Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy [Paperback]

John DeFrancis (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press (October 1, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0824810686
• ISBN-13: 978-0824810689
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #369,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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43 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very enlightening reading, January 7, 2003

By 

Mr. Vesa Peltomaki (Finland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Paperback)

John DeFrancis' book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is the best book I have read on the Chinese language. It explains in great detail what the Chinese language and its ancient writing system is all about. It is also great fun to read.

Based on his profound understanding of the language and its teaching methods, Mr. DeFrancis, in this book, contradicts all misconceptions, myths and fantasies that people may have about the subject. And there are lots of them.

He begins the book by telling a long-winded joke about a Language Committee that was founded by the Japanese during World War II. Its task was to prepare for changing the writing systems of all major world languages into using the Chinese language writing method in case the Japanese emerge victorious and become the rulers of the world. This way, by comparing the two writing systems Mr. DeFrancis makes it abundantly clear that most ideas people have about the Chinese language and its writing system lay on a very shaky foundation. I'll try to mention some points here although it has been a while since I read the book.

For a Western person, it is very difficult to say anything even remotely meaningful about the Chinese language before he has spent a good number of years studying it. We are told, for example, that there is such a thing as the Chinese language, and that it is universally spoken and understood, written and read by all Chinese-speaking people. This is one of the misconceptions Mr. DeFrancis attacks: most of the so-called dialects of the Chinese language are in fact completely different languages with mutual differences as great as those between English and German, or French and Spanish.

Mandarin Chinese has four tones, whereas Cantonese and Shanghaihua have six and nine, respectively. All of these languages use different words for the needs of the basic daily life and, when they do use the same word for a specific purpose, it is pronounced differently. In Pinyin, it is difficult to see whether we are talking about the same word or not, but still, in the Chinese character writing, the same character will be used. This makes it look, for a Western person, like Chinese was a single language that is used universally by all Chinese-speaking people.

Why is it, then, that Mandarin Chinese writing is understood by all Chinese-speaking people all over the world? It isn't, quite simply. Mr. DeFrancis goes on to show how much more difficult it is for a school child in China to learn to read and write as well as most school children using Indo-European languages. He illustrates his point by going through Chinese literacy statistics and expresses his doubts on whether these statistics are true or false.

Another explanation for the "easiness of universal understanding of the Chinese character writing" is the use of ideographs. Allegedly, each character describes its object so vividly that it is possible to understand what a Chinese character means - just by looking at it. Mr. DeFrancis takes it upon himself to do this point quite thoroughly.

The "one character - one word" -fallacy is also given a good going-over by Mr. DeFrancis. He shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that the Chinese language is in fact constituted of syllables, and that these syllables are written using characters. There are dozens of quite different characters that are pronounced identically. The characters representing each syllable of a word may be selected quite arbitrarily.

This is one of the works on the subject of the Chinese language that will really take you beyond myths and fantasies into the real world of facts. Read it and see for yourself.

31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything You Thought You Knew About Chinese -- and Don't, August 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Paperback)

This is not only the best book I know about Chinese, it is one of the best books I know about language. DeFrancis, a University of Hawaii professor who is a distinguished author of texts for English speaking learners of Chinese, attacks a whole web of misconceptions about the Chinese writing system, in particular, the notion that it works by representing concepts or ideas, rather than sounds and words.

The point of attack is a wonderfully whimsical chapter framaed as the notes of a [fictitious] international committee established by the Japanese government during WWII to create a way to write English in kanji -- adapted Chinese characters -- for occupation and reculturation of America. The committee consists of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese scholars. In the course of presenting the problems facing the group (against the historical background of the problems in adapting Chinese characters to Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese) it becomes obvious how misleading and wrongheaded is the idea that Chinese writing somehow embodies thoughts rather sounds in spoken languages.

In the subsequent chapter, DeFrancis examines in detail the components of the concept-writing idea -- what he calls "myths" about Chinese characters. In the course of these expositions, a reader not only learns a great deal about Chinese languages (there are many) and their written representation, but also about the basic process by which _any_ language is written. (DeFrancis later developed these ideas into another book, "Visible Speech," also recommended.

"The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" remains controversial: some of the myths DeFrancis attacks are held by Chinese about their own language, and DeFrancis is emphatically a non-fan of the Chinese writing system. But DeFrancis argues his case with elegance, deep knowledge, skill at presenting examples which make his points with intuitive directness, and passion. The best part is a reader needs no prior knowledge of Chinese or linguistics at all to appreciate it, only an interest in how people communicate. I recommend it highly to anyone who has this interest in any form.

35 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Selective Facts, Strange Fantasy, August 30, 2009

By 

Christopher Tricarick "lancelot andrewes" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Paperback)

I have just read this book straight through three times in a row in an effort to make sure that I was not missing or misunderstanding anything. Each time I came away with a greater horror at the inaccurate picture which it creates. Please note that the statements in Mr. DeFrancis book, which is a sustained argument of close to three hundred pages, cannot be thoroughly refuted in a review of the length permitted by this website; what follows is a mere summary of my principal objections to this book.

1. The arguments are circular. We get a pretty strange example of this almost at the outset. Linguists, we are told, prefer to use the word 'language' exclusively to mean the spoken, not the written, word. This is to avoid confusion. Mr. DeFrancis, who has a habit of falling back on every-day common sense only after a couple of pages of mind-numbing obfuscation, ultimately declares that he himself will not follow the advice of these anonymous 'linguists' in his own book: indeed his very title indicates a refusal to follow that advice. Instead, he promises to keep the distinction between writing and speech clear in his own writing, and to use (in what he makes sound like a brilliant solution to a vexing problem, whereas in fact the problem would not have vexed anyone had he himself not brought it up) to use the expressions "spoken language" and "written language". Why then bring up the problem at all? He and his fellow linguists are, it seems, engaged in a "persistent but largely unsuccessful battle against the confusion resulting from the popular use of the term" to mean both writing and speech. He gives two examples of this 'confusion'. First, the statement of a textbook writer that "two thousand [chinese characters] are sufficient for the speech of a well-educated man." DeFrancis comments: "This comment evokes a picture of our 'well-educated man' parading about like a comic strip figure with cahracter-filled balloons coming out of his mouth." Now, is it unclear to anyone that the speech of the well-educated man, according to the textbook writer, would, if written down, require about two thousand characters? Where is the confusion? Every day we see some writing which we cannot decipher and ask: "What does this say?" I suppose DeFrancis would chortle at that and then point out sententiously that it doesn't "say" anything as it is writing, and writing doesn't speak. He goes on to say:

"More typically misleading is the frequent dinner-table situation in which Chinese guests, when asked about their language, blandly assume that it is an inquiry about Chinese writing (which may indeed have been the case) or simply do not recognise the distinction and thus regale their listeners by dragging out the shopworn example of how the character for 'woman' and the character for 'child' are charmingly combined to form the character for 'good'. Incongruities and muddleheadedness of the kind just noted irritate scholars...."

Let us look closely at this passage; it exhibits three of the most common weapons in the DeFrancis arsenal. First, where is the muddleheadedness? We were told that using the word language to mean only speech, excluding writing, was necessary to avoid confusion, and that this anecdote would be an example of the confusion that might result if we did not make that distinction. On the contrary, however, it is only when we have such a distinction in mind--when we already expect "language" to mean only "speech"--that there is anything wrong with the response of the Chinese dinner guest above. Furthermore, the anecdote is highly suspicious. The imaginary Chinese dinner guest appears to have been asked something quite vague: "Tell us about your language." The scholar who asks so general a question as that has no right to be irritated when the answer does not happen to correspond to the aspect of the Chinese language he had hoped to hear about. Why, then, does this imaginary guest get painted as a muddle-head?

2. DeFrancis makes a highly reductionist argument. In what starts out as a highly accurate, scientific account of the nature of the Chinese writing system, he eventually ends up creating the false impression that Chinese characters are almost all phonetic. This may in itself be a useful counter-weight to the tendency, which indeed existed and exists, to treat Chinese as if it were exclusively ideographic, and which DeFrancis is right to oppose, but he practices an astonishing sleight-of-hand when he leaps from the fact that Chinese characters are largely phonetic to the suggestion that therefore only the phonetic principle deserves attention. He belittles the fact that even the most phonetic characters have a semantic component as well; he utterly neglects the fact that many phonetic elements are not exclusively phonetic at all but have a semantic aspect as well; and, worst of all, he dramatically underestimates the importance of the characters which are not phonetic at all but either pictographic or ideographic. (the sort of "woman+child=good" compounds whose introduction into dinner-table conversation he so deplores.) The way he does this is one of breath-taking cunning. Elsewhere, he rightly condemns the practice of taking the whole contents of large dictionaries as representative of the language, and highlights the importance of looking at characters or words which actually come up in typical prose instead. But here, he simply points out that in the enormous KangXi dictionary, 93% of the characters are of the phonetic-semantic compound variety. This, again, besides ignoring the fact that all of those characters have a semantic component, and that in many of them the phonetic component also has semantic value, also overlooks the fact that in normal Chinese prose characters of the purely ideographic sort will come up far more than 7% of the time.

3. There are also some strange bits of dishonesty here. He makes much of the rebus principle: the character "lai" for "come" is written with an old pictograph for wheat, as the word for wheat was pronounced the same way. He repeates this simple fact a number of times throughout the book, thus working exactly as he accuses his opponents of doing: exaggerating the importance of a small number of characters and ignoring the other types. But the real dishonesty comes when he blithely refers to a large number of simple pictographs as "independent phonetics". By this, he means something like the character "ma" for horse. In the words for mother, and ant, and question, and scold, the "horse" pictograph is indeed phonetic: it tells you how the character is pronounced. But in the word for horse itself, the character is neither phonetic nor following the rebus principle. It means horse, and derives from a picture of a horse. Now, you could argue that once we are familiar with the phonetic nature of the characters which include this element, we can read that information back to the original character itself, but to simply include a great mass of non-phonetic characters among the phonetic ones, in an author who makes so much of strict accuracy and who is so hostile and, I must say, rude to everyone who does not share his own rather sterile concern for semantics, is unforgivable.

4. I want to look more closely at the way he constructs his 'phonetic' argument. Typically, he debunks a somewhat false impression created by the loose talk of people who are not approaching Chinese characters in the spirit of a math teacher: that someone who knows Chinese well can guess the meaning of a character even if he's never seen it before. He refers to a guessing game or a game of twenty questions. But he ignores three things. First, the semantic elements, the radicals, are, if not so helpful as others might have suggested, more helpful than DeFrancis leads us to suppose. Imagine seeing the sentence "There was an X in the garden", X being a word I have never seen before. In English, or in Chinese written with pinyin, there is very little in the context to tell me what X is. In Chinese characters, on the other hand, there might be a great deal. Is there a grass radical? X is almost certainly some kind of plant. An insect radical or a mammal radical? Almost certainly an insect or reptile, or a mammal. I can attest from my own reading of Chinese books that this sort of thing is enormously helpful with some regularity. Secondly, he writes as if the only value of the characters in their semantic aspect is to help someone who has never seen a character before guess its meaning; he ignores the great usefulness of the semantic aspect in remembering the meaning of a character which we may have seen before but not deeply learned. Finally, and amazingly in a book that includes a whole chapter debunking the so-called "monosyllabic myth", he here behaves as if Chinese were indeed monosyllabic: apparently it suits him. Many Chinese words are made up of two characters. Even if I know both characters, I don't necessarily know the two-character word they compose. But perhaps I can guess. Now there are dozens of characters pronounced "yi" and dozens pronounced "shi" and so on. If I simply see pinyin it is highly unlikely that I will know which "yi" is meant, but if I see the character, and I know it is the "yi" that means medicine (not the one that means justice, or interest, or already, or any of the others) I have a good chance of guessing the meaning of the word. If I see pinyin I have no chance.

5. After all of this preparatory obfuscation, he descends into the lowest point of the book. He conducts two
"little tests" to find out whether Chinese readers use the ideographic elements in reading. First, he writes a simple sentence that means "I have one older brother and two younger brothers.": "Wo you yi ge ge ge, liang ge di di." Five of... Read more ›