偶看新闻吴桂阳律师联系方式:Chinese: What is the Chinese language?
来源：百度文库 编辑：偶看新闻 时间：2024/05/10 07:00:20
Chinese
What is the Chinese language?
Dec 13th 2011, 21:34 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
In brief, Chinese traditionalists believe
1) Chinese is one language with dialects.
2) Chinese is best written in the character-based hanzi system.
3) All Chinese read and share the same writing system, despite speaking in different ways.
Western linguists tend to respond
1) Chinese is not a language but a family; the "dialects" are not dialects but languages.
2) Hanzi-based writing is unnecessarily difficult; the characters do not represent "ideas" but "morphemes" (small and combinable units of meaning, like the morphemes of any language). Pinyin (the standard Roman system) could just as easily be used for Chinese. Puns, wordplay and etymology might be sacrificed, but ease of use would be enhanced.
3) Modern hanzi writing is basically Mandarin with the old characters in a form modified by the People's Republic. Everyone else (Cantonese speakers, say) must either write Mandarin or significantly alter the system to write their own "Chinese".
There are so many arguments packed into these two ideas that it's hard to start, much less finish, in a blog post. Since I'm (really) on holiday, I'll leave it to commenters to enlighten each other, and me on my return.