Are Chinese digraphic?
Digraphia is DeFrancis’s term, I believe (please correct me if it was coined by someone else). In The Chinese Language he says,
This term is intended to suggest a parallel in writing to Ferguson’s well-known concept of “diglossia” in speech: the use of two related but quite different forms of speech, High and Low, in different situations.
I was struck by the completeness of Serbian digraphia as reported by John Wells, first quoting from Wikipedia:
“Serbian is a rare and excellent example of synchronic digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them.”
and then anecdotally
On the streets of Belgrade some advertisements or names of businesses are in one alphabet, some in the other. The same shop window may display written messages in both. Many road signs show names of destinations in both, first in one and then in the other, thus for example Београд Beograd.
I don’t think anyone’s going to debate that lots of Chinese are at least partially digraphic in Pinyin and Hanzi (汉字 = Chinese characters). A few examples:
- You have to be in order to use Pinyin input systems on computers and cell phones.
- There’s lots of Pinyin on signs around hanzi-land (although some of it, as documented by Pinyin.info, is woefully below the standards envisioned by its creators).
- Mainland education has kids learning Pinyin during the first few months of first grade, at which point they can use it to write pretty much anything they can say. After that, writing education is aimed squarely at hanzi, but kids continue to use Pinyin when they don’t know the hanzi for a word, at least as late as second grade.
But lots of folks aren’t. My mother-in-law, a retired physician in her late 60s, has only the foggiest notion of how Pinyin represents Mandarin. She certainly can’t use a Pinyin input system, although she is reasonably computer literate. I’d say that applies to a lot of folks of her generation.
Then there’s the under 40 crowd. All had Pinyin education*, but I’m not sure they really think of it as a script, as a way of writing Mandarin. And my personal observation is that the Pinyin-“literate” are usually daunted by trying to read an entire passage of Pinyin — slowly sounding it out and then turning it over on their tongues a couple of times before it begins to sound like Mandarin.
No doubt there are 10,000 variations and subtleties. So what, really, is the state of Mandarin digraphia?
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*Actually, it’d be cool to know what year Pinyin education started in earnest.
In Nanjing I lived off a street called 清凉门, for which the pinyin read “QINGQINGQING”. If I may meme for a moment, digraphia fail.
One of the minor issues with pinyin digraphia at least in my world is that a number of native or near-native speakers are fairly uncertain about the pinyin spelling of certain words, specifically the whole n/ng endings, but also with z/zh, s/sh etc. It’s not just an accent in those cases. They’re actually often under the impression that it’s spelled the way they say it. Not all of course, but some.
Perhaps this shows my current lack of blood sugar, but if for no other reason than that one must publicly make a fool of oneself every now and then: Wouldn’t simplified/traditional be a better example of digraphia? It also seems closer to the Serbian example in that Cyrillic and Latin are at least somewhat related, both owing something to Greek.
And before I go and eat so that I can come back to see how much of a fool I have made of myself: I second Kellen’s second paragraph, especially in those southern areas where differences in accent are big enough to create some serious clashes with the official spelling. At least, that’s been my experience.
I would also agree with Chris Waugh that the simplified/traditional hanzi is more digraphic than the pinyin, especially because it also points at a difference in social strata, cultured vs uncultured…as to pinyin digraphicness, it would distinguish the younger generation from the older one
@Waugh: I empathize with the blood sugar thing. I’ve recall blowing a job interview because I ran out of fuel and answered some question: “Y’know, I really have no idea…”
But I think your brain’s holding up okay right now 😀
I mean I agree: Trad/Simple is at least some kind of digraphia, right? But it seems to me more like one-and-a-halphia or something cuz there’s so much overlap…
Or, well, now that I think about how damn simple phonemic alphabets are by comparison to characters, maybe I’m changing my mind within this paragraph. Maybe it does count as full digraphia. After all, it would probably take someone longer to go from full literacy in traditional to simple (or vice versa) than it would to go from roman to cyrillic (or vice versa).
Actually you definitely don’t need to know pinyin to use phones or computers: I know Chinese in their 20’s or 30’s whose pinyin is not good, exactly because of those sh/s zh/s ch/c l/n/r problems, who use Wubi to input Chinese .. and they reckon they type much faster than their pinyinning friends.
Gotta second that.
Most native speaker seem to use some kind of stroke order inpput on their phones and computers.
Pinyin is for fools like us.
For a long time I had a phone with a writing pad (handwriting recognition) and used it instead of pinyin so I would be forced to write more. Now with 3G phones it is much easier to do this.
But most people I know use pinyin input on their phone. My phone has a “fuzzy pinyin” setting. I’ve never used it, but I would guess it would include z- in the zh- results, etc.
Syz,
“now that I think about how damn simple phonemic alphabets are by comparison to characters …”
In the Serbian case that Chris makes reference to, the similarity in the two writing systems goes well beyond the fact that they are both alphabets. There’s a lot of overlap — precisely, as Chris says, because they both derive from the Greek alphabet. For example, the letters A, E, K, M, O, T represent basically the same sounds in both alphabets.
That makes diglossia in Serbian a whole lot different than you’d get with, say, the Roman and Korean alphabets.
I am just buying soy sauce but I had to say, one-and-a-halphia made me laugh!
Wait, was DeFrancis really saying Mandarin was digraphic because of pinyin? Does that make it trigraphic because of the use of Zhuyin? Or digraphic before the use of pinyin in the Zhuyin days? Or Quadgraphic with Xiaoerjing?
Was there ever a time when pinyin was not used exclusively as a learning tool for the language learners or as a pronunciation key in dictionaries or for obscure characters? Am I missing something here?
As for pinyin as an input method, I don’t see how that qualifies it to be a “graphic” anymore than the other input methods, zhuyin, wubi, cangjie, etc. In the pinyin (and zhuyin case) you input a code to produce a character based on pronuciation, with cangjie and other methods you enter a code based on visual representation of the character to produce a character, what am I missing here?
DeFrancis liked to focus on digraphia problems because of his long held pro-romanization stance. I remember there was even some tests he did where he asked some Chinese people to write a shopping list, and then showed how the common people could not even handwrite a good part of the characters and wrote pinyin or homophones instead.
Since I read that I have tried the same with young educated Chinese here, and I found out that every time they write the shopping list items pretty well, perhaps some errors on the least common vegetables, but hey I don’t even know the name of those in my native language either.
My point here is that, as of today, I don’t see Chinese adults relying so much on pinyin, and I would definitely not call this a digraphia situation because nobody uses pure pinyin functionally.
In fact, it has happened sometimes that I had to send messages in pinyin (my phone had no hanzi), and I sent them complete with tone marks, only to find that the receiver did not understand them. They COULD understand if they take the time of course, but they are just not used to seeing full sentences in pinyin.
As far as I’ve seen, pinyin is only for IME and to clarify obscure characters. Out of the big cities I just don’t see many signs that are pinyin-ized (except perhaps highway signs, there seems to be an official policy there).