Authors: Tim Clissold
Mr. China (21 page)
About a hundred years ago, there was a move to abolish characters. There was a brief reform movement and the government was trying to modernize the country. The writing system was seen as
archaic, something that was holding China back, so they proposed the idea of replacing characters with a phonetic representation. The characters for China,
would be replaced by a spelling of its sound: ‘chung kuo’. Beijing, or
, would become ‘pei ching’; the underlying characters would be done away with.
A professor at Beijing University wrote a short, nonsensical but intelligible story in response. It told of a poet, called Gentleman Shi, who lived in a stone house and became addicted to eating
lions. He went in search of them and found ten in a market, but realized that they were all dead when he got home. The professor published his story without any comment.
Transcribed into the phonetics that the government had suggested,
became:
Shih shih shih shih shih
Shih shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih. Shih shih shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih, shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih, shih
shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih shih shih shih shih shih shih shih. Shih shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih shih, shih
shih shih shih shih shih shih shih, shih shih, shih shih shih shih shih shih shih
Shih shih shih shih!
Every character in the professor’s story is pronounced
shih.
The last four mean something like ‘Go on, check that it’s true!’ The
professor’s point was clear; like it or not, Chinese can’t be reduced to an alphabet. The characters are here to stay.
Modern Chinese characters are highly developed pictograms. Sometimes it is possible to make out the root, but for most it is not. ‘Horse’, for example, still looks
vaguely like the animal. With a bit of imagination, the mane, the back, the four legs and the tail in the hook on the right hand side are still visible.
But then tiger,
or snake,
give no obvious clue to their meaning. Rain can be seen in the picture of a cloud and cascading water droplets,
and umbrella – well, it’s an umbrella.
In other characters, vague hints can be given to the meaning and sometimes the sound, but never enough to be sure. For instance, three droplets at the left-hand side of a character imply
water, thus:
river,
lake,
