Learning the Language 213called in English the ‘radicals’, form underlying components
of most of the 50,000 plus characters in the total Chinese
lexicon. Traditional Chinese dictionaries and encyclopaedias
were organised around a commonly agreed order of these
radicals, with individual characters under each radical
listed in ‘stroke order’ (the number of brush or pen strokes
required to write the character). Still, the radicals do not
function like an English alphabet, since they rarely offer
clues to pronunciation. And though they do provide a way
of organising dictionaries, looking up words is still hardly as
straightforward as A-B-C.
So, Why Do They Do It?
With all these complications, many a Western learner
has wondered why the Chinese bother. Why not give up
characters, which must be memorised individually by the
thousands, for an alphabetic system like ours, where only
26 shapes are enough to arrange and rearrange into all the
nearly one million words of the English lexicon? Why not
at least add alphabetic components to the language, as
have the Japanese and Koreans? Many Chinese have raised
this suggestion, and it was seriously debated at the time
of the 1949 revolution, prior to which an estimated under
10 per cent of China’s population was literate, in large part
due to the difficulties of written Chinese.
The answer, of course, is: tradition. It is not just that Chinese
people are attached to the character system because their
ancestors used it for thousands of years so there is sentimental
value (though in a Confucian culture that sort of sentiment
is significant). Even more importantly, the fact that Chinese
ancestors wrote in characters makes the writing of the ancestors
relatively accessible to their more literate descendents.
All spoken languages, like oral traditions, change
significantly over time. In alphabetic systems like English,
where the written form of words is tied (at least to some
degree) to their pronunciation, writing evolves nearly as
quickly as speaking. That is why students of English literature
often need special training even to read an author as relatively
recent as Shakespeare, let alone Chaucer or Beowulf.