Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
29 of 30 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 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.
|
|
|
34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very enlightening reading, January 7, 2003
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.
|
|
|
29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Really an enlightening attack on the character writing system, October 22, 2005
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: Fact and Fantasy, by the legendary pedagogue of Chinese John DeFrancis, is an imprecisely titled book. What DeFrancis seeks to show here is that the Chinese character writing system is inefficient, unnecessary, and detrimental to mass literacy.
DeFrancis begins with an introductory essay (which he later revealed to be a joke) about a World War II committee of Asian scholars attempting to design a character-based writing system for Western peoples once they were subjugated by the unstoppable Japanese. After this brief piece, the reader will already see that characters are unsuitable for most of the world's languages.
The first part, the only portion of the book which is dedicated to the Chinese language in the sense of speech, elucidates the division language -> regionalect -> dialect. In the second part, DeFrancis tries to reach a conclusion on what exactly characters are, as diverse terminology from "pictograph" to "ideograph" has been used. The third part, "Demythifying Chinese Characters" is the real meat of the book. While hard to believe now, in previous centuries European intellectuals were enamoured with characters and even called them a universal writing system. DeFrancis slays the universality myth, and the closely related emulatability myth, mainly based on the fact that literacy is so hard to acheive, as well as on the fact that no phonetic information can be had. The idea that Chinese is monosyllabic is shown as a myth, since the spoken language has and depends upon polysyllabic constructions to avoid redundacy and only in the thoroughly artificial written language could one see monosyllabism. The myth that characters are indispensable is revealed, since pinyin works well once the spoken language is used as a basis for writing, and only the use of an artificial literary language hampers alphabetization. Students of Chinese will already understand this, for reading a transcript of a conversation in pinyin presents little confusion. Finally, if anyone out there really still believes that characters could be successul, DeFrancis shows how terrible their impact has been on mass literacy in China compared to Japan. An interesting aside in this chapter is that even Japanese literacy isn't what it's cracked up to be. The fourth and final part discusses historical steps for reform of the spoken and written languages.
Some knowledge of Chinese, ideally Mandarin (Putonghua) is necessary to fully enjoy this book, although DeFrancis tries hard to make it accessible to a general audience. DeFrancis was one of the great Western scholars of Chinese, and from a three-year sojourn in China in his youth he had a great love of the Chinese people and their culture. If he argues against the use of characters, his opinions are worth hearing out, and students and scholars of Chinese may be quite interested by this work.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Daniel Kane
by S. Robert Ramsey
See all 36 books citing this book
