A new view on romanization
It’s not just China that has debated romanization. In a number of other countries and times, romanization has both succeeded and failed. The following bit is from an article by İlker Aytürk called “Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization“. Because I don’t have access to it, I’ve haven’t read the whole thing and I’ve lifted this quote completely from a longer excerpt on the always thought-provoking Far Outliers.
Since the downfall of the Soviet regime in 1991, successive Turkish governments have been trying to impress upon the ex-Soviet Turkish republics the necessity of adopting the Roman alphabet…. Adoption of a Roman-based alphabet in Turkey in 1928 is habitually cited as the textbook example of a successful and lasting case of romanization. The problem with the approach of the Turkish policy makers, on the other hand, is the somewhat naïve conviction that, with a good amount of fortitude, the Turkish success could be easily replicated elsewhere.
This approach is not new, nor is it particular to the Turkish officials. It had been voiced earlier, during attempts at romanizing the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese scripts in the interwar period and the immediate aftermath of World War II at the heyday of an international romanization movement. What is common in all of them is a tendency to strip the question of script from its historical, religious, and political context and to present it mainly as an issue of the expediency of a writing system….
What I intend to do in this article is precisely this. By focusing on the Hebrew and Turkish cases, I aim at constructing a theoretical framework for explaining success and failure of romanization.
If anyone has full access and/or wants to summarize the article’s framework for explaining romanization failure/success, that would be fantastic.
A couple of points
- Sinoglot has seen lots of debate on romanization. See this post and extensive comments for a starting point. Please read that first if you are going to comment in that area.
- For the record: I don’t personally advocate romanization. Neither do I advocate retention of characters. I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both, but I don’t care about being either an agent of change or of conservatism (not that anyone would listen to me anyway).
- That said, I don’t take the position of some in the debate that “foreigners have no business discussing the issue”. I think there are facts that one can try to lay out (e.g. does it take a lot longer to become literate because of writing system X over Y) that are fun and worth exploring.
- I don’t think for a second that the framework above is going to end debate on the subject, I’m just posting it because it looks to provide a new perspective.
“A theoretical framework for explaining success and failure of romanization” sounds interesting, but then again, next to purely practical reasons, there are cultural and political reasons as well for adopting/not adopting romanisation. Those reasons are set in a historical context which will inevitably make it hard to analyse the data, next to the obvious problem of the unability to have fluency in all of these languages to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Not even mentioning the political motivations of native speakers to be pro or contra romanisation when giving their points of view on the success/failure of romanisation in their languages.
This being said, I am interested in reading what he comes up with…
May be a bit out of topic since I cannot reach the article right now, but, regarding romanization of Chinese, wouldn’t the high homophony in the language be a handicap for reading pinyinized written chinese? I know, if you can figure out when listening to Chinese, you can do the same with pinyin. But, isn’t the fact that the selection of homophone characters is done by you in written script give and advantage in reading speed compared to reading pinyin?
Probably you can get used to it, but the idea of reading a novel in pinyin sounds terribly difficult to me.
Does Chinese really have that many homophones? Or rather, pīnyīn homographs?
Now, I know the Chinese are conditioned to think of things on a syllable by syllable basis, of which there are very few, but a huge percentage of cí are actually made up of 2-3 syllables.
If you use spacing between each cí in pīnyīn instead of between every single syllable (as you’re supposed to), and remembering to mark tones (which really is like remembering to write vowels in English), are there really that many homophones in Chinese? I know there are a few (though I unfortunately can’t think of any off the top of my head right now) but every language has those and most seem to do fine with a phonetic script.
Bias alert: I’m a huge advocate for drastic further Chinese script reform. If not romanization, then perhaps some sort of hyper-regularized phonosemantic system.
@hurp: simple example chiwan fan and chi wanfan that (吃完饭 and 吃晚饭）what in simple spoken contexts already leads to some misunderstanding but like you said with right spacing could be avoided, but what about all the verbs that are singular or with poetry or chinese humor where the joke is exactly about the misinterpretation of a homophone character…take away the characters and all of this simply becomes unintelligible.
Bias Alert: I am contra any romanisation of the chinese language. It should already be clear that 儿子and 二字is not the same either… and we can go on and on…
Marking tones is complicating the whole thing even more because it doesn’t add any meaning content to what you are writing and would only be valuable to native speakers but not to anyone who starts to learn chinese at a later age for the right tones are a headache to anyone learning the language. Furthermore since current software has no need for tone-indication why suddenly start implementing it?
(I have access to the article : Syz, write me if you want it.)
Chris : In the eventuality of a switch to romanisation, there would be a big need for tone support. They do reduce a lot the homophones problem. I don’t understand why you say “it doesn’t add any meaning content to what you are writing”. Of course it adds meaning, by separating two different words.
儿子 and 二字 would be different in this hypothetical romanized world : érzi and èrzì (or maybe èr zì). The ABC dictionary on Pleco doesn’t give any homophone to any of them.
By the way, it is really simple to input pinyin and software already exist for that. And when you say “would only be valuable to native speakers but not to anyone who starts to learn Chinese at a later age”, I don’t see your point. What is the ratio anyway, 100 000 to 1 ? Do you think we should also remove all those pesky accents of French because it is hard to input on a qwerty keyboard ? No, the French did their own keyboard layout. It would be trivial to make a Chinese layout of keyboard with the necessary diacritics. Learners would adapt, of course, and if they have to put more emphasis on tones at the beginning, it may not be a bad thing (my tones suck, but as a visual learner, I would have memorized them better if I had to read them).
The homophones problem is indeed difficult to avoid in existing literature. Classical Chinese texts can’t really be romanized and would be limited to a small circle of scholars, much like Plato and Horace for Europeans. Their modern Chinese translation, however, would be available.
I am not an advocate of romanisation, I am interested in Chinese because of the characters. However I am quite sure that, once the transition done, it would work smoothly enough.
As far as I know, linguists like the late J. de Francis and others already proved that pinyin (with tone-marks of course) is perfectly usable as a script.
My understanding is that romanization is not a technical problem at all, but a cultural one. I am and have always been a radical anti-romanization in the case of Chinese, but in other cases like turkish I can understand it, because the arabic script was not inherent to their culture as characters are to mandarin.
I know for practically minded people it might sound like BS, but I seriously believe it: the characters are the core cultural heritage of the Chinese, much more important (and older) than other surviving items today, like Confucianism or the great wall. Only for this reason they cannot be abandoned without betraying the soul of Chinese culture. There is more to a people than it’s GDP, damnit!
Romanization was supported at some point by many intelligent Chinese because they thought characters were an obstacle to China’s development. With the progress of technology China has proven that this is not a problem anymore, and it develops just fine today.
Sure, the kids have to study very hard at school, so what. It is a mistake to see the brain as a box where you put one thing and then you cannot fit others. On the contrary, acquiring one ability as a kid develops your brain even more, and that time is better spent than playing computer games. I spent a good part of my childhood learning the grammar of one of the most difficult and useless languages you can learn (basque), instead of dedicating that time to learn, for example, French. As a result I became interested in studying more, I always had good marks in foreign languages, and I have an advantage compared to others who didn’t go through that process.
Sorry for the long comment, unlike Syz, I do feel quite strongly about this. I find it difficult to understand why anyone would push for romanization today, when characters have been proven to work. Let’s I think a more relevant subject today would be the merger simplified-traditional, which has to happen at some point.
@Julen, that’s the most rhetorically sound defense of character conservatism I’ve ever read. This is what character supporters should be focused on: a philosophical perspective about how we spend our time.
When character advocates try to play the efficiency game, it’s hard for me not to sigh. It’s a losing battle. Sure, you can say you get a few gains here and there, try to argue that you can read faster or learn Japanese faster or whatever, but my guess is those are all minuscule if not downright nonexistent benefits. So what are the advocates going to do when all the research is in and it shows, unequivocally, that it takes waaaay longer to learn characters and you don’t read any faster. Are they going to embrace Pinyin? No, and there are reasonable reasons not to, which they should embrace now instead of playing the efficiency game:
I couldn’t agree more. As I watch my daughter spend hours a day on characters (time that I know she wouldn’t have to spend on just writing if China used a phonemic system), I do some days resent the “waste”. But at the same time I do doubt the whole “waste” concept because it is based on, once again, the efficiency myth. Heck, she even enjoys writing calligraphy sometimes.
Since @Jean was kind enough to get me the whole article that this is based on, I’m going to have to post a bit of Aytürk’s framework at some point. It’s a nice way to sketch out a view of script reform that’s much broader than mere efficiency.