fshck@UMAC
28/01/2001 05:52 PM

on the issue of when silent reading began in China ... I have a few colleagues
onto the question

I think a nice flipside to the subvocalising issue is the drawing of Chinese
characters in the air during a conversation to disambiguate homophones. This is
very common in Japanese because Japanese is not a tone language and the lexicon
borrowed from Chinese is used do a lot of the heavy duty intellectual work (a
little like the Latinate lexicon as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon one in English);
hence Japanese is a language with a lot of homophones (and a lot of synonyms).
one has to remember though that characters have phonetic value (phonetic parts
you could say) in Chinese.
\
on the issue of literacy - literacy estimates are notoriously dodgy in this part
of the world (i.e. East Asia) because there are clearly defined degrees of
literacy...
Japanese provides probably the most tangible example of clearly stratified
degrees of literacy. Phonetic scripts derived from Chinese characters (the
Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries) are there to lead the child into literacy.
And to help out foreigners. And to sound out foreign words. And best of all to
render the Japanese grammatical paraphernalia in a form that could go with words
from a totally unrelated language: i.e. Chinese. A Japanese children?s
encyclopedia typically uses about five hundred characters. Next to each of them
the word is sounded out in the phonetic script, called furigana for this
purpose. The same thing happens in comic books where the Japanese Chicken
Littles illustrate their standards are falling argument by suggesting that
furigana lead adults out of full literacy: i.e. a proper knowledge of Chinese
characters.

     The Japanese, who are by any standard a remarkably literate society given
the difficulty of achieving competence in two native syllabaries as well as the
Chinese characters, professed a duty during their expansion through China in
the 1930?s to improve the literacy rate, in general to bring culture to the
benighted masses. The irony of the Japanese bringing literacy to the Chinese
was mainly missed by the locals who were mainly dodging the bullets and hoping
to wish in less interesting times.

     As far as I can work out literacy estimates in China now range from about
60 to 90 per cent. The more official the higher. At the turn of the last
century I've seen estimates under ten per cent for people who knew what they
were reading. Foreign devils at the time noted that the number of people who
could sound out the characters was much lower than the number of people who knew
what they were reading. Dyer Ball's 'Things Chinese' - 1890 something has a
nice entry on this...

From Kominos' point of view i think the Chinese character thing and its spatial
dimensions and possibilities and the way they work across the cultures that use
or adapt the system (Japanese and Korean have no genetic relation to the
Sino-Tibetan language family) are all extremely interesting. As I think are
particularly the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching. Chinese maps pre and post the
arrival of the Jesuits are very interesting. Look at the world maps and you
start giggling. Look at the maps of dykes and canals and you start feeling a
little more impressed. Go and even Mah Jong may be worth a look at along with
the maps...
just a few scattered thoughts on possible leads...

hope it's of use

Christopher Kelen,
English Department,
University of Macau,
Taipa, Macau S.A.R., CHINA



                                                                  
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Please respond to Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry
      and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

To: [log in to unmask]
cc: (bcc: fshck/UMAC)
Subject: Re: Silent reading




Oh boy oh boy

komninos

er, although I go along with some of what you say I would suggest it is not
as simple as you portray it. In the first place, only a very small number of
characters in Classical Chinese script are simply iconographic in the way
you describe. Essentially, the characters represent words, in a literary
language that was almost agrammatic, totally monosyllabic (unlike, I
understand, spoken Chinese) and deluged with homophones.
Korean might be interesting in this context, as I understand it has both a
Chinese based script and a phonetic script.
Interestingly, there are those who see the future development of English as
a written language as promising to be curiously similar to the course
Chinese took: English script after all, although alphabetic, is not all that
phonetic, preserving as it does, almost as part of its meanings, past
pronunciations. I think the idea is that that English will become
alphabetic-etymological rather than alphabetic-phonetic.
Sorry for the crude brevity of this, but the hour grows late at the end of a
long day here.

david


----- Original Message -----
From: komninos zervos <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2001 10:51 PM
Subject: Re: Silent reading


> i thought you are joking because chinese is not a phonetic but an
> iconographic language.ie the spoken language is different froooom the
> written language, unlike alphabetic language which allows it to be sounded
> without necessarily knowing what it means.
>
> i assume with iconographic languages the symbols have to be interpreted
> first before they can be verbalised into speech.
>
> ie. given a picture of a man, a road and a house, i have to visualise
> first, then express in spoken language my interpretation, a man took a
> journey and arrived at a house.
>
> so that would mean reading chinese silently is the only way you can read
> it, since the characters don't have spoken equivalents.
>
> illich and saunders, the alphabetization of civilisation, and ong's
orality
> come to mind as texts that have dealt with this topic.
> regards
> komninos
> komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502
> cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/
> komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 5552 8872
> lecturer in cyberStudies,
> school of arts,
> gold coast campus,
> griffith university,
> pmb 50, gold coast mail centre
> queensland, 9726
> australia.