Chinese languages have been written in characters since at least 3000 years ago, although of course the script has evolved quite a bit since then. Alone among writing systems in use today (but like Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian pictographs, and Mayan glyphs), characters do not represent the sounds of the spoken languages, but instead represent meanings. Because of that, the same character can be used to write the same meaning in languages that pronounce it very differently. For example, the character 月 means "moon" or "month", even though it's pronounced yuè in Chinese, jyut in Cantonese, getsu in Sino-Japanese, tsuki in native Japanese, and wel in Korean. The funny thing is that most Chinese characters include phonetic elements, but the pronunciations have changed so much that the phonetics are at best hints, just like the English word knight is spelled in honor of its pronunciation in Old English.

To show how characters work, let's look at a typical example. Here is the character for cat, pronounced māo, in both traditional and simplified forms.

They're written with 15 and 11 strokes, respectively. The part on the left is called the radical, and represents a general meaning. In the traditional character, the radical

The two elements on the right of the characters for cat form another compound character:

The top element of miáo is another radical: it means grass. When it's on its own, it's pronounced cǎo (sounds like tsow) and written

Finally, the last element in the characters for cat is

So now you can see the logic: the word for cat, māo, is spelled with a radical meaning badger or dog, followed by a phonetic element pronounced somewhat alike whose meaning is irrelevant. It's like a rebus: try to think of a word that sounds like miáo but has something to do with small animals.

Lest you think I chose a complicated example, let's go back and look at the everyday characters for dog and grass. The phonetic element of gǒu

The phonetic element of cǎo

Characters get easier as you learn more of them: you meet the same elements again and again. There are 214 official radicals, and dozens more that aren't radicals, for a total of about 300 elements. They range from 1 to 17 strokes, although few have more than 7. And a typical character might have 2-4 elements, although some are much more complex. There's a type of noodle whose name is biáng: its character has 57 strokes!

But with some practice, these ~300 elements begin to function like an alphabet: they become familiar. They still only hint at pronunciation or meaning, the positions of the elements within a character are not pre-determined, and did I mention that the stroke order is important? You have to get that right, too. But with practice, patterns emerge.

When writing was first invented - in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3300BC, in China more than 2000 years later, and in Mesoamerica another 1000 years later - it consisted of symbols that stood for things: cattle, people, houses, animals, crops, etc. The idea of writing language took a while longer to develop, and obliged scribes to come up with symbols for less tangible things, like verbs and adjectives, that were harder to represent with drawings. The next step of supplementing the drawings of objects with phonetic information arose in all four cultures, and in three of them the phonetic symbols began to be used on their own. That's the step that never happened in China, and in fact there never developed a standard inventory of phonetic symbols even within characters: two characters might write the same sound differently.

My theory is that it's because in all the centuries of Chinese history, dominance never passed to speakers of a completely different language, as happened in Mesopotamia when the Akkadians took over from the Sumerians, or in Sinai when the Canaanites adopted the Egyptian phonetic symbols for their language without borrowing the logographs. Yes, China was conquered by the Mongols and the Manchus, both of whom had their own writing systems, and Chinese writing was also borrowed by the Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese, but in all three cases, it was initially used only to write Chinese (albeit in local pronunciation), not the local languages. Eventually, Vietnamese and Korean abandoned Chinese logographic writing altogether to write their own languages phonetically, while Japan based its phonetic alphabets on Chinese and still continues to use Chinese writing for meaning. One explanation is that because Japan was never conquered by the Chinese, they don't see the Kanji as a reminder of a humiliating past.

If you grew up in China, you were told that characters are easier to read, easier to understand or have some other advantage. But compare the above with the English word cat, which is written in only five strokes and it tells you its pronunciation! And because it's written in an alphabet, it's much easier to sort into alphabetical order, to look up in a dictionary, or to type on a keyboard. And it is much, much, much easier to learn!

There's another hidden burden with characters that makes them even harder to learn: they have no relationship with the spoken language. When you learn a new word in English, you learn both the spelling and the pronunciation at the same time, because one represents the other. Even if you encounter a word with crazy spelling - like knight - for the first time in its spoken form, at worst you might think it was spelled night or even nite: you'd be wrong, but close. But in Chinese, you might learn the spoken word māo, and you'd have no idea how to write it - none! Likewise if you happen to encounter the written word 猫 first; you'd have no idea how to pronounce it. So spoken Chinese and written Chinese are two completely separate languages, and Chinese readers have to learn both of them!

And even though we say that characters represent meaning, if you encountered the character 猫 on your own, you would have absolutely no idea what it means. Even if you knew some Chinese, and you recognized the symbols that mean badger, dog, grass and field, you would probably not guess cat as the meaning. Of course that's true of any other language, too! The words cat chat gato Katze кот don't tell you anything about their meaning on their own - you have to know the language. But if you do already speak the language, you can hope to recognize the meaning on your own the first time you encounter the written word. Not in Chinese!

However, characters have two advantages that alphabets don't. The first is a degree of language independence. A Cantonese speaker from Guangzhou and a Chinese speaker from Beijing would not be able to have a conversation: those are two different languages, although China calls them "dialects". But although the pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and word order are often different, they are both written in the same characters, so the northerner may be able to understand some written Cantonese. The situation is not so different from that between Spanish and Portuguese, for example: Spanish speakers can't understand spoken Portuguese, but they can usually read quite a bit.

This language independence also permits Chinese to read texts written in Classical Chinese, a language they would certainly not understand if read aloud. A very similar situation applies to the Arabic world, where native speakers each speak their own dialect, but only write a standard form. We used to have the same problem in Europe, where (church) Latin was the only written language, even though nobody spoke it as a native language. In these latter cases, this diglossia is rightly viewed as an impediment to literacy and development. Sure enough, when Europeans began writing their vernacular languages, Europe began to overtake the world! And nobody thinks that writing the English word knight as it was pronounced 1000 years ago is a Good Thing because it enables us to read Old English.

A second big advantage is disambiguation of homophones. Modern Chinese has only about 1300 syllables, including tone - far fewer than most languages (English has ten times as many). The result is an abundance of homonyms: syllables that sound alike. When they occur in a compound word, as is usually the case, the ambiguity is resolved. But when written, even a lone character presents no ambiguity. Because of that, until a century ago, written Chinese was very terse, in the style of fortune cookies. Since then, the Báihuà movement has encouraged people to write Chinese as is it spoken, so this is less of an advantage.

People who mention homophones as an impediment to sound-based orthography in Chinese need to remember that many languages have homophones - to too two in English; foi foie fois Foix in French - and that many languages have fewer syllables: Japanese has only about 100 syllables, and Hawai'ian has only 40! Obviously, if people can understand each other when speaking, then they can understand the written version of the same text!

Until a century ago, characters were all that Chinese had. When languages all over the world were handwritten, the only disadvantage of Hanzi was how hard the characters are to learn, limiting literacy to the rich (and to Classical Chinese, a dead language). Chinese had movable type, but not the printing press, so printing was onerous but possible: a Chinese typesetter had to find the right character from a much larger set of types than his counterparts using alphabets. They used Fanqie to describe pronunciation and Kangxi to sort lists, and they got by about as well as anyone else.

But then in the 19th century, the West developed several inventions that supercharged the written word: the telegraph, the typewriter, and the linotype machine. Although these inventions spread easily across other alphabetic languages, they posed challenges for Chinese that were only solved in ways so convoluted that they never really caught on. That left China at a serious handicap relative to the West.

After China became a republic at the beginnning of the 20th century, these issues demanded attention, and as you can imagine, the first response was to solve them by switching to an alphabet. Several alphabets were tried, but none caught on, the revolution went too far too fast, and the return of nationalism and conservatism sapped the collective enthusiasm for that approach. The simplification of characters might have made them easier to learn and to read, but it didn't solve the real problems.

The first step towards a solution was … switching to an alphabet: Hanyu Pinyin! But only for the things that alphabets do well: text entry, collation, pronunciation, and early education. For reading and writing, Chinese still uses characters. This hybrid approach seems somewhat ridiculous to people from alphabetic backgrounds. Imagine that you wanted to type "I like to ride horses", but after typing "horses", you had to replace it by selecting ♞ from a list of symbols. And then your reader would have to interpret ♞ to mean "horse", although it was sometimes used to spell "hoarse". Wouldn't it be easier just to transmit the word "horses" as spelled? After all, we understand that word when it's spoken aloud.

With the proliferation of computers in the late 20th century, the process of typing and selecting the character you want has become much easier. Clever IMEs and predictive text means that (using the previous example) it might suffice to type "ho" to enter ♞ in context. You still have to learn the characters, and you still have to know Chinese to type (an English speaker doesn't have to know Mexican to type Oaxaca). But Chinese is no longer handicapped, and the Chinese Internet is doing very well :)

The advantages of alphabets have been obvious to many Chinese, too. The New Culture Movement of the 1910s, which begat the May Fourth Movement of 1919, proposed replacing characters with an alphabet, and this idea was supported by such giants of the era as Sun Yat-Sen, Mao Zedong, Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun, as well as philologists like Qian Xuantong, Zhang Binglin, Hu Shih, and Chao Yuanren. But when Chiang Kai-shek took over, the spirit of Western-inspired innovation was replaced by a return to nationalism and traditional values, and the script reform project was downgraded to a dual program of simplifying the characters and using an alphabet only in an auxiliary role. The result is the current situation, with pinyin in the latter role.

But stability has never been a hallmark of Chinese history, and the next change in direction, whenever it takes place, may see the pendulum swing in the opposite direction, and the idea of writing Chinese in an alphabet may again be raised. Hopefully, Musa will be considered for that role! Until then, Musa is an improvement over pinyin in the role of auxiliary spelling.

Musa for Chinese >