Ursula

Posted by Victor Mair

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Letter to the editor of Taipei Times (4/29/25) by Te Khai-su / Tè Khái-sū:

Abolish Chinese characters

A few months ago, under the overhang walkway (teng-a-kha, or Hokkien architecture) of a Tainan side street, I saw a child — perhaps 10 years old — hunched over one of the collapsible tables of her parents’ food stall, writing columns of “hanzi” (漢字, Chinese/Han characters), each in their dozens.

A familiar, if rather sad sight in Taiwan — although not nearly as spectacular as Hugo Tseng’s (曾泰元) evocative account in this newspaper (“Rejuvenating ‘Chinese character,’” April 20, page 8), where he recalled the legend of Cangjie’s (倉頡) creation of hanzi, describing how “millet grains rained from the sky and the ghosts and gods wept at night.”

Tseng waxed lyrical about hanzi, calling it a “profound cultural significance,” a “monumental writing system,” and “one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements” — as if such ebullience could be taken for granted without evidence. The schoolchild might have no option, but adults like me have seen alternatives in other societies.

After just a couple of years of schooling in alphabetic script, including systems such as Korean “hangul,” all literature in that language becomes accessible to students. More importantly, they can express themselves readily in writing, and have time left over to explore other pursuits, such as learning another language, or start learning hanzi for historical interest. Instead, Taiwanese schoolchildren are burdened from an early age with long school days and years of tedious homework, much of it due to the demands of hanzi.

I am far from the first to criticize hanzi for being hard to learn and holding people back. Early 20th-century critiques — the great Chinese writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) being a pioneer — paved the way for the (albeit incomplete) language reforms in China after the Communist Revolution, resulting in the creation of simplified characters and “Hanyu pinyin.” In contrast, the (then) anti-communist Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan entrenched the use of traditional hanzi.

Such conservatism reminds me of Choe Man-ri 崔萬里* (d. 1445), a Confucian academic at the 15th-century Korean royal court, who opposed King Sejong the Great’s (1397-1450) invention of hangul. Choe fought against hangul in favor of hanzi, dreading that the innovation would “be to our shame in serving the great and in admiring China.”

National Cheng Kung University Department of Taiwanese Literature professor Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung (蔣為文) was right when he wrote in 1996 that Taiwanese “cannot achieve independence unless we abolish Han characters.”

Happily, most Taiwanese languages already have Latin orthographies in use, and we can learn from the successes of Korea and Vietnam.

Te Khai-su

Helsinki, Finland

[VHM:  *See here for the Classical Chinese text and English translation of Ch'oe's 1444 protest against Hangul, which nonetheless was promulgated in 1446.]

Selected readings

• "The perils of literacy" (1/14/17) — Su Shi (Dongpo [1037-1101]
• "Hu Shih and Chinese Language Reform" (2/4/17) — also available here
• "English or Mandarin as the World Language?" (5/2/14)
• "Which is worse?" (1/21/16)
• Geoff Pullum, "There Was No Committee", Lingua Franca (4/30/14)
• _________, "The Awful Chinese Writing System" Lingua Franca (1/20/16),

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