Preface
Who would have thought that the Chinese characters we use every day today were almost deposed by "experts"!
If Chinese characters disappear completely, it will almost mean that the Chinese civilization will be cut off, and future generations will not know Chinese characters, and our history will be completely forgotten.
During the Republic of China, there was a vigorous tide of "deposing Chinese characters", and it has been a little effective, and even at that time, the southeast coastal areas had begun to use the "alphabet language", and the people did not recognize Chinese characters but were proficient in Western alphabets!
At this time, a person stood up and expressed the irreplaceability of Chinese characters with an article of less than 100 words, which brought everyone back to their senses in time.
This person is not only culturally inscrutable, but also saved Chinese characters with his own writing, who is this person?
Chinese characters have faced "life and death"!
The general meaning of Chinese characters is the writing created and used by the Han people, and the specific origin time has long been impossible to verify, but the history of the existence of Chinese characters does not need to be verified.
From the oracle bone inscription to the current simplified Chinese characters, in fact, they are essentially the same script, and our ancient historical documents are also Chinese characters.
Chinese characters have long been universalized in the land of China, and they are no longer only the Han Chinese language, but also other ethnic minority compatriots are also very proficient in using Chinese characters.
In modern times, the popularity of Chinese characters has reached a peak, and almost everyone in China uses Chinese characters, and the vast majority of people can read and write, and illiteracy has long been a thing of the past.
This proves that the script that we have inherited for thousands of years has an unparalleled superiority, and has been used for thousands of years without breaking the generations, and those minority regimes in history still have to use Chinese characters.
No one thought that such a powerful Chinese character system would one day be in danger of survival, but in fact, Chinese characters were indeed almost deposed during the Republic of China, and Chinese writing culture was in jeopardy.
More than 100 years ago, Chinese characters encountered an unprecedented crisis, but many famous families wanted to abolish Chinese characters, and they also gave quite good reasons.
And it also has a great connection with the environment at that time, the world pattern at that time was tilted towards the West as a whole, and countries such as Europe and the United States were far ahead in any aspect, which made us realize the advanced nature of the West.
As a result, some learned people who advocated total Westernization were born, and they should learn from the West not only in terms of productivity, but also in terms of culture.
At that time, the West in the eyes of the Chinese was undoubtedly powerful, which once made us feel inferior, and even produced a spiritual tumor that admired foreign countries.
In terms of productivity, there is no problem in being close to the West, because at that time the West experienced the Industrial Revolution, and the productivity was indeed proud of the world, which was the greatest advantage of the West at that time.
However, it is debatable whether we should get closer to the West in terms of culture, after all, culture is irreplaceable, and we can spread culture or absorb foreign culture, but we do need to be cautious about using foreign culture as a whole.
At that time, many literary people believed that Chinese characters had too many shortcomings, especially those that were too different from Western characters, which led to many obstacles to the cultural exchange between China and the West at that time.
It is difficult for Chinese and Western cultures to integrate, and the language systems of the two have almost nothing in common, and the world pattern at that time was dominated by the West, and the first thing that needed to be solved if you wanted to integrate into their rules was communication.
Then there is the question of the Chinese characters themselves, which can be called almost the most difficult language in the world to learn, but at the same time they are also the best and most accurate language.
During the Republic of China, most of the Chinese characters were traditional Chinese characters and classical Chinese, whether it was spoken or written, it was really difficult, and we people today would find it difficult to learn this set of things, especially those obscure classical Chinese, and they didn't know what to say.
Therefore, at that time, almost all the literate people were high-level people, and some ordinary people did not know how to read, let alone let the people write, which was a group of illiterate.
The low literacy rate of the common people is very detrimental to development, so at that time someone proposed to abolish Chinese characters and directly change to an alphabetic language, which is similar to Western languages, but we use pronunciation, which is very similar to the pinyin we learned when we were children.
At that time, the practice of replacing Chinese characters with letters even appeared on the southeast coast, and the local people were willing to learn it, and soon the language began to spread.
The common people do not need to learn the complicated Chinese characters, they only need to follow the pronunciation, except for the different structures, the rest is no different from Western languages.
Suddenly, there seemed to be a momentum to replace Chinese characters, which were not actively modified by us, but brought by Western missionaries at that time.
This created the illusion that it would work to replace Chinese with the alphabet, and that it would be very useful for eliminating illiteracy, but was it really appropriate?
Chinese characters have faced the most serious challenge, almost to the point of life and death, and at the same time, the thousands of years of Chinese history have also ushered in a major challenge.
At this time, a well-read person saved the precarious Chinese characters with only an article of less than 100 words, which can really be described as turning the tide.
Zhao Yuanren's "Shi's Lion Eating History" corrects the name of Chinese characters!
In this case, if we want to protect Chinese characters, we should not rush to oppose their abolition, but we should prove the superiority and irreplaceability of Chinese characters, and at the same time we must grasp the sore spots of Western characters and attack them.
No matter how the Western alphabet system is refined, there is a drawback that cannot be improved, that is, the problem of homophony, because the number of letters is too small, so the pronunciation is very poor, not as rich as Chinese characters, and the repetition rate of the Western writing system is very high.
The meaning of Western words is not very clear, and those who are proficient in English know that English can only express a general meaning, and it cannot be as fine as Chinese.
It is obviously inappropriate to replace Chinese characters with such a "low-dimensional" language, and it is actually very easy to refute it.
So Zhao Yuanren attacked the shortcomings of Western writing, and an article "Shi's Lion Eating History" was born, the full text is only 96 Chinese characters, and the structure of the article is extremely simple, but it belittles the Western writing system as worthless!
These 96 Chinese characters have only one pronunciation, and that is (shi), but the tones used between the characters are different, but the pronunciation represents a very different character.
This is a good testament to the depth of the Chinese script, and it also proves that the use of the Latin alphabet instead of Chinese characters is not feasible, but it does not mean that we should completely reject the Latin language family.
We can use the legibility and simple structure of the letters to help people learn Chinese, which is what we learned as children.
This is a clever approach and has allowed us to integrate our language well into the modern age, even in the computer age.
The profundity of Chinese characters and Chinese is not comparable to dozens of letters, and the Western writing system is now also facing a crisis, that is, the advent of the information explosion era, and many new words and new things need to be recorded in words.
However, due to the simplification of the Western writing system, new words can only be created with letters, and the new words can only get longer and longer, and the difficulty of learning is also increasing.
On the contrary, we do not have such troubles, our writing system is very large, and words are all-encompassing, almost able to express everything in the world very well, we don't need to create new words at all, we only need to recombine existing words to form new words.
epilogue
Chinese characters exist in "isolation" in the world, and it is difficult to find languages similar to Chinese characters in the world, except for languages derived from Chinese characters.
But this does not mean that our language is backward, but it proves that Chinese is a higher-dimensional language, because we can be well compatible with other languages, but other languages cannot properly compatible with Chinese characters, and we have been backward compatible!
References:
Beijing News2019-12-15"The Changes of the Times and the Simplification of Chinese Characters: The Criticism and Transformation of Chinese Characters by Modern Intellectuals"
"Huang Dekuan: How many "life and death disasters" have Chinese characters experienced" released on December 14, 2018 by the People's Political Consultative Conference website
On October 13, 2014, China News Network released "Chinese characters have begun to simplify the Republic of China, Qian Xuantong has proposed 8 simplification strategies"
"Simplification and Standardization of Chinese Characters in the Past 100 Years" issued by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China on August 27, 2013
Baidu Encyclopedia "Zhao Yuanren" entry
On November 26, 2008, China News Network published "The full text of Shi's Lion Eating History" has one pronunciation and became popular on the Internet"