China brought itself to the forefront of the entire region of East Asia in antiquity. China invented printing, the compass, gunpowder, porcelain, paper, and silk before the West. Moreover, China had more technological advances than western Eurasia until about A.D. 1400 (Diamond, 1999). According to Sampson (2015), half of all books ever published in the world were written in Chinese before 1900Footnote 3. The explosion of publications in Chinese was possibly due to the inventions of block printing around A.D. 600 and movable wooden type printing around A.D. 1040, which was way before Gutenberg’s mechanical movable type printing invented in Germany in 1439 (Man, 2000).
Chinese is the most commonly spoken language in the world among over 1.3 billion people (Ethnologue, 2005; Wikipedia.org, 2019). Chinese is spoken by Chinese natives and those who have Chinese heritage in Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as by Chinese immigrants in European countries, North America, and Australasia. The use of the Chinese writing system alone is on par with the use of all alphabetic scripts.
Concerning the representation of written language, Chinese has been considered to comprise pictograms (mainly by nonlinguists; e.g., {月} depicting <moon>; {木} depicting <tree>), ideograms (e.g., {一} meaning <one>; {三} meaning <three>), and logograms (e.g., {花} <flower>; {开花} <blossom>). The common designation is a logography (logo = word; graph = written symbol), representing the meaning primarily and the sound secondarily (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Based on the feature that a character represents a morpheme in a syllabic unit, a term morphosyllary has been used to refer to the Chinese writing system (Leong, 1997).
Some scholars claim that Chinese characters are inefficient for learning, compared to the alphabet, because it takes long to learn to read in Chinese due to the vast number of characters to master (Hannas, 1997; Man, 2000; Wolf, 2007). Notwithstanding their inefficiency and complexities, Chinese characters have endured for more than 5,000 years. The Chinese writing system is the only one, among all writing systems invented before 1,000 B.C., which is still used by a great number of people in the world. This causes a number of questions to arise: What has made the Chinese writing system endure so long, despite its inefficiency? Is it the case that precedence or tradition surpasses convenience or efficiency? In addition, if it was inefficient, how could Chinese native students excel over their counterparts in the world in reading, as shown in the results of an international test (PISA, 2018)? If there is a truth to the claim of Chinese characters being inefficient and if Hannas’ condemnation of Chinese script is justified, how could the Chinese writing system exert an immense influence on the Japanese writing system? This does not fit well with the notion of natural selection. The remaining part of this chapter attempts to address these questions in terms of historical considerations, scriptal characteristics, and cultural compatibility.
5.1.1 A Brief Historical Account
5.1.1.1 The Origin of Chinese Writing
The emergence of Chinese characters is rich in history and distinctive in writing. Although some archeologists trace the origin of Chinese characters back to about 8,000 years ago, a credible account goes back to the Neolithic times around 5000 to 3000 B.C. (Demattè, 2010; Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Evidence from the Yangshao culture developed in the middle and lower runs of the Yellow River in northeast China (a.k.a., the cradle of Chinese civilization) shows painted pottery, stone implements, and incised signs in farming communities (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Simple linear signs and pictures of animals, such as fish and frogs, resembled characters engraved in oracle bones, which suggests that these Neolithic signs might be the harbinger of Chinese characters.
The earliest full-fledged Chinese writing is considered to have been developed during the period of 1300–1200 B.C. under the Shang dynasty (1675–1029 B.C.Footnote 4). Written signs preserved on bronze vessels and divination bones were found in Anyang county, Henan Province in China, which was the last capital of the Shang dynasty (Bagley, 2004). The Anyang writing includes divination inscriptions for oracle texts on animal bones (mainly oxen bones), either interior or exterior turtle shells, bronze inscriptions, and other inscriptions written on shells, jades, stones, pottery, wood, and bamboo slips. Early bronze scripts representing clan names, which were decorative and pictorial, were written with a brush in the varying degrees of thickness (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). In the early twentieth century, numerous excavations discovered over 175,000 pieces of bones and shells, bearing over 4,500 different characters, in the Anyang area (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Although the Chinese writing system has evolved for more than 3,000 years, there has been little change in the style of writing, except for the simplification of characters (Lu & Aiken, 2004).
5.1.1.2 Debate over the Origin
Although the Anyang evidence is the main interpretation of the origin of Chinese writing, it is still uncertain when, where, why, and how the Chinese script was invented, because it is possible that archaeological evidence and records of pre-Anyang inscriptions have not yet been discovered, have perished, or have been nonexistent. The explanation of the origin of the Chinese script makes three assumptions. The first hypothesis is stimulus diffusion, meaning that footsteps toward the Chinese written signs can be traced back to Mesopotamia. This hypothesis is open to questions. Deringer (1996) claimed that “[t]he general conception of writing might perhaps have been borrowed, directly or indirectly, from the Sumerians, but not a single sign taken from the Sumerian system can be found. A dependence on Egyptian hieroglyphics is still more unlikely” (p. 66).
The second hypothesis, which is the oldest and most persistent interpretation, is that the precursors of the Anyang script were lost, and we can only assume the trajectory based on clan signs on Anyang bronzes. For example, some early oracle inscriptions on bones disappeared with the collapse of the Shang dynasty (Deng, 2018).
The third hypothesis is a sudden invention of full writing with no archaeological trace. This hypothesis posits that a few gifted officials (perhaps diviners) discovered the value of a sign system that could represent oral language and invented full writing without evolutional footsteps (Bagley, 2004). A legendary tale is actually available to fulfill this line of assumption as follows.
Long, long ago, in the golden age, there was a dragon horse which came up out of the Yellow River with curious symbols traced upon its back, and revealed them to Fu-hi (the first of China’s legendary primeval emperors). This potentate copied them and thus acquired the mystical characters, which later became the skeleton of I King [I Ching or Yijing; Book of Changes], the Canon of Changes, one of the Five Canons [Confucian classics]. And under the third primeval emperor, Huang-ti [Huang Di], the minister Ts’ang Kie proceeded further along the path of invention and fashioned the first primitive characters, by copying footmarks of birds made in the sand. (Karlgren, 1923, p. 32, cited in Taylor & Taylor, 2014, p. 36)
The competing hypotheses regarding the origin of Chinese writing (i.e., gradual evolution vs. sudden invention) raise questions about the dynamics and timing of the development of Chinese writing. They also raise a question on the nature of writing as the function of social and cultural phenomena. An independent development of a script typically takes a form of evolution over time. As shown in the cases of Mesopotamia and Egypt, writing is likely to have developed from an earlier sign system by undergoing an extended period of evolution before establishing the status of an efficient tool of language-recording (Demattè, 2010). Like the Korean writing system, Hangul, it is possible that a new writing system is invented out of the blue as a result of top-down governance or as a secondary writing system that complements the primary writing. However, this has been scarce in history.
In favor of the view of a gradual development rather than a sudden invention, Demattè (2010) used four criteria to identify valid evolutionary evidence for Chinese as follows: (1) intentionality and structural coherence of shapes and systematic use, (2) morphological relationships with bronze and bone scripts of the Shang dynasty, (3) an expansion of regional systems over time, and (4) emergence out of the relative socio-political complexity. Based on these criteria, Demattè (2010) concludes that the Chinese writing system evolved from Dawenkou, Liangzhu, and Shijiahe graphs. The forms and usage patterns of these graphs indicate that these signs could fulfill the objectives of simple recording tasks without phonology and syntax. Although it is debatable whether these three signs meet the definition of writing, Demattè (2010) argues that Dawenkou, Liangzhu, and Shijiahe graphs did serve as the beginning thread of the mature Chinese writing of the Shang oracle bone inscriptions and that non-linguistic signs also influenced the emergence of the writing system.
Studies of the early Mesopotamian epigraphic corpus indicated that writing was inscribed to control the production of agricultural goods, animal husbandry, and transactions (Bagley, 2004; Logan, 2004; Lu & Aiken, 2004). Despite the lesser degree of intensity, the Chinese Anyang writing was also used for managing agricultural bases, craft enterprises, and commercial applications. The earliest archeological evidence for Chinese shows that pottery inscriptions, including the numeric information of products and transactions, had the highest frequency of occurrences, suggesting that the purpose of early writing was for counting and book-keeping (Lu & Aiken, 2004). One difference from the Mesopotamian writing was for divination purposes, such as the genealogies of ancestors who received sacrifices and the schedules of sacrifices as well as the king’s military campaigns (Bagley, 2004). As full writing is the byproduct of social and political functions as well as activities of administrative applications, ownership assurance of goods, divination records, and royal display were likely to be a collective impetus for the development of Chinese writing.
5.1.1.3 A Road to Modern Characters
Following the Shang dynasty, the Western Zhou dynasty (circa 1046–771 B.C.) reigned, followed by the Eastern Zhou dynasty (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). The Eastern Zhou dynasty was broken down into two periods: Spring and Autumn (770–476 B.C.) and Warring States (475–221 B.C.). During the Warring States period, society went through significant changes as the powerful lost their power, aristocratic privilege, and hereditary ruling class. After the powerful lost control over the monopoly of writing, non-aristocrats started to use writing. As a result, a variety of script styles were developed in different Warring States. When the Warring States was unified in the third century B.C., the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (a.k.a., Qin Shi Huang Di)Footnote 5, strived to standardize the varied shapes of characters used at the time in a small-seal script (xiaozhuan) by simplifying the traditional Western Zhou great-seal script (dazhuan). The small-seal script was used mainly for inscriptions on stones and formal engravings (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). The Qin emperor’s standardization of Chinese characters served as a catalyst for unifying Chinese people who spoke diverse dialects. The emperor was the first monarch who could read and required literacy to be included in the regimen of emperor training.
The small-seal script, which was the orthodox script in the Qin period, was the last form of old Chinese writing. The simplified seal characters evolved into a clerical script (lishu), which was named on the basis of its use by official clerks and got popularized at that time with writing on bamboo strips (Bagley, 2004; Taylor & Taylor, 2014).
In the Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220), the modified clerical script paved its way to orthodox writing. As demands for official documents grew greater, writing on bamboo strips was replaced with writing on silk and paper with brushes. The clerical script gradually evolved into the standard script (kaishu) during the late Han dynasty. The advent of printing technology in the late Tang (618–907) and early Song (960–1279) dynasties led to the more prevalent use of the standard script. In handwriting, a shorthand version of the clerical and standard script became highly cursive, called “grass script” (caoshu) describing the “dance of the brush.” Among a variety of cursive versions, “modern cursive” (jincao) was the most common. A semi-cursive form of “running script” (xingshu) was also developed, which was one of the two most commonly used scripts in the Tang dynasty, along with the standard script. In modern China, the traditional characters have been simplified several times since 1935, which became the orthodox form of characters.
5.1.2 Features of Chinese Script
Sampson (2015) summarizes the features of the Chinese writing system, which are not mutually exclusive. First, syllables are demarcated such that syllabic boundaries are clear and unambiguous. This is different from English in which syllable boundaries are opaque within the word. Relatedly, there is no space used between words. Since each character is written in a square block, sentences are legible without spaces between words. Second, morphemes are co-representative with syllables, as a morpheme generally corresponds to a syllableFootnote 6. Since the minimal writing unit corresponds to the syllable, there is no morpheme available at the phonemic level. This is also different from English in which a fraction of a syllable represents a morpheme as shown in the plural marker “s” in cats or the past-tense marker “ed” in walked. Third, there are neither inflections that occur at prefix or suffix levels (i.e., no coalescence of roots with affixes) nor morphophonemic alternation. Chinese is not subject to inflections as in Japanese, Korean, and English. For this reason, Sampson (2015) claims that Chinese is an isolating language, in which each word form typically comprises a single morpheme. Last, although each character is written independently, Chinese is not entirely monosyllabic because compound words are the norm and there is the small number of polysyllabic morphemes/words (see footnote 6 in this chapter). Mandarin has fewer than 1,300 distinct syllables (Hannas, 1997). Since no language can survive with only a few thousand monosyllabic words, DeFrancis (1984) notes that the belief of Chinese to be monosyllabic is a myth.
Another feature that is pivotal within the Chinese writing system is the presence of the subcomponent of the character, called radicals (i.e., bushou) including 541 radicals (Chinese Radical Position Frequency Dictionary, 1984, cited in Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003a). Simple characters can stand alone as independent characters (e.g., {子} /zi/ <child>; {月} /yuè/ <moon>) and can be used as the subcomponent of the compound character as the radical (the independent character {火} /huǒ/ <fire> becomes {灬} located at the bottom of the character as the radical; {水} /shuǐ/ <water> becomes {氵} located to the left of the character as the radical; {刀} /dāo/ <knife> becomes {刂} located to the right of the character as the radical). Radicals constitute semantic radicals suggesting meaning and phonetic radicals suggesting sound in the forms of side-by-side, top-to-bottom, closed inside–outside, and open inside-outside. However, semantic and phonetic radicals within characters are not highly reliable in terms of character identification.
There are also compound words. Chinese compound words have systematic ways of combining two characters, and, in general, have three types of morphological construction, including subordinate (one character supports another; e.g., {房型} /fáng xíng/, house + model, layout of house), coordinative (two characters equally contribute to the meaning; e.g., {蔬果} /shū guǒ/, vegetable + fruits, <vegetable and fruits>), and attributive (the descriptive character precedes a noun, verb, or adjective; e.g., {天价} /tiān jià/ sky + price, <high price>; {速递} – /sù dì/ fast + to pass <express delivery>). Kuo and Anderson (2006) further classify the structures of compound words into five types by categorizing the attributive compound words into three types, including subject–predicate (e.g., 公立 /gōnglì/ public-establish, public), verb–object (e.g., 吃饭 /chīfàn/ eat-meal, to eat), and verb/adjective-complement (e.g., 改进 /gǎijìn/ change-forward, improve; see also Sun, 2020; Sun, Zhao, & Pae, 2020).
5.1.2.1 Simplified Characters
A simplification of the traditional script took place by reducing the number of strokes and by changing the shapes of the graphs in order to decrease the complexity of characters and relieve the burden of writing (e.g., traditional characters → simplified characters: {開} → {开}, {燈} → {灯}, {廣} → {广}, {學} → {学}, {葉} → {叶}, {關} → {关}). The graph simplification did not make Chinese characters lose the status of being a logography, as Sampson notes “[t]he simplified graphs are as logographic as those they replace…” (p. 193).
The effort to simplify characters began in the late twentieth century with cursive written text. The first effort for simplification yielded 324 characters introduced in 1935. The government of the People’s Republic of China authorized simplified characters that were prescribed in the List of Simplified Chinese Characters for use in Mainland China since the 1950s and 1960s to promote literacy. The People’s Republic of China issued the first phase of simplified characters in two documents. The first document was published in 1956 and the second one in 1964.
The second attempt for simplification was promulgated in 1977, but it never materialized due to the public’s confusion and the unpopularity of the second effort for simplification. The unsuccessful attempt culminated with the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) which occurred to preserve the communist ideology and Mao Zedong’s doctrine by eradicating capitalist and traditional values from the Chinese society. Due to the apprehension created by the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s death in 1976, the second phase of simplification was not successful. The government withdrew the second-phase simplification and endorsed the 1964 document with minor changes. The revised List of Simplified Chinese Characters comprising 8,105 simplified characters (including 45 newly recognized characters and 226 characters that were not explicitly acknowledged in the previous document) was officially endorsed for use by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China in 2013. Not all Chinese-speaking countries have adopted simplified characters, however, as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau still use traditional Chinese characters.
The method of simplification involved structural simplification by replacing or omitting some components and by adopting new character forms. The simplified form made greater use of phonetic substitutions than the traditional forms. Before the reform, the average of strokes per character was 11 to 12, depending on characters considered in the sample. Based on the count of 2,000 most frequently used simplified characters, the stroke count dropped from 11.2 (traditional) to 9.8 (simplified) strokes, on average, indicating a 12.5% drop. The figure rises to 16.2% of drop in the simplified version for running text (DeFrancis, 1984; Hannas, 1997).
Simplification resulted in more obscure radicals. According to Matthews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, 830 characters out of 7,773 entries have lexicographically obscure radicals (Hannas, 1997). This number comprises 11% of the radicals in the inventory that are obscure, based on lexicographic standards. However, Hannas (1997) asserts that simplification has made readers become less dependent on the morphemic representations of characters because simplified characters lose ideographic illustrations, and paved the way to the phonetic writing addendum, Pinyin.
5.1.2.2 Pinyin
Due to the complexity of characters, an effort to facilitate reading led to a creation of Pinyin (literally <spelling sounds>), which is a system for transcribing the sounds of Chinese. The Pinyin system was developed in the 1950s and was formally adopted in 1958 as a notational tool. The Chinese government revised it several times. Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet (except the letter {v} due to the nonexistence of its sound in standard Mandarin) as well as diacritics for tone to indicate pitch contours rather than the sounds of characters. Since 1979, Western publishers have accepted Pinyin as the standard. This is why the name {毛澤東} (traditional) or {毛泽东} (simplified; /Máozédōng/) is now spelled “Mao Zedong” rather than “Mao Tse-tung” (Sampson, 2015). The International Organization for Standardization adopted simplified characters as an international standard in 1982, followed by the United Nations in 1986. Taiwan adopted Pinyin in 2009, but it is partly used for the purposes of international events, not for educational purposes. Another phonetic symbol, 注音符號/注音符号 /zhùyīn fúhào/, is used for transliteration or annotation of sounds only for Taiwanese Mandarin.
5.1.2.3 The Number of Characters and Their Complexity
As for the estimate of characters, there have been efforts to quantify characters in use. The first notable effort was made by the lexicographer Xu Shen who included 9,353 characters in the Shuowen Jiezi (“The Explanation of Simple Characters and Analysis of Composite Characters”) in A.D. 121. The second attempt was made by 30 scholars under the Qing emperor Kangxi when the authority defined 47,035 characters to include in the Kangxi Dictionary in 1716. The third notable attempt was made by the Chinese Character Analysis Group in Taiwan when it identified and defined about 74,000 entries in the 1980s, including 49,300 standard characters and additional 24,700 variants (which took different forms of characters but had the same meanings and sounds as standard characters). More recently, The Dictionary of Variant Characters (Yitizi Zidian) included 106,230 entries in 2004 (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Hannas (1997) shows another estimate, as in “[t]he Chung-wen Ta-tz’ utien (Zhongwen dacidian), which appeared in thirty-eight volumes between 1962 and 1968, held the record at 49,905 characters until eclipsed by the recent appearance in the People’s Republic of China of Hanyu dazidian which has nearly 60,000 entries” (p. 131).
The large number of characters indicates that there is no theoretical and practical limit to the number of characters in the writing system. In principle, the increasing number of characters can be infrequently observed because new characters can be created to address newly emerging concepts, new tools, or new discovery (e.g., newly created character {熵}/shāng/ for <entropy>, using the existing radical {火} /huǒ / <fire> indicating <energy> and {商} /shāng/ <quotient> referring to the physics term entropy being defined in a form of division) on top of creating new compound words using existing characters (e.g., {电脑} /diànnǎo/, electric + brain, <computer>). A large-scale study conducted by the National Publication Bureau of China in 1975 counted a total of 24,213,955 characters that appeared in various outlets, such as science, newspaper, arts, literature, and politics, but only a little over 6,000 different characters were used for the total number of characters examined in the study (Taylor & Taylor, 2014). Another estimate shows a similar count; the number of characters currently in use in Chinese is about 7,000 (Zhou, 1987, p. 22, cited in Hannas, 1997, p. 132; see also Table 3–5 in Taylor & Taylor, 2014, p. 49). However, Mandarin has fewer than 1300 distinct syllables (Hannas, 1997), as indicated earlier.
The complexity of characters ranges from one stroke to more than 60 strokes. The character meaning number <one> is written with one horizontal line stroke {一}. The character meaning <melancholy> has 29 strokes {鬱}. The most complex character has 64 strokes, albeit rare usage. Table 5.1 shows characters from the simplest to the most complex. A systematic form of addition is observed in the case of singlet {木} that becomes a doublet {林} and further a triplet {森}. An extreme case of addition is found in the character at the bottom of Table 5.1. The character has duplicates up to four times within a single character with the character {龍} meaning <dragon> twice at the top and twice at the bottom.
Table 5.1. A Wide Range of Character Strokes 5.1.3 Strengths and Weaknesses as a Script
Whatever script a culture adopts, the writing system practically reflects linguistic, psychological, and cultural features of the nation at the surface level. Although a logography can be considered inefficient because of rote-memorization and longer time taken to master than the alphabet (Hannas, 1997; Man, 2000), Chinese characters may fulfill the linguistic needs of spoken Chinese and be conducive to Chinese culture. The logographic characteristics of the Chinese writing system bear several linguistic strengths. Given this is a semi-concluding section for the Chinese writing system, some overlap is inevitable. First, due to its logographic characteristics, in principle, each morpheme in Chinese has its own graph. This means that, in general, the huge number of characters corresponds to the number of morphemes or words in the language. The Kangxi Dictionary of 1716, which was the largest Chinese dictionary, contained about 47,036 graphs. In comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary included “less than a third of the period covered by a major Chinese dictionary” in the eighth century (Sampson, 2015, p. 194). The large number of characters to learn requires the learner to take unbearable time until mastery. There may be a trade-off, however. Mattingly (1972) notes that phonographic writing systems, such as English, may show “… more reading successes, because the learning time is far shorter, but proportionately more failures too, because of the greater demand on linguistic awareness” (p. 144). If this is true, the time and effort to learn to read in Chinese may be rewarding because an analysis for syllabic parsing and a synthesis of letter clusters to make sense of a word are not necessary when decoding Chinese characters. Based on Mattingly’s (1972) statement, reading Chinese characters, once they are acquired, does not require linguistic awareness of subsyllabic units, such as phonemes, onsets-rimes, or bodies-codas, because it is unnecessary; as a result, it may lead to efficient reading overall by going through direct processes without assembling processes of consonant and vowels. Notably, an international comparison of students’ achievement in reading constantly shows Chinese students’ reading success (this is revisited in a later section of this chapter in more detail). If there is a truth to Mattingly’s argument, the outstanding performance of Chinese students would not be accidental. Undoubtedly, the payoff for Chinese would be the cultural dedication to learning at home and school.
Second, in principle, a Chinese character represents a morpheme such that each morpheme is an invariant of the syllable, except for the small number of polysyllabic morphemes. The nature of monosyllabic morphemes allows for no theoretical limit to how far the inventory of characters can expand (Hannas, 1997). This is evidenced by about 60,000 entries of characters in Hanyu dazidian (Hannas, 1997). Due to its self-sufficient nature of morphology, Chinese did not have to borrow morphemes from other languages to any significant extent (Sampson, 2015).
Last, the writing orientation of Chinese characters offers greater flexibility than that of English. Since they are written in blocks, Chinese characters can be written either horizontally or vertically depending on space availability or the author’s intention. Although the left-to-right writing direction has been the norm since 1949Footnote 7, characters used to be written vertically right-to-left across the top of the page until the later time of the Qing Dynasty (A.D. 1892).
As for the weaknesses of Chinese characters, the most obvious drawback has to do with the large number of individual tokens and the complexity of their signs. The large number and the complexity of Chinese characters make children take much more time to learn to read than any other written language. In general, it takes six years for children to learn to read in Chinese (The Curriculum and Teaching Materials Research Institute, 2009). In response to the challenge of mastering such a large number of characters, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2011) published the Curriculum Standards for Chinese Characters in Compulsory Education, which spelled out the numbers of characters that were expected for students to acquire at different grade levels. Grades 1–2 are expected to be able to read 1,600 and write 800 commonly-used characters; Grades 3–4 are to read 2,500 and write 1,600 characters, cumulatively; Grades 5–6 are to read 3,000 and write 2,500 characters accumulatively; and Grades 7–9 are to read 3,500 characters accumulatively.
Inputting logographs into computers or electronic devices is not as easy as letters or graphs in the alphabet (Sampson, 2015). In order use computers or devices, individuals first type the Pinyin for the character of interest and then select the proper suggestion from the pop-up bar with a mouse or select the number associated with a suggestion to enter it. The speed of typing graphs or words per minute is quite comparable with that of European-language typists (Sampson, 2015). However, non-professional typists or learners of Chinese apparently go through an extra-step in Chinese typing.
Another shortcoming may be the large number of homophones, although it is difficult to consider this a weakness. Since Chinese characters represent more than speech, Chinese users can distinguish sight words that have the same sound quality using different tones. A homophone{谐音} /xié yīn/ in Chinese refers to words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings, origin, or word form. Due to the use of tones indicating the meaning of the spoken word, Chinese has an abundance of homophones. Perfetti, Liu, and Tan (2005) note that “[m]odern-day usage incudes 420 distinct syllables (disregarding tone) mapped onto about 4,574 characters … on average, 11 characters share a single pronunciation … Tone disambiguates a large number of these cases, but ample ambiguity remains (about four homophones for each character)” (p. 44). Table 5.2 shows an extreme case of the same sound with different tones. It is a 64-character story using a one-sound word /shi/ with different tones. The title, story, and its translation are shown in Table 5.2. below.
Table 5.2. An Example of a One-Sound Word with Different Tones in a Story Regardless of strengths or weaknesses, pragmatically, a relatively small number of characters accounts for most print materials. This makes Chinese more accessible to learners of Chinese because they can identify characters or read Chinese with a mastery of a small segment of the character inventory. DeFrancis (1984) analyzed a corpus of 900,000 characters of written texts to find that the most frequently used 100 characters account for 47%, and 1,100 characters accounted for 90% of the text. Of 30,000 characters drawn from nine different types of publications, 1,017 characters accounted for 90%, and well-chosen 4,000 characters accounted for 99.8% (Hannas, 1997). Recently, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2013) published a list of commonly used characters in modern Chinese, including 3,500 characters in the first tier, 3,000 characters in the second tier, and 1,605 characters in the third tier, totaling 8,105 characters. The estimates of DeFrancis (1984), Hannas (1997), and the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2013) consistently show the small number of characters used in practical usage.