Learning the Language 195THE ORIGINS OF CHINESE
Ah, the mysteries of the Orient!
For many Westerners through much of history, the alleged
inscrutability of China has been perhaps best symbolised
by the sing-song lilt of spoken Chinese, so unfamiliar to
speakers of non-tonal languages; and by those densely
complex squiggles we call ‘Chinese characters’ (the Chinese
themselves call them ሺ zi).
Every Chinese 101 student has at some point ‘hit the
wall’ with those squiggles and sing-song. We have stared at
pages of characters, perhaps at classical texts without even
punctuation, feeling them to be impossibly unreadable,
not so much a language as a mysterious code. We have
sat on the edge of conversations wondering whether the
topic was football, weather or the latest crisis in the Middle
East. Let’s face it: not many people describe something
incomprehensible by saying they ‘may as well have been
speaking French’.
Yes, the Chinese language is difficult, different, downright
alien from the perspective of English speakers. Chinese is
its own linguistic group, with no underlying connection to
English. Unlike English, it is also a language that (due to
historical and geographic separation as well as to local pride)
has borrowed remarkably few words from other languages.
Learners therefore have few cognates (familiar-sounding
words) to help along the way.