Readings from

SCIENTIFICAMERICAN

With Introductions by

William S- Y. WangUniversity of California, Berkeley

rn W. H. Freeman and CompanySan Francisco

r7

1

J

,.~.4

by William S-Y. WangFebruary 1973

This melodious tongue is spoken by more people thanany other. Although the Chinese system of writing is

complex, the basic structure of the language is

remarkably simple

in a grammar of Chinese. For the variousforms of the verb "to buy," such as"buy," "buys," "bought" and "buying,"Chinese has the single form maio (Themark over the a signifies that the syllableis spoken in a tone that falls and thenrises. There are three other vowel marksfor tones, as in a indicating a rising tone,Ii indicating a falling tone and a indicat-ing a level high tone.) For "book,""books," "to the books" and "of thebooks" the Chinese is shu. Most of thetime it is quite clear from the contextwhat tense or mood is intended for a verband what number or case is intended fora noun. Hence the Chinese languagedoes not bother much with this particu-lar type of redundancy in its grammar.Perhaps it is this structural simplicity ofthe language that moved the anthropolo-gist and linguist Edward Sapir to char-

acterize it as "soberly logical."

gives the illusion that the thing beingnamed is new.

There is one sense, ho\vever, in whichChinese is a very old language. Sumerianis the only language we know of that hasextant written materials that antedateChinese ones. Sumerian cuneiform writ-ing dates back some 5,000 years; theearliest Chinese writing in existence to-day dates back 3,500 years. But Sumeri-an and its derivative orthographies diedout long before the beginning of theChristian Era.-Chinese orthography hascontinued to this day, although there

have been major stylistic changes.The earliest Chinese writings are in-

cisions on bone and tortoise shell. Mostof the inscriptions are oracular, deal-ing with political or religious events orwith the weather or warfare. Discoveredtoward the end of the 19th century inChinese drugstores, where they were be-ing sold as "dragon bones" for theirmedicinal value, the story of these in-scriptions is a colorful chapter in thehistory of Chinese archaeology and phi-lology. More than 100,000 inscribedpieces have now been found. Eventhough the total number of written char-acters on the pieces is more than a mil-lion, the number of different charactersis small. The texts of the oracular inscrip-tions dealt with a very limited range oftopics, and the same characters are re-peated over and over again. Of the 2,000to 3,000 characters on the shells and

bones, about half can be read today.Through the centuries Chinese char-

acters have been preserved in many dif-ferent mediums: metal vessels, stonedrums, jade jewelry, coins, metal mirrors,bricks and tiles. The central line of de-velopment, however, has been the use ofthe brush on silk, bamboo, wood and

ultimately on paper. A brush can pro-duce variations in thickness whereas astylus cannot. Such variations give the

.

t~.

T o people who are familiar onlywith the common European lan-guages the Chinese language is

strikingly different. Yet today Chinese isspoken by more people than any otherlanguage, and Chinese literature is theworld's oldest, spanning a period of 35centuries. When we examine the struc-ture of the Chinese language, we findthat it is not conspicuously complex; in-deed, in many ways it is simpler than theWestern languages. But since Chinesedoes differ from the European languagesin fundamental respects, some knowl-edge of its structure and historical devel-opment is indispensable to a generalunderstanding of the nature of human

language.To the Western eye the writing system

of the Chinese is altogether novel: in-stead of neat rows of simple alphabeticletters there are thousands of uniquecharacters, many of which seem incred-ibly intricate. To the ear the languagesounds rather melodious, perhaps a littlelike singing. When one peers below thesurface, there are more surprises. Thelanguage has virtually no conjugation forits verbs and no declension for its nouns.The inevitable paradigms that Westernschoolchildren have come to dread intheir grammar books are totally absent

The Antiquity of Chinese

Chinese is often termed a very oldlanguage. In a sense such a statementis misleading. All human languages goback to the dim uncertainty of prehis-tory, and at present we have no way ofknowing whether or not they can all betraced back to the same root. Four thou-sand years ago the ancestors of the Chi-nese peoples spoke an early form of theChinese language in much the same waythat the ancestors of the English-speak-ing peoples were using an early form ofthe English language. Since almost noth-ing is known about the emergence of lan-guage in the human species, we are notin a position to say which of the world'slanguages evolved earlier and whichlater. It is rather that in the course ofhistol-Y some languages have been re-named more often than others (as a re-sult of events such as migration or con-quest) and the newness of the names

SYMBIOTIC RELATION bet""een paintin,

and writing in Chinese art is elegantly ex.

emplified by a detail from "Flowering Plants

and Trees" on the opposite page. The char-

acters were written in the traditional for.

mat: in columns and from right to left. The

portion of the poem that is framed by the

pine branches is translated: "Jade strands

hang limp in' the wind. Crimson berries

sparkle bright against the snow." The paint.

ing was made by Ch'en Shun in the 16th cen.

tury during the Ming dynasty. It is part of

the Avery Brundage Collection at the Center

of Asian Art and Culture in San Francisco,

54

MAP OF CHINA shows the distribution of the major dialects ofthe Chinese language. More than two-thirds of the Chinese popula-tion speak one of the Mandarin dialects, of which the speech ofPeking is the standard. It is the dialects along the southern coast,

however, that have been carried to many parts of tbe world byChinese emigrants. There are also several non.Chinese linguisticstocks within China. The regions to the north and west are domi.nated by non.Chinese languages such as Mongolian and Tibetan.

r-

THE CHINESE LANGUAGEWANG 55

writer a much greater artistic freedom inrendering his characters.

Some of the earliest written Chinesecharacters were pictographic. The char-acter for "rain" was several columns ofbroken lines, and the one for "horse"looked like a horse, complete with maneand four legs [see illustration on page61]. Pictographs, however, are only aminority in the total vocabulary of Chi-nese. Most of the words in the languagecannot be suggested by a simple picture.

Calligraphy, the elegant rendering ofcharacters, is a highly cultivated art fonnthat has long been prized in Chineseculture, much as painting is valued inthe Western world. For the Chinesethere is a close relation between paintingand calligraphy. Typically a silk scroll iscovered with a picture and a few linesof characters, the two carefully balancedagainst each other. Because of their ar-tistic values and their long history, Chi-nese characters have a much greaterrange of variability in their size andshape than the characters of any other

writing system.

The Writing System

The Chinese writing system under-went major changes in 1956, when thegovernment of the People's Republic ofChina decided to simplify the charactersand also to adopt a system of spellingChinese words in Latin letters. Bothmeasures are intended to make the read-ing and writing of Chinese easier tolearn, a cI1Jcial step in promoting lin-guistic unity and raising the standard ofliteracy in China.

In order to understand the nature ofChinese characters and their simplifica-tion, we must first examine their internalstl1Jcture. Each character is made up oftwo types of smaller unit called thestroke and the radical. Roughly speak-ing, a stroke is a line, either straight orcurved, that is completed every time thepen leaves the paper. For example, thecharacter for "sun," which is pronouncedri, looks like:

t1It is built up of four strokes [see top il.lustration on page 57]. Both the orderand the geometric position of the strokesare important. There are approximately20 distinct strokes in the language, sothat strokes are the closest counterpartsto the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet.There is no counterpart of the radicals inthe orthography of other languages. Thetraditional set consists of 214 radicals,and these radicals are found in almost all

ORACLE-BONE INSCRIPTIONS, dating from 1300 B.C., are among the earliest.known ex.amples of Chinese writing. They were made on ox bones and tortoise shells and were usedror divination. The photograph, provided through the courtesy of Bernhard Karlgren andJan Wirgin, shows specimens in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm.

II LANGUAGES AND DERIVATIVE SYSTEMS56

meaning of the "sun" radical. In thesecharacters the radical is called the sig-nific and the remainders are the pho-netics. The phonetics indicate how thecharacters are to be pronounced. In"morning sun" the phonetic is 16ng:

£

phonetic portion is pronounced 16ng andis written:

Chinese dictionaries. A dictionary pub-lished in 1971, however, has mergedsome radicals, reducing the number to189. Most radicals are also characters;for example, the "sun" radical and thecharacter for "sun" are identical. Thereare thousands of characters in regularuse, and the majority of them are notradicals. Each character contains onlyone radical, with or without a remainder.

The character for "star," pronouncedxing, is written:

It gives its pronunciation to the char-acter. On the other hand, there are char-acters that are not pronounced like theirphonetic, often for reasons of historicalsound change. The phonetic in the char-acter "star" is:

There would be no problem in agreeingthat the character should be the nameof a metal or metallic compound andshould be pronounced like l6ng, eventhough such a character does not exist inthe language.

Another fictitious character was sentto me recently by a friend as a riddle.The character has three components:

+l..TX

There is a literary character referring tothe morning sun, pronounced l6ng,that is written:

!.t.

The first component means "woman."The second and third components alsoare independent characters; they arepronounced shang and xid and respec-tively mean "up" and "down." We as-signed the signific to the "woman" com-ponent, and the character looked likethis:

The phonetic is pronounced sheng, butthe pronunciation for "star" is xing.

As another example of a phonetic wecan take the character for "horse." It ispronounced md and is written:

~

eft.Now it can be seen that both characterscontain the "sun radical:

1:1

"Star has the radical on top and a re-mainder, which is pronounced sheng,that )ook.~ like this:

!.t-"Morning sun" has the "sun" radical tothe left; its remainder is pronouncedfc)ng and is written:

When the phonetic for "horse" is com-bined with the signific for "woman," wehave md, which means "mother";

~~When the "horse" phonetic is combinedwith the signific for "jade," we have ma,which means "agate";

J.';Combined with the signific for "insect,"the meaning becomes "ant," and again itis pronounced mil:

~Almost all the recent Chinese dictio-

naries and reference books arrange theircharacters by radicals. Take for examplethe character for "star:' To look it upone first goes to the section marked bythe "sun" radical: t.~

When there are two "mouth" signilicshovering over the "horse" phonetic, themeaning becomes "to scold," and it ispronounced ma:

1:1

In this section all the characters thatcontain the "sun" radical are ordered bythe number of strokes in the remainder,which is:

90~There are a large number of charac-

ters in Chinese that are constructed onthe phonetic-signmc plan. Thus under-lying many Chinese characters there isa phonetic principle. The average Chi-nese can often pronounce correctly acharacter he has never seen before sim-ply by making a shrewd guess at itsphonetic. For example, examine the fol-

lowing:

!.tThis remainder is only moderately com-plex, with five strokes. We would expectto find it in about the middle of the sec-tion.

A key process in the construction ofcharacters can be illustrated with "star"and "morning sun";

X 11~Their meanings are clearly related to the

Ifti

The signific portion means "gold." The

For the character as a whole we settledon the meaning "elevator girl," However,there is no intuitive way of pronouncingthe character, since the last two com-ponents do not constitute a phonetic.The solution of pronouncing it with twosyllables, shdng-xia, breaks a generalrule of Chinese orthography, namelythat for one character there is one syl-lable. Although reformers of the Chineselanguage have occasionally proposedpolysyllabic characters, no such reformhas ever been successful.

Chinese dictionaries and rhyme booksmay list tens of thousands of characters,but a knowledge of 4,000 to 7,000 char-acters is sufficient for, say, reading anewspaper. The form of the charactershas been built up unsystematicallythrough the centuries, and some are veryintricate, requiring 30 or more strokes towrite. The Chinese government's planof simplification has gone a long waytoward standardizing the form of thecharacters and reducing the averagenumber of strokes per character. Thenet gain has been dramatic, A text writ-ten in simplified characters can containfewer than half as many strokes as thesame text written before 1956, Thissimplification makes the task of learningthe written language considerably easier.An average of five or six strokes per char-acter is not significantly different fromthe average of five or six letters perEnglish word.

Since it is not the primary purpose of

57

the characters to represent sounds, theChinese written language has been large-ly independent of the evolutionarychanges that have taken place in thespoken language. This independence hasmade it possible for the written languageto provide a literary continuity acrossthousands of years and to serve as a co-hesive force binding the diverse culturesof China together.

The Evolution of the Language CHARACTER FOR "SUN" is built up with four brushstrokes: first a vertical. then a turn-ing stroke. then the inside and finally the closure. Order and the geometric position or thestrokes are important. All the components of a character should fit roughly into a square.

OLD SIMPLIFIED

t7SUN (n)

e.!.t.STAR (xing)

MORNING SUN (long)

~ '--"

HORSE (ma)

\~

MOTHER (ma)

AGATE (ma)

J\~

ANT (m~)

i~

The evolution of spoken Chinese, liketIle evolution of all other living lan-guages, has been constant. Thereforemany of the beautiful poems of theTang dynasty of the seventh to 10thcenturies no longer rhyme. If Confucius,who lived in the fifth century B.C., wereto give a lecture anywhere in China to-day, he would not be understood. Withinthe large area of China dialects haveevolved so far apart in their sounds thata man from Peking cannot be sure of be-ing able to order a dinner in a Cantoneserestaurant. Compared with the changein sounds, the written characters havechanged little. Most of the charactersConfucius used are still in books today,and many of these characters have theiroriginal meanings. The writing of Con-fucius is more intelligible to a modernChinese than, say, a page of Beowulf isto an American. By the same token,although the Tang poems no longerrhyme, they are still enjoyed throughoutChina because their visual message re-mains the same. When the poems areread aloud by people in Peking, Shang-hai or Canton, the poems sound alto-gether different because of the variousdialects. It is rather like hearing "6 + 7= 13" being read aloud in English, Ger-.man and Norwegian. Even in Japan aChinese with no knowledge of Japanesecan manage to communicate reasonablywell by writing. Chinese characters werealso a significant medium of communica-tion in Korea and in Vietnam. The in-dependence of the characters from thespoken language has enabled them toserve as a core of culture in much of EastAsia for many centuries.

A written Chinese character has amore direct connection with its meaningthan a written word in English does. Thesequence of letters spelling "horse" hasmeaning only through the mediation ofthe sounds they represent. The shape ofthe letters has no relation to the concept"horse." Little would be changed if En-glish-speaking peoples were to take upthe Cyrillic alphabet and the sounds for"horse" were represented xopc. To a Chi-

TO SCOLD (ma)

",,\':1~\;t~

,~SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS were introduced in 1956 by the government of the Peo.pie's Republic of China. Simple characters, such as the first two, were not affected.The remaining characters, somewhat more complex, were each reduced by tiix strokes.

58 II I LANGUAGES AND DERIVATIVE SYSTENIS

nese the character for "horse" means ten in Pinyin. The government has beenhorse with no mediation through the careful to point out that Pinyin is not in-sound ma. The image is so vivid that one tended to replace the characters butcan almost sense an abstract figure gal- rather to serve as an aid in learning pro-loping across the page: nunciation. To discontinue the use of the

Chinese characters would deprive com-~ ing generations of Chinese of a rich and

meaningful cultural heritage.The other major linguistic decision

made by the Chinese government was toadopt a spelling system based on theLatin alphabet. This system is calledPinyin, which literally means "spellsound." All the Chinese words spelledout in Latin letters in this article are writ-

Standard Chinese

To discuss the Pinyin system of spell-ing we need to examine the sound systemof what is called standard Chinese,which is based on the Peking dialect and

.."\

go~maTO SCOLD

...

is now being taught in all parts of China.It is a straightforward system, simpler inmany ways than the easy syllables ofSpanish. There is really only one aspectunfamiliar to those who speak Europeanlanguages: the tones. The musical qual-ity of the spoken Chinese language isdue to the fact that almost every syllablemust carry one of four basic tones. Thesetones are indicated by diacritical marksover the vowels. The phenomenon oftones seems to be confined to Chineseand to some of the languages of South-east Asia that have been heavily in-fluenced by Chinese.

One of the earliest references in theliterature to tones dates back to thesi."(th century. When the emperor of Li-ang asked one of his scholars, Zhou She,what was meant by the four tones, Zhouresponded with an elegant illustration:

*'.-J-!-4jIt means "The son of heaven is divineand wise." (Chinese emperors have tra-ditionally been regarded as sons of heav-en and divine, whether or not they werewise.) The beauty of Zhou's response liesin the fact that the first word of hisphrase illustrates the first tone in thespeech of that time, the second word thesecond tone, and so on.

Essentially every Chinese syllable hasa characteristic pitch pattern (tone).Changing the tone alters the meaningjust as much as changing a consonant ora vowel in English changes the meaning.In English we use a rising pitch patternfor "John?" and a falling pitch patternfor "John!" The different tones conveydifferent attitudes, but the meaning ofthe word remains the same. In Chinese,however, ma with a rising pitch patternmeans "hemp" and ma with a fallingpitch pattern means "to scold." The twomeanings are no more related to eachother than they would be if we were tochange the vowel to get ml, which means"honey," or if we were to change the con-sonant to get pd, which means "to fear."

Standard Chinese has a total of fourtones: rising, falling, level and dipping(see illustration at left]. In addition tothe tone every syllable must also have anucleus to carry the tone, usually a vow-el. The tone and the nucleus are the twoobligatory components of the Chinesesyllable. There are also three optionalcomponents of a syllable: the initial com-ponent, which is usually a consonant;the medial component, which is a glide,and the ending, which may be either aglide or a consonant from a restrictedclass. There are eight possible forms asyllable can take.

-

JOHN!

VOWELCHANGE

CONSONANTCHANGE

TONE CHANGE

\1/

JEAN! JOHN?

TONES are used to alter the meaning of Chinese words. Standard Chinese has only fourtones: falling (as in ma), rising (ma), level (ma) and dipping, or falling and then rising(ma). The oscillograph traces at right show the fundamental frequency of the author's voiceas he spoke the words. In English, on the other hand, variation in tone is used to conveydifferent moods; the meaning of the word being spoken does not change. In Chinese chang.ing tone has same kind of effect on meaning of word as changing a vowel or a consonant.

L--. ---"DON!

59

FINALNUCLEUS.

VOWEL

.

.

.

.

INITIALCONSONANT MEDIAL,

GLIDE

.

.

ENDING.IVOWEL OR CONSONANT

PINYIN PHONETIC

.

Ij£n

thj£

t~ary

ma

j(n

lian

tie

....

FACE

IRON

zhangTO GROW emaHORSE

..

yan

.....

EYE

yue

y'i'n

y'i'

Y~

In

MOON

.

HIDDEN

'ICHAIR

which is usually a consonant; the medial, which is a glide, and theending, which may be either a glide or a consonant. All togetherthere are eight possible forms that a Chinese syllable can take.

COMPONENTS OF A CHINESE SYLLABLE that are obligatoryare the tone and the nucleus (usually a vowel) to carry the tone.There are three optional components in a syllable: the initial,

corresponds to the Chinese term Guan-hud, which means "official speech," Stan-dard Chinese is a conventionalized va-riety of this dialect and is known asGuoyu, or "national language," It also isreferred to as Beifanghua, which means"northern speech," or as Putonghua,"common speech."

Outside China standard Chinese playsa much less important role. The domi-nant dialects among the 15 million Chi-nese in Southeast Asia are rue andSouthern Min, because it was peoplefrom the southern coastal provinces whomigrated into the area. In the U.S. theChinese are relative newcomers; theydate back to 1850, when they were firstdrawn across the Pacific Ocean by thediscovery of gold in California. Laterthese immigrants made up the core ofthe labor force that built the railroads inthe American West. The ancestry of thegreat majority of the several hundredthousand Chinese now in the U ,S, canbe traced back to a small cluster of vil-lages around Canton, all within a radiusof 100 miles or so, The speech patternsof these villages are definitely of the ruedialect group, but they differ markedlyfrom one another. We can be sure thatsignificant differences have arisen in thepast 100 years between the speech of theAmerican Chinese and the speech of thesource villages around Canton.

One striking feature of Chinese wordsin comparison with most Europeanwords is the lack of clusters of conso-nants before and after the nuclear vowel.When Western words with consonantclusters are represented in Chinese, theyare typically broken up so that each con-sonant has its own syllable. "Marx" isconventionally rendered:

~ >t I~'It is pronounced ma-ke-si. The first char-acter is the one for "horse," which alsohappens to be a prevalent Chinese sur-name.

Although the Pinyin system and stan-dard Chinese are taught in all parts ofChina, the languages of ethnic minoritiesare given full consideration. Accordingto The Nationalities in China, a bookpublished in Peking in 1961, there areabout 30 million people belonging to mi-nority groups. The minorities occupyabout a third of the land of China, most-ly in the west and northwest. Some ofthe groups are large: the Zhuangs areclose to eight million in number and theUighurs about four million. The lan-guages of some of these groups are re-lated genetically to Chinese but belongto other linguistic families such as Altaicand Austroasiatic.

A 1956 report by the Chinese Acad-emy of Sciences estimated that the totalnumber of people in China who spokeone or another of the Chinese dialectswas more than 500 million. Of the di-alects, Mandarin has by far the mostspeakers: more than two-thirds of thetotal [see illustration on page 54]. The\\.estern name "Mandarin" derives fromthe fact that the dialect was the speechof government officials, or mandarins. It

Word Formation

Every language has a stock of severalthousand morphemes: the bearers of thebasic semantic and grammatical content,An expression such as "can openers"comprises four morphemes: "can,""open," "oer" and "-s," Some morphemesin English have more than one syllable

(as in "open" and "adamant"), whereasothers, such as the "-s" in "cats" and the"-t" in "slept," are single consonants. InChinese most morphemes are exactlyone syllable long. The usual division ofmorphemes into three major categories-noun, verb and adjective-applies to Chi-nese quite well. Thus in Chinese sha("book") is a noun, 111ai ("buy") is a verband gul ("expensive") is an adjective.These morphemes are known as con-tentives, in that they carry independentsemantic meanings.

There is also a class of morphemescalled functives. They are usually at-tached to contentives to modify theu"meaning in systematic ways and to showthe relations the contentives have to oneanother. For example, functives attachedto the contentive "prove" change its

meaning: "proves," "proved," "proving,""disprove," "unproved" and "proof." Al-though conjugational and declensionalparadigms are important in English, theyare negligible in Chinese. There is, hc;>w-ever, a sizable amount of derivationalmorphology in Chinese, where nouns arederived from verbs by changing the tone.Thus shu is a verb meaning "to count,"and shu is a noun meaning "number."The verb lian means "to connect," andthe noun lian means "a chain." M6 is "togrind," and mo is "a grindstone." To de-rive a noun in these cases one simplychanges the syllable to a falling tone. Asimilar example from English is derivinga noun from a verb by devoicing the finalconsonant: "prove"-"proof," "bathe"-"b th " "h " "h "a, ouse -ouse.

The device of derivation by tonechange is no longer productive in stan-dard Chinese, but it is suspected thattonal derivation was an important proc-ess in the earlier stages of development

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INPUT STRING

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SENTENCE POSITION

001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008

COMPUTER TRANSLATION of a Chinese sentence from a scien.tific text produces a reasonably accurate and understandable result.The string of Chinese characters is entered into the computer usinga numeric code for each character. The position of each characterin the sentence is also entered. The computer searches its memoryfor the meaning of each character and then perfonns syntactic

009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016

analysis of the sentence. In converting the sentence into Englishthe computer makes permutations of the word order. The sentencemeans: "It may he obtained after bombarding the element withhigh-energy particles." Research into computer analysis of Chi.nese is being conducted hy the author and his colleagues at thephonology laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley.

1 3 [T] r "~ ~ E 4

VIH4 12 [T]1-11 r

DE4 NN DE4 VA VTH NRJ

5 6-7 12 14 15 16

0037 63477820 0037 0668 1779 0037

ZHI.1 ZHI.2 DIAN.3 ZHI.1 KE.3 DE.3 ZHI.1

PARTICLE MAY OBTAIN IT'THEM

WANG

for word "We eat chicken." There is atendency in Chinese to delete either thesubject or the object. Hence women chi("We eat") or chi ii ("Eat chicken") areboth common sentences. To focus at-tention on the object, the Chinese speak-er will move it to the beginning of thesentence. Ii women chi, for instance,means "We eat chicken," but it is nor-mally used to contrast with somethingelse we do not eat. Suppose subject de-letion and moving the object to the initialposition both operated on the sentencewomen chi Ii. First we front the objectand get ii women chi, and then we deletethe subject and get ii chi. The resultingsentence would mean something like"Chicken A eats," and the identity of A

I THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 61

normally would be clear from the con-text. But ii chi of course also meanssomething like "The chicken eats,"where ti is the subject of the verb. Inother words, ii chi is an ambiguous sen-tence, its ambiguity arising from objectfronting and subject deletion.

There is no evidence that Chinese al-lows either more ambiguity than Englishor less. In an English sentence such as"It is too hot to eat," the "it"'can refer tothe weather, to the food or to the animallhat is doing the eating. Moreover, "hot"could mean "high in heat content"(which in Chinese is tang) or it couldmean "spicy" (which in Chinese is la).

The Chinese language as an object ofstudy goes back as far as the beginning

REGULAR FORMS

TIGER DRAGON

~~~ANCIENT GRAPHSABOUT 2000 B.C.

SHELL-AND-BONECHARACTERS

jiaguwenABOUT 1400-

1200 B.C.f\~

~,~

fn

~GREAT SEAL

dazhuanABOUT 1100-300 B.C.

SCRIPT FORMSSMALL SEALxiaozhuan

221-207 B.C. TIGER DRAGON

of the Chinese language. In the Canton-ese dialect, however, the process is stillvery productive. The Cantonese use tonechange for forming diminutives: "candy"from "sugar," "daughter" from "female"and so on.

A common derivational device in Chi-nese is reduplicatl,on. Applied to nouns,it carries the meaning "every." Hence al-though Ten means "person," renrenmeans "evel'Y person," tian means "day"and tiantian means "every day." Appliedto verbs, it adds a transitory meaning tothe action: kan means "to look," whereaskankan means "to take a look," zOumeans "to walk" and z6uzou means "totake a walk." Adverbs can be derivedfrom adjectives by reduplication and theaddition of a de suffix. Thus kuai is"quick" and kudikuaide is "quickly," Ianis "lazy" and lanldnde is '1azily."

The manner in which two-syllable ad-jectives reduplicate is different. Whereasa two-syllable verb, tdolun ("to discuss"),reduplicates as tdoluntdolun ("to discussa little"), an adjective, say gaoxing ("hap-py"), becomes gaogaoxingxingde ("hap-pily"). A verb reduplicates by the entireword, but the adjective reduplicates interms of its constituent syllables.

Another device for word formation inChinese is the conjoining of antonyms."Buy" and "sell" combine to form "busi-ness," mdimdi. "Long" and "short" com-bine to form "length," changdudn. Thederived meaning is not always straight-forward. For example, fan means "turnedover" and zheng means "right side up."Put together, fdnzheng means "in anycase."

Classifiers are a linguistic feature pe-culiar to Chinese and its neighboringlanguages. Articles, numerals and othersuch modifiers cannot directly precedetheir associated noun; there has to be anintervening classifier, which usually hasnegligible semantic content. In Chineseone cannot say san sha ("three books") ornei maD ("that cat"). One has to say sanhen sha ("three piece book") or nei zhimaD ("that piece cat"). The terms henand zhi here are translated as "piece"for the lack of a better counterpart inEnglish. Such classifiers are absolutelynecessary in Chinese expressions. Thisfeature has been carried over into manypidgin and Creole languages based onChinese, in which "three bananas" or"this man" are rendered as "three piecebanana" or "this fellow man."

DOCUMENTARYSCRIPT

zhangcaoABOUT 200 B.C..

A.D.1700tfJ

SCRIBE CHARACTERIishii

ABOUT 200 B.C.-A.D. 200

~ if?STANDARD

CHARACTERSkaishu

ABOUT A.D. 100-PRESENT

RUNNING STYLExlngshu

ABOUT A.D. 200.PRESENTIt ~l-!-

t1 ,t

~L

SIMPLIFIEDCHARACTERS

jianziABOUT A.D. 100

-PRESENT

SIMPLIFIED SCRIPTCHARACTERS

lianbl jianziABOUT A.D.100

-PRESENT

..t.,~

~

J=.J--t

~\":f!.

'MODERN" SCRIPTjincao

ABOUT A.D. 300.PRESENT

-t

1t~

ERRATIC SCRIPT

IkuangcaoABOUT A.D. 600-1700

Sentence FormationHISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT of pictographic characters for the two most powerful ani.mals in Chinese mythology, the tiger and the dragon, are shown in their various stages. Theearliest-known pictographic forms of the animals are at the top in red. The illustration isfrom Introduction to Chinese Cursive Script, by F. Y. Wang of Seton Hall University.

The basic sentence in Chinese has theorder subject-verb-object, as in English.Thus the sentence women chi ii is word

~

62 II I LANGUAGES AND DERIV A'

of the Christian Era. At that time theChinese had already produced sophisti-cated works in dialectology and in se-mantic classification. The foundations forthe historical study of Chinese soundswere laid during the 17th and 18th cen-turies by the great scholars of the Qingdynasty, and it is on their shoulders thatmodern Chinese linguists stand.

The key to how a language soundedcenturies ago lies in how it sounds today.The basic method is to compare the pro-nunciation of morphemes in contempo-rary dialects and to infer what their an-cestral pronunciations might have been.The inference is not just a guess but ismade on the basis of documentary evi-dence and knowledge of the generallinguistic principles underlying sound

change.Given the non phonetic nature of the

Chinese writing system, it may seem animpossible task to reconstruct how thelanguage was spoken many centuriesago. One might think that the soundsof alphabetic languages, such as OldChurch Slavic or Sanskrit, would bemuch easier to reconstruct. Actually it isnot much easier, because there is nodirect way to determine how a letter waspronounced. With alphabetic languagesthe phonetic values must also be arrivedat by inference.

Chinese has the great advantage of anabundance of ancient writings that reachback continuously in time further thanthe literature of any other language inthe world. The fact that the form ofChinese characters is often not much in-fluenced by changes in pronunciation isquite a convenience in helping linguiststo determine which morphemes are ety-mologically related.

The study of Chinese dialects has

rIVE SYSTENlS

been hampered in the past by an over-abundance of data, which tended tomake research procedures cumbersomeand time-consuming. The advent oflarge computers has facilitated the ma-nipulation of the data. Chin-ChuanCheng and I, with the help of severalcolleagues, have developed a dialect dic-tionary on computer, which we callDOC. The program is in operation at thecomputer centers of the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley and of the Uni-versity of Illinois. It incorporates the pro-nunciation of more than 2,000 mor-phemes in each of 20 Chinese dialects,

Evidence is accumulating from ourwork with DOC that changes in languageproceed in ways that are essentially par-allel to biological evolution, as CharlesDarwin noted in The Descent of i'llan.In both cases the mechanism of changeresides in variation. When two or morevariants appear, the'rival forms competefor survival. For instance, in Americanspeech the vowel in "room" varies be-tween that of "pool" and that of "put,"and the s in "disobey" varies between an.9 and a :. The major selective force,which is constant across time as well asacross languages, is the ease with whichthe forms can be pronounced and prop-erly perceived. This selective force de-termines what forms of speech will sur-vive.

With the aid of computer programssuch as DOC we have been able to lounthrough large pools of data to locateongoing sound changes of special inter-est. Some changes are just beginning,some are in midstream and some areending. In the Chaozhou dialect, for ex-ample, there is a change from one toneto another that has so far affected abouthalf of the vocabulary. By having access

to a large number of well-defined typesof sound change, we are now in a posi-tion to study much more effectivt'ly theselective forcc that determines the di-rection of language evolution.

Another aspect of the Chinese lan-guage that has been subjected to in-tensive computer study is its morphol-ogy and syntax. With the collaborationof Stephen W. Chan, Benjamin K. Tsouand others, we have developed a ma-chine dictionary with more than iO,OOOentries, together with the necessary pro-grams for translation from Chinese intoEnglish. A good measure of how well weunderstand the stl"Ucture of a languageis how well we can break it apart in away that is suitable for translation bymachine. Although \ve are an indefinitedistance away from being able to trans-late a Tang poem into English withoutlosing its exquisite sensitivity, \ve cando a reasonably accurate job with scien-tific texts [see illustration on page 60].

Now that relations between the Peo-ple's Republic of China and Westernnations are becoming more normal, in-terest in the Chinese language is increas-ing at an accelerating tempo. Consider-ing that the Chinese language has thelargest number of speakers in the worldand the greatest time depth in its litera-ture, this interest is long overdue. \Viththe increase in interest we may look for-ward to deeper probings into the historyand the structure of the language, andinto the inHuence the language has hadon the cultural and intellectual devl"l-opment of the Chinese people. Thesestudies will surely lead to a better gen-eral understanding of the nature of hll-man language.