DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 1
Introduction The Sing/ish Affair
The world is of the opinion that those who know Chinese characters are wise and worthy, whereas those who do not know characters are simple and stupid. Zheng Qiao (1 104-1162), TongZhz' [Encyclopedic annals J
This is a report on my discovery of material exposing what has since come to be called The Singlish Affair. The discovery came about when I chanced upon a forgotten carton of wartime documents in the Thyo Bunko Library in Japan while pursuing research on the fate of the Chinese writing system in China, Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam.1 The material consists of a hodgepodge of manuscript documents . and notes prepared by a small secret group of scholars with the innoc uous name of the Committee on English Language Planning. At tached directly to the.officeof General Thjo, the supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces, the committee was headed by his close personal friend, Prof. Ono Kanji, and included only three other members, all collaborationists from lands occupied by the Japanese a Chinese, Lr Yilian; a Korean, Kim Mun-yi; and a Vietnamese, Phi De Giua. Information is lacking on how these four scholars came to be selected for membership in the committee, a point of considerable interest, for it would be hard to imagine a less harmonious group of coworkers. The documents reveal that they were continuously involved in ethnocentric bickering on what to an outsider seem to be quite trivial points of dei:ail. On only one thing were they fully agreed. This was the astonishing
· notion that, in anticipation that firstHawaii, then Australia and New
· 1 Zealand, and eventually the continental United States itself would be conquered and incorporated within theJapanese empire as part of an expanded East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, it was necessary to plan for the day when policy would be implemented for reforming the writing systems of these English-speaking countries by forcing them to aban don their traditional orthography based on the Latin alphabet and to adopt instead a system based on Chinese characters. DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 2 INTRODUCTION The Sing/ish Affair 3 2 influence would have implanted itself legitimately and would have The precise nature of this projected new system of writing was a been dominant for a period that no one can imagine.The great Orien matter of acrimonious dispute among the scholars. To the various tal nations, so precocious in their development, have been arrested; schemes that they proposed, and to the single scheme, whatever it the Hindu, Siamese, Annamese, and Chinese civilizations have re might turn out to be, that they were mandated by General!ojo to try mained what they were for two thousand years. We, on the other to reach agreement on, they gave the portmanteau name of Singlish. hand, have gone forward .... Now the eternal la�.ofhistory has intervened.In our turn, we arrive with our fleets, our equipment both pacific and warlike, and legiti RATIONALE FOR SINGLISH mately acquire our commanding influence.[Chailley 1887:327-328] origi Although information is lacking on how this grandiose idea Now, said Phi De Giua, what Paul Bert envisaged might have hap- nated, the rationale for it was most clearly stated by the Vietnamese at nearly pened over two thousand years ago was actually taking place: "The member of the committee, the venerable Phi De Giua, who by a dec eternal law of history" was seeing a great Oriental nation that had eighty years of age was apparently the oldest, though only little addi gone forward arrive with its fleet, withits equipment both pacific and ade or so, of this group of hoary academicians. From what appears to warlike, and legitimately acquire its commanding influence over the tional information I have been able to glean about him he Con arrested civilizations of the West. Recalling further that Paul Bert, have been a scholar of considerable erudition both in traditional and even more openly another colonial administrator, Etienne Aymo fucian learning and in Western, especially French, scholarship. He pre-French Vietnamese nier, had worked for the ascendency of the French language over was an unyielding advocate of a return to the _ Vtetnamese-Aymonier (1890: 10-11) had even envisaged the Viet orthography-that is, the abandonment of the French-promoted and the namese abandoning their language for French-Phi De Giua argued romanization, called Quic Ngu' ("National Language")*, He that the time had now arrived for the countries of Asia, under Japa restoration of Vietnamese writing based on Chinese characters. rational nese leadership, to turn the tables on the West by creating what he was also virulently anti-Western. These attitudes explain the called an East-West Cocultural Sphere in which, continuing his sly ization he presented for the promotion of Singlish, a rationalization paraphrasing of Paul Bert, he said the modern Asian disciples of Con centered on two main themes. (he fucius would do what the sage himself should have done over two In a position paper, Phi De Giua argued that Asian hegemony jus thousand years ago-namely, bring the benefits of an already refined was writing at the height of Japanese victories in 1942 and 1943) He civilization, especially its superior writing system, to the rude peoples tifiedimposing the superior culture of Asia on the decadent West. a young of the West. invoked in support of this thesis the same argument which as General The second argument advanced by Phi De Giua was a so-called lin man in his early twenties he had heard presented by Resident Viet Nam. guistic justification centering on the thesis that "ideographic Chinese Paul Bert in 1886 in justification of French control over to writing" was superior to "alphabetic Western writing" and should Phi De Giua recalled the following passage from a letter addressed colla - therefore replace it. He cited the fact that the Chinese characters had scholars like himself by Paul Bert in the hope of winning their b functioned successfully, for more centuries than the upstart nations of oration: the West could boast in their histories, as the basis for the writing sys _ If, four hundred years before Christ, when our ancestors were subsist tems of such dtsparate languages as "isolating,2 monosyllabic" Chi ing on fruits, and when Confucius was writing the Book of History, a nese and Vietnamese and "agglutinative, polysyllabic" Korean and Chinese fleethad invaded ouf'Sho!"es, bringing.to these rude tribes an Japanese. He said the characters were just as well suited to represent already refined civilization, advanced arts and sciences, a strongly the inflectional languages of the West and indeed were fully capable organized social hierarchy, and an admirable moral code, Chinese of serving as what he variously called "the universal script" and "the international written language." Phi De Giua invoked the names of the German philosopher and *English renderings of expressions given in transcription have been placed in double rather mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the than single quotation marks to follow popular rather than technical usage. (1646-1716) DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,... 1984. 3 INTRODUCTION The Sing/ishAffair 5 4
modern French sinologist Georges Margoulies as exponents of the initial stage, which might last for one, two, or even three or more years of school before the complete transition to classical Chinese superiority of Chinese characters as a universal means �� i�t�llectual communication. 3 In his extensive references to Margouhes tt ts appar could be effected. In any case, following Aymonier, he envisaged the ent that Phi De Giua had succeeded, surprisingly quickly, in obtain eventual abandonment of their native language by the subject peo ing access to a book-length study that he French sin logue published ples; at best only a few vestigial words of English would be absorbed : . . ? . in 1943 under the title La langue et I , ecrzturechtnozses. He espectally into Chinese. The non-Chinese members of the committee objected to these quotes the appendix to this work, in which, after � length� eulo�y of the Chinese writing system, the author takes up , le probleme dune views as unrealistic. They felt that this extreme approach might work in Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand with their smaller popula langue internationale" and finds the solution in the unive�sal use of Chinese characters. 4 Margoulies envisioned that the semanttc value of tions but argued that it was not feasible to expect that the more the characters would be the same in all languages, just as is the case numerous Americans in the continental United States could be made with the arabic numerals, and that they would merely be pronounced to abandon completely both their. spoken and written languages for differently and arranged in different order according to the phono Chinese. U Y!lian thereupon retreated to the position that in the ini logical and syntactical habits of each language that they represented.5 tial stage, while tolerating the use of their own speech by the natives, all writing in English should be sternly forbidden and only writing in classical Chinese should be allowed. At first this approach would CHINESE UBER ALLES require the importation of a substantial number of Chinese scholars the committee, seized upon Phi De as had happened in the case of Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam in thei · U Yllian the Chinese member of ; · English-speaking initial contacts with Chinese, but eventually, said, an indigenous Giua's p esentation to advance the view that the U � Korea, Japan, and class of collaborationist scholars would emerge who would be able to countries should be made to repeat the history of and the Chinese express themselves in the new medium of writing. These scholars, fol Viet Nam in first adopting the Chinese language . c mmu t lowing the path of their predecessors in Asia, could be counted upon writing system in toto as the primary system of intellectual � � duc d mto Vtet to guard their monopoly of learning, take pride in their newly cation. He pointed out that Chinese h�d been intr? � .m 1 1 B. C., acquired knowledge, extol the merits of Chinese over their own lan Nam not long after the assertion of Chmese suzeramty � few centunes later. guage as a medium of communication, and develop a refined litera into Korea about the same time, and into Japan a i the case of iet ture the appreciation of which would be restricted to those few with For a great many years (morq: than a millennium � '_' . commum a enough resources to acquire a command of classical Chinese. Nam), classical Chinese was the only medmm of wntten � these countnes envisaged, for example, that Westerners would start their school tion in all three countries. He acknowledged that U first came in con ing, as in the traditional Chinese educational system, with the study lacked an indigenous system of writing when they . . countnes of the classical Chinese rhymes contained in the Zhou dynasty {1027- tact with Chinese culture, whereas the English-speakmg one based on 221 B. C. Book ofPoetry. Here is the opening stanza of such a poem were equipped with an orthography of sorts, albeit ) Nevertheless, widely quoted in anthologies of Chinese literature, for which I pro mundane letters rather than on the aesthetic characters. ued for the a op vide a transcription and character-for-character translation: paralleling the views expressed by Aymoni�r, L� ar� � � the educatwnal tion of classical Chinese as Ia langue vehzculazre m specify wheth systems of the English-speaking countries. He did not . o be ompletely ye you sr jun wilds there's dead doe er English in both its spoken and written forms was : � . m Chmese eliminated, with all instruction to be given exclustvely bai mao bao zhi white reeds shroud it school (as Aymo from the firstday of class in the first year of primary you nil huai qun there's girl feels Spring the use of a nier recommended for French in Viet Nam), or whether jf shJ: you zhi fine knight tempts her Chinese in the spoken form of English would. be permitted to explain DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 4 INTRODUCTION The Sing/ishAffair 7 6 Sino-Vietnamese had resulted from the phonetic modification of BROKEN CHINESE Chinese words as pronounced by speakers in the borrowing countries. The other committee members were opposed to the idea that West They were perfectly aware, to give one example, that the modern erners should be made to start their study of Chinese with something Chinese word gu6 ("country"), which when it was borrowed in the as difficult as classical poetry. They pointed out that poetry, even first few hundred years of our era was pronounced something like more than other forms of writing, is dependent for its beauty on how kwuk in Chinese, bec:_a:me Sino-Korean kuk, Sino-Japanese koku, and it sounds, and it is precisely with respect to pronunciation that for Sino-Vietnamese quae. 'L1 Yl:lianwas sure that it would undergo even greater distortion when borrowed into Sino-English. What else, he eigners are most seriously guilty of speaking broken Chinese. U Yl:lian conceded that it would be easier to teach Americans to write observed, could one expect of people who perpetrated such monstro elegant Chinese than to get them to pronounce Chinese with any sities as the GI distortion of "Chiang Kai-shek" as "Chancre Jack"? degree of accuracy. He was aware even some of the most highly The Korean member remarked, rather smugly, that in the inevita acclaimed Chinese programs in American universities had failed to ble process of bringing many Chinese loanwords into English he hoped it would be possible to avoid the Vietnamese, and more espe give their students a modest command of spoken Chinese. Tones . would undoubtedly be the first casualty, as they had been in Korea, cially Japanese, precedent of basing the Chinese borrowings not on a Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Viet Nam, where the indigenous lan m�re o� less homogeneous variety of Chinese but on phonologically guage 'Yaseither tonal to begin with or became tonal in the course of qutte dtsparate forms belonging to different Chinese di!llects during different periods of time. Thus a Chinese character meaning "to kill" its history. U Yilian admitted that Americans, notoriously incapable of pronouncing Chinese even approximately correctly, were sure to was taken over into Japanese as seti in the "go' on" pronunciation of massacre the poem cited here by pronouncing it with outrageous the Shanghai area in the third to sixth centuries and as satu in the phonetic distortions, much as if the lines were written in traditional "kan'on" pronunciation of Northwest China in the seventh to tenth English orthography: centuries;6 in addition to these pronunciations in Chinese loanwords it was also used to represent the stem of the purely Japanese word yeah yo s-s-s june korosu for "to kill." In defense of such different pronunciations, wh ch make it very difficult for Japanese to know what reading to bye maugh baugh jer ! . yo new hwigh chune ass�gn to Chmese characters, the Japanese member, Ono Kanji, gee sher yo jer pomted out that English was not without similar problems, citing the case of the following expressions: confound Warming to the subject, he said Americans would surely ("revile"), 4th (fourth), where thefouris of Germanic origin. mit ("mother"), ma ("hemp"), ma ("horse"), and ma if they 4to (quarto), where the quar is of Latin origin. pronouncing all of these words as undifferentiated ma. Thus were to say something that they might write in their traditional they While acknowledging the existence of such variant pronunciations orthography as my ma it would be impossible to tell whether or mai of the same written symbol, Kim Mun-yi remarked that they were no were saying mai mit("bury mother"), mai ma ("buy hemp"), distinguished more numerous in English than in his own language. Kim urged that ina ("sell horses"). These words are, of course, clearly in every effort should be made to emulate the Korean success in avoid written in Chinese characters or when accurately pronounced when ing excessive irregularity and complexity in phonological borrowings. Chinese. All four members agreed, in any case, on the need for the large other committee members, however, were not much con- The scale importation of Chinese loanwords into English and indicated with the phonetic modifications that Americans would make cerned their own preferences regarding the terms that should be brought in. in pronouncing what they called Sino-English, which they said would and U Yl:lian, an avid performer on the two�stringed Chinese violin who inevitably come into being, just as Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 5 8 INTRODUCTION The Singlt'shAffair 9 was inordinately proud of having played erhu ("second violin") in Such writing was called Idu ("Clerk Reading") in Korean; Man' some of the leading Chinese orchestras, was eager to have his instru yogana (literally "Borrowed Names of the Man'yoshu, " one of the ment replace the conventional Western violin and to import the ter earliest works in which this system was used) in Japanese; and Nom or minology accompanying this change. He noted that the term erhu, Chu 'Nom in Vietnamese, a name which in the original Chinese form for example, would probably be taken over as erhoo, a phonetic had the meaning "babbled words" but was changed by the Vietnam semantic borrowing whose Sino-English pronunciation was not far ese to a nonpejorative character meaning "southern words" (DeFran- · from the original. The committee compiled a list of ten thousand cis 1977:27-28). such phonetic-semantic loanwords they believed were needed to The committee members agreed that their English-speaking sub improve the English vocabulary. jects should be permitted a similar use of Chinese characters to render English nam�s and terms. Thus the personal name Anna was to be rendered as !:fi: -liJJp. This for Chinese-speaking purists would have the CHINESE CHARACTERS AS PHONETIC SY MBOLS pronunciation an-na. There was some disagreement, however, over Although there were varying degrees of concern over the problem which characters should be selected to represent these names. Should of Sino-English distortion of Chinese loanwords, with the Chinese the first syllable, for ex�mple, be represented by the an iff::meaning member naturally expressing the greatest worry on this score, all four "peace" or by the an Jlf meaning "dark, gloomy"? Should the sec members expressed even greater concern about the problem that had �nd syllable be the no-M� meaning "elegant, fascinating" or the na plagued their own countries: how to express non-Chinese terms in ;ff:lmeaning "to patch"? U Yllian held out for the use of characters Chinese characters. The Chinese were the first to deal with this prob with pejorative meanings. He pointed out that the Chinese had done lem, which they did by extending the principle, already adopted in just this in rendering foreign names into Chinese in their early con their own language, of using characters to express sounds. In the tacts with Westerners before they were forced to abandon the practice Book of Poetry the cries of birds were expressed by characters used in the nineteenth century in treaties imposed upon them by the solely for their phonetic value. When the .Chinese were confronted imperialist powers. Phi De Giua agreed with U and also noted with with the problem of expressing foreign terms and names, as hap considerable glee that the surname of Paul Bert's unsuspecting suc pened on a large scale with the introduction of Buddhism in the first cessor, Paul Doumer, was given a Vietnamese rendering that sounded century A.D. , they did so by further extending the use of Chinese like the vulgar Vietnamese expression which in expurgated transla characters as phonetic symbols. The word Buddha itself came to be tion can be rendered as au-mr; "to copulate with one's mother." represented by a character which at one time had a pronunciation (DeFrancis 1977: 127). Although the other committee members sym something like b'iwat and now, after a long process of phonological pathized with this crude but subtle way of mocking the despised change, is pronounced f6. Westerners, they all finally agreed that from a long-range point of The phonetic use of Chinese characters was also applied by the view it was better to adopt characters with auspicious or at least neu Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese in rendering words in their own tral meanings, as in the name Anna, which was already well estab language. The earliest recorded example of this usage in Viet Nam lished in Chinese in the form cited. occurred in the year 791 when two Chinese characters with the mod The scholars agreed, on the basis of precedents in their own coun ern pronunciation bit and gai and the literal but irrelevant meanings tries, that one of the firstuses of English expressions written in Chi of "cotton cloth; arrange; publish" and "to cover; roof; to build" nese characters would undoubtedly occur in rendering English words respectively were used in their phonetic value to transcribe two Viet including personal and place-names, in an otherwise wholly classical namese words which are usually identified as bo cai ("father and Chinese passage. This approach was somewhat as if an American mother") (DeFrancis 1977:22). In Korea and Japan this phonetic use using the Latin alphabet and composing in Latin were to write "J ohn of Chinese characters to represent indigenous words has an even amat Mary, sed Mary non amatJohn." longer history. DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 6 10 INTRODUCTION The Singft'shAffair 11
er (2, 5, 11) is often ENGLISH WRITTEN IN CHINESE CHARACTERS � used for r si (3, 12) is often used for s ifrr From discussion of the isolated rendering of English words in Chinese de (7) is often used ford characters the scholars passed on to consideration of the inevitable �� (13) is often used fora next step that would repeat the history of writing in their own coun p� a tries. This was the major extension of the use of Chinese characters in their phonetic value to represent the indigenous Korean, Japanese, With hints such as these, we arrive at the following: and Vietnamese languages in their entirety. In applying the charac ters to the English language, the committee prepared a sample text /6-er (for) si-gu6-er (sguor) en-de (end) from which I quote the following opening passage of fourteen charac se-wen (sewen) yier-si (yirs) a-gou (agou) ters: Not :nu�h knowledge of the contrastive phonology of Chinese and Enghsh 1 2 3 4 5 13 14 1s needed to recognize this passage as "Four score and seven years ago." The whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was rendered 14j7 � $,f riJ �� PiiJ. i� by the committee in the same fashion, but this excerpt is enough to reve�l the general procedure adopted in transcribing the sounds of A brief examination of this passage shows that the characters are not · Enghsh by the use of Chinese characters. being used in their semantic values, for their meanings, as the follow ing glosses show, make no sense: MIXED USE OF CHARACTERS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 At his poi t in their deliberations the committee members turned Buddha you this country you grace get � � theu attenuon to the possibility of the mixed use of 13 14 Chinese charac 8 9 10 11 12 ters in their semantic . and phonetic values. Here they were simply fol color writing he you this groan hook lowmg the evolution . of writing in Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam. It was pomted out, for example, that in If we examine the characters with respect to their phonetic value, we the opening passage of the Get tysburg Address the numbers mentioned find that they would be rendered in present-day Mandarin as follows: there could just as well be represe ted by Chinese � . numerals. The following table contrasts the alter�atlVe phonetic and semantic representations of the numbers in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 . 10 11 12 13 14 9 quesuon: /6 er si gu6 er en de se wen yi er si a gou
At first glance this rendering too seems to make no sense, especially Phonetic since the Chinese script gives no indication of what syllables are to be four �� f,ffl) /6-er (meanings irrelevant) read together-that is, whether the first five syllables, for example, score $fr I� I� si-gu6-er (meanings irrelevant) are to be read as indicated (that is, separately), as/6 er-si gu6-er, or as seven �:Z se-wen (meanings irrelevant) /6-ersi-gu6-er, or as any one of the hundreds of other combinations that might be. possible. However, some knowledge of how Chinese Semantic transcribes foreign sounds provides clues in the decipherment. Thus four liE (pronunciation si irrelevant) several of the characters are conventionally used to transcribe certain score -1f (pronunciation nian irrelevant) foreign sounds, and we also see that some of them are repeated: seven -t: (pronunciation qi irrelevant) DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 7 The Sing/ish Affair 13 12 INTRODUCTION
Among the documents discovered in the Singlish file are two texts phonetic-semantic syllables. He illustrated each of these uses as fol from which I cite the following opening passage: lows: 1. P rely h?netic: representing the sounds of English words by A. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7-8 � f ust�g stmtl�rly sounding Chinese characters without regard to 'i!SJ -d- :;ift:l. -!:: �;,, -+ 1-1 -fJ theu meanmg-for example, the use of -11\1 � (/6-er) to repre B. 1 2 3a-3b 4 5 6 7-8 sen� "four." (The meanings of /6 ["Buddha"] and er ["you"] fi) 1.13 are melevant. ) ..w- ,\!> -1:: t!9 , 1·�r if 1-1 pg ifq 2. P�rely sen:antic: representing the meanings of English words by usmg Chmese characters with the same meanings without re that we have here two different Singlish ver It is readily apparent gard to their sound-for example, the use of \7!3 to represent Address. In both cases sions of the opening passage in the Gettysburg "four." (Its pronunciation of s'iis irrelevant. ) makes greater use of the grammar is English, not Chinese. Text A 3. Phonetic-semantic: representing Chinese loanwords taken into is used in its characters as semantic units; only the sixth character English by using characters in both their original phonetic and 2 "score," and . phonetic value. Character 1 means "four," character semanttc values-for example,.::.. MJ ("second violin" ), which the two numbers character 4 "seven." Character 3 occurring between would be read as erhoo in Sino-English. for "score" and "seven" is a conjunction meaning "and" that is 5 means "year." never used in this position in Chinese. Character To thes three uses of Chinese characters in Singlish, Ono proposed a before." Its position � . Characters 7-8 form a compound meaning "ago, fourth m whtch the characters would function as rebus symbols, the position that its . at the end of the phrase happens to coincide with whtch means to represent English words or syllables by Chinese char the sixth character, equivalent occupies in English. Thus, except for acters whose English meanings resemble the intended words or sylla represent characters all others are used in their semantic value. If we bles in sound. used phoneti used semantically by capitalized words and characters To illustrate the manner in which this extended use developed by cally by italics we can render Text A as follows: theJapanese should be applied to English, Ono drafted a memo in whtch_ he showed how the simple Chinese character.::..could also be 6 7-8 A. 1 2 3 4 5 used as a rebus symbol. The basic semantic value of this character is AND SEVEN YEAR s AGO FOUR SCORE "two" ; it a so as th derived meaning "second" in some usages. Its . ! � � pronu ctatton m Chmese is er, which in Sino-English would become Text B makes greater use of characters as phonetic symbols. In addi � er fauly close to the Chinese original except for the lack of tone. As tion to character sf as s we have 3a-3b .en-de as "and" and 7-8 - 6 a rebus symbol it would be used to symbolize English words homoph tt-g6uas "ago." Text B can therefore be rendered as: onous with "two," namely "to" and "too." He further explained these four usages by presenting the following illustration of the char B. 1 2 3a-3b 4 5 6 7-8 acter's use in sentences which, to focus attention on the varied uses of FOUR SCORE and SEVEN YEAR s ago the character, he wrote as a mixture of Chinese and English ortho At this point Ono Kanji made a strong bid for a further extension. in graphy: the use of Chinese characters along lines mo;;t extensively developed by the Japanese. He pointed out that so far the committee had been 1. Purely phonetic: To..::::.. is human. (To err is human. ) considering the application of Chinese characters to English in three 2. Purely semantic: It's. :..: o'clock. (It's two o'clock. ) different ways common to the Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese The.::.... violin is out of tune. (The as purely phonetic symbols, as purely semantic symbols, and as mixed second violin is out of tune. ) DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 8 14 INTRODUCTION The Sing/ish Affair 15 3. Phonetic-semantic: The _::__ hoo is out of tune. (The erhoo is \IE ("four") they should out of tune.) create the new character the left-hand side of which, consisting of the 1!!1(9�, 4. Rebus: It's .:::... your advantage. (It's to your character rw, would give the meaning "four," and the right-hand advantage. ) side, consisting of 1?p(/6, whose meaning "Buddha" is irrelevant), It's .::....expensive. (It's too expensive. ) would suggest the sound. In this syllable in way every English would be written with a distinctive character would at least give that In this way the character.:::...would acquire several differe t m a ings some .indication of the sound and might _? � � cases, as in the one in some and readings in Singlish, a state of complexit t�at Ono mststed just cited, also provide a semantic clue. _Y . The other members would not be excessive for Singlish as a whole. St ghsh would sull be of the committee objected to this approach � the grounds that since English on easier than the character-based orthography used mJapan�se. had more than eight thousand . syllables, to represent distinct Ono also argued that the attention of Singlish readers, hke those m each one of them by a separate character place too much would of a burden on readers and writers of Japan, would be kept always on the alert by the constan� need to script. They such a Singlish remarked, rather caustically, that Vietnamese guess just how a character is being used. In fact, he predtcted t?at approximately with its 4,800 distinct syllables had a some writers would follow the Japanese l
Japan, he said, writers of Singlish would compose in a mixture of influence, are written not sequentially but in a square, as f}, much standard characters and abbreviated syllabic signs. The phrase "four if we were to write Kim as KI score and seven" could be rendered by replacing the whole-character M. approach (shown first below) with the reduced-character modifica tion (shown in the second line) for the characters representing the TH SE TEN YO AR RE IN RI NO HA BE WRIT sound and: E N CE U E AD G GHT W SEN TEN TH WA T07 119 IS Y 0 1!5) -+1- C/2 vp --t In the Singlish orthography the simple hangul alphabet could be FOUR SCORE and SEVEN combined with characters as in the Korean writing system. Though denouncing the idea, advanced especially by Koreans of communist Ono Kanji pointed out that, as in Japan, the more characters a persuasion, that the Chinese characters should be eliminated com writer used, the more he could display his erudition. He also noted pletely from the Korean orthography, which would then be written that women were the first to write exclusively, or almost exclusively, solely in the phonetic hangul alphabet, Kim Mun-yi nevertheless in the simple syllabary-the well-known Tale of Gen;i' is an early seemed open to the possibility that the English speakers might be (eleventh century) example of such writing-and he predicted that permitted to eschew characters in Singlish if they would abandon "women and other less well educated writers" of Singlish would their atrocious orthography for the superior hangul script. produce some works entirely in the simple syllabary that he was pro posing for English. He did not envision that the more complex char CHINESE CHARACTERS AS A UNIVERSAL SCRIPT acters would ever be completely eliminated from the Singlish script, however, since the scholars could be counted upon, as always, to show There was general support for the principle, common to both Korean their erudition by larding their compositions with as many characters and Japanese orthographies, that in the Singlish orthography the as they could. , main words should be written in characters and the verb endings, The Korean member of the committee advanced the view that a conjunctions, and so forth in a phonetic script. The Chinese and Japanese-style Singlish orthography, while simpler than the Vietnam Vietnamese members of the committee, however, aware that their ese proposal, was nevertheless not as good as one modeled on Korean languages as traditionally written lacked a simple system of represent writing. He pointed out that the Koreans, like the Japanese, had ing sounds, were jealously opposed to the use of anything like the gone through the stages of first using pure Chinese, then using whole Korean or Japanese creations in the Singlish orthography. Instead Chinese characters to represent some Korean sounds, and then mix they insisted that if the general principle of combining semantic char ing both. They had improved upon the Japanese reduced-character acters with phonetic symbols was adopted for Singlish, one might just syllabary, however, by producing, as long ago as the middle of the fif as well retain the conventional roman letters instead of using hangul teenth century, a completely new set of phonetic (more properly, or creating a whole new set of symbols on the Korean or Japanese phonemic) symbols called hangul that took the further step of repre models. They therefore argued that the opening phrase of the pas senting the basic units of sound. The common surname Kim, for sage cited should be written like this: example, which would be represented in Chinese by the single char acter 4:'- and in the Japanese syllabary by the two symbols� J.,., hav \IE +r and -1:: lf-s ago ing the value of ki for the initial and m(u) for the final, could be represented in the Korean alphabet by three separate symbols fork, i, To show how the Chinese characters could function as a truly univer and m. In Korean orthography these three letters, owing to Chinese sal writing system they also presented the same passage in a Sino- DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 10 18 INTRODUCTION The Singl£shAffair 19
French orthography. I cite the following opening phrase, to which I however, that their mentor, General Thjo, evaluated their work very have appended the equivalent in conventional French: highly and intended to implement their proposals as soon as his forces completed the conquest of the English-speaking populations.
II y a 5f-s In the war crimes trial of General Thjo his role in The Singlish Affair received no mention. The four members of the committee who II y a QUATRE VINGT SEPT AN s were his accomplices in this dastardly affairsucceeded in remaining in complete obscurity, thus avoiding being brought before the bar of The foregoing excerpts from the Singlish file appear to represent justice. There is reason for believing, in fact, that they are still at large the last stage of the committee's deliberations. It was, however, by no and, under assumed names, are continuing to influence the writing means the final or definitive form which the committee was strug systems of their own countries and have joined with Western accom gling to achieve. There were still many points of disagreement. The plices to plot further advances for the Chinese characters on an inter Korean member, for example, argued that the word "and" should national scale. be written, Korean style, as AN. The Vietnamese member pressed for D . . EPILOGUE the creation, Vietnamese style, of new characters not already existing in Chinese to represent peculiarly American concepts. He suggested, When the foregoing essay was firstpresented to some col.leagues sev for example, that the two existing Chinese characters 4:- meaning eral years ago, I assumed they would immediately catch on to what I "gold" (its pronunciation jln is irrelevant) and _ii pronounced dou was doing. To my utter consternation, this assumption turned out to (its meaning "bean" is irrelevant) be combined to create the new be unwarranted. I therefore added a note specifically stating that the character 4Ji,, which would suggest the meaning and indicate the Committee on English Language Planning never really existed and approximate pronunciation of the American slang term "dough" for that the so-called Singlish Affair is a figment of the imagination-a money or wealth. The Chinese member, though happy that the char literary device designed to make more interesting an otherwise un acters which were his country's great contribution to Eastern civiliza adorned discussion of the Chinese writing system, its adaptation in tion would now also be bestowed upon the West, wa,nted assurance the writing systems of Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam, and some of the that the characters would neither be reduced in number, as some Jap problems involved in its use as a universal system of writing. anese had proposed from time to time, nor simplified by reduction in Yes, the whole of the preceding essay is a joke. Actually, it is a very number of strokes, as some Chinese whom he denounced as commu serious joke, one intended as entertainment, to be sure, but enter
nists proposed. 8 The most nearly satisfied of the group was the Japa tainment with a purpose. My primary purpose was to poke fun at the. nese member, who thought they were arriving at a form of Singlish romantic nonsense about Chinese characters that culminates in the that most closely approximated the principles developed by his ances notion that they can function as a universal written language. What tors in creating the script so beloved by all right-thinking Japanese. better way to point up the absurdity of this idea, I thought, than by On the whole the four members felt they had cause to congratulate burlesquing it? themselves because they were succeeding in the attempt to promote But even specialists, contrary to all my expectations, were, with few in a planned way what had happened haphazardly in Korea, Japan, exceptions, fooled by my elaborate joke. In retrospect it is clear that and Viet Nam when these countries groped to adapt Chinese charac my original expectation that they would be able to penetrate my ploy ters to their own needs. was quite unreasonable. Thus it is I rather than my readers who dis The documents relating to The Singlish Affair throw no further played inadequate understanding. My colleagues were better able light on the deliberations of the Committee on English Language than I to appreciate that the attachment to characters can be so Planning nor even on what eventually became of its members. Their intense as to make quite plausible an all-out defense of character names do not appear in any uther connection. There are indications, based scripts and the desire to extend their application to users of DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 11 The Sing/ish Affair 21 20 INTRODUCTION view of the quite serious harm resulting from them. To counter the alphabetic systems. So much nonsense has been written about Chi deeply e trenched mythology about Chinese requires not merely a nese characters that my parody turns out to be not as obviously � presentatiOn of dry facts. It also requires sharp and specific criticism implausible as I had thought it to be. There were other factors, of of the myths and their perpetrators. course, in the acceptance of my essay at face value, including the T e criticism has taken the form of burlesque in The Singlish mechanical aspect of footnotes and references (all of which, inciden � Affatr and that of somewhat popularized exposition in the rest of the tally, are authentic) and other features that give the essay the appear book. A complete popularization is impossible, however, since the ance of ordinary academic writing, in which seriousness is generally complexity o the subject and the need for concrete detail require expected to be cloaked in solemnity rather than in humor. � . careful analysts based on extenstve research. In general the academic Apart from the specialist colleagues for whom the essay was pri style adopted throughout the book is based on the belief that sound marily intended, many others, including students at various levels, scholarship is not incompatible with having fun. have read it in mimeographed form. Their almost unanimous reac In The Singlish Affair I have indulged in a number of puns and tion has been one of delight on discovering that they have undergone ord games that in some cases are perhaps impenetrable private an entertaining but highly unorthodox educational experience. The :v Jokes. In the case of the names of the four members of the "commit approach has proved to be a particularly effective teaching device tee," for example, those who know the meaning of kanji as "charac because students who might ordinarily be daunted by a straightfor ter" will perhaps recognize "Ono Kanji" as an intended pun on ward analysis of complex problems have been led to ponder the issues "Oh, no characters!" Phi De Giua might more easily be identified if so unconventionally illustrated in the introductory essay and have we follow the Vietnamese pronunciation and give the first syllable been stimulated to go into them more deeply. the soundfoe rather than.fi'e, in which case the name will sound more There is indeed need for a thorough rethinking of the issues like the intended "fille de joie." Kim Mun-yi is the feeblest joke of involved. Foremost among these is the nature of the Chinese lan all: "Kim" means "gold," and "Mun-yi" is supposed to evoke guage. This fundamental issue is so clouded by confusion and error "money." The most complex is the name Y'ilian. Those who know that considerable effort is needed to separate fact from fantasy in U hi ese ay get the poi t i it i written in characters: or, order to arrive at a clear understanding about Chinese. It is to this � � .U: � � � .jlf. 'if, 1 stm ltfted characters, .ifL X.. ).Hi,. The three characters mean respec effort that the rest of the book is devoted. ? � . . tively propnety, morahty, modesty" and form part of a four-charac The initial aim of the present work was to ridicule certain romantic ter phrase listing a number of Confucian virtues of which the fourth notions about Chinese as a universal script which though technically is�'!!..'(chr "a sense of shame"). The omission of the fourth character feasible in theory, as shown in The Singlish Affair, must be dismissed is part of a C inese word g me in which the reader is supposed to as impractical if one makes a hardheaded effort to analyze the ideas � . � guess the last ttem when 1t ts omitted (Kroll 1966)-much as if we in detail and to test them by implementation-a procedure which had to tell what is lacking in the list of the three Christian virtues of will inevitably deflatethe panegyrics for writing systems that deserve "Faith, Hope, and _·_.'' The omission of the fourth character is rather to be characterized as Rube Goldberg scripts on a par with that expressed s � J/''-'' or ft... Jf•l!,' (wii chi "lacking a sense of shame"). In cartoonist's most madcap contraptions for doing simple tasks in pre � short, callmg someone Mr. U Y'ilian seems to praise him as Mr. Pro posterously complex ways. Another aim was to bring home the priety, Morality, and Modesty but actually insults him as Mr. Shame language policy practiced by allcolonial powers, a pol essence of the less. icy that the distinguished linguist Einar Haugen (1973) has savagely In keeping with my description of the original essay as a serious but appropriately called "linguistic genocide.�' . JOke, I shall conclude by taking up again the tongue-in-cheek refer The expansion from essay to book has the added purpose of pre ence in the final paragraph to the fact that the four members of the senting some basic facts about Chinese in its spoken and written "com itte " involved in the dastardly Singlish Affair had managed forms countering the pervasive myths that have grown up around it. � � to avotd bemg brought before the bar of justice. I intend to see that Some of the myths are amusing; others are anything but funny in DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 12 22 INTRODUCTION justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime ...to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:
Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to com plete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.
FIGUREr. Chinese Writing: Oracle Bone Inscription This Shang dynasty inscription incised on an animal shoulder bone asks if there will be any calamities, notes the spirits' affirmativeanswer, and reports later verifi , cation that calamities did indeed occur. Reprinted with permission of the publish er from Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 32. DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 13
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FIGURE 1.. Chinese Writing: "Radical + Phonetic" Characters An assembly of Shang and Zhou dynasty graphs "compiled expressly to illustrate the advanced nature of the [radical + phonetic] form of characters from the earli FIGURE 3. Chinese Writing: Calligraphy as Art est times of which we have examples.'' The asterisked characters were no longer Regular, running, and cursive styles of writing displayed respectively in (a) a stone used after the spelling reform· of the Qin dynasty {221-207 B.C.). Reprinted with rubbing of a pair of commemorative scrolls written in 1953 by Shao Lizi, a promi permission of the publisher from Barnard, "The Nature of the Ch'in 'Reform of nent Guomindang supporter of the PRC; (b) a rubbing of a commemorative in the Script,' '' in David T. Roy and Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Ancient China: Stttdies in scription written about the same time for the same commemorative purpose by Early Chi11ese Civilization (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1979), pp. Mao Zedong; and (c a hanging scroll with a poem written by the seventee th- ) r; . 202-203. century poet and calligrapher Fu Shan. A and b taken from Chen and Chen,jzmez Aoyttan tike tanben,· c reprinted with permission of The Art Museum, Princeton University. TheJeannette Shambaugh Elliot Collection. DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 14
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1-\ � ·\-{ � ·� ·\�� �·���-� FIGURE 4- Chinese Writing: Characters vs. Pinyin l!ld ,\, ,;,.,d. \ill;, Three versions (Pinyin, new simplified characters, and old complex characters) of • � --=1 '"" - part of a poem dedicated to Wu Yuzhang {1878-1966), language reformer and .. · iri "'� -4u -1.¥ president of People's University. The third version is the author's addition. From 1,1\¢ tl ·.� ·� Yu wen Xiandaihua no. 3 {1980): 349. �u\? �\k> � � .:i� I!.( i!:1 � ·�\� ��. � DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 15
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FIGURE 7. Japanese Writing: Characters Plus Syllabic Kana Kanji and hiragana intermixed in the main text. The kanji under the oracle bone are accompanied on the left by the katakana rendition of their go 'on pronuncia tion and on the right by the hiragana rendition of their kan 'on pronunciation. Re printed from A]ALT(Association forJapanese-Language Teaching), 1978, p. 3. DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984. 16
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