Chinese Language. Scientific American

Readings from SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

With Introductions by William S-Y. Wang University of California, Berkeley

rn W. H. Freeman and Company SanFrancisco

,J . 7 .~ 4 by William S-Y. Wang February 1973

This melodious tongue is spoken by more people than any other. Although the Chinese system of writing is complex, the basic structure of the language is remarkably simple

T o people who are familiar only in a grammar of Chinese. For the various gives the illusion that the thing being with the common European lan- forms of the verb "to buy," such as named is new. guages the Chinese language is "buy," "buys," "bought" and "buying," There is one sense, ho\vever, in which t strikingly different. Yet today Chinese is Chinese has the single form maio (The Chinese is a very old language. Sumerian is the only language we know of that has ~. spoken by more people than any other mark over the a signifies that the syllable extant written materials that antedate language, and Chinese literature is the is spoken in a tone that falls and then Chinese ones. Sumerian cuneiform writ- world's oldest, spanning a period of 35 rises. There are three other vowel marks centuries. When we examine the struc- for tones, as in a indicating a rising tone, ing dates back some 5,000 years; the ture of the Chinese language, we find Ii indicating a falling tone and a indicat- earliest Chinese writing in existence to- that it is not conspicuously complex; in- ing a level high tone.) For "book," day dates back 3,500 years. But Sumeri- an and its derivative orthographies died deed, in many ways it is simpler than the "books," "to the books" and "of the out long before the beginning of the Western languages. But since Chinese books" the Chinese is shu. Most of the Christian Era.-Chinese orthography has does differ from the European languages time it is quite clear from the context continued to this day, although there in fundamental respects, some knowl- what tense or mood is intended for a verb edge of its structure and historical devel- and what number or case is intended for have been major stylistic changes. The earliest Chinese writings are in- opment is indispensable to a general a noun. Hence the Chinese language cisions on bone and tortoise shell. Most understanding of the nature of human does not bother much with this particu- lar type of redundancy in its grammar. of the inscriptions are oracular, deal- language. ing with political or religious events or To the Western eye the writing system Perhaps it is this structural simplicity of with the weather or warfare. Discovered of the Chinese is altogether novel: in- the language that moved the anthropolo- toward the end of the 19th century in stead of neat rows of simple alphabetic gist and linguist Edward Sapir to char- Chinese drugstores, where they were be- letters there are thousands of unique acterize it as "soberly logical." ing sold as "dragon bones" for their characters, many of which seem incred- medicinal value, the story of these in- ibly intricate. To the ear the language The Antiquity of Chinese scriptions is a colorful chapter in the sounds rather melodious, perhaps a little history of Chinese archaeology and phi- like singing. When one peers below the Chinese is often termed a very old lology. More than 100,000 inscribed surface, there are more surprises. The language. In a sense such a statement pieces have now been found. Even language has virtually no conjugation for is misleading. All human languages go though the total number of written char- its verbs and no declension for its nouns. back to the dim uncertainty of prehis- acters on the pieces is more than a mil- The inevitable paradigms that Western tory, and at present we have no way of lion, the number of different characters schoolchildren have come to dread in knowing whether or not they can all be their grammar books are totally absent traced back to the same root. Four thou- is small. The texts of the oracular inscrip- sand years ago the ancestors of the Chi- tions dealt with a very limited range of nese peoples spoke an early form of the topics, and the same characters are re- Chinese language in much the same way peated over and over again. Of the 2,000 SYMBIOTIC RELATION bet""een paintin, to 3,000 characters on the shells and and writing in Chinese art is elegantly ex. that the ancestors of the English-speak- emplified by a detail from "Flowering Plants ing peoples were using an early form of bones, about half can be read today. and Trees" on the opposite page. The char- the English language. Since almost noth- Through the centuries Chinese characters were written in the traditional for. ing is known about the emergence of lan- acters have been preserved in many dif- mat: in columns and from right to left. The guage in the human species, we are not ferent mediums: metal vessels, stone portion of the poem that is framed by the in a position to say which of the world's drums, jade jewelry, coins, metal mirrors, pine branches is translated: "Jade strands languages evolved earlier and which bricks and tiles. The central line of de- hang limp in' the wind. Crimson berries later. It is rather that in the course of velopment, however, has been the use of sparkle bright against the snow." The paint. histol-Y some languages have been re- the brush on silk, bamboo, wood and ing was made by Ch'en Shun in the 16th cen. named more often than others (as a re- ultimately on paper. A brush can pro- tury during the Ming dynasty. It is part of duce variations in thickness whereas a the Avery Brundage Collection at the Center sult of events such as migration or con- stylus cannot. Such variations give the of Asian Art and Culture in San Francisco, quest) and the newness of the names

.1 54

MAP OF CHINA shows the distribution of the major dialects of however, that have been carried to many parts of tbe world by the Chinese language. More than two-thirds of the Chinese popula- Chinese emigrants. There are also several non.Chinese linguistic tion speak one of the Mandarin dialects, of which the speech of stocks within China. The regions to the north and west are domi. Peking is the standard. It is the dialects along the southern coast, nated by non.Chinese languages such as Mongolian and Tibetan. r-

WANG THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 55

writer a much greater artistic freedom in rendering his characters. Some of the earliest written Chinese characters were pictographic. The character for "rain" was several columns of broken lines, and the one for "horse" looked like a horse, complete with mane and four legs [see illustration on page 61]. Pictographs, however, are only a minority in the total vocabulary of Chi- nese. Most of the words in the language cannot be suggested by a simple picture. Calligraphy, the elegant rendering of characters, is a highly cultivated art fonn that has long been prized in Chinese culture, much as painting is valued in the Western world. For the Chinese there is a close relation between painting and calligraphy. Typically a silk scroll is covered with a picture and a few lines of characters, the two carefully balanced against each other. Because of their artistic values and their long history, Chi- nese characters have a much greater range of variability in their size and shape than the characters of any other writing system.

The Writing System

The Chinese writing system under- went major changes in 1956, when the government of the People's Republic of China decided to simplify the characters and also to adopt a system of spelling Chinese words in Latin letters. Both measures are intended to make the reading and writing of Chinese easier to learn, a cI1Jcial step in promoting linguistic unity and raising the standard of literacy in China. In order to understand the nature of Chinese characters and their simplification, we must first examine their internal stl1Jcture. Each character is made up of two types of smaller unit called the stroke and the radical. Roughly speaking, a stroke is a line, either straight or curved, that is completed every time the pen leaves the paper. For example, the character for "sun," which is pronounced ri, looks like: t1

It is built up of four strokes [see top il. lustration on page 57]. Both the order and the geometric position of the strokes are important. There are approximately 20 distinct strokes in the language, so that strokes are the closest counterparts to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. There is no counterpart of the radicals in ORACLE-BONE INSCRIPTIONS, dating from 1300B.C., are among the earliest.known ex. the orthography of other languages. The amples of Chinese writing. They were made on ox bones and tortoise shells and were used traditional set consists of 214 radicals, ror divination. The photograph, provided through the courtesy of Bernhard Karlgren and and these radicals are found in almost all Jan Wirgin, shows specimens in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm. 56 II LANGUAGES AND DERIVATIVE SYSTEMS

Chinese dictionaries. A dictionary pub- meaning of the "sun" radical. In these phonetic portion is pronounced 16ngand lished in 1971, however, has merged characters the radical is called the sig- is written: some radicals, reducing the number to nific and the remainders are the pho- 189. Most radicals are also characters; netics. The phonetics indicate how the for example, the "sun" radical and the characters are to be pronounced. In character for "sun" are identical. There "morning sun" the phonetic is 16ng: There would be no problem in agreeing are thousands of characters in regular that the character should be the name use, and the majority of them are not of a metal or metallic compound and radicals. Each character contains only £ should be pronounced like l6ng, even one radical, with or without a remainder. It gives its pronunciation to the char- though such a character does not exist in The character for "star," pronounced acter. On the other hand, there are char- the language. xing, is written: acters that are not pronounced like their Another fictitious character was sent phonetic, often for reasonsof historical to me recently by a friend as a riddle. sound change. The phonetic in the char- The characterhas three components: X acter "star" is: There is a literary character referring to the morning sun, pronounced l6ng, +l..T that is written: The first component means "woman." The phonetic is pronounced sheng, but The second and third components also the pronunciation for "star" is xing. are independent characters; they are eft. As another example of a phonetic we pronounced shang and xid and respec- Now it can be seen that both characters can take the character for "horse." It is tively mean "up" and "down." We as- contain the "sun radical: pronounced md and is written: signed the signific to the "woman" component, and the character looked like this: 1:1 ~ "Star has the radical on top and a re- When the phonetic for "horse" is com- mainder, which is pronounced sheng, bined with the signific for "woman," we that )ook.~like this: have md, which means"mother"; For the character as a whole we settled on the meaning "elevator girl," However, !.t- there is no intuitive way of pronouncing ~~ the character, since the last two com- "Morning sun" has the "sun" radical to When the "horse" phonetic is combined ponents do not constitute a phonetic. the left; its remainder is pronounced with the signific for "jade," we have ma, The solution of pronouncing it with two fc)ngand is written: which means"agate"; syllables, shdng-xia, breaks a general rule of Chinese orthography, namely that for one character there is one syl- ~ J.'; lable. Although reformers of the Chinese Almost all the recent Chinese dictio- Combined with the signific for "insect," language have occasionally proposed naries and reference books arrange their the meaning becomes"ant," and again it polysyllabic characters, no such reform charactersby radicals. Take for example is pronounced mil: has ever beensuccessful. the character for "star:' To look it up Chinese dictionaries and rhyme books one first goes to the section marked by may list tens of thousands of characters, the "sun" radical: t.~ but a knowledge of 4,000 to 7,000 char- When there are two "mouth" signilics acters is sufficient for, say, reading a 1:1 hovering over the "horse" phonetic, the newspaper. The form of the characters meaning becomes "to scold," and it is has been built up unsystematically In this section all the characters that pronounced ma: through the centuries, and some are very contain the "sun" radical are ordered by intricate, requiring 30 or more strokesto 90 the number of strokes in the remainder, write. The Chinese government's plan which is: ~ of simplification has gone a long way There are a large number of charac- toward standardizing the form of the !.t ters in Chinese that are constructed on characters and reducing the average the phonetic-signmc plan. Thus under- number of strokes per character. The This remainder is only moderately com- lying many Chinese characters there is net gain has been dramatic, A text writ- plex, with five strokes.We would expect a phonetic principle. The average Chi- ten in simplified characters can contain to find it in about the middle of the sec- nese can often pronounce correctly a fewer than half as many strokes as the tion. character he has never seenbefore sim- same text written before 1956, This A key process in the construction of ply by making a shrewd guess at its simplification makes the task of learning characters can be illustrated with "star" phonetic. For example,examine the fol- the written language considerablyeasier. and "morning sun"; lowing: An average of five or six strokes per character is not significantly different from X 11~ the average of five or six letters per English word. Their meaningsare clearly related to the The signific portion means "gold." The Since it is not the primary purpose of

!.t.Ifti 57

the characters to represent sounds, the Chinese written languagehas beenlarge- ly independent of the evolutionary changes that have taken place in the spokenlanguage. This independencehas made it possiblefor the written language to provide a literary continuity across thousands of years and to serve as a co- hesive force binding the diverse cultures of China together.

The Evolution of the Language CHARACTER FOR "SUN" is built up with four brushstrokes: first a vertical. then a turn- ing stroke. then the inside and finally the closure. Order and the geometric position or the The evolution of spoken Chinese,like strokes are important. All the components of a character should fit roughly into a square. tIle evolution of all other living languages, has been constant. Therefore many of the beautiful poems of the Tang dynasty of the seventh to 10th centuries no longer rhyme. If Confucius, who lived in the fifth century B.C.,were OLD SIMPLIFIED to give a lecture anywhere in China today, he would not be understood. Within the large area of China dialects have evolved so far apart in their sounds that SUN (n) a man from Peking cannot be sure of be- t7 ing able to order a dinner in a Cantonese restaurant. Compared with the change in sounds, the written characters have e.!.t. changed little. Most of the characters STAR (xing) Confucius used are still in books today, and many of these charactershave their original meanings. The writing of Con- fucius is more intelligible to a modern Chinese than, say, a page of Beowulf is MORNING SUN (long) to an American. By the same token, '--" although the Tang poems no longer ~ rhyme, they are still enjoyed throughout China because their visual messagere- mains the same. When the poems are HORSE (ma) read aloud by people in Peking, Shang- hai or Canton, the poems sound altogether different because of the various dialects. It is rather like hearing "6 + 7 = 13" being read aloud in English, Ger- MOTHER (ma) .man and Norwegian. Even in Japan a Chinese with no knowledge of Japanese can manage to communicate reasonably well by writing. Chinesecharacters were also a significant medium of communica- AGATE (ma) tion in Korea and in Vietnam. The in- dependence of the characters from the spoken language has enabled them to serve as a core of culture in much of East Asia for many centuries. ANT (m~) A written Chinese character has a more direct connection with its meaning than a written word in English does.The \;t~ ",,\':1 sequence of letters spelling "horse" has ~ meaning only through the mediation of TO SCOLD (ma) the sounds they represent. The shape of the letters has no relation to the concept ,~ "horse." Little would be changed if En- glish-speaking peoples were to take up SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS were introduced in 1956 by the government of the Peo. the Cyrillic alphabet and the sounds for pie's Republic of China. Simple characters, such as the first two, were not affected. "horse" were representedxopc. To a Chi- The remaining characters, somewhat more complex, were each reduced by tiix strokes. i~\~J\~ 58 II I LANGUAGES AND DERIVATIVE SYSTENIS nese the character for "horse" means ten in Pinyin. The governmenthas been is now being taught in all parts of China. horse with no mediation through the careful to point out that Pinyin is not in- It is a straightforward system,simpler in sound ma. The image is so vivid that one tended to replace the characters but many ways than the easy syllables of can almost sense an abstract figure gal- rather to serve as an aid in learning pro- Spanish. There is really only one aspect loping acrossthe page: nunciation. To discontinue the use of the unfamiliar to those who speakEuropean Chinese characters would deprive com- languages: the tones. The musical qual- ~ ing generations of Chinese of a rich and ity of the spoken Chinese language is meaningful cultural heritage. due to the fact that almostevery syllable The other major linguistic decision must carry one of four basic tones. These made by the Chinese governmentwas to Standard Chinese tones are indicated by diacritical marks adopt a spelling system based on the over the vowels. The phenomenon of Latin alphabet. This system is called To discuss the Pinyin system of spell- tones seems to be confined to Chinese Pinyin, which literally means "spell ing we need to examinethe sound system and to some of the languages of South- sound." All the Chinese words spelled of what is called standard Chinese, east Asia that have been heavily in- out in Latin letters in this article are writ- which is based on the Peking dialect and fluenced by Chinese. One of the earliest references in the literature to tones dates back to the si."(thcentury. When the emperor of Li- .."\ ang asked one of his scholars,Zhou She, go what was meant by the four tones,Zhou ma ... responded with an elegant illustration: TO SCOLD ~ *'.-J-!-4j It means "The son of heaven is divine and wise." (Chinese emperors have tra- ditionally been regarded as sons of heaven and divine, whether or not they were wise.) The beauty of Zhou's responselies in the fact that the first word of his phrase illustrates the first tone in the speechof that time, the secondword the second tone, and so on. Essentially every Chinese syllable has a characteristic pitch pattern (tone). Changing the tone alters the meaning just as much as changing a consonantor a vowel in English changesthe meaning. In English we use a rising pitch pattern for "John?" and a falling pitch pattern for "John!" The different tones convey different attitudes, but the meaning of the word remains the same. In Chinese, however, ma with a rising pitch pattern means "hemp" and ma with a falling pitch pattern means "to scold." The two meanings are no more related to each other than they would be if we were to change the vowel to get ml, which means - "honey," or if we were to changethe con- sonantto get pd, which means"to fear." Standard Chinese has a total of four JOHN! tones: rising, falling, level and dipping (see illustration at left]. In addition to the tone every syllable must also have a VOWEL CONSONANT nucleus to carry the tone, usually a vow- CHANGE CHANGE el. The tone and the nucleusare the two TONE CHANGE obligatory components of the Chinese \1/ L--. ---" syllable. There are also three optional JEAN! JOHN? DON! components of a syllable: the initial component, which is usually a consonant; TONES are used to alter the meaning of Chinese words. Standard Chinese has only four the medial component, which is a glide, tones: falling (as in ma), rising (ma), level (ma) and dipping, or falling and then rising (ma). The oscillograph traces at right show the fundamental frequency of the author's voice and the ending, which may be either a as he spoke the words. In English, on the other hand, variation in tone is used to convey glide or a consonant from a restricted different moods; the meaning of the word being spoken does not change. In Chinese chang. class. There are eight possible forms a ing tone has same kind of effect on meaning of word as changing a vowel or a consonant. syllable can take. 59

FINALNUCLEUS. INITIAL MEDIAL, ENDING. PINYIN PHONETIC CONSONANT GLIDE VOWEL VOWEL OR CONSONANT I

FACE lian Ij£n . . IRON tie thj£ . . TO GROW zhang t~ary . e

HORSE ma ma .

EYE yan j(n

MOON yue Y~

HIDDEN y'i'n In

CHAIR y'i' 'I

COMPONENTS OF A CHINESE SYLLABLE that are obligatory which is usually a consonant; the medial, which is a glide, and the are the tone and the nucleus (usually a vowel) to carry the tone. ending, which may be either a glide or a consonant. All together There are three optional components in a syllable: the initial, there are eight possible forms that a Chinese syllable can take.

One striking feature of Chinese words correspondsto the Chinese term Guan- (as in "open" and "adamant"), whereas in comparison with most European hud, which means"official speech," Stan- others, such as the "-s" in "cats" and the words is the lack of clusters of conso- dard Chinese is a conventionalized va- "-t" in "slept," are single consonants.In nants before and after the nuclear vowel. riety of this dialect and is known as Chinese most morphemes are exactly When Western words with consonant Guoyu, or "national language," It also is one syllable long. The usual division of clusters are represented in Chinese,they referred to as Beifanghua, which means morphemesinto three major categories- are typically broken up so that each con- "northern speech," or as Putonghua, noun, verb and adjective-applies to Chi- sonant has its own syllable. "Marx" is "common speech." nese quite well. Thus in Chinese sha conventionally rendered: Outside China standard Chineseplays ("book") is a noun, 111ai("buy") is a verb a much less important role. The domi- and gul ("expensive") is an adjective. nant dialects among the 15 million Chi- These morphemes are known as con- ~ >t I~' nese in Southeast Asia are rue and tentives, in that they carry independent It is pronounced ma-ke-si.The first char- Southern Min, because it was people semanticmeanings. acter is the one for "horse," which also from the southern coastalprovinces who There is also a class of morphemes happens to be a prevalent Chinese sur- migrated into the area. In the U.S. the called functives. They are usually at- name. Chinese are relative newcomers; they tached to contentives to modify theu" Although the Pinyin systemand stan- date back to 1850, when they were first meaning in systematicways and to show dard Chinese are taught in all parts of drawn across the Pacific Ocean by the the relations the contentives have to one China, the languagesof ethnic minorities discovery of gold in California. Later another. For example,functives attached are given full consideration. According these immigrants made up the core of to the contentive "prove" change its to The Nationalities in China, a book the labor force that built the railroads in meaning: "proves," "proved," "proving," published in Peking in 1961, there are the American West. The ancestry of the "disprove," "unproved" and "proof." Al- about 30 million people belonging to mi- great majority of the several hundred though conjugational and declensional nority groups. The minorities occupy thousand Chinese now in the U ,S, can paradigms are important in English, they about a third of the land of China, most- be traced back to a small cluster of vil- are negligible in Chinese.There is, hc;>w- ly in the west and northwest. Some of lages around Canton, all within a radius ever, a sizable amount of derivational the groups are large: the Zhuangs are of 100 miles or so, The speechpatterns morphology in Chinese,where nouns are close to eight million in number and the of these villages are definitely of the rue derived from verbs by changing the tone. Uighurs about four million. The lan- dialect group, but they differ markedly Thus shu is a verb meaning "to count," guages of some of these groups are re- from one another. We can be sure that and shu is a noun meaning "number." lated genetically to Chinese but belong significant differences have arisen in the The verb lian means "to connect," and to other linguistic families such as Altaic past 100 years betweenthe speechof the the noun lian means "a chain." M6 is "to and Austroasiatic. American Chinese and the speechof the grind," and mo is "a grindstone." To de- A 1956 report by the Chinese Acad- sourcevillages around Canton. rive a noun in these cases one simply emy of Sciencesestimated that the total changesthe syllable to a falling tone. A number of people in China who spoke Word Formation similar example from English is deriving one or another of the Chinese dialects a noun from a verb by devoicing the final was more than 500 million. Of the di- Every language has a stock of several consonant: "prove"-"proof," "bathe"- "b th " "h " "h " alects, Mandarin has by far the most thousand morphemes:the bearers of the a, ouse -ouse. speakers: more than two-thirds of the basic semantic and grammatical content, The device of derivation by tone total [see illustration on page 54]. The An expression such as "can openers" change is no longer productive in stan- \\.estern name "Mandarin" derives from comprises four morphemes: "can," dard Chinese, but it is suspected that the fact that the dialect was the speech "open," "oer" and "-s," Somemorphemes tonal derivation was an important proc- of government officials, or mandarins. It in English have more than one syllable ess in the earlier stages of development ...... VIH4 I 1-16L ~

NTV VIH3 1-13 14 -16

1._. r"""""""""~""-) NTV"A A VIH3 1-13 14 15-16 I I ,~ ~E R VA VIH2 1-:12 14 [T] 15-16 13 [T] r "~ ~ E4 I VIH4 12 [T] VIHG 1-11 r 15-16 I ~ VIH3 r '1 1-11 VTH2 NRJ I 16 16 IT] VIH3.R I 1-11 VTH r l , 15 [T]

VIH3 AR 8-11 1-7 I I

VIH2 M2 1-7 8l11 r J~ VIHG WD N 1 [T] 2-7 8-11 r r l_--i I VTH2/NN NNS NN5 8"79 10- 11 2-7 I 1 I VTH/NN NN4 NN4 8-9[T] 10-11 2-7 I I NN3 NN3 10-11 2-7 I I NN2 NN2 10-11 ,..",2-7J , I NN DP NN2 10 -11 [T} 2-5 6-7 ("'...~~'-, I DP DE4 NN 2-.4[T1 SIT) 6-7 IT]

DE4 NN DE4 VA VTH NRJ 1V.NT VTH/NN NN WD DP 5 6-7 12 14 15 16 13 8-9 10-11 1 2-4 0037 63477820 0037 0668 1779 0037 1775 58972345 03374790 0110 755951746852 ZHI.1 ZHI.2 DIAN.3 ZHI.1 KE.3 DE.3 ZHI.1 HOU.4 CHONG.1 JI.1 YUAN.2 SU.4 YI.3 GAD.1 NENG.2 LlANG.4 PARTICLE MAY OBTAIN IT'THEM AFTER [PHYSj BOMBARD ELEMENT WITH HIGH-ENERGY 1\1 -s- .t..~ ~ c:5 7[. * z i& -cr 1~ z J.-A rCJ §t. ~ Z ~ 1\\\ ~ INPUT STRING 0668 1779 0037 0110 7559 5174 6852 0037 6347 7820 5897 2345 0337 4790 0037 1775

SENTENCE POSITION 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008

COMPUTER TRANSLATION of a Chinese sentence from a scien. analysis of the sentence. In converting the sentence into English tific text produces a reasonably accurate and understandable result. the computer makes permutations of the word order. The sentence means: "It may he obtained after bombarding the element with The string of Chinese characters is entered into the computer using high-energy particles." Research into computer analysis of Chi. a numeric code for each character. The position of each character nese is being conducted hy the author and his colleagues at the in the sentence is also entered. The computer searchesits memory phonology laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. for the meaning of each character and then perfonns syntactic

111 WANG I THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 61 of the Chinese language. In the Canton- for word "We eat chicken." There is a normally would be clear from the con- ese dialect, however, the process is still tendency in Chinese to delete either the text. But ii chi of course also means very productive. The Cantoneseuse tone subject or the object. Hence women chi something like "The chicken eats," change for forming diminutives: "candy" ("We eat") or chi ii ("Eat chicken") are where ti is the subject of the verb. In from "sugar," "daughter" from "female" both common sentences. To focus at- other words, ii chi is an ambiguous sen- and so on. tention on the object, the Chinesespeak- tence, its ambiguity arising from object A common derivational device in Chi- er will move it to the beginning of the fronting and subject deletion. nese is reduplicatl,on. Applied to nouns, sentence. Ii women chi, for instance, There is no evidence that Chinese al- it carries the meaning "every." Hence al- means "We eat chicken," but it is nor- lows either more ambiguity than English though Ten means "person," renren mally used to contrast with something or less. In an English sentence such as means "evel'Y person," tian means "day" else we do not eat. Suppose subject de- "It is too hot to eat," the "it"'can refer to and tiantian means "every day." Applied letion and moving the object to the initial the weather, to the food or to the animal to verbs, it adds a transitory meaning to position both operated on the sentence lhat is doing the eating. Moreover, "hot" the action: kan means"to look," whereas women chi Ii. First we front the object could mean "high in heat content" kankan means "to take a look," zOu and get ii women chi, and then we delete (which in Chinese is tang) or it could means "to walk" and z6uzou means "to the subject and get ii chi. The resulting mean"spicy" (which in Chinese is la). take a walk." Adverbs can be derived sentence would mean something like The Chinese language as an object of from adjectives by reduplication and the "Chicken A eats," and the identity of A study goes back as far as the beginning addition of a de suffix. Thus kuai is "quick" and kudikuaide is "quickly," Ian is "lazy" and lanldnde is '1azily." The manner in which two-syllable adjectives reduplicate is different. Whereas REGULAR FORMS a two-syllable verb, tdolun ("to discuss"), reduplicates as tdoluntdolun ("to discuss TIGER DRAGON a little"), an adjective, say gaoxing ("hap- py"), becomes gaogaoxingxingde ("hap- ANCIENT GRAPHS ~ pily"). A verb reduplicates by the entire ABOUT 2000 B.C. word, but the adjective reduplicates in ~ ~ terms of its constituent syllables. SHELL-AND-BONE Another device for word formation in CHARACTERS jiaguwen Chinese is the conjoining of antonyms. ABOUT 1400- "Buy" and "sell" combine to form "busi- f\ 1200 B.C. ~ ness," mdimdi. "Long" and "short" combine to form "length," changdudn. The GREAT SEAL dazhuan derived meaning is not always straight- ABOUT 1100-300 B.C. forward. For example,fan means"turned ~ ~ over" and zheng means "right side up." ,~ SCRIPT FORMS Put together, fdnzheng means "in any SMALL SEAL xiaozhuan case." 221-207 B.C. TIGER DRAGON Classifiers are a linguistic feature pe- fn culiar to Chinese and its neighboring DOCUMENTARY SCRIBE CHARACTER SCRIPT languages. Articles, numerals and other Iishii ABOUT 200 B.C.- zhangcao such modifiers cannot directly precede A.D. 200 ~ if? tfJ ABOUT 200 B.C.. their associatednoun; there has to be an A.D.1700 intervening classifier, which usually has STANDARD RUNNING STYLE CHARACTERS ~ negligible semantic content. In Chinese kaishu -!- l xlngshu one cannot saysan sha ("three books")or ABOUT A.D. 100 ABOUT A.D. 200 t1 ,t .PRESENT -PRESENT It nei maD ("that cat"). One has to say san hen sha ("three piece book") or nei zhi SIMPLIFIED SIMPLIFIED SCRIPT CHARACTERS CHARACTERS maD ("that piece cat"). The terms hen J=. ..t. jianzi ~ ,~ lianbl jianzi and zhi here are translated as "piece" ABOUT A.D. 100 \":f!. ABOUT A.D.100 -PRESENT J--t for the lack of a better counterpart in -PRESENT English. Such classifiers are absolutely 'MODERN" SCRIPT necessaryin Chinese expressions. This jincao -t ABOUT A.D. 300 feature has been carried over into many .PRESENT pidgin and Creole languages based on Chinese, in which "three bananas" or ERRATIC SCRIPT

"this man" are rendered as "three piece kuangcao I banana" or "this fellow man." ABOUT A.D. 600-1700

SentenceFormation HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT of pictographic characters for the two most powerful ani. The basic sentence in Chinese has the mals in Chinese mythology, the tiger and the dragon, are shown in their various stages.The order subject-verb-object, as in English. earliest-known pictographic forms of the animals are at the top in red. The illustration is Thus the sentencewomen chi ii is word from Introduction to Chinese Cursive Script, by F. Y. Wang of Seton Hall University.

~1t~L 62 II I LANGUAGES AND DERIV A'rIVE SYSTENlS of the Christian Era. At that time the been hampered in the past by an over- to a large number of well-defined types of sound change, we are now in a posi- Chinese had already produced sophisti- abundance of data, which tended to cated works in dialectology and in se- make research procedures cumbersome tion to study much more effectivt'ly the mantic classification.The foundations for and time-consuming. The advent of selective forcc that determines the di- the historical study of Chinese sounds large computers has facilitated the ma- rection of languageevolution. were laid during the 17th and 18th cen- nipulation of the data. Chin-Chuan Another aspect of the Chinese lan- turies by the great scholars of the Qing Cheng and I, with the help of several guage that has been subjected to in- dynasty, and it is on their shoulders that colleagues,have developed a dialect dic- tensive computer study is its morphol- modern Chineselinguists stand. tionary on computer, which we call ogy and syntax. With the collaboration The key to how a language sounded DOC.The program is in operation at the of StephenW. Chan, Benjamin K. Tsou centuries ago lies in how it soundstoday. computer centers of the University of and others, we have developed a ma- The basic method is to compare the pro- California at Berkeley and of the Uni- chine dictionary with more than iO,OOO nunciation of morphemes in contempo- versity of Illinois. It incorporatesthe pro- entries, together with the necessarypro- rary dialects and to infer what their an- nunciation of more than 2,000 mor- grams for translation from Chinese into cestral pronunciations might have been. phemes in each of 20 Chinese dialects, English. A good measureof how well we The inference is not just a guess but is Evidence is accumulating from our understand the stl"Uctureof a language made on the basis of documentary evi- work with DOCthat changes in language is how well we can break it apart in a dence and knowledge of the general proceed in ways that are essentiallypar- way that is suitable for translation by linguistic principles underlying sound allel to biological evolution, as Charles machine. Although \ve are an indefinite Darwin noted in The Descent of i'llan. distance away from being able to trans- change. Given the nonphonetic nature of the In both casesthe mechanism of change late a Tang poem into English without Chinese writing system, it may seem an resides in variation. When two or more losing its exquisite sensitivity, \ve can impossible task to reconstruct how the variants appear, the'rival forms compete do a reasonablyaccurate job with scien- language was spoken many centuries for survival. For instance, in American tific texts [see illustration on page 60]. ago. One might think that the sounds speech the vowel in "room" varies be- Now that relations between the Peo- of alphabetic languages, such as Old tween that of "pool" and that of "put," ple's Republic of China and Western Church Slavic or Sanskrit, would be and the s in "disobey" varies between an nations are becoming more normal, in- much easierto reconstruct. Actually it is .9 and a :. The major selective force, terest in the Chineselanguage is increas- not much easier, because there is no which is constant acrosstime as well as ing at an accelerating tempo. Consider- direct way to determine how a letter was across languages,is the easewith which ing that the Chinese language has the pronounced. With alphabetic languages the forms can be pronounced and prop- largest number of speakers in the world the phonetic values must also be arrived erly perceived. This selective force de- and the greatesttime depth in its literature, this interest is long overdue. \Vith at by inference. termines what forms of speechwill sur- Chinese has the great advantage of an vive. the increase in interest we may look for- abundance of ancientwritings that reach With the aid of computer programs ward to deeper probings into the history back continuously in time further than such as DOCwe have been able to loun and the structure of the language, and the literature of any other language in through large pools of data to locate into the inHuencethe language has had the world. The fact that the form of ongoing sound changes of special inter- on the cultural and intellectual devl"l- Chinese charactersis often not much in- est. Some changes are just beginning, opment of the Chinese people. These fluenced by changesin pronunciation is some are in midstream and some are studies will surely lead to a better gen- quite a convenience in helping linguists ending. In the Chaozhou dialect, for ex- eral understanding of the nature of hll- to determine which morphemesare ety- ample, there is a change from one tone manlanguage. mologically related. to another that has so far affected about The study of Chinese dialects has half of the vocabulary. By having access