Replacing Chinese characters with pinyin forever as Vietnamese did

Question

I know both languages to a certain extent. By no means I am fluent; reading is still a challenge, especially in Chinese, thus I am not allowed to firmly stand by my opinion.

I often ponder on the big loss the Vietnamese Language incurred with the replacement of the Chinese-based Chữ Nôm writing system with the latin based script (chữ Quốc ngữ) by missionaries and French colonizers.

I know that Vietnamese have no problems reading the latin-based script, and I raised a following questions many times to Chinese people I know:

Could Chinese characters be totally abandoned and could children be
taught to only use the pinyin(拼音) instead? Would they still be able to read efficiently?

A standard Chinese answer to this hypothetical question is something like:

no, it's absolutely impossible.

The only "proof" I got until now is this which underlines the abundance of homonyms in Chinese.

It's not much and I still think it's possible to switch to pinyin for Chinese. I'm basing my opinion on the similarity of Vietnamese/Chinese, but would love to hear some more down-to-earth proofs/references.

[edited] Note that I am not into economics of such a hypothetical enterprise. I am strictly interested in the possibility of Chinese people to read in pinyin without being excessively exposed to ambiguity due to homonyms (pinyin is the same for many characters. Examples: 是 and 士).

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible to read texts that are written only in pinyin. This is pretty trivial in one sense: pinyin spelling indicates all of the segmental phonemic distinctions of standard Putonghua Chinese (it was designed to) and when used with tone marks and correct word division and punctuation, it indicates some of the suprasegmental and intonational aspects of pronunciation as well. So someone with a pinyin text can read the sounds out loud fairly well, and if you can do that, you should be able to understand what's being said about as well as you can understand something that you hear that is not written down.

In another sense, it's obviously difficult for people who are used to one spelling system to read something in an unfamiliar spelling system. /fɔr ɪgˈzæmpəl, aɪm ˈraɪtɪŋ ðɪs ˈsɛntəns ɪn ði ɪntərˈnæʃənəl fəˈnɛtɪk ˈælfəbɛt; ɪts ˈprɑbəbli ˈhɑrdər tə rid ðən ðə nɛkst ˈsɛntəns./ For example, this sentence is probably easier to read than the preceding sentence written using the International Phonetic Alphabet. But it is not impossible to read an IPA transcription of English; it just requires knowledge of the sound correspondences, and practice if you want to be able to read quickly. So this is a practical objection to replacing characters in pinyin; it doesn't mean writing comprehensible Chinese in pinyin is "absolutely impossible" in principle.

And in another sense, a non-phonemic writing system allows you to get away with things that would be confusing, or even incomprehensible, in spoken language (like the "shi" poem). I found a tract calling for English spelling reform that gives the following English example:

the words "attend to know understanding" might easily be read to convey the meaning "attend to no understanding"

A plea for phonetic spelling: or, The necessity of orthographic reform, by Alexander John Ellis

But as Ellis points out, such sentences can simply be reworded to make them less ambiguous in their spoken form. Furthermore, this isn't something that's only possible in post-reform spelling systems. Many native English speakers are familiar with sentences such as "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" or "James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" that are technically grammatically "correct" but impossible to understand even when written down in the current English spelling system. This could be seen as a "flaw" of the current English spelling system, but in practice it is not a problem for English speakers because nobody needs to use sentences like this anyway.

Similarly, no one actually needs to be able to write sentences or texts composed entirely of variations on the syllable "shi" in Chinese (I say "variations" because the syllables are not actually completely identical; there are different tones which can be indicated in Pinyin with tone diacritics or numbers).

The "shi" poem is an extreme example, of course, and doesn't represent the real issues that would arise with spelling reform. The tendency to ignore the potential of confusing homophony when writing in characters may make it difficult to read some texts that were originally written in characters that are re-written in pinyin. (Furthermore, as michau points out, it means that some established specialized or technical terminology is currently disambiguated mainly by the spelling; something like a more extreme version of the distinctions in English between phonetically similar words like "prescribe" and "proscribe", or "alkanes", "alkenes" and "alkynes", or "hypothermia" and "hyperthermia".) This doesn't make it impossible to write texts in pinyin that are understandable. But, it does mean writing Chinese without characters may require some changes in word usage compared to writing Chinese with characters.

However, I think that language reformers in other places have made changes in word usage/vocabulary that are of comparable or greater magnitude. For example, in the transition from Ottoman Turkish (written in a form of the Arabic alphabet) to modern Turkish (written in a form of the Latin alphabet) many words of Arabic origin were more or less replaced with words built on Turkish roots. Likewise, it would not be impossible for Chinese writers to avoid overly ambiguous old vocabulary terms and devise some new standard replacements if it became necessary. Obviously, this kind of vocabulary replacement would have cultural impacts that I am not qualified to evaluate, but there is nothing inherently impossible about it from a linguistic point of view.

The linguist Victor Mair has written a lot about pinyin and characters and how they are used in modern Chinese writing. Here is a blog post he made that mentions the memoirs of Chang Li-ching (his wife) that were published in pinyin: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=27423 The article and comments mention that many native Chinese speakers find it hard to read the text fluently, but it is evidently not literally "impossible".

As many of the other posts on this page have mentioned, the details of standardized writing systems are more strongly influenced by political and cultural considerations than by whether it is literally "possible" or "impossible" from a strictly linguistic perspective to use any particular system for any particular language.

Answer 2

It is possible only if you write in an informal way – the way you would say things out loud. The difference between formal and informal writing is quite large in Chinese, and the informal style may feel very awkward in many circumstances. With Pinyin it wouldn't be possible to write everything the way it is written now.

Some examples of clearly distinct word pairs that have identical pronunciation and can appear in very similar contexts:

• Chemistry: Two chemical elements, selenium (硒) and tin (锡) are both pronounced xī in mainland China. Similarly, both sulphur (硫) and lutetium (鎦) are pronounced liú in Taiwan.
• Biology: The genus Anser (grey geese) is 雁屬 and the genus Hirundo (swallows) is 燕屬, both pronounced yànshǔ. Similarly, 鵲巢 quècháo means ‘magpie's nest’, while 雀巢 quècháo means ‘sparrow's nest’ (or the proper name Nestlé).
• Law and politics: In mainland China, 检查机关 is a ‘censorship organ’ and 检察机关 is a ‘procuratorial organ’. Both are pronounced jiǎnchá jīguān.
• Language: 詞典 cídiǎn means ‘dictionary of words’ and 辭典 cídiǎn means ‘dictionary of phrases’. The distinction is subtle, but clear.
• Paleography: According to an important modern theory of classification of Chinese characters, 意符 yìfú is a category of character components (‘semantic component’), and 義符 yìfú (‘meaning component’) is one of subcategories of 意符 yìfú.
• Geography: The Five Great Mountains list includes 衡山 Héng Shān and 恆山 Héng Shān. Writers would have to find workarounds to distinguish them if they could only use Pinyin.
• Street names: Harbin has two Lìjiāng Streets: 莅江路 and 丽江路, despite the identical pronunciation. If they were written identically, the problem would be much bigger. Nowadays, you can say 丽江路，美丽的丽 “Lìjiāng street, Lì as in the word mĕilì (beautiful)”. If Pinyin was used, it would make no sense, as every lì would look the same.
• General vocabulary: 巨變 means ‘great changes’, while 劇變 means ‘sudden/violent change’. Both are pronounced jùbiàn. You can also take a look at a much longer list of Chinese homophones.
• Puns: 向钱看 ‘look for money’ is a play on the communist slogan 向前看 ‘look towards the future’. It wouldn't work in Pinyin without additional explanations, as both expressions are pronounced xiàng qián kàn. And there are many more such puns, see Baidu 10 mythical creatures and joke names.

As you can see, conversion into Pinyin might remove some crucial information. Precision in scientific and official texts is obviously much more important than in everyday speech. But it would also restrict the creativity found in modern informal and humorous writing.

All in all, using Pinyin in writing would be possible only after making adjustments to the way people write. But then again, with enough adjustments you can make any language use any script.

Answer 3

You have had some good answers to your question, but I would like to expand on what you say about Vietnamese writing traditions. The Chinese-based chữ nôm had a very marginal existence in Vietnam, being used almost exclusively for poetry and for “women’s literature” (basically translations - or imitations - of Chinese novels by and for women). The main written language in Vietnam until well into the colonial period was Chinese. The Portuguese-based chữ quốc ngữ writing system was also very much marginal, even among the Jesuits who invented it, who also did most of their writing in Chinese, until it was adopted by the nationalist movement in the 20th century.

Answer 4

Beyond other answers, I will add some examples of actual use of phonetic writing systems actually used for Chinese (or any Sinitic language, what is traditionally called Chinese dialects/topolects). These example show that it is linguistically possible to use a phonetic script to write Chinese; of course, doing so would be a major revolutionary change, rendering some poetic or technical texts totally unintelligible. Actually, any text which needs supplementary explanation of homophones when read alone would by definition pose problem.

In all examples below, a phonetic system is (or was) actually used by a sizeable community of people as a writing system for several generations, ensuring its actual usefulness. For them (except maybe for the medieval 'Phags-pa case), it is the main writing system, since they don’t have access to the usual Chinese characters.

If you are interested in discussions about phonetic writing of Chinese you can read this post by Victor Mair at LanguageLog and the links therein.

Historic use of phonetic scripts in China

Historically, China has been in contact with various phonetic scripts (Mogolian, Tibetan, among others) and I think several have been used to write Chinese. Notably, Phags-Pa (wiki ; more details by Andrew West) was commissioned by Kublai Khan for this use, and was an official way to write Chinese (and other languages of the Mongol empire) during almost a century (from 1269 to 1351 or 1352). However this was not popular among Chinese scholar and disappeared with the Yuan dynasty.

I have no idea about the balance of the political vs linguistic factors in this lack of popularity, but I think it illustrates well the difficulties a phonetic orthographic reform would face for Chinese. If a century of effort by a power as strong as the one of the Yuan dynasty didn’t manage to impose a phonetic spelling, in an era where only a minority of the population was literate, it seems unlikely to see such a reform ever happen.

Arabic script has also been used to write Chinese by Muslim minorities, and seems to still be in use but declining, according to the linked Wikipedia page.

Chinese Braille

Nowadays, a phonetic script is the main script for many Chinese blinds: three different systems are used for Mandarin and (at lest) one for Cantonese. I have no specific information about the actual use of this script, but I guess millions of Chinese read and write in it, and thousands of book are transcribed in it, with not much problem.

Dungan in Cyrillic

The Dugans are essentially Hui people who moved from Gansu to what is now Kyrgyzstan and Kasakhstan in late 19th century. Being form northwestern China, their language is closely related to standard Chinese. However, due to the Soviet policy on minority languages, it is fully written in Cyrillic script since 1953, with a perfectly functional orthography used by a community of 50,000 people. The implication of this fact on a reform like the one you have in mind is the subject of a paper by the sinologist Victor H. Mair, written in 1990 (html version; scanned original pdf)

Answer 5

It would be possible to use pinyin even without the tone marks to write down Chinese and it will be correctly understood. Actually, a similar thing has been done in the Dungan language for decades already, the only difference is they use not the Latin, but Cyrillic alphabet, and absolutely no tone marks although thera are tones in the language. Dungan is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese used by Muslims, this orthography functions in all spheres of life – at school, in books, newspapers, etc.

Answer 6

Pinyin tosses out a lot of semantic information. Once Chinese characters are removed from the language, it becomes harder for Mandarin to coexist with different Chinese languages under the same umbrella.

If I learned history right, the French used the Latin script to do that very thing: cut off the Vietnamese from the Chinese sphere of influence. Nowadays, borrowed words there are even imported verbatim into the language instead of naturalized as English and French becomes trendy. I reckon most Latin-based scripts eventually run into the problem that English faces: words that retain the spelling of their originating language.

One way to address the problems is a language regulatory institution that has the backing of a government to do two things:

1. Differentiate homophones with etymological spelling like French. The spelling should pose no problem to reading since it contains more information than what is spoken aloud. A reader will know to collapse the different graphemes (like the <m> and <n> nasal codas) into one phoneme or to delete silent letters (like <p>, <t>, and <k> in the coda position). However, speech cannot be written with etymologically correct spelling without knowing beforehand how the morphemes should be spelled.
   • 原因 “reason” (yuányīn) and 元音 “vowel” (yuányīn → yuányīm)
   • 香蕉 “banana” (xiāngjiāo → hiāngziāo) and 相交 “cross over” (xiāngjiāo → siānggiāo)
   • 目的 “goal” (mùdì → mùkdìk) and 墓地 “burial ground” (mùdì)
2. Promulgate spelling rules for transliterating foreign words into the native spelling rules that do not accommodate foreign phonology.

Whether it works or not, the use of Chinese characters is a very cultural/political issue. The use of Latin may be seen as kowtowing to Western civilization. There might be a happy medium like the use of Zhuyin which is indigenous but not too difficult to master for anyone. Zhuyin is already used to write some non-Chinese languages.

Answer 7

The idea of pinyin or any other phonetic script replacing Chinese character writing is already more than a hundred years old. At the beginning of 20th century, when the Qing empire was collapsing, a lot of scholars came to the conclusion that it is because of China’s backwardness. They kept comparing China to the West and realized that in terms of technology, education and more, China was very far behind, therefore some of them insisted on reforms. Some of them regarded Chinese characters as a perfect example of what was holding China back and the idea of either simplifying or abandoning them was born (the famous writer Lu Xun wrote: “汉字不灭，中国必亡”, “If Chinese characters are not destroyed, China will inevitably die”).

Long story short, at a conference in 1986 it was decided that the Chinese writing will not be replaced by a phonetic script, but will remain simplified. At that point, pinyin was already an international romanization standard recognized by ISO, and had replaced all of the previous ones in Mainland China. However, it had never replaced the characters themselves.

In addition to what had already been said, I would like to point out that Chinese characters are some sort of cultural heritage for Chinese. They are something more than just writing. That is why even the idea of simplifying them outraged some scholars and numerous slogans opposing the reforms were created, such as 没有心如何爱？, “How to love without a heart?” (traditional character for ‘love’ is written 愛 with a ‘heart’ component in it). If Chinese characters were abandoned, Chinese calligraphy would not be the same and all of the character riddles and jokes would become meaningless (谜提：这字没人不会 （打一字），谜底：云）. All the other countries that abandoned Chinese characters need not worry about this, since characters were never originally theirs.

Answer 8

When syllables are assembled to form, especially, 2-syllable words, it's not sounds that are being concatenated, but ideas that are being combined. If you lose the ideograms, you lose track of lexical formation and word families. You'd be losing an essential part of the language's logic. Even if romanization became the mainstream written medium, you would still have to refer to ideograms to create neologisms and to teach or study lexical semantics.

Answer 9

While as a foreigner I am grateful for the Latin alphabet in Vietnam, I would be concerned about the loss of cultural information that would be involved in moving from Chinese characters to pinyin in China. Don't the characters contain etymological information that contributes to the meaning of the words? When I studied traditional Chinese medicine, understanding the names of acupuncture points included explicit knowledge of the structure of the characters. That would all be lost in pinyin.

Answer 10

Because many vague questions are being asked, check the following, general, vague answer. Maybe like that you can understand what you are asking.

This question continues to be asked and it is usually asked by folks who really don't want to understand that Chinese is not the same as Vietnamese, that Chinese characters mean Chinese culture, Chinese thought, and Chinese tradition. The most amazing thing about it is that it is even asked by Western linguists.

If you only make the effort to remember that China is a vast and complex culture with a non-homogeneous tongue and that in the Chinese writing system, i.e., the characters are what hold this complex culture together. Remove the characters and their shared, embedded history, Chinese thought, and shared tradition and you break up Chinese culture. Why can a Westerner's bias not break through that simple reality?

Answer 11

I think replacing Chinese Characters with only pinyin is absolutely stupid. Chinese writing has existed for more than 5000 years while pinyin only 100 years. One of the biggest problem with pinyin is that the syllables in pinyin gives you multiple words which is very ambiguous and confusing where as with using the Chinese characters the meaning of the word is accurate or concise and without ambiguity. Very poor thing to do.