Preface
Chinese culture has been inherited for 5,000 years, and Chinese characters have been continuously developed and improved in this thousand years.
The great poet Mr. Yu Guangzhong spoke highly of Chinese characters: "As long as the inspiration is not extinguished and the beautiful Chinese is not old, the image and the magnet-like centripetal force will of course always be there."
However, the Nobel Prize-winning literary giant Russell believes that "Chinese characters have three major defects".
The China Question
In 1921, Russell was invited to China to give a lecture and stayed in China for more than nine months.
The following year, based on his own experience, he wrote The China Question, the theme of which discussed the differences and advantages of Chinese and Western civilizations, as well as the possibility of mutual learning and common prosperity.
Russell called the problems of China and the world the fundamental problems, and he believed that there were three major problems in traditional Chinese culture: writing, Confucianism, and scientific research.
Based on his own personal experience in the process of Chinese cultural research, Russell found that Chinese characters have three deficiencies as an information carrier, the most prominent of which are the number of strokes, regularity and technical terms, which have caused widespread debate.
We all know the Chinese characters we use every day, but in the face of Russell's deeper questions, it is still necessary to have a deeper understanding of Chinese characters.
The importance of Chinese characters
The earliest writing we know of is an oracle bone inscription from the Yin Shang dynasty and cast in bronze, so it is likely that the Chinese characters predate the Shang dynasty.
Chinese characters are accumulated from a sporadic single character to a specific number, and then manually standardized to form a set of writing systems.
As a way of writing to express the original meaning, it has the advantage that it will not be replaced and copied by other languages in the process of writing.
We can say that ancient China has gone through many wars and turmoil to finally achieve great unification, and Chinese characters have played a huge role in this.
There are many ethnic groups on the mainland, and there are dozens of different dialects in each place, and if you don't understand other dialects, it's like a foreign language, so how do you achieve unity?
The answer is Chinese characters, and each word has its own intrinsic meaning, so no matter how the dialect is spoken or read, its meaning is the same.
In this way, the messages conveyed to each other are like an invisible bond that links the fifty-six ethnic groups.
Over the next few hundred years, Chinese characters evolved several times, with the emergence of calligraphic forms such as cursive and xingshu, but they remained traditional scripts.
Before the fifties of the 20th century, Chinese characters were mostly traditional characters, and some common characters had as many as a dozen or twenty strokes, which was very cumbersome.
It was in this context that Russell came to China for academic investigation, and he was accustomed to writing in English, but of course he was a little uncomfortable with the traditional Chinese characters of Chinese.
Three major flaws
Therefore, he proposes that Chinese characters have three fatal shortcomings compared to the alphabets of many other countries:
First of all, there are many types of Chinese characters, and it is difficult to read and write, and they are not as easy to learn as the 20-odd letters of Western Chinese.
Second, it is difficult to arrange Chinese characters in dictionaries, case files, catalogs, etc., let alone use new Leno printers;
Third, the pronunciation is inaccurate, and it is difficult to express foreign words, especially scientific and technical terms.
Are these three really the shortcomings of Chinese characters? Let's look at them one by one.
From complex to simple
The first drawback: the strokes in Chinese characters are too complex.
The Chinese characters we learn today are simplified, and most of the Chinese characters in ancient times were in traditional characters, and even now, with the popularization of Chinese characters, people still have certain difficulties in writing traditional characters.
One of the most important factors in the popularity of English around the world is its ease of writing, which facilitates communication between countries.
Russell believed that Chinese characters were far more complex than the English system, and that the large number of Chinese characters was a major failure.
Although there are only a few thousand Chinese characters commonly used, the words composed of these Chinese characters are very large, and a person must remember not only Chinese characters, but also words composed of Chinese characters.
Russell did see the shortcomings of Chinese. This is also the reason why after the establishment of New China, simplified Chinese characters were widely promoted.
At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, most people were illiterate, and the promotion of simplified Chinese characters could better eliminate illiteracy and promote the development of Chinese characters.
In the case of Russell, despite his keen eye, his judgment of Chinese characters still has certain limitations of the times.
Sorting issues
Then the next question, Russell said that it is inconvenient to arrange Chinese characters in dictionaries, case files, catalogs, etc., let alone use Leno's new typesetting machine, right?
The reason for this is that many Chinese characters are biased and have many radicals, which are not easy to remember, and many foreigners will feel intimidated when learning Chinese characters.
In addition, Russell's country uses a machine called a "typesetter", which is equivalent to the "computer keyboard" used today, and with this tool, the writing efficiency of foreigners will be greatly improved.
So Russell was surprised that the Chinese did not know about typewriters at that time, and he even tried various methods to simplify the arrangement of Chinese characters, but without success.
Russell pointed out that the creation of Chinese characters did not follow certain rules, for example, if the word "mother" represents love, if a special radical is added, it will become the poison of the word "poison", which is another matter.
Obviously, this kind of Chinese character is completely different from English with fixed tenses, tones, and other characteristics.
Because of this, when Russell realized that Chinese characters had to be written by hand, he wrote about this defect in his writings.
In fact, Chinese dictionaries have existed since ancient times, but the Chinese characters are arranged differently than the letters, and the earliest movable type printing technology appeared during the Song Dynasty.
However, although this technology is a bit backward from the current perspective, it is still at the forefront of the world, not to mention pinyin in the future.
The problem of not being able to sort in a regular order is also dealt with perfectly.
When Russell proposed the three shortcomings of Chinese characters, there was no pinyin at that time, so it was more difficult to arrange Chinese characters, and it was also difficult to typeset.
It wasn't until February 11, 1958 that we had a Chinese pinyin system that arranged Chinese characters alphabetically in English order so that Chinese characters could be searched by the first letter.
Diverse meanings
The third defect is that Chinese is relatively abstract, which can easily lead to misunderstandings and disagreements.
Although Chinese writing evolved from pictograms, it has so far led to a lack of awareness of its meaning.
We all know that Chinese characters are composed of three parts: "sound", "shape" and "meaning", and none of them can be missing, and pronunciation alone cannot make people understand the meaning it is trying to convey.
As far as semantics are concerned, human beings may have different forms of expression when they express the same thing and the same meaning, and Chinese characters are composed of three elements: phonetics, glyphs, and semantics, and when the three are combined together, a Chinese character will have a real meaning.
Russell believes that the structure of "sound", "form", and "meaning" has become the biggest shortcoming of Chinese characters.
This serious flaw can be clearly seen by comparing English with Chinese characters, English is a way of pronunciation, and if you can read a word, you will probably be able to write it.
Russell also believed that it was difficult for Chinese characters to accurately represent foreign words, and in fact, there was a huge difference between Chinese and Western languages, and there were great difficulties between many foreign words and Chinese characters.
For example, the original meaning of "copy" in English is "copy", "copy", etc., but in Chinese, it is only translated as "copy", and the meaning is much lighter, so the spelling of Chinese characters loses its original meaning, causing difficulties in communication.
Russell pointed out that the inability of Chinese characters to convey foreign words well was his "third shortcoming", but this assertion still had its time limitations, and he did not see the development potential of Chinese characters.
In fact, Chinese characters are one of the oldest forms of writing in China, and they have a special talent for absorbing and expressing foreign words in their long-term historical development.
There are many ways to deal with this, such as using paraphrasing, transliteration, or a combination of paraphrasing and transliteration.
Sometimes, we can even simplify these rare words, so Russell's question is too simple for us.
The limitations of the times
From the perspective of these problems, Russell's "defects" did not come out of thin air, but his understanding of Chinese characters was not enough.
At present, simplified Chinese characters are very common in China, which has brought great convenience to people's learning, writing and use, and the creation of excellent Chinese characters and calligraphy and painting has also emerged in an endless stream.
Now, with the promotion of the Chinese language, communication between everyone has become more and more convenient, and the "Chinese Words" sung by SHE has become popular all over the world, causing a wave of Chinese fever.
Judging from today's reality, Russell's so-called flaws in Chinese characters, no matter which one they are, cannot be established.
Chinese characters are words that have been handed down for thousands of years, and they have changed over the years, but they have always maintained their original meanings, and their history is so long that they transcend the limitations of the times.