CHINESE NOT ONE LANGUAGE

Southland Times, Issue 23513, 20 May 1938, Page 16

CHINESE NOT ONE LANGUAGE

WIDE VARIATION IN DIALECTS MORE THAN 3000 LETTERS IN ALPHABET Illustrative of the historic lack of unison between the various provinces of China was an incident observed on a ship bound from Shanghai to Hong Kong. A Chinese merchant from Lienchoufu, desiring to speak to a Chinese merchant from Chinchowfu, had to call upon an Occidental to serve as interpreter. The one merchant spoke English, the other Spanish—both could: speak Chinese, yet neither could understand the other. Actually, to say that one speaks Chinese is like saying that one speaks European. The Chinese language of the north is radically different from that spoken in the south. Such a simple word as “thanks,” for example, is shi-shi-ni in the vicinity of Nanking, and o-de-ah in Canton. 'Hie Moslem Chinese of the far interior, again, speak a language that differs widely from the coastal tongues. It is the custom to speak of Chinese dialects rather than of Chinese languages, but that is merely a matter of definition. Basically, all of the dialects are founded on an idea strange to Occidental languages, namely, a varied infection and lengthening and shortening of syllables (the Chinese singsong) to express different meanings. A common syllable such as fa has as many as six widely varying meanings in certain dialects. That common basis, peculiar to all the Chinese languages, is in many cases the only simi-r larity between them. True, there is “mandarin” Chinese, evolved long ago as a sort of “hochDeutsch” for China, but only the more literate Chinese are familiar with it. COMPLEXITY OF WRITING An obstacle to literacy for the masses is the complexity of Chinese writing. Its more than 3000 letters are not our understanding of the term at all, but are ideographs—that is to say, each character is the picture of an idea, highly conventionalized in its passage, through the centuries. To master Chinese writing requires a prodigious memory as well as a developed artistic sense and the ability to handle a brush deftly. The Japanese are faced with somewhat the same difficulty, since their writing is based on Chinese characters, but they have introdced various short cuts and simplifications, such as the “kata-kana,” a syllabic alphabet of 50 characters. Japanese, an Imost unaccented language, spoken in a monotone, can readily be represented in the English alphabet, but Chinese, with its rising and falling inflections, and its extreme tonal gradations, would offer formidable difficulties, unless possibly an elaborate musical scale were combined with our alphabet. ■ 5 So great and frequent are these tonal gradations that it is quite impossible to whisper in Chinese. Tone is so important that whispering reduces any of the dialects to a meaningless jargon. English-speaking peoples, with their common tongue, can have little idea of the difficulties involved in developing a spirit of unity and the nucleus of patriotism in a country of vast distances, poor transportation facilities, illiteracy, and different tongues.. The man from Walla Walla, Washington, many misunderstand an occasional word spoken by the man from Selma, Alabama, but, when one of America’s leaders addresses the nation by radio, there are few, if any, of his words that are not understood by his listeners. The Chinese leader, on the other hand, would have to stand before the .microphone for hours on end, repeating the same speech over and over again in a wide variety of tongues. PIDGIN ENGLISH Because of the linguistic difficulties in China, pidgin English is increasingly being used as a lingua franca among the Chinese in the coastal region and in many parts of the interior. This queer speech serves a definite purpose. To those who speak English as a mother tongue, the difficulty of the language is often not apparent, but this difficulty is magnified many times for a Chinese, whose basic ideas of the way to express thought are so at variance with Americans. Chinese. presents a similar difficulty to Americans, and pidgin English is an ingenious compromise. All foreigners who intend to live in China must learn it, but the speed with which the coolies pick it up is amazing. “Go top-side fetch missy for chow chop-chop,” may sound silly the first time you are called upon to say it, but pidgin English is by no means “babytalk,” nor a humorous device for vaudeville comedians. Pidgin English, in fact, has been dignified . by more than one grammar and dictionary of its own, printed along the China coast, to which more than one learned philologist has contributed time and

Its grammatical rules are simple and its vocabulary is limited to a few hundred words, but there must be many philosophers who, when called upon to speak it, have revelled in its very simplicity, which makes for crystal clarity, and, who knows, also for greater truth, since pidgin English is not the language for those who deal in innuendoes and double meanings.