Michael Christensen wrote:Reducing languages to mere "efficiency"* would rob them of their subletly and beauty, and most likely would render nuanced expression and understanding impossible.
It's all relative. Chinese grammar is far simpler and more efficient than English, but you try telling the Chinese that their 3,000 years of literature is barren of nuanced expression and understanding. Try reading
三字經, a 13th century classical text which is simple enough to be used to teach school children history and moral principles, but which required considerable literary skill to compose in order to achieve the aim of the work whilst keeping within the strict circumference of the demanding 'three character phrase' literary style. It's a masterpiece of nuanced expression and understanding.
Besides, the morphology, semantics, phonology as well as the writing system of a language reflect the mentality, the history, the culture and the way of life of the people that brought forth the language (and – in some cases – are still using the language). To pare down the language artificially would be the same as destroying the very cultural roots of the people using the language.
People said all this when the Chinese decided to switch from traditional to simplified characters. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be wrong. I say unsurprisingly because such changes had already happened several times in the history of the Chinese language, as well as other languages. In the history of language, this happens frequently, and people adjust. Look at English, a scruffy mongrel of a linguistic accident cobbled together with spare parts like a medieval creole. Fast forward a few centuries (after a couple of changes of alphabet along the way), and it was stripped of gendered nouns, underwent a radical shift in vowel pronunciation which had a significant impact on what became standard spelling, and was later ruthlessly pruned and streamlined by the ruling elite.
And hear, hear, I say. I don't see anyone clamouring to go back to
this, and despite the radical shifts through which English staggered on several occasions (typically enforced and at very rapid pace), any historian would be hard pressed to argue that English society suffered signifcant cultural loss in the process. No one seems to miss
thorn.
Thus, to understand Taiwanese (or Chinese) people, it helps a great deal to take the trouble of learning about the Chinese language and writing system (although I personally find it fascinating rather than troubling)...
Er, quite. You need hardly tell me.

However, the more you learn about the Chinese language the more you learn; 1) that the vast majority of its speakers know next to nothing about its history or the history of its writing system, 2) that the vast majority of its speakers are taught completely inaccurate folklore explanations of its development, 3) that the language has repeatedly undergone enforced radical shifts at various stages of its history at the hands of the ruling elite, with the specific aim of simplifying it, and that 4) these shifts have never caused the socio-cultural and historical crisis that people allege will take place if such language shifts take place. The history of the Chinese language is not the history of the Chinese people, though the writing system has shaped the Sintic psyche, and the writing system in the PRC today is less than 100 years old, hardly embedded deeply in the misty past of Chinese history.
...just as to understand the New Testament or Greek philosophy, it helps to learn about the Greek language, as well the Hebrew and Aramaic (since the NT language is influenced by these, especially in the gospels). Even if one doesn't attain professional mastery of the language, even a partial understanding of a language can open many "doors" – in other words: new perspectives (at least in my experience so far).
I absolutely agree with this. Even my few remaining scraps of Greek and Latin are of significant use to my Biblical studies, not least because they provide access to extremely useful professional tools and commentaries (not to mention the occasional classical text), which would otherwise be literally a closed book.
Therefore, I'm quite glad you don't have it your way: anyway, if anybody did suceed in implementing a scheme to reduce the grammar, the vocabulary and/or the writing system of either English, Greek or Chinese to a seemingly "simpler" system, I would stubbornly refuse to use it and stick to the traditional system – because it had largely grown organically within the society that used the language, rather than having beed administered artificially from without for so-called "practical" reasons.
Well that's just what happens to languages as they evolve. Modern developments in English which are doing exactly this, have been observed and followed by philologists for the last few decades. I wonder what the early scribes thought when minuscules were being introduced; 'This will never take off!', 'These newfangled characters are so ugly no one will ever use them, 'We'll lose our access to thousands of historic manuscripts, which no one will ever be able to read anymore!', 'I refuse to submit to the authoritarian military-industrial complex!'.
Fortunately for most of us, these developments tend to take more than a lifetime and we tend not to even notice them as they happen. I've known nonagenerians who were born in the 19th century and who lived until the late 20th century, who had experienced a massive shift in English language use over that time, but because it was relatively gradual and took place over such a long time, there wasn't any significant 'shock of the new'. Anyone who wants a convenient window into how a more simplified English is currently being gradually imprinted on the current generation only has to use Microsoft Word. Replacement of diphthongs with single vowel sounds, replacement of double consonants with single consonants, and other documented changes, are readily observable.
*Extra note: I must admit however, that the definition of "efficiency" can vary quite a bit from person to person: I, for instance, find the Chinese writing system extremely "efficient", since there is no other language I know of that is capable of such a density of expression – take, for example, the multitude of four character 成語's – which other language has so many four word idioms?
The writing system is extremely efficient in that sense, certainly. However, the sheer number of characters is massively redundant and an incredible learning burden. One of the government's aims in introducing first a phonetic system and then simplifying the characters, was to increase literacy; it simply took so long and such a rigorous pedagogy to learn the written language that millions of people literally never had the time or opportunity to do so. Westerners underestimate dramatically the length of time necessary to learn the 4,000 characters required for functional literacy. Chinese students are still learning characters in junior high school.
Density of expression is fine. But wait until you discover how many homophones there are. There are at least 219 with the sound 'xi', 225 with the sound 'yu', and an astonishing 286 with the sound 'yi'. This, coupled with the complete dislocation of the written from the spoken language, results in native Chinese speakers having to resort to clumsy work arounds in order to make themselves understood. Because the vast number of homophones results in incredible ambiguity in the spoken language, native speakers are sometimes compelled to 'draw' characters on their palm when speaking in order to clarify which character they are using when pronouncing certain sounds, and commonly have to add clarifying explanations to their spoken conversation such as 'I mean 天 as in 夏天', or 'I mean 所 as in 所以'. Add to that the number of times that native Chinese speakers simply forget how to read or write characters in their own language, and you'll understand that the density of expression is a poor compensation prize for the many difficulties with which the writing system is encumbered.
"Replacing" the characters with a solely phonetic system would not do, since so many different characters have identical pronunciations – it would make it impossible to trace the origin of as well as the semantic ideas behind the words that are represented in the visual forms of the writing system (besides the fact that it would create many ambiguities and difficulties in understanding the written language – especially for foreigners who will have even more difficulty discerning the correct meanings of the words from the context, because there would be a lot more possiblities to choose from).
This is a common myth. The same was said of Japanese, and it turned out to be untrue in that case as well. In fact so many Japanese themselves now use a Romanized phonetic alphabet or the hiragana/katakana phonetic alphabets instead of the traditional kanji characters (all children are taught Romanization in school, so everyone already knows it from an early age), that it's clear that the writing is on the wall for kanji. In the case of Chinese, young children in Taiwan use the 注音符號 phonetic system invented in 1910 before they are taught the characters. Unsurprisingly, they find no difficulty reading and writing in this phonetic system. Many foreigners in Taiwan and China (as in Japan), use either 注音符號 or Hanyu Pinyin (a Romanization system for Chinese), without problems. Native Chinese speakers learn completely non-factual stories about the historical relationship of the characters to their meaning (the true history of which has been lost in the case of thousands of characters anyway; historical Chinese dictionaries were riddled with mistaken etymologies and false meaning attributions to characters in their own language), so it's clear that knowing or not knowing the 'true' origin and original semantic ideas behind the words is completely unnecessary. It's just a matter of the mnemonic that works for you.
The fact is that the origin and original semantic ideas behind the characters are largely unimportant. They are not represented in the visual form of the characters in the way that many Westerners imagine; much of what is written and read about semantic and symbolic representation in Chinese characters is both way out of date and completely inaccurate. In reality the vast majority of Chinese characters have shapes which are completely arbitrary, and which have no intrinsic relation whatever to their semantic or phonetic meaning; many of them can be pronounced in at least three or four different ways, for a start, with a completely different semantic meaning each time. This arbitrary assignation of meaning to symbol is one of the most unfortunate facts about the Chinese writing system, and one of the reasons why it's so difficult to learn. I would recommend reading this and this.
People who speak Chinese on a high level are constantly aware of the written forms while in conversation – several word plays and puns used in conversation are based on the fact that there are several different characters that have an identical or similar pronunciation; besides, this awareness enables them to avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings by providing enough descriptive context (or body language) to ensure that the listeners will not mistake the word they want to say for a different word that has an identical sound. Thus one can see that the Chinese writing system is extremely important to the language and the speakers of the language and therefore should not be replaced.
Firstly, there are few people who really speak Chinese 'on a high level' like this; normal people don't speak 'literary Chinese', and hardly anyone can remember the classical literary Chinese and its characters, through which they typically slept (or tried to sleep), in junior high school, not least because almost no one bothers to use it anymore. Secondly, as I've already explained, the ambiguities and misunderstandings in verbal communication result from the weaknesses of the language, and people typically have to resort to clumsy workarounds in order to compensate. It's not simply a matter of using 'enough descriptive content or body language'.
The fact is that the Chinese writing system has been changed dramatically and radically many times over its lengthy history, and will happily continue to do so without any of the dreadful disasters which some people fear will accompany such changes. The characters could be replaced with a phonetic system (of either English characters or Chinese characters), without any major losses and with considerable advantages to be gained. As much as I enjoy the characters myself, I look forward to that inevitable moment in time. Without such a change, Chinese certainly cannot become a global language, which is a major concern of some in the Chinese government.
But I fear we have strayed considerably offtopic. Perhaps there's a place for this discussion elsewhere on the forum.