Is Chinese a backward language? A recent article in Foreign Policy has sparked much discussion.

I feel compelled to comment on Tom Mullaney's article and on responses from various scholars including David Moser from Beijing's Capital Normal University. I can do so, not as a linguist but as someone who has used my acquired language skills in my work and daily life over decades in Hong Kong, the mainland and Australia.

Let us first be clear that Mullaney and Moser's argument is about Chinese script and not about the spoken language. They are not discussing the faults and virtues of Cantonese and Putonghua but rather of character script and pinyin or other phonetic transcriptions. Mullaney says that the widespread use of character texts on the internet proves that characters are a smart system and capable of survival in the digital age. Moser says that characters are difficult to learn and to use, compared with the "alphabetic world". Who is correct and what does it mean for Hong Kong?

For the last 150 years there has been controversy in China about language reform. One reason for the introduction of simplified characters in the 1960s was that they would be easier to learn and would lift literacy rates. According to official statistics, the literacy rate in China is now 95 percent, but it is also over 95 percent in Hong Kong, where traditional full-form characters are still in use, so it would seem that complicated characters do not affect literacy. You might think that abolition of characters altogether would have little effect on literacy, except that the global adult literacy rate in developed nations is actually even higher - 99 percent.

There are certainly educational advantages in Chinese script that should be considered. Psychologists Brian Butterworth and Joey Tang at University College London have shown that learning characters activates a different part of the brain from that used to learn alphabetic script. Fewer children are dyslexic in China compared with the UK. Again, New Zealand educationist Louise White has shown a correlation between learning characters and numeracy. This is corroborated by studies in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, so there are several positives for character use.

On the other hand, learning characters is really hard. A 19th-century missionary, William Milne, wrote: "Learning the Chinese language requires bodies of iron, lungs of brass, heads of oak, hands of spring steel, eyes of eagles, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah." Knowledge of several thousand characters is required to reach an acceptable level of literacy. Modern Western curricula downplay rote learning, and education gurus such as Ken Robinson emphasize the importance of building students' critical thinking faculties rather than imparting facts, so that they can cope with a rapidly changing world. Maybe less time should be devoted to rote learning, including Chinese script?

A progressive script should be able to adapt to meet changing social needs. In the 21st century no challenge is greater than increasing computerization in daily life. Overwhelmingly, English is still the major language used on the internet, although use of Chinese is increasing year by year, helped by quick and easy new ways to input Chinese characters. The Hong Kong IT industry is well placed to work on overcoming any remaining obstacles in matching character usage to technical demands. Surely Hong Kong should encourage this since it is an international communication hub.

Finally, one advantage of a character script compared with alphabetic and other phonetic scripts is that it can be read and understood by people speaking different dialects or languages. In classical times Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese all used characters. Eighteenth-century Tokugawa Japan acquired advanced medical science by "brush talks" (bi-tan) between Korean and Japanese scholars, both educated in the use of characters and study of character texts. The 19th-century Hakka scholar Huang Zunxian conversed with scholars in Tokyo the same way to compile a record of the Meiji reforms that later became a platform for revolutionary change in China. In China today, the teaching and use of characters (no matter whether simplified or full-form) has been a unifying force and allows all people to draw on the vast resources of national history and culture. The all-embracing and unifying role of character script inspired the sequence on "writing" (wenzi) in the dramatic performance opening the Beijing Olympic Games. Seen as calligraphy, characters are truly an art form.

So how does the score board stack up? Is Chinese a backward language? From my perspective, I would say that there definitely are problems, but Chinese characters are not dinosaurs but evolving and progressive tools for communication and understanding.

(HK Edition 06/10/2016 page6)