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The Sing/Ish Affair

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The Sing/Ish Affair 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.
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