THE PRESS THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 1979 Changes in Chinese

Press, 18 January 1979, Page 12

THE PRESS THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 1979 Changes in Chinese

Readers of overseas news in “The Press” and other publications will have noticed that since the beginning of the year, the spellings of many Chinese names —of places and people — have been changed. To most this will have seemed like confusion worse compounded. Chinese names are difficult enough for most Westerners to master without the additional difficulty of accepting changes in how the sounds of various Chinese characters are depicted in the Roman script familiar to Westerners. But the changes, which have been made on the initiative of the Chinese themselves, promise in the end to make the mastery of Chinese names by Westerners a somewhat less difficult task.

The Chinese have replaced one system of transcribing characters into a form which Westerners can read with another Two nineteenth century British scholars devised the system for writing Chinese “words,” including names, in English and other Western languages which has been used most commonly up till now. The system is riddled with inconsistencies, eccentricities and difficulties. Many Chinese names have ended up with romanised forms which give the untutored reader no accurate guide to how the Chinese themselves would pronounce the names. The new system. Pinyin, promises to make it somewhat easier for those with no knowledge of the Chinese language to pronounce the names as the Chinese pronounce them.

The new Pinyin system is not without its own eccentricities and inconsistencies, but it is a distinct improvement on the older system. It is a matter for regret, therefore, that some international news agencies and some Western newspapers are resisting the change, although not the New Zealand Press Association and Reuters, from which “The Press” draws most of its foreign news. Reuters, sensibly, made a few exceptions for those Chinese names so familiar in their old forms that the change would make no sense. Thus, readers will not be expected to begin calling the capital of China “Beijing,” or to begin calling the most famous Chinese of this century “Mao Zedong,” although both Beijing and Mao Zedong give a very much better idea of how the names are pronounced in Chinese than Peking and Mao Tse-tung.

The Chinese have not decided to urge the use of the Pinyin system exclusively just to help readers of Western newspapers. The Chinese language is a problem to the Chinese themselves and they have been debating for very many years how to make it simpler to learn and to write. In a classical Chinese dictionary there are tens of thousands of characters, many of great complexity. A major Chinese concern is

the time it takes children to learn even the few thousand characters that are needed for everyday life. One solution with which the Chinese have toyed has been to do away with the characters entirely and replace them with a phonetic, Roman script.

The Chinese are not very likely to abandon their characters in favour of Pinyin. If everyone in China spoke the standard language an alphabetic system could replace the characters without any serious loss — except the intangible losses from abandoning a system of writing hallowed by time and which has done much to give Chinese civilisation its distinctive stamp. The problem is that Chinese is a single language only as it is written. Spoken Chinese is a babble of tongues. There are six major regional dialects, some as different from others as French is different from Spanish, and uncountable local variations.

A non-phonetic system of writing has been an important unifying element in a country the sheer size of which invites division. The characters also perform a more practical, daily function in helping people speaking to each other to distinguish among the hundreds of words that sound the same but are different in meaning and in written representation. Chinese conversing with each other will often sketch characters quickly in the air to resolve ambiguities that present themselves to the ear alone.

The Chinese are unlikely, therefore, ever to adopt Pinyin as the sole way of writing Chinese. Changes in the written language are more likely to proceed along another line, already well-developed; this is to simplify the forms of characters in common use. The elimination of characters entirely is likely to remain an official but not very ardently sought goal. The fact that the Chinese themselves will probably not use Pinyin for this ultimate purpose is no reason for Westerners to reject its use in transcribing Chinese names.

At least a uniform system, in use throughout the world, will help people who speak other languages avoid the discourtesj' of pronouncing Chinese names in a way that would make them unintelligible to the Chinese themselves. Since China has begun to communicate extensively throughout the world, and has enabled more foreigners to communicate with Chinese, the need for international uniformity in language is obvious. A Chinese official requirement on the use of the Pinyin version of the language will ultimately be of great practical value in personal business, travel and other exchanges, not just to the Chinese but to the rest of the world.