Writing Without Spelling

By “Awake!” correspondent in Taiwan

TEN-YEAR-OLD Lin Yung-hsiung sits at his desk in Taiwan. His small hand grasps firmly a slender bamboo-handled brush, almost straight up and down. He painstakingly draws black marks on his paper. Millions of other children in the cities, towns and villages of the Orient do the same thing each day. What are they doing? Are they painting pictures for an art class?

The answer is both Yes and No. The children are learning the art of writing without spelling. It is an art that reaches back, some 3,000 years or more, to the Shang dynasty of China.

But how can there be writing without spelling? Let us illustrate with the name of the young boy mentioned above. In Mandarin Chinese his family name is Lin. The character for this [Artwork​—Chinese Characters] means “forest” or “thicket.” Can you see the two trees that convey the idea? His given name, Yung-hsiung, is made up of two characters [Artwork​—Chinese Characters] that mean something like “permanent valor” or “everlasting manliness.”

But while the characters reveal the meaning, they do not spell out the pronunciation of the word. The reader must sound out the word according to the particular type of Chinese that he speaks. For instance, a Cantonese-speaking person whose name is written with the same characters set out in the previous paragraph would pronounce the name, not Lin Yung-hsiung, but Lam Wing-hung. Yet the meaning would be the same in both cases. All who read Chinese can communicate with one another in writing, though speakers of one dialect may not comprehend the spoken language of another.

Efforts to Promote Mandarin

Recently, efforts have been made to make Mandarina the national spoken language of all China. To facilitate this, experts formulated what are known as National Phonetic Symbols, a set of thirty-seven symbols that can spell out accurately the Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese characters. These phonetic symbols are used to teach Mandarin pronunciation. They are also used alongside characters in publications for children and people with limited education. This enables them to read without knowing many thousands of complicated characters.

Since early in the twentieth century a second campaign has further affected written Chinese. How so? During the previous eighteen centuries Chinese writing appeared in the style known as wenyen. This is a very terse method of writing, with only one single-syllable character for each word. A person reading out loud such monosyllables would be little understood. To illustrate the problem: The character for “loyal” is pronounced chung¹ in Mandarin.b Yet this very same spoken sound can also mean “center,” “clock,” “finish” or other things. English has similar examples of words that sound alike, yet have different meanings, as in “bare” and “bear,” “ware” and “wear.”

In conversation a Chinese person often overcomes this problem by adding an extra syllable to certain words in order to convey to his hearer the exact shade of meaning intended. For instance, when a Mandarin-speaking person is talking, instead of using one character for “loyal” (chung¹), he says chung¹-hsin¹, adding an extra syllable (hsin¹) so that his hearers would know that he meant “loyal” rather than “center,” “clock,” or something else. The paihua method adds the extra syllables in writing, making it similar to daily speech, which is what the term paihua means. This makes reading much more intelligible to the less educated person. These campaigns to employ phonetic symbols for teaching Mandarin pronunciation and the principles of paihua when writing Chinese have encouraged many persons to learn to read and converse in Mandarin.

Writing Without Spelling

Writing Chinese characters is quite an art. A schoolboy must first learn the correct order of the strokes. Balance and proportion are necessary too. As an aid, beginners use paper printed with small squares. Our young friend Yung-hsiung first practiced on squared paper with pen or pencil. Eventually he developed ability to write a character containing up to thirty-three strokes in a small square. Later on, Yung-hsiung mastered the art of writing the characters with a brush.

Writing without spelling presents problems. But the Chinese have devised ingenious ways to cope with these. Interesting is the way in which Yung-hsiung finds names in a telephone directory. Since Chinese has no alphabet, the names are listed according to the number of strokes used in writing the first character of the name, which, in Chinese, is the family name, or surname. His first step in finding the name is to write the character, counting the strokes as he does so. Yung-hsiung’s own family name, Lin, requires eight strokes; so he finds it in the eight-stroke section of the directory.

What about the relationship of Chinese to Japanese? Actually the two languages are not closely related. Japanese grammar and sentence construction are entirely different from Chinese. Yet the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters to write their language.

Borrowing Chinese characters for Japanese has produced one of the most complicated forms of writing in the world. Since all Chinese characters in Japanese have both Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, some may be read in up to nine or more different ways, depending on their context. And while Japanese students can get by with about 1,850 basic Chinese characters, they must also master two different phonetic methods of writing the forty-eight basic Japanese sounds. And that is not all. To complicate matters further, reading Japanese requires getting acquainted with tens of thousands of different combinations of two or more characters in order to know their correct pronunciation in various settings.

The Chinese system of writing without spelling is indeed a complicated art. But its value to the human family has been great, for Chinese writing makes it possible for some 800 million persons speaking different Chinese dialects to communicate clearly with one another.

[Footnotes]

[Picture on page 16]

The family name Lin