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Can a Logographic Script Be Simplified? Lessons from the 20Th Century Chinese Writing Reform Informed by Recent Psycholinguistic Research*

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Can a Logographic Script Be Simplified? Lessons from the 20Th Century Chinese Writing Reform Informed by Recent Psycholinguistic Research* Can a Logographic Script be Simplified? Lessons from the 20th Century Chinese Writing Reform Informed by Recent Psycholinguistic Research* Zev Handel University of Washington, Seattle In the 1950s and 1960s, the government of the People’s Republic of China undertook, in two stages, a carefully planned “simplification” of the logographic Chinese script. Drawing on a variety of historical precedents, over 2,000 individual graphs were modified in an attempt to make the script easier to learn and use. This was the first significant change in the official form of the Chinese script in nearly two millennia, and resulted in the script variety that is widely used today in mainland China, commonly termed “simplified Chinese characters.” Drawing on recent psycholinguistic experiments that attempt to characterize the cognitive functions involved in Chinese script processing, this study revisits long-standing questions about the efficacy of character simplification and provides some additional theoretical insights into the nature of logographic writing. The central conclusion of this study is that meaningful simplification of a logographic script is possible, but that today’s simplified character script cannot be characterized as an effective reform by any reasonable metric—it is only “simpler” in the crudest of senses. After evaluating the results of recent studies on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters, I introduce the concept of semantic orthographic depth and argue that a true simplification of a logographic script should be based on regularization of semantic and phonetic components, rather than on reduction of the number of graphs or the reduction of the number of strokes per graph. Furthermore, there is reason * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Idea of Writing conference in Venice (2011) and the Scripta conference in Seoul (2012). I owe thanks to the organizers and attendees of these conferences for valuable comments and suggestions. I am indebted to James Myers and Alex de Voogt for pointing me to helpful references in psycholinguistics, and to Jeon Kwang Jin for an extensive, thoughtful response to my Seoul presentation. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. SCRIPTA, Volume 5 (September 2013): 21-66 © 2013 The Hunmin jeongeum Society 22 SCRIPTA, VOLUME 5 (2013) to believe that a well functioning logographic script has cognitive advantages over purely phonographic scripts. As a thought experiment, I apply these conclusions to sketch out a scheme for what genuinely effective logographic reform of the Chinese script might have looked like. Keywords: simplified Chinese characters, orthographic depth, semantic orthographic depth, psycholinguistics, script reform 1. Introduction In the 1950s and 1960s, the government of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] undertook, in two stages, a carefully planned “simplification” of the logographic Chinese script. Drawing on a variety of historical precedents, over 2,000 individual graphs were modified in an attempt to make the script easier to learn and use. This was the first significant change in the official form of the Chinese script in nearly two millennia. The psycholinguistic research of the last two decades allows us to go beyond insightful but speculative criticisms of the simplification process (cf. Chen 1999, Ramsey 1987, DeFrancis 1984:214-216, Hannas 1997) and to re-evaluate the 20th-century simplification in objective terms related to reading strategies and cognitive representation. It thus provides a more sophisticated framework for evaluating the claims that were made on behalf of simplification by early- and mid-20th century advocates, many of which had little or no scientific basis. As it turns out, what is revealed so far by this experimental research largely confirms the suspicions of critics of simplification. If 20th-century Chinese writing reform was a failure, this leads to an interesting theoretical question: Can a logographic writing system with the basic structural properties of Chinese be effectively simplified—in a meaningful way that addresses both learning efficiency and reading efficiency—while remaining typologically logographic? Or are real gains in “simplification” only achievable through a typological shift to a phonographic writing system (syllabary or alphabet)? Is there a method of “simplificaton” different from the one that actually took place that might have been more effective? In the following sections we will briefly describe the structure and function of the Chinese script and the recent history of character Can a Logographic Script be Simplified? 23 simplification. Having laid this groundwork, the questions raised above will be explored in more detail, and provided with answers. 2. Chinese characters - structure and function In order to understand the methods of simplification that were employed in the 20th century and the motivations behind them, and to evaluate their effects, it is first necessary to summarize the basic structure of modern Chinese characters and the nature of the Chinese writing system as a whole, along with relevant terminology.1 Chinese writing is usually characterized as logographic.2 As it has been used over approximately the last 2,000 years it can also be accurately characterized as morphosyllabic. By this is meant that the overwhelming majority of Chinese characters as conventionally employed in the Chinese writing system are logographs representing monosyllabic morphemes of the spoken language.3 Since the vast majority of spoken Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic, there exists a nearly isomorphic relationship between written graphs on the one hand and spoken syllables/morphemes on the other. If we are speaking specifically of Modern Standard Written Chinese, then the morphemes involved are those occurring in Modern Standard 1 More detailed descriptions of the Chinese writing system can be found in Boltz 1994 and DeFrancis 1984. See also Handel 2009. 2 I use the term logographic in its widely accepted sense, referring to a writing system whose graphic units represent individual morphemes of the spoken language. These units are called logographs or logograms. Unger & DeFrancis (1995) object to this characterization of Chinese writing, but there is a bit of sleight of hand at work here. In making their argument, they change the terms of debate without being explicit about it. Their objection is based on redefining logogram in terms of a graph’s internal structure rather than its referent, namely as a unit of writing that contains no visual clue to its pronunciation (1995:45, 50). While this conception may be useful as a way of thinking about the internal structure and function of graphs, by repurposing an existing technical term they confuse rather than clarify the underlying issues. By redefining the term logo- graphic in a way that precludes any writing system from being logographic, they thereby render it useless as a way of characterizing writing systems like Chinese whose graphic referents are primarily morphemes rather than semantically empty phoneme strings. 3 While bisyllabic and subsyllabic morphemes do exist in modern spoken varieties of Chinese, they are somewhat marginal in terms of how the writing system works, and are not significant for the purposes of the present study. 24 SCRIPTA, VOLUME 5 (2013) Mandarin.4 Because a morpheme, by definition, has both phonological shape and semantic content, each Chinese character also has an associated pronunciation and meaning, namely the pronunciation and meaning of the morpheme with which it is or has been conventionally associated. For native users of the script, these linguistic features are thought of as inhering within the written graph itself. When Chinese orthography is considered in terms of its correlation with units of spoken language, the basic unit of the writing system is clearly the Chinese character. But we also recognize that the characters themselves have a high degree of internal structure; many psycholinguistic studies have demonstrated that this internal structure is salient at both a conscious and unconscious level for script users. Aspects of the internal structure bear some relationship with spoken language, but some internal elements can only be understood in purely graphic terms as units of a structured system that is independent of the spoken language.5 At the most basic level, script users view Chinese characters as composed of “strokes” (bǐhuà 筆畫), which can be defined as movements of the writing utensil that cannot be interrupted by lifting it from the writing surface.6 While strokes are a culturally salient and aesthetically important component of characters, they are not systemically significant. Generally speaking, stroke distinctions are not graphemic; in other words, switching out one stroke for another will not often produce a meaningfully contrastive graphic form.7 There is a unit of graphic structure in between 4 In practice, the writing system permits the imposition of different phonological systems onto the syntax and lexicon of the standard written language. Thus, a Hong Kong speaker of Cantonese can read Standard Written Chinese—which essentially reflects the lexicon and syntax of modern standard Mandarin—aloud using Cantonese phonological patterns. Note that Standard Written Chinese with Cantonese phonology must be carefully distinguished from the written representation of spoken Cantonese, i.e. Written Cantonese. 5 Myers (2011) argues that the formal regularities
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