Hello everyone,
I'll try my best by going back to David's initial question.
I want to make the point what we call silent reading is only silent to others
but not to oneself. From the replies generated by the question I gather the
consensus is that silent reading refers to reading texts silently to oneself
without pronouncing audiably the sounds of the words. However, even if we
don't read aloud, I believe our mind still reads on the basis of assuming the
pronunciation. Sometimes the phonetic assumption could be wrong or different,
but it does not really hinder the reading process. I suspect this applies to
all languages.
What happens in reading Chinese is not particularly different or 'peculiar'.
The readers automatically pronounce the words according their own
pronunciations, be they southerners or northerns or Cantonese. The same way
Americans pronounce English words differently from the British or the
Australians. Or for this matter, Japanese, Korean, Vitnamese or anyone who's
learnt the script. If we are talking about reading 'texts', rather than
'words', it does not matter when occasionally the reader comes across a word
that he does not know how to pronounce it.
What make the Chinese speakers different from other language users is that
they cannot communicate orally to each other because their pronunciations
differ so much that renders each other incomprehensible.
In contemporary China studies, some scholars suggest that China should be
approached like the continental Europe because of its regional differences.
It is not accurate to say that Chinese is not a phonetic language. It is
phonetic to some extent (quite similar to that of English as David points
out), although its phonetic indication system differs from abphabetical
languages. A Chinese character is usually made of two or more parts (this is a
generalisation about a human phenomenon called language so there are certainly
exceptions), one of which is often an indicator of how it's pronounced and
another part(s) tells the reader its meaning. One does not have to know the
character's pronounced to know its meaning or vice versa. Classical Chinese
poems often do not rhyme properly with the pronunciation of modern standard
Chinese, for the characters used to be pronounced differently. This has left
for people from certain regions, such Canton in the southeast China, or
Shaanxi in China's northwest, to argue that their pronuciation rhyme the poems
better therefore they are the more 'authentic' Chinese.
All this started, in my understanding of Chinese history, with the first
emperor of China, the one depected in the film The Emperor and the Assasin. He
unified China around 220 BCE and he did three things that had huge impacts on
unifying China as a nation, namely unification of roads, unification of
measurement and unification of written language. From then on people from
different parts of the Chinese empire could communicate in written forms.
So, back to square one: when did the Chinese literati start silent reading?
Perhaps sometime in the first century? if there is such a thing as silent
reading. On the other hand, the Chinese have favoured rote learning perhaps
until now. This may mean that many things they read are perhaps read aloud to
help with memorizing at some stage.
with best regards,
Yiyan
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Dr Yiyan Wang
Chinese Studies A18
University of Sydney NSW 2006
AUSTRALIA
tel+ 61 2 9351 4512 fax+ 61 2 9351 2319
email: [log in to unmask]
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