what chinese characters can't do

8/9/2019 What Chinese Characters Can't Do

1/6

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/moser/chinese_characters.html

Some Things Chinese Characters Cant Do-Be-Do-Be-Do

David Moser

Beijing Foreign Studies University

Heres an odd question, but bear with me: How would one scat sing in Chinese? We all

know how Ella Fitzgerald does it in English. Doo-dee-op be-yoo-bee-yiddy-yoo-bee, yabba bip-

byoo ba-di-bip-dee-YOOO-bee-op!1 These are nonsense syllables made up of different vowels

and consonants pieced together in rhythmic patterns. Most often they do not correspond to any

English morphemes, and in fact, recognizable words are avoided, to retain the flow of pure

musical sound free of semantic associations. My question is: What would scat singing performed

by the Chinese Ella Fitzgerald sound like?

Jazz is, of course, an American art form, so there is no obvious cultural equivalent. Yet since

scat singing involves using the human voice to imitate the sound of musical instruments, it might

be instructive to compare Ellas highly developed art to the rhythmic nonsense that Chinese verbal

arts performers sing to imitate musical accompaniment patterns. Im referring to the performers

who specialize in quyi , the storytelling forms which include Shandong kuaishu ,

kuaibanr, dagu,xiangsheng, and so forth. Often in the course of their narratives,

a character will provide a little musical patter to simulate Peking Opera accompaniment motifs,

including the ubiquitous clanging of the luo, the distinctive little mini-gong that is part of the

instrumental array of the wenwuchang , the group of musicians playing on the stage. The

result is phrases like: deng genr li genr long genr long2andA qiang, a

dou, dou a, qi dou qi dou qiang , , . .3 Some of these phrases are

relatively fixed and invariant, while others are more flexibly combined in a semi-improvisational

way that bears at least some resemblance to scat singing.

A closer look at these nonsense phrases reveals a deep difference in the way the two

languages are perceived and processed. What Ella Fitzgerald is doing is to mix and match English

phonemes to create novel syllabic structures, the result being legal but non-existent syllables

like dwee, wap, yab, byoo, etc. In contrast, what the Chinese performers seem to be

doing is juxtaposing entiresyllables of the language, choosing from the 1280 or so set of distinct

syllables in Mandarin (with tonal information), and stringing them into onomatopoeic patterns.

There is no manipulation of the segments, no mixing and matching of phonemes.

Isnt it an amazing coincidence that these singers quite naturally restrict themselves (if that

is the word) to exactly the linguistic level that their writing system represents? After all, one can

easily imagine manipulation of Chinese at the phoneme level. Using a kind of quasi-fanqie

assembly method to notate it, you could arrive at creations like these (which I render here in

pinyin):

gas in gan + ingas in ding =ging

1 From Ellas classic recording ofHow High the Moon, from the collection Something to Live For, Verve Records314-547-800-2, 1990.2 From thexiangshengpiece Chuan diao, , inZhongguo chuantong xiangsheng daquan(Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe , p. 455).3 From thexiangshengpiece Mai baozi, also fromZhongguo chuantong xiangsheng daquan, p. 470.

1
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/moser/chinese_characters.htmlhttp://www.pinyin.info/readings/moser/chinese_characters.html


2/6

shu as in shuang + ingas in ding =shuing

p as in ping + uan as in guan =puan

das in dong + ua as in gua = dua

ku as in kuan + en as in men = kuen

And so on. A Chinese Ella might sing something like Ging-a-ging puan dua-bo KUEN-de

shuing shuing! (It dont mean a thing if it aint got that shuing?) Those accustomed topinyin

will find these creations a little off-putting at first, but they are all perfectly readable creations

based on the sound-to-orthography rules ofpinyin. Note that if these syllables are illegal in any

sense, they are only so because the Chinese characters cannot accommodate them, not because the

sounds of Chinese (as represented bypinyin, Wade-Giles, IPA or whatever) cannot be recombined

in these ways.

So why are the Chinese performers so accommodating to this idiosyncrasy of the Chinese

writing system? Do speakers of the language naturally carve up their speech into neat

morphosyllabic chunks, as reflected by the character set? Or do they gravitate toward this level

because the writing system has coerced them into doing so?4 Which came first, the kung-pao

chicken or the egg drop soup?

The problem is that Chinese speakers dontalways adhere to the principle their writing system

is based on, preferring to play it by ear very often, and in such cases the writing system does not

do a very good job of representing their speech. If the syllabic nature of the Chinese writing

system precluded only Ella Fitzgerald-style scat singing, it would not be a very interesting

restriction. However, this quality of the Chinese characters also effectively precludes a host of

other orthographic conveniences and techniques that alphabetic systems afford. In what follows, I

mention just a few.

English has numerous conventions for representing casual oral speech: Are you kiddin

me? Whaddya wanna do tonight, Marty? Im gettin outta here! Gimme that. And so on.

Such spelling conventions have been employed in the literature of most alphabetic traditions for

hundreds of years, and are often an invaluable link to the vernaculars of the past. English-

language writers from Mark Twain to James Joyce have used the flexibility of the alphabet to

vividly re-created various speech worlds in their works. It is, in fact, hard to imagine how much

of the literature of the West could have been produced without recourse to such devices.

Chinese characters, by contrast, cannot reproduce the equivalent elisions and blends of

colloquial Chinese, except in rare cases, and only at the level of the syllable. Chinese readers who

encounter written phrases like gemenr(pal, buddy) or baobeir(baby, sweetie,

etc.) will drop the the /n/ sound from men in the first compound, and perform a vowel shift on

the characterbei from the second, but this is effectively due to the fact that the er suffix

codes for a different syllable in each case. I have also occasionally seen one character substituted

for another in writing to represent the way sounds are truncated and altered in everyday language

(for example, a pop star on stage saying a perfunctory thanks to the audience after a performance

written as xixi, instead of xiexie). Such devices are not productive, however, and

are not often used, for the obvious reason that the substitution of a different character discards the

4 For valuable opinions on this matter, see William Hannas two books,Asias Orthographic Dilemma, Honolulu:University of Hawaii Press (1997), and The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (2003).

2


3/6

original semantic information and substitutes different semantics.5 The result is that China

effectively has no tradition of realistically notating vernacular speech. Wenyanwen ,

classical Chinese, exerted a virtual stranglehold on written literature up until the early twentieth

century, and even then, most writers did not attempt to accurately represent common speech,

despite the appearance of an occasional Lao She or Ba Jin. But even if such writers had so

desired, working within the Chinese system of writing, they could never have notated the sounds

of the language around them with the same kind of vivid verisimilitude of the following examples

in English:

Mark Twain,Huckleberry Finn:

Yo ole father doan know yit what hes a-gwyne to do. Sometimes he spec hell go way, en den

agin he spec hell stay. De bes way is to res easy en let de ole man take his own way. Deys two

angels hoverin roun bout him. One uv em is white en shiny, en tother one is black. De white

one gits him to go right a little while, den de black one sail in en bust it all up. A body cant tell yit

which one gwyne to fetch him at de las. But you is all right. You gwyne to have considable

trouble in yo life, en considable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne

to git sick; but every time yous gwyne to git well agin. Deys two gals flyin bout you in yo life.

One uv ems light en tother one is dark. One is rich en tother is po. Yous gwyne to marry de

po one fust en de rich one by en by. You wants to keep way fum de water as much as you kin, en

dont run no resk, kase its down in de bills dat yous gwyne to git hung.

George Bernard Shaw,Pygmalion:

The Mother: How do you know that my sons name is Freddy, pray?

The Flower Girl: Ow, eez y-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan yd-ooty bawmz a mather should,

eed now bettern to spawl a pore gels flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me fthem?

[Oh, hes your son, is he? Well, if youd done your duty by him as a mother should, hed know

better than to spoil a poor girls flowers and then run away without paying. Will you pay me for

them?]

Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth:

Ant he beautiful, John? Dont he look precious in his sleep?

Very precious, said John. Very much so. He generally is asleep, ant he?

Lor, John! Good gracious no!

Oh, said John, pondering. I thought his eyes was generally shut. Halloa!

Goodness, John, how you startle one!

It ant right for him to turn em up in that way! said the astonished Carrier, is it? See how hes

winking with both of em at once! And look at his mouth! Why hes gasping like a gold and

silver fish!

Walt Kelly,Pogo:

Weevil: You isnt from China. You is mere a common ant bug.

5 In English one can also play the game of simply substituting homophonic syllables to simulate actual speech. Iremember a website that used to parody Bill Clintons Arkansas accent, providing translations of his phrases for

the uninitiated. For example, child care center was spoken in Clintonese as chalk air center. This isisomorphic to the Chinese technique, and as humorous as it is, its clear that it wont get one very far, for the samereason: the interfering semantic sense of the substitution requires heavy contexting.

3


4/6

Pogo: Why, Mr. Weevil. I sees our Oriental friend clumb outen this hole afore my very own

soft brown eyes.

Ant: Sho nuff! I will talk some more China: Chicken Chow Dog. Egg Foo Young. Okay

boss, plenty of starch.

Pogo: Man! What more proof is you need?

Weevil: Who cant talk that kind Chinese? Egg Foo Young, Egg Foo Old, Egg Foo in the pot,

nine days old? This hole you is say come up from China is only a inch deep.

Pogo: AY-mazin! Dint have no idea China was so close.

This sort of thing is quite impossible to achieve with Chinese characters. Due to the nature of

the Chinese writing system, China has no Mark Twains, no Dickenses, no Faulkners, no James

Joyces; that is, no literature with phonetically realistic re-creations of vernacular speech. Chinese

characters effectively preclude such writing, though authors have made masterful attempts

working within the Chinese system. As hypothetical as it might be, and at the risk of mixing

apples and Mandarin oranges, it is interesting to imagine what kinds of literature Lao She or the

contemporary writer Wang Shuo might have produced had they been able to work within an

alphabetic system. How could the actual sounds of spoken Chinese be written ifpinyin were the

medium rather than the characters?

Those familiar with the colloquialputonghua environment know that Chinese people, like the

speakers of all languages, do not utter words and phrases according to textbook standards. Just to

pick a very few examples, common phrases like bu zhidao , [I] dont know, duoshao

qian, How much money? orzenmehuishi??, Whats this all about? could be

represented inpinyin as follows to represent the way they are usually spoken:

. Bu zhidao. > Bur dao.

? Duoshaoqian? > Duoao qian?

? Zenmehuishi? > Zem hui shi?

Note that, just as in English, one does not need to find linguistically accurate phonetic renditions

of these forms, merely ones that intuitively map onto the sounds of the original. My versions

above are merely suggestions, and ifpinyin were used to write Chinese, native speakers would

arrive at reasonable conventional renditions that would trigger the target sounds. Orthographic

representation at the phoneme level would open up vast worlds of sound in written Chinese.

Putonghua with various dialect accents could be represented with enough accuracy to evoke the

actual phonetic flavor of the real thing. For example, the speech of southern speakers, who do not

usually pronounce the retroflex initials of northern Mandarin, could be represented as:

. Bu zhidao. > Bu zidao.

? Duoshaoqian? > Duosao qian?

? Zenmehuishi? > Zem hui si?

And so on. Currently Chinese writers, if they wish to evoke the sounds of regional dialects in

their writing, can only do so by the inclusion of giveaway lexical items, such as the substitution of

an, a dialect form, forwo, me. Given these lexical cues, the reader then mentally shifts

4


5/6

the voice of the passage into the intended dialect, just as Americans, when reading I say, old

chap, what say we go get a spot of sherry? can be expected to begin hearing the sounds of British

English in their heads.

Usingpinyin, foreign accents could also be represented, just as they are in English:

Eet eez easy to noteece zat I am writing wiz a Franch accent, non?

Und now I haff svitched to a Cherman accent.

Just as in these English examples, rendering foreign-accented Mandarin inpinyin might also entail

bizarrepinyin spellings, but this is half the fun of itcoercing the tongue into silly or non-native

sounds, something Chinese characters are incapable of.

Needless to say, nonsense words a la Lewis Carroll are also effectively blocked in Chinese

orthography:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Zhao Yuanren did marvelous translations ofAlice in Wonderlandand Through the Looking Glass

into Chinese, attempts that found miraculous equivalences and creative solutions to Carrolls

whimsy. In translating the above poem, The Jabberwocky, Zhao had to resort to made-up

characters, such as the component with the fire radical below it to translate brillig, a

creation that would presumably be read bai, but presumably is precisely the problem. Zhao

wisely used this technique sparingly, as too many such characters in the text soon results in a kind

of visual game in which the whimsical play with spoken language is lost.

I wont bore the reader with extensive counterfactual exercises imagining Chinese literature

within an alphabetic system. I think one can easily imagine the possibilities. I also dont want to

suggest that works like Lao Shes Teahouse are somehow merely failed attempts to create a

Dickensian linguistic world. Lao She was working brilliantly within the only system he had at his

disposal, and the success he achieved was on its own terms. But given that there is a quite

considerable functional overlap between Chinese characters and pinyin (that is, pinyin can fulfill

almost every function performed by the characters) it is reasonable to raise issues of relative

power and flexibility.

Finally, a note on the transliteration of proper names. Chinese characters isolate the Chinese

texts from world community, acting like a kind of firewall against the alphabetic domain. This is

nowhere more apparent than in the translation and use of foreign proper names, which is a real

headache in Chinese, much more so than in any other world language. In the roman alphabet

universe, proper names are common currency that can be traded freely, with only negligible

tweaks, between languages. English accommodates German names like Beethoven, German

absorbs Sartre, and French doesnt bat an eye at Eminem. Non-native spellings are either

pronounced according to indigenous spelling rules, or more-or-less sophisticated stabs are made at

the actual pronunciationBach in the glottal German way or Americanized to sound like

Bok. Occasional wholesale translations occur, such as the French penchant for Jean-Sebastien

5


6/6

Bach instead of Johann Sebastian Bach, but these are rare. Usually the character string

remains invariant, and the pronunciation takes care of itself.6 And transliteration from other

alphabets, such as Russias Cyrillic, is usually also a rather straightforward, rule-governed process.

Chaikofsky and Tchaikovsky might compete for a time, but eventually a consensus is

reached.7 And even transliterations from Chinese present no serious problem, since the sounds

first go through the standard romanization (formerly Wade-Giles, now universally pinyin), and

then can be printed in any alphabetic language, to be pronounced willy-nilly as the natives see fit.8

Not so in Chinese, where every new proper name must go through a torturous process of

sinification in order to enter the language. Though there is a relatively small set of characters that

are routinely used to transliterate foreign names into Chinese, such as si, di, la, dun,

ba, li, ke, te, and so on, these are applied rather haphazardly. In addition, Taiwan and

the mainland often diverge, with, for example, Reagan being rendered as Ligen in the

mainland andLeigen across the Strait.

To make matters worse, some brand names are transliterated with the sounds of Cantonese in

mind, and others into Mandarin, resulting in puzzling clunkers like Maidanglao ,

Bishengke, and Shashebiya, all of of which sound a lot more like their targets

(McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Shakespeare) in Cantonese than in Mandarin. All these

transliteration problems would not be automatically solved by a switch to pinyin, but significant

degree of ambiguity and uncertainty would be reduced.

As for scat singing, music is a kind of universal language, and I dont think we need a

Chinese Ella Fitzgerald when the American one will do nicely. But who knows? Maybe someday

someone will translate this artform into Chinese, and instead ofdeng genr li genr long genr long

, it will be du bi du bi du.

6 Except for occasional breakdowns, when Americans try to pronounce a Polish name like SzczepanSzczurowski.7 There is Woody Allens joke to the effect that the Russian revolution broke out when the people realized that theczar and the tsar were actually the same person.8 Such as Beijing, the /j/ of which American newscasters inexplicably pronounce like the /s/ in pleasure. My

guess is that the doggedly monolingual Americans assume that all /j/ sounds in foreign terms are to be pronouncedaccording to the only foreign language they have any knowledge of, which is high-school French. Making theanalogy with French words likeje andjeter, they sophisticatedly avoid the more obvious pronunciation.

6

what chinese characters can't do

Documents