How the Chinese Language Got Modernized | Hacker News Reader

How the Chinese Language Got Modernized

newyorker.com

28 pointsHooke9 comments

This is a decent read. It's funny to read that the the CCP did a literal translation of German Marxist texts including its propensity for long convoluted sentences --which is the opposite of most Chinese styles --but that dovetailed nicely into the idea of the four olds.

It's also quite interesting that one of the motivations to simplify the writing system wasn't so much to make it easier to learn but rather to make it difficult to read pre-communist texts once you raised literacy --which they did in order to achieve better indoctrination.

> “It's also quite interesting that one of the motivations to simplify the writing system wasn't so much to make it easier to learn but rather to make it difficult to read pre-communist texts.”

This is straight out of Orwell’s “1984” where one of the functions of simplified Newspeak was to make old texts impossible to understand.

Since many of the themes in the book were based on Orwell’s encounters with 1930s Stalinism (e.g. “2+2=5” was an actual Soviet slogan), I wonder if Newspeak was partly based on the Soviet romanization efforts also mentioned in this New Yorker article. (Can’t read old religious texts if you change the alphabet)

It is very strange if they really intended that result. Most well educated Chinese can read traditional characters without much effort, while most lesser educated Chinese probably would have been in the bucket of not very literate people before the revolution.

>"Most well educated Chinese can read traditional..."

That's the key. Proximally illiterate people --who were the target of Mao's campaign, and ninety percent of the pop. back then, would not have had an easy time deciphering pre-communist texts. The well educated who didn't come correct were re-educated or liquidated so they were not the target.

Again, why would the6 care? They were barely literate before the revolution, more literate after but probably still not very interested in old texts from the imperial and republic eras. So they were probably just being dumb if that was their intention. Heck, today most Chinese at the university level learn to read archaic imperial era texts in the original form (making traditional characters look downright modern), they seem to have gone in the opposite direction.

It’s not like traditional Chinese evolved from the Chinese writing before that. Many characters in traditional Chinese are simplified compared to the same characters in say Japanese (consider telephone in Japanese vs Chinese).

It may be that 1984 was inspired in part by real-life events. But to say anything is "straight out of 1984" is absurd on the face of it. 1984 is not a documentary, it is one non-linguist's politically-charged fictional novel. Newspeak never existed.

1984 Was a criticism of the Soviet system and totalitarianism in general, and China was, at least in the first decade, heavily inspired by the USSR and its tactics --so there would be overlap.

When people say something is straight out of 1984, they mean that it's something that'd be perfectly in-character for the totalitarian government from that book to do. I don't see anything absurd about saying that.

Maybe there is some truth here but they haven’t done a good job if that is the goal. The simplified Chinese is not that different from traditional Chinese. We can still read traditional text easily. The biggest difference is the Simplified Chinese is much easier to write (by hand).

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