As a person who grew up having Hokkien as my first language, I've feared that Hokkien might go extinct over time. Having a formal English and Mandarin Chinese education had pretty much started to erase my Hokkien knowledge. I'm glad that AI technologies can be used to preserve this language.
Yeah language attrition is very real. I used to be a near native speaker of Hokkien and Cantonese, now I can barely understand a word after more than a decade of not speaking them.
Going extinct would be sad, sure, but I'm not sure that the effort required to not make it so would be worth it. Putting children through thousands of hours of education in another language, for what exactly? If I have kids, I'm not sure I'd be willing to put them through all that work for a nearly dead language. They're not gonna use it to speak with their peers, or to open up communication with another group of people, it's just preservation for the sake of preservation.
We're making the opposite choice, my wife speaks Cantonese to our kid because we believe it's worth preserving (of course, the fact that there are a lot more medias in Cantonese than in Hokkien makes it easier to preserve).
Of course Mandarin, is more "useful" in a purely pragmatic way but languages are social things, they're tied to culture, they help create relationships with other people who speak those languages (I have plenty of Teo Chew friends who have made very good friends with others from different country because they are kakinang) and speaking multiple languages is always worth keeping.
Plus even besides this, having a multilingual home, regardless of the usefulness of the languages that are spoken, is associated with a lot of cognitive benefits for children so the thousands of hours learning a different language are useful.
Perhaps the old reasons will do just as well. Hokkien is an interesting case of being involved in a potentially fractious political situation- one can imagine to further distinguish themselves from the Chinese mainland, the people of Taiwan promote the use of Hokkien. Not dissimilar to say bilingual laws in Canada.
After all, the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of national languages and elimination of regional dialects in the name of fostering nationalism, which continued in the twentieth but also saw the revival of languages like Irish or Hebrew for new nationalisms.
I doubt that desire for cultural differentiation is going to change much about the diglossic situation in Taiwan, since the continued use of Traditional Chinese characters is already a pretty big differentiator. The government is making some effort to promote the Tai-lô writing system (e.g. https://tailo.moe.edu.tw/index.php ), but overall there's very little incentive for Hokkien speakers to become literate in it. If you look at Wikipedia visits from Taiwan, 92% go to the Mandarin version, 6% to English, 1% to Japanese, and Hokkien is in the tail of small languages behind even Cantonese and Classical Chinese. Of these, I think English is most likely to grow in the future.
Also, the differentiation potential is somewhat limited due to the fact that the majority of Hokkien speakers lives in Fujian province on the mainland (Hokkien = Fujian) and there's some preservation work going on there as well. E.g. Xiamen University's Speech Lab had a working demo of spoken-Hokkien-to-written-Mandarin translation in 2018, although the link shortener they used has since suffered from link rot. https://speech.xmu.edu.cn/2018/1215/c18169a359542/page.htm
You’re not wrong, not to mention the problematic nature of conflating Hokkien with “Taiwanese” identity, as that then omits the Hakka, never mind the aboriginal languages. But one could see a Benshengren revival of Taigi nonetheless, even if only as a set of quixotic pan-Green government initiatives.
Also, Hokkien interest is present even outside of that geopolitical flashpoint:
Preservation of a cosmovision and a form of intelligence, not just a language. Furthermore, I hypothesise whether kids lose intelligence when adults shut their mother tongues off.
I like that we're preserving dying languages by maintaining the ability to understand and translate them as archives of humanity on Earth's past, but I'm hoping in the next century or two language attrition will whittle all the world's languages down to just a handful.
The day every person on Earth speaks some shared common language (ideally one so straightforward that it can be learned by children within a year or so) will be a day I'd celebrate as a monumental milestone in the development of our species.
It's fine if people know other languages too, but having that shared global one is vital.
I'm happy to lose innumerable untranslatable phrases and cultural understandings in service of this.
I disagree. There is no possible benefit to a monoculture of language that would justify the immense loss of culture and of different ways to see the world.
Cultural spheres have always managed to come up with a lingua franca that enabled them to exchange ideas. English fills that role currently and will probably endure to dominate. Even if something goes monumentally wrong with the Anglosphere, it will endure until another language manages to step up to that role.
Children are perfectly able to learn multiple languages within a few years by pure immersion. I can't see what further optimization here would achieve.
Still, judging by the events of the past, languages that are not sanctioned by some state will probably all die out by the end of this century. Further erosion is very unlikely though. The language of any country with at least, say, 50 millions speakers is probably safe.
The language will be “preserved” in that 300 years from now, a tape drive in Harvard’s Widener Library will have a Hokkien model on file for historians writing a tenure book designed to go right back into those dusty shelves.
Some researchers think that this is a sort of limitation of our current language structures, and that there exist more general encodings of our ideas ("engrams") that we could express if we had perfect telepathy and perfect comprehension.
In this sense, we would exchange information that was of a higher order than language. For example, a complex idea like "the location where I will meet you for lunch this afternoon" would be independent of the verbal language we use it to express it.
We can see a similar (albeit more limited) exchange of language-independent structural ideas in mathematics. We distinguish between "numbers" (the idea of a quantity) and "numerals" (the symbols we use to describe that quantity). For example, `III`, `three`, `3`, `5 - 2`, and `the number of complete revolutions made by rotating 6*pi radians` are all ways of defining and representing the same common idea — "the number three". Going back to the previous example, imagine if an idea "where I'll meet you for lunch today" could be universally and unambiguously shared in a similar way, and you'll get a rough approximation of what perfect telepathy and perfect comprehension would be like.
I don't think it's just researchers that think this.
Every time that I have a word on the tip of my tongue I have an idea in mind that I wish to express, but I simply cannot remember the word to convey the concept. That is to say that I've already thought of the idea and am now merely looking for a way to express it.
However, I think that "thinking out loud" in your head has benefits. It makes the idea you wish to express more concrete and lets you iterate on it more easily. Think of it like writing down an equation when doing math: it gets easier to reason about it when it's expressed externally. I think ideas and thinking verbally in your head work the same way.
I asked in part because I don't have an internal monologue. I was quite surprised to learn that many other people have one and people who do usually seem surprised that monologueless people can think at all.
So, The idea of thinking without directly using language is less foreign to me than many. Nevertheless, I'll still sometimes use 'words' internally to reason things through which are too complex to solve intuitively, or when enacting a procedure I learned from someone else.
It's not clear to me that the engrams you imagine wouldn't just be a symbolic language under another name. I suppose if they were continuous in some vast highly dimensional space ... but even then one could discretize them at the resolution of distinguishable ideas and it's a symbolic language again. :)
Also spoken heavily where I used to live. However, a lot of the time it was used by non-Hokien speakers for its rich collection of curse and swear words.
They won't. It will only help accelerate the move towards concentration to national languages (Standard Chinese in Taiwan and China, French in France, etc.) Why would anyone put the effort to learn a "small" language when it can be translated automatically for understanding?
The way to preserve a language is putting humans in the loop. Creating content in that language; interestingly more and more shows are produced in Taiwan in or using non-Mandarin languages as a political way to mark a difference with the big neighbour. And having government support, notably at school (at young age) by allowing partial or total teaching in the language to be preserved.
It's anthropocentric to say a language can only be preserved by live humans rather than AI natural language models and digital corpora. No one use Latin any more but we can still figure out what Roman text meant.
It's also counterproductive to let humans learn a language of limited content resources and use cases.
Taiwan people are highly educated and urbanized. It's much harder to use Taiwanese in Taiwan compared to High German in a Pennsylvanian Amish village.
I don't know how to express clearly in Taiwanese "GPS in my neighborhood has a 100x lower accuracy because of radio interference" or "move this MOSFET up by 15mm to balance the PCB thermal stress". If you still have to switch to Chinese or English from time to time, why not just use the popular languages?
Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
> Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
This is really not common and if anything it's something unheard of to me. I work in an English speaking company in Japan and most of my coworkers (who are fluent enough to speak English in technical conversations) would instantly switch back to Japanese to talk about technical things between them if there's no foreigner involved in the conversation. I've seen the same thing happen in my wife's company and other companies too. This is on top of the fact that the level of English education in Japan is very low (unfortunately) and these people who work in English-speaking companies are very much the exception. I don't think I've ever seen a single Japanese person favor using English over Japanese for technical discussions if they were ever given the choice.
^ this. I did a lot of integration work with japan over the years and all documentation is in Japanese. All communication via email and docs is Japanese. Every thing technical is in Japanese.
I struggled with Google translate because it’s like 40% accurate at translating technical related stuff.
Your Japanese coworkers are the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of Japanese speakers in Japan, including those in technical fields, do all of their work communication in Japanese. They may use technical vocabulary borrowed from English and other languages, but those words are used with Japanese pronunciation in Japanese sentences.
In Masahiro Sakurai[0]'s series of YouTube talks[1] on game development, he specifically mentions how he has to tell Japanese developers to always name files and source code functions in English, just in case they need to work with an overseas team.
Yes, it is possible to do everything 100% in Japanese, with the only English being the keywords of whatever programming system you are working with. However, that is more the exception than the rule, especially in larger teams that need to work overseas.
Even teams that work with overseas teams tend to funnel that through several people or the like (this is universal). Even "english only" companies in Tokyo will still just have a bunch of docs/convos written in Japanese when the team compositions are not uniformly mixed.
There are of course aesthetic/logistics reasons behind "code the stuff in English" (if only cuz your code is going into an ASCII codepage, and ... yeah, sharing). But the language used in teams is pretty company-culture dependent, and "we do all of our work in English" lands in a very restricted set of companies. Probably Finance is the one where that culture is there, but most tech companies.... there are higher-than-average english language levels in these places, but if there's no other English-preferer (foreigners, but also returnees or people who just like English a lot) in the room? Not happening
> Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
Are you Japanese yourself? If not I don't think it's strange that they would adapt their way of speaking with a foreigner, especially since most technical words in IT are coming from English anyway. For other fields, health for instance, it's totally possible to never heard English in months/years. Japanese is well alive, and English is more a social marker than anything else. Most Japanese have very bad command of English if at all and can live their whole life never using it.
> Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
You must live in a kind of weird cocoon because in Japan nobody switches to English for technical discussions because they cant even speak English in the first place.
> It's much harder to use Taiwanese in Taiwan compared to High German in a Pennsylvanian Amish village.
Your example for difficult use is particularly apt in that you’re choosing to focus on specialized technical examples, which often default to international lingua franca anyway, often English.
I doubt that day to day use of Taigi in Taiwanese communities is as rare and difficult as you say. Maybe in highly educated and urbanized Taipei, but have you even been to the southern countryside?
You can easily say these two sentences in Spanish that every Spanish speaker has no difficulty understanding.
El GPS en mi barrio tiene precisión cien veces peor debido a la interferencia de radio.
mueve este MOSFET 15mm hacia arriba para balancia de estrés térmico a la placa.
I believe you can "invent" a Taiwanese sentence to mean the above, but there is no consensus among Taiwanese speakers in how to say them, so they would need your explanations of what your chosen words mean. If you borrow Chinese words, your sentence will be no much different from the Chinese sentence.
For your question -- yes you can scrape by with only Taiwanese, just like you can live in some areas in the US speaking only Spanish. But to do anything more, like riding a train to another Spanish speaking area, you could meet a conductor who have to open the translator app for you.
For highly technical terms you can use the exact same strategy that Spanish and Mandarin speakers use, just use the English term like you did in your example sentence. A random Taiwanese speaker will not understand MOSFET, but neither will a Spanish speaker, unless they have that technical knowledge.
Yes and even in most of northern Taiwan, there's a ton of Taiwanese everywhere. One of my old friends was born in Neihu and moved to the US around 3rd grade or so. When he visited me in Taipei as an adult, he spoke fluent Taiwanese and much more limited Mandarin. His situation was a bit comical to younger people, but not a real obstacle.
I also lived in the Guishan/Linkou area for a year and heard a lot more Taiwanese than Mandarin in day to day life.
> It's also counterproductive to let humans learn a language of limited content resources and use cases.
Taiwanese/Hokkien have limited content resources because of conscious decisions of previous governing bodies in China, Singapore, Taiwan (not sure about Malaysia). If they had been allowed to flourish, actively promoted and native speakers were taught how to write, it would be a lot different today. The premise of the article is false. Taiwanes/Hokkien has had a standardized written form since the 19th century. The problem is most native speakers do not know it, so really what it suffers from are low literacy rate. I communicate in written Taiwanese via text quite often.
Over the past ten years or so, the government in Taiwan has been trying to promote native language literacy, but with so-so results due to what I see as poor pedagogy.
> I don't know how to express clearly in Taiwanese
Many heritage or home speakers probably feel the same way. There are strong social stigmas against using Taiwanese in academia or people seeing it as a crude language. But if you are a native speaker of both Mandarin and Taiwanese, it isn't too hard to learn the written form if you want to.
I'm not a native speaker of Taiwanese, but I can make somewhat intelligible translations of them. A native speaker who has learned to write Taiwanese and knows English could do a better job.
> GPS in my neighborhood has a 100x lower accuracy because of radio interference
> Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
That's interesting. I have only experienced preference for English technical vocabulary, but never switching of languages. Even for native English speakers they need to have familiarity with the subject or those technical words are unintelligible to them.
> Taiwan people are highly educated and urbanized. It's much harder to use Taiwanese in Taiwan compared to High German in a Pennsylvanian Amish village.
This isn't true at all. Taiwan is highly educated and urbanized and nearly everyone can understand Taiwanese. Millions of people speak it natively and everyone else has encountered it in media, day-to-day life and also in school in the past 15 or so years.
>Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.
It's a chicken and egg problem. If you don't do technical discussions on Japanese now then you won't do them in the future either. You have to consciously start doing that and then eventually you'll do it that way as a preference.
>why not just use the popular languages?
Because you will then take over their cultural baggage. Look at English and the internet. Americans are outnumbered and yet it's expected that people follow the norms of American culture online.
If you speak German on the same websites then those norms more or less disappear.
> You have to consciously start doing that and then eventually you'll do it that way as a preference.
For Japanese, it's opposite. People aren't good at English so Japanese tech writing/talk is everyone's preference. Also Katakana helps a lot to import foreign words. Top people learn English, import words, wrote their text, and talked in Japanese.
Now Japanese texts are getting not popular (due to not profitable) and many English texts are very easily accessible thanks to internet and it's lingua franca. So finally many Japanese are going to learn English to catch up.
The better translation technology is the less likely it is I’ll ever learn a language.
To put it another way, in 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese.
I’d the Chinese can come to a university and never need to learn English, they won’t. Your parents and community will teach out to speak and that’ll be the end of it.
It’ll be closer to the Tower of Babel scenario. Every community will have their own language and dialect and the AI will just adapt. If a solar flare takes out electronics we won’t be able to understand each other.
Alternatively, the AI will teach us to speak or an implant will teach us similar to the matrix.
Those are the scenarios in the next 25-30 years I see.
> 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese
Doubt it. When you learn a language you learn a lot more than the translation, you learn thinking and connotations that require a broader understanding that never get captured regardless of the translation quality, because they require knowing history and seeing previous uses in context that can't be captured in the translation.
"Good" translation will do for language what wikipedia has done for knowledge. Everyone will get a superficial understanding, some will pretend that reading off a definitions is the same as actually knowing something, and the world will get a lot more shallow, empty conversations.
All of that does not matter for just communicating, even for the languages where google translate is terrible, it's already equivalent to a B2 level which is enough for communicating about everything.
In some languages, DeepL has near perfect translation to the point you cannot really tell if it was translated.
The Tower of Babel scenario isn't so bad is it? Instead of minority language speakers being under immense pressure to adapt to and be replaced by dominant languages, communities can continue to exist as they are in their own language.
I don’t need cultural context to order a cheese burger. Presumably, future AI systems would be able to translate this context as well. They do to some extent [poorly] today.
Calling Hokkien unwritten is a bit of a stretch. I grew up watching Hokkien shows from Taiwan, and the subtitles have always used plain chinese characters. I'm not sure about Taiwan, but in Singapore and Malaysia, where the chinese community speaks a slightly different dialect, everybody can read using chinese characters just fine, even the elderly who can't really speak mandarin chinese.
It's written, it just doesn't have a standardized written form, it's written informally in standard Chinese character but it's modified from the spoken form in order to conform better to standard Mandarin forms, AFAIK. From Wikipedia:
"if "pure, unadulterated spoken vernacular Taiwanese" were written exclusively in Chinese characters, with minimal use of Mandarin phrases, over 25% of morphemes would have no character, about 25% would have arbitrarily selected (yet more or less conventionally accepted) characters that are homophones or near-homophones, 10% would be written using characters exclusive to Hokkien, and 40% would be written with characters that have the correct sound and meaning. However, in more colloquial styles of Taiwanese Hokkien, the proportion of morphemes written with conventionally accepted characters would drop even lower than 40%."
This might just be a difference between Taiwanese Hokkien and SG/Malaysia Hokkien. As with everything in Chinese dialects it varies from place to place, community to community, etc.
Except the language being written on the screen is written Chinese, based on Mandarin more than Hokkien. Or at least some sort of hybrid of the two.
Calling languages like Hokkien “a slightly different dialect” is really underselling it. These are totally different languages, as divergent as German is from Portuguese.
Agree very much. Hokkien is 65 million people's language, more than Italy's population.
There are Hokkien-speaking people in Hong Kong and China's Guangdong province. They write Hokkien in Chinese characters mixed with pinyin for these without a corresponding character.
It is fascinating that there are such major languages (or language groups) without standard written representations.
I understand the concept of formal literary languages but in this case, having literary Chinese as your "written language" feels like an anachronism. Like treating Latin as literary language in medieval Europe: ultimately disenfranchising to common people and something that needed to be set aside.
The AI community would be taken more seriously if they didn't over-exaggerate or even straight up lie about their achievements like it is done in that article title.
Hokkien, specifically the version mentioned in the article (Taiwanese Southern Min) has two main writing systems: Chinese characters and Latin letters based romanization. Heck, that's actually more than most languages in the world! The Tâi-lô[1] system, a slight modification of Pe̍h-ōe-jī was recently standardized by the government. On the other hand, Chinese characters can be used to write Taiwanese, not just Classical Chinese or Standard Chinese (Mandarin), save for a few words that are often written using Latin or bopomofo letters. It's true that a large number of speakers have not been taught either of those writing systems, but it does not mean they don't exist. I've already met someone which taught me few words in Hokkien (the infamous chia̍h-pá--bōe 食飽未) and write it in Chinese characters for me.
I'm working with various Sinitic languages, and Taiwanese is far from being the worst when it comes to available resources in written form (for my use cases dictionnaries).
If most people aren't able to use those systems, I think it's about as good as unwritten, especially if the target audience is your everyday speaker who wouldn't be familiar.
I disagree. It makes a big difference: creating a writing system is not a simple as it seems and it's a task that require quite a lot of work, especially when there is huge dialectal variations in-between dialects. When a system already exist it means there is already a bunch of tools available such as dictionaries, input method[1], a corpus of texts even if small or medium, including text books. That can be used both for AI and teaching. This make the task way less daunting than doing everything from scratch.
In case of Taiwanese, there is a small but existing corpus of literature, as a 5 seconds Google/Wikipedia search shows[2][3].
The problem is that most speakers were never taught how to use these systems. Most people only learn Pinyin and written and spoken Standard Chinese in school.
Cantonese survives and is thriving because it dominates as a spoken language in education and in public. Even so, only few people are familiar with any of the romanization systems for Cantonese. In Taiwan, Hokkien and other languages are not so established, and were even suppressed for some time. Therefore, it's not so surprising that even fewer people know about writing systems for these.
Most people are able to use those systems, it’s just the demand to learn Hokkien/Min Nan/Taigi is fairly low and thus there’s nothing like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone support for the dialect, or many tutors nor language books for them.
That comparison is a stretch, as Latin and English are both written alphabetically, while classic and the various modern chinese dialects/languages are written logographically.
It's a delightfully complex topic! The headline is a bit misleading, as wikipedia has an entire article on written Hokkien - as you note, it isn't standardized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Hokkien
The comparison between Latin in Europe in the early modern period and literary Chinese in the Sinosphere for much of history is pretty good (and often made). Latin and literary Chinese are very different languages, but had similar roles in society by being the standard written language in a world where everybody spoke different languages (that were heavily influenced by, or even derived from, but different to the written form).
Fair enough, there are similarities. However, alphabetically written languages are the same as their spoken - learn how to pronounce a hundred letter combinations and exceptions, and as long as you know the spoken language you're good. However with latin, pronouncing it wouldn't help with comprehension. With logographically represented languages, the characters have more to do with meaning than with pronunciation. It's part of why Chinese characters were used for completely different spoken languages (Korean, Japanese)
One of the amusing 20th century historical anecdotes which I am constantly pointing out to mainland Chinese is that the lauded literary figure Lu Xun of Shaoxing actually advocated for the replacement of written Chinese with an alphabetic/romanized writing system based on phonetic transposition. China then invented pinyin, which is a relatively well conceived and elegant system, but refused to support the replacement of characters and instead advocated for "simplified" characters (which are approximately as hard as the originals, but provide a convenient cultural gap). While Lu Xun is now taught in all mainland Chinese schools, they conveniently leave out the part where he advocated for leaving characters in the past. His primary argument was the years wasted on rote learning that Chinese students require as a precondition to literacy.
> China then invented pinyin, which is a relatively well conceived and elegant system, but refused to support the replacement of characters and instead advocated for "simplified" characters (which are approximately as hard as the originals, but provide a convenient cultural gap).
This is only because the plan for simplified characters died midway through. There was a second round of simplifications that would have gone even further with talks of full phoneticization if that succeeded. However, the second round of simplification was simply too unpopular.
> While Lu Xun is now taught in all mainland Chinese schools, they conveniently leave out the part where he advocated for leaving characters in the past.
They definitely don't. His arguments and polemics about this are pretty well known in China. There are a variety of secondary and undergraduate courses that cover his collected works, with that specific quote showing up all the time. This is also a hot topic that repeatedly shows up in all sorts of Chinese online forums.
Lu Xun, like the other scholars of his time, was extreme in the other direction. He believed that it was fundamentally impossible for China to advance without a phonetic script and that China was doomed and it was impossible for the Chinese citizenry to achieve literacy. His arguments are generally discarded today because he said things that have been soundly disproved.
It is worth noting that many early 20th century scholars had a fanatical devotion to anything Western. They contorted Chinese to make it as close to Western languages, especially English, as much as possible, adding new pronouns, following Western grammar patterns, etc. Indeed, some early 20th century Chinese articles are quite awkward to read without an English background.
Leaving aside whether characters are "good" or "bad," there is an oft-raised, but mistaken, view that using a phonetic script for Chinese would not change the language. After all it is but a different medium for the same information.
But that's not true. There remains a level of diglossia in modern Mandarin that makes some modern works difficult to decipher when read out loud (yes this is true even if we leave out Classical Chinese). Using a phonetic script to write Chinese would necessarily involve a change to the language, not just its transmission. Whether that's worth it is a separate question, but it is a change.
> This is only because the plan for simplified characters died midway through. There was a second round of simplifications that would have gone even further with talks of full phoneticization if that succeeded.
I was under the impression that most of the debates about moving from Chinese characters to alphabetic writing happened in the pre-PRC period. For example, Lu Xun supported Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] in the 30s. These proposals failed for a variety of reasons. Simplified characters were introduced in the 50s. Pinyin was also introduced in the 50s, but unlike previous latinisations meant to replace the Chinese characters, it was only ever intended as a teaching tool. I think there was still a thought to replace Chinese characters with alphabetic writing at a later stage, but, in practice, it pretty much died in the 40s.
> We believe: Chinese characters inevitably must change. We can use the changes in Chinese characters of the past to prove that in the future, this must follow the global trend of phonetic spelling [this is almost a carbon copy of Mao's words]
This sentiment continued through the second round of simplification. The People's Daily (the usual mouthpiece of the PRC) wrote an article in 1977 (https://www.laoziliao.net/rmrb/1977-12-20-1) in concert with the beginning of the second round of simplification explicitly describing character simplification as setting the stage for phonetic spelling.
> 毛主席指出，汉字的拼音化需要做许多准备工作；在实现拼音化以前，必须简化汉字
> Chairman Mao has stated: the pinyin-ification of Chinese characters requires a great deal of preparation. Before we can achieve pinyin-ficiation, we must first simply characters.
But by that time literacy rates were sufficiently high that there was considerable backlash against the second round of simplification and it was withdrawn, first informally and later formally. Had it succeeded, no doubt a fully phonetic script would've been at least on the table for discussion.
Thanks, that's interesting. Yurou Zhong, in her book Chinese Grammatology, traces the end of the latinisation movement to a precise date in 1958 when Zhou Enlai gave a speech "当前文字改革的任务" ("The Current Tasks of the Script Reform"), where he announced the current tasks are to simplify characters, promote putonghua and issue and implement a pinyin plan, conspicuously not including further alphabetisation.
In general it is true that the central government agreed that in the interim pinyin was not to replace characters. However, they explicitly made clear that this was a plan only for the initial task at hand, and not any final conclusion about the future of a phonetic script. The sentences preceding my quote from the committee head make this clear:
> As for the question of the future of Chinese characters: will they never change or will they change? Will the change be restricted to the scope of their current form, or will they be replaced by a phonetic script? Will they be replaced by a phonetic script based on Latin characters, or will they be replaced by another form of phonetic script? For now, we will not rush to any conclusions on this topic. We believe: Chinese characters inevitably must change. We can use the changes in Chinese characters of the past to prove that in the future, this must follow the global trend of phonetic spelling. Moreover it can be said, the languages and scripts of all the people in the world will one day come together and unify as one. But these are not within the scope of our current reform tasks and as such today we have no need to discuss them further.
The committee head's pronouncement was in fact essentially paraphrasing and nearly copying large parts of Zhou Enlai's speech. So I would not characterize his speech as closing the door on a phonetic script, only setting it aside for now and leaving the door open for a future date. From Zhou Enlai's speech:
> As for the future of Chinese characters, will they not change across the eons time? Or will they change? Will they trend towards changes based on the shapes of characters themselves? Or will they be replaced by phonetic script? Will they be replaced by a Latin character-based phonetic script, or will they be replaced by some other form of phonetic script? As of now, we are not yet in a rush to make conclusions. But writing must change. The past changes of Chinese character can prove this. In the future, there must be change. Moreover it can be said, the scripts of all the peoples of the world will one day unify as one, indeed language itself will gradually unify. Humanity's language and script development's ultimate trend is to gradually become closer. In the end there may not be much of any difference [among different languages].
And as we can see that rhetoric about a fully fledged phonetic script would indeed come back once the initial reform plans were finished.
Only with the failure of the second wave of simplification does it seem that future plans for a phonetic script finally disappeared from the conversation.
OK, {{citation-needed}}. FWIW, my source is two decades talking to locals. I am yet to meet anyone aware of these aspects of his position save academics, therefore I am genuinely interested in why you claim this is "definitely" false.
Dunno how you've been phrasing it to people. Maybe most of the people you've been talking too didn't do the literature track in school (China splits tracks very early on)? Most people I know know about it (or at least that there were a variety of 20th century Chinese intellectuals interested in doing away with Chinese characters). Also people forget things they learned in school.
But as for sources...
It shows up on high school tests. E.g. a 2022 high school test from Dalian https://www.51jiaoxi.com/doc-13250120.html (there's a paywall but it's client-side you can remove it with your browser's DOM inspection tools)
> "The literature revolution championed by Hu Shih in reality was a laxative. Yet Chen Duxiu, Qian Xuantong, Lu Xun and others thought it was still not extreme enough. As a result, "Get rid of chinese characters," "Throw thread-bound books [the usual book binding for classical texts] into the toilet," "Don't read Chinese books," and other shocking sayings came out one after the other, and even now there are people who applaud such sayings." This comment points out that the New Culture Movement ([a series of multiple choice answers follows])
Japanese tried the same thing - dropping kanji[0] and kana[1] entirely in favor of romaji[2]. It failed primarily for the same reason that English spelling reform fails, which is that we the horrifically mangled and confusing orthography to distinguish words spelled the same way.
[0] Characters derived from Chinese. Each character has both an embedded meaning and one or more readings. They look like this: 漢字
[1] Characters that spell out whole syllables. The glyphs are typographically derived from kanji, but very simplified and without meanings. Due to medieval Japanese gender politics, there are two of them. They look like this: ひらがな and カタカナ.
Japan is the only culture I know of with three or four concurrent systems in use. China could be said to have two. Taiwan could be said to have three, if you could bopomofo.
Japanese could get rid of either Hiragana or Katakana if they really wanted, since both of them are fully functional syllabaries. But in Taiwan, the choice between Bopomofo, Pinyin, and their local variant of Pinyin has political significance because it is taken to be reflective of their stance to the Mainland.
I had the privilege of taking a 10-week course on Hokkien when I lived in Taiwan, and while it is true that Hokkien is unwritten, it is also true that there are some classic poems that are really only intelligible when read in Hokkien. The evolution of Hokkien and how it relates to classic Chinese is utterly fascinating to me. I feel like my understanding of Chinese as a whole became a lot deeper after learning Hokkien.
People say that Hokkien is a dying / dead language, but the way I see it is that it won't die out completely in my lifetime so it's still worth learning.
He did not lie about the legs. He said they were coming soon. No different than any other marketing video about a sill-in-development, upcoming feature.
Is this an area where linguistics and the IPA [1] can help? You could translate the spoken language into IPA, and then write a model which translates the IPA into English. Or does the IPA not actually capture all of Hokkien's nuance?
Yes! Also innovation. There are many instances of certain languages recognising a concept for which there is no direct translation in other languages.
The spread of concepts across languages has provided meaningful benefit over thousands of years.
People who are multi-lingual also speak of how after immersing in one language or another they start to dream and think in a new language and this adjusts their thought patterns.
The affect of our dominate language on us is not neutral and different languages bring different benefits and framing.
As a person who grew up having Hokkien as my first language, I've feared that Hokkien might go extinct over time. Having a formal English and Mandarin Chinese education had pretty much started to erase my Hokkien knowledge. I'm glad that AI technologies can be used to preserve this language.