KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS

How the oldest living written language has had to modernize and adapt.

Because of the highly complicated ideographic nature of the Chinese written language, both the West and China’s own people have long striven to decipher its meaning and power. Traditionally, only the elite could master the elaborate script, since it took too long to write and was hard to learn. When China was confronted with “catching up” with the West by the late 19th century, the task of modernizing and adaptation was enormous. Tsu, a Yale professor of East Asian studies who emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. as a child, has a unique and poignant perspective on having to adapt to the Western alphabet and a different mode of critical thinking. “The two language worlds did not accord; they clashed,” she writes. The author reviews the basic properties of the Chinese script as it transformed via characters, strokes, components, radicals, and tone. She explores Wang Zhao’s first attempts to modernize Mandarin during the mid-1900s in the spirit of reform and in response to Japan’s attempts to modernize its own language; the first mapping of the ideographic keyboards for typewriters (adapted for a few thousand commonly used Chinese characters rather than the letters of the Roman alphabet), which allowed Chinese to become a part of the telegraphy revolution; the deconstruction of the language for categorizing and indexing for libraries; and the Communist Party’s attempts to simplify and modernize in the 1950s using roman script instead of ideograms. Purists might object, but literacy rates have increased hugely—to 96.8 percent by 2018, according to Tsu’s reckoning. The linguistic and historical threads the author weaves together are complex, but her engaging tone makes the book accessible for general readers.

An engaging, relevant work that delves into the linguistic past in order to predict China’s future success in the world.