
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Modern Mandarin: “我们需要提出一个建议。” (Women xuyao tichu yige jianyi — We need to put forward a suggestion).
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The Classical Kernel: “当议。” (Dang yi — Should discuss).
The Classical verb (Yi) is potent and self-contained. The Modern version treats “suggestion” as a noun requiring a dummy verb (”put forward”) to carry it. This is “noun-heavy” bloat, adding tokens not for meaning, but to satisfy a Western grammatical structure.
The critic Yu Kwang-chung (余光中) lamented this “Malicious Europeanization” in his essay The Common and Abnormal States of Chinese (《论中文的常态与变态》). He argued that Modern Chinese has become “lazy” by forgetting how to use its own verbs. instead of “researching” (研究, yanjiu), speakers “conduct research” (进行研究, jinxing yanjiu). Instead of “contributing,” they “make a contribution.” The language is drowning in nouns, supported by weak, crutch-like verbs, creating a bureaucratic sludge that mimics the worst tendencies of English officialdom.
The Cultural Logic
This was a survival strategy. Traditional parataxis is beautiful for poetry but fatal for contract law or computer science. When drafting a constitution or explaining polymer bonds, ambiguity is a defect.
By introducing European syntax, precise conjunctions, abstract nouns, neutral passive voice, gave Chinese the structural integrity to build skyscrapers of logic. It moved the language from a tool for describing experiences to a tool for defining systems. The shock of the West “activated” dormant possibilities within Chinese, forcing it to evolve a thousand years in a single century.
The Hybrid Future
Modern Chinese is a cyborg. It possesses the body of the Han Dynasty, the flesh and bone of characters, but runs on a Western-style neural network.
There is no going back. One cannot uninstall an operating system update that has been running for a hundred years. China did not just translate Western books; it translated the Western mind, disassembled it, and rebuilt it inside the modern tongue.
However, this reveals a divergent path for the learner. If one is drawn to the language not for contracts or commerce, but for the Tang poets, the Song lyricists, or the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, the best route may not be to master Modern Mandarin at all. It may be to bypass the modern “creole” entirely and engage directly with Classical Chinese (Wenyanwen).
In a profound sense, Classical Chinese escapes the shackles of pronunciation. It is a visual logic, indifferent to the accent of the reader. Whether recited in the clipped tones of modern Mandarin, the rich cadences of Cantonese, or even a synthesized reconstruction of Middle Chinese phonology, the text remains the master. The “English” update never touched it; it remains an independent code, waiting to be read raw.
A few other selections
Richard Futrell said,
April 4, 2026 @ 8:35 pm
Strong AI vibes from this writing.
JASON STOKES said,
April 4, 2026 @ 10:25 pm
There are some structural similarites between Chinese and English, and undoubtedly there is some influence of English on Chinese, mostly staring in the 20th century.
KIRINPUTRA said,
April 4, 2026 @ 11:44 pm
Skip Mandarin. Go straight to Chinglish.
katarina said,
April 5, 2026 @ 12:04 am
I thought this a wonderful post by Prof. Mair. I've noticed the Europeanization of modern Chinese for many years but it was refreshing to read the views of others like JingYu and Yu Kwang-chung who have noticed this trend.
Thomas said,
April 5, 2026 @ 4:44 am
Apart from the argument that the article is making, I feel like the bloated verb-noun structures are mainly a thing of official news articles. I am not sure people really talk like that.
Philip Taylor said,
April 5, 2026 @ 7:49 am
ChatGPT's assessment —
VVOV said,
April 5, 2026 @ 10:06 am
LLMs love bulleted or numbered lists with boldface headings — that's what struck me as the most AI-like about this document. In contrast, the verb-subject agreement error in "The Indo-European grammar have been imported" flagged in Philip Taylor's ChatGPT assessment actually struck me as evidence of flawed human authorship.
My guess is this was an "AI-assisted" writeup with the bulk of substantive writing being done by the human author, but use of an LLM for editing and formatting.
Vanya said,
April 5, 2026 @ 11:37 am
Classical Chinese was a highly stylized artificial literary language. How much does modern Mandarin simply reflect spoken 19th century Mandarin even prior to Western influence? It would not surprise me if the spoken vernaculars had a far higher degree of hypotaxis than the literary language. The lack of ambiguity is a price to be paid for mass literacy.
Philip Taylor said,
April 5, 2026 @ 2:19 pm
Intrigued that you regard "lack of ambiguity" as a "price to be paid". Do you not see a lack of ambiguity as a step forward rather than a regression, Vanya ?
OL said,
April 5, 2026 @ 3:34 pm
Disregarding the primary argument itself for a second, this post feels as if very specific prompts were put into an LLM and then something was spat out, especially considering the bombastic framing of the main argument ("Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage").
David Marjanović said,
April 5, 2026 @ 3:44 pm
My general reaction is "yes, but" – I think all processes described in the article have been real, but it is extremely easy to exaggerate them.
On one hand, translating 1 : 1 between modern written Mandarin and modern English or any other European language yields less catastrophic results than attempting to do this between early Old English and early Middle Chinese would have, but it still doesn't simply work the way it reportedly does between Korean and Japanese.
On the other, as Vanya said, the extreme terseness of Classical Chinese/Literary Sinitic is artificial – an artefact of 1) writing & reading as opposed to speaking & hearing, 2) handwriting with extreme effort, and 3) a particular subculture of literati that has not existed in quite that form elsewhere. I'm not trying to say "no natural language could be terse"; Latin sayings can come pretty close to the CC/LS model (nemo iudex in causa sua "nobody [can be a] judge in [their] own cause" comes to mind, or ars longa, vita brevis, or even the decidedly postclassical Roma locuta(,) causa finita which is beautifully ambiguous between "Rome has spoken, [so now] the matter is over" and "because Rome has spoken, the matter is over" – this ambiguity would immediately disappear in Classical pronunciation). But CC/LS makes a point of consistently pushing it to extremes. "Omit needless!"
Apart from this, many of the features claimed to be Indo-European in the article are not IE at all, they're European areal innovations of the last thousand years or so; you're more likely to find them in Basque or Estonian than in Farsi or Hindi, let alone Tocharian. Of course that only makes them (slightly) more exotic to China.
Finally, "creole" as a term in linguistics does not mean "mixed". Instead, it refers to what happens when a community that has a pidgin as its only common language starts having children – the children fill in the gaps in the pidgin (often by reinterpretation of words as grammar) and turn it into a language that develops normally from then on. Pidgins can and do contain words from any number of languages, often just one; creoles can later pick up loanwords from any number of languages, sometimes none.
John Rohsenow said,
April 5, 2026 @ 4:52 pm
On reading this, two thoughts came to my mind:
1. 半文半白 (Bàn wén bàn bái)- the written Chinese currently encountered in
newspaper articles, etc. being (the result of) the creation of the 白話 (Báihuà)
written style created during the celebrated "May 4th Movement" in 1919, in which some Chinese intellectuals attempted to create a written style CLOSER to contemporary spoken Mandarin to replace the traditional older 文言文
(Wényánwén) literary written style in use at the end of the Qing/Ch'ing dynasty in the early 20th century, but still did retain some of the older influences.
Some people do feel that as many of those scholars were familiar with European languages, that they were also influenced by those as well.
2. See the distinctions made by Lubos Gajdos,in his "The Discrepancy Between Spoken and Written Chinese— Methodological Notes on Linguistics", SOS 10 · 1 (2011) pp.155-159, between "wenyanwen → shumianyu ↔ kouyu".
JMGN said,
April 5, 2026 @ 5:54 pm
I heartily recommend this reading: THE BIRTH OF TWENTIETHCENTURY CHINESE LITERATURE Revolutions in Language, History, and Culture (ISBN 9781137559364)
Chester Draws said,
April 5, 2026 @ 7:44 pm
AI writes like it does because of what it was trained on — formal writing. Formal academic writing precedes AI.
Now if my 16 year old students wrote like this, I would know it was AI.
But I am surprised when an academic doesn't write like this (especially if English is not their native language).
anon said,
April 5, 2026 @ 8:49 pm
One thing AI didn't recognize that is the precategoriality of Late Archaic Han Chinese (i.e. Classical Chinese) lexicon. We cannot find any discrete evidence for the existence of lexical word categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives,…) in Classical Chinese that prescriptivist grammars claimed and so any lexeme can freely function as the head of predicative, referential, and attributive phrases without any morphological change. (Bisang 2008)
Student said,
April 5, 2026 @ 9:05 pm
Regarding this Language Log post, although it is filed by Victor Mair, its formatting doesn't resemble anything Victor Mair would make. Normally, Victor Mair indents quotations, but halfway through the post the indentation ceased, even though some of the material was clearly copied and pasted from an online article. The writing style too differs significantly.
I don't think the odd formatting was intentional, but I have always expected Victor's or Mark's excellent insights or commentary, which is absent from the post. It's their expertise and prose I enjoy and come to this site for. I don't like the unformatted jumble of others' opinions; I came to hear authoratative experts.
Regarding the claim of the quotations that Chinese grammar has been influenced by English; I find this claim possible but doubtful to the extent claimed. Are we really to believe modern Chinese hypotaxis came from English language influence, rather than another European language, or more likely an existing spoken Chinese language?
I recall a previous Language Log post investigating trends in parataxis and hypotaxis in English over time, showing a significant increase in parataxis, which was attributed to the rise of more colloquial writing styles, but the same post questioned the distinction of parataxis and hypotaxis. The definitions there were not the same as the quotations here; specifically hypotaxis was defined as involving grammatical subordination, in English using the "that" in "the man that I saw earlier". However, prepositions are not subordinators in English; this post's quotation that hypotaxis includes conjunctions (which might include English coordinators) and prepositions contradicts this previous Language Log definition. Apologies if I misremembered that previous post.
As for the other quotation claims, they are as bold as they are ill-evidenced. I doubt them, but I welcome anyone's insight.
Neil Kubler said,
April 5, 2026 @ 10:15 pm
There is no doubt that modern written, and to a lesser degree, spoken Chinese have since the second half of the 19th century been strongly influenced by European languages, both directly and indirectly, via borrowings from Europeanized Japanese. However, the claims made in this article are much too extreme, with many half-truths and exaggerations. Moreover, the language used (e.g., "Modern Chinese can read as English in Hanzi camouflage," "Modern Chinese…possesses the body of the Han Dynasty, the flesh and bone of characters, but runs on a Western-style neural network") is in parts sensationalist and far from the kind of objective prose a trained linguist strives to use. To be clear, the 1985 book on Europeanized grammar that is cited (which was a slight revision of my Cornell M.A. thesis written in the early 1970s), while discussing some of the same linguistic phenomena, makes much more modest claims.
Jerry Packard said,
April 6, 2026 @ 6:51 am
The Europeanization of Mandarin worked on so fervently by Neil reminds me of earlier work on the Altaicazation of Mandarin studied by M. Hashimoto and others many years back. As one might expect this occurred in northern Mandarin due to contact between the two language groups there. The Altaicization seems a bit different than the Europeanization in that the former was more geographically driven while the latter was more the result of cultural rather than geographical contact.
David Marjanović said,
April 6, 2026 @ 12:53 pm
Is "Bisang 2008" this paper?
Josh R. said,
April 6, 2026 @ 8:24 pm
If I had a genie that only granted mundane wishes, I'd wish that the idea of a "creole" was wiped from the minds of non-linguists.
Languages change. They butt up against each other and trade influence. Significant influxes of vocabulary, or even grammatical constructions or methods of expression do not make a language a creole. Or if it does, then almost *every* language is a creole, and the term has no meaning.
Philip Taylor said,
April 7, 2026 @ 4:43 am
Well, the OED team is composed of lexicographers rather than linguists qua linguists of course, but let's nonetheless see what they have to say —
David Marjanović said,
April 7, 2026 @ 7:53 am
Why? We're talking about the technical term here, not about the history of the word or its use by people who believe they're using the technical term but aren't.
Never look up "dinosaur" in a dictionary.
Philip Taylor said,
April 7, 2026 @ 9:55 am
Why, David ? Simply in order to "see what they have to say", nothing more, nothing less. You may wish to challenge what the OED has to say (that is your prerogative) but unless you wish to pretend that dictionaries don't (or should not) exist, then I can see no reason why their contents should be adduced here.
Daniel said,
April 7, 2026 @ 11:59 am
I agree that this article was most likely AI written, but I had a strong positive response to the ideas put forward. Being a native speaker of English who learned mandarin Chinese at the intermediate level, the similarity of English and Chinese grammar rings true. I feel glad someone wrote it, since I've long noticed this, but not to the level of detail explained in the article.
The notion that both English and Chinese have become maximally analytical languages makes sense, as well as the idea that English specifically had an influence on Chinese during the 20th century. In some ways, modern Chinese is more rigidly logical than English. Native Chinese speakers I've known have commented negatively on the few peculiarities of English that don't follow strict logic, such as double-negatives or how word order changes in questions.
This is in obvious contrast to the way language is treated in Tang dynasty poetry. However, I'm not equipped to determine how much of the difference is due to grammar or due to the mode of writing (poetry), though I think parataxis is definitely more prevalent in classical Chinese. Parataxis is for sure part of the stereotype that the western mind has for the Orient. This was also how the alien language in the film Arrival was said to work. However, modern stereotypes for Asians tend to be more rigidly logical, like Spock. Neither are completely true, obviously. But perhaps the shift in stereotypes is related to the shift in grammar.
Relevant to this discussion is that my field is not linguistics. I only minored in linguistics, but keep connected to is as a hobby. I specifically didn't want to go farther in linguistics because the field felt unduly skeptical to bold ideas. The constant training in linguistics to be skeptical of your own perceptions didn't fit how I like to think about language. I know this posture is for a good reason, but it still feels too restrictive to me, as an outsider looking in.
Jerry Packard said,
April 7, 2026 @ 1:42 pm
Yes I’ve always seen English and Mandarin as quite similar and have always pitched it to my students that way. The big differences I see is the 2 languages form relative clauses on the opposite sides, Mandarin doesn’t like to have more than one thing follow the object, and Mandarin puts most modifying expressions between the S and the V, while English allows more freedom there.
Josh R. said,
April 8, 2026 @ 2:47 am
Philip going descriptive on me? What indeed is the world coming to…
Jinfu Ke said,
April 9, 2026 @ 2:46 am
To some comments: so far no LLM can reliably tell what text is LLM-generated. My institution has explicitly banned the use of LLMs for such tasks.
wgj said,
April 18, 2026 @ 10:20 am
Classical Chinese and modern Chinese aren't comparable, because one is written and the other is spoken language. I'm fairly certain and a thousand years ago, Chinese people spoke more similarly to Chinese people today, than to what they wrote down.