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The Languages of China and the Chinese Language

1. THE LANGUAGES OF CHINA

[Title slide] My title might seem contradictory or at least paradoxical: The “languages” of China—plural—and the Chinese “language”—singular. [Outline for today and next week]

--[China/USA slide] Here’s a slide I showed the first week, but some of you missed it. It’s good to bear in mind the relative size of China.

--The international borders that China claims today were established in 1795, during the Qing Dynasty. After a series of successful wars against nations on its periphery, China was larger than it had ever been. The Chinese heartland is the home of the Han people, the vast majority within China. [population density map] When we refer to “the Chinese people” we usually mean the Han people. But within China’s international boundaries are 55 minorities, including Tibetans, Mongolians, Kazakhs, Uighurs, Koreans, Manchus, and many other groups who are different from each other and from the Han. They live in China and are Chinese citizens, but they are not the heirs of Chinese civilization, literature, history, or tradition. The minorities vary greatly in number: from as few as 1,000 to as many as 15 million; they also vary in their degree of assimilation to Han culture. Some of the largest minorities are proudly independent and even have their own writing system. You know what Chinese characters look like. By contrast, here is Tibetan [Tibetan]; here is a public pronouncement in Uighur [Uighur]; you will see that Uighur resembles Arabic script; and finally, here is the Manchu script [Manchu].

--All of the minorities together make up roughly 70 million people, a large number but still a small fraction of China’s 1.3 billion. However, the lands occupied by the minorities make up more than half of the nation’s total land area [China’s Borders slide]. Moreover, these regions make up the strategically important areas that lie along the borders China shares with Russia, India, Vietnam, and the “Stans” that used to be part of Soviet Central Asia, with their Muslim majorities.

--It is extremely important to the CCP to project the image of a multi-ethnic China in which the national minorities are happily integrated. One encounters endless propaganda celebrating colorful native costumes and dancing, for example. But it

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goes beyond such window dressing. The minorities are accorded a kind of affirmative action. They are exempt from the one-child policy (I talked once with a Tibetan guy who had 5 children); there are several minority universities with relaxed entrance exams; and so forth. So any signs of ethnic agitation are treated with great seriousness and are usually harshly repressed. As you probably know, open rebellion has been seen several times in both Tibet and Xinjiang. Within the last few weeks several Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns, and even a few laymen, have burned themselves alive in protest. Besides granting special privileges to buy them off, the government employs three other main tactics: increased funds for social and economic development, as the minority regions tend to be poor; a heavy security presence in ethnic regions; and increased Han migration to those areas, so as to dilute the volatile solution. We can talk further about all these matters during the question period, if you’d like.

--If we look at a map of the languages of China, we see how complex the picture is. Suffice it to say that the languages of north China share many features, but are almost wholly unrelated to the languages of the south [map of Chinese languages]. Mongolian, Manchu, Korean, and Japanese are related. The linguistic situation in South China is if anything more complicated. Many languages cross international borders, between China and Burma (or Myanmar), China and Thailand, China and Vietnam. [map of South China dialects].

--All right, so much for the non-Chinese languages. Let’s turn to Chinese itself.

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2. THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

--No language is completely uniform, and even today a Roman has trouble understanding a Sicilian. Few Americans understand Cockney. People who “speak the same language” may nevertheless be unable to speak to each other. So, dialects are common. What makes the Chinese language different is the number and complexity of such dialects. In fact the interconnections between its dialects are at least as complicated as those which connect a family of languages. Romance languages, such as French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, are linked to each other about as closely as the Chinese dialects are [map of Romance languages].

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--French, for example, is not sharply separated from Italian, but rather changes into its sister language gradually from village to village across the French-Italian border. Beijing Mandarin is linked to Shanghainese with about the same degree of complexity. So, from a linguistic point of view, the Chinese “dialects” could be considered different languages, just as French and Italian are. [2 maps of Chinese dialects; then map of South China dialects] Here it’s well to remember both the relative size and population of China and all of Europe [map of population equivalents]. For example, this useful map shows us that the populations of France and Hunan province are about the same; Italy and Hubei province; Germany and Sichuan province; and the Philippines and Guangdong province.

-- So, from a linguistic point of view, the Chinese “dialects” could be considered different languages, just as French and Italian are. But the Chinese themselves would insist that they have only one language—Chinese. In China the practical demands of communication mean that many people must learn different dialects, but these are never studied as foreign languages, the way a Frenchman might study Spanish. Educated Chinese everywhere learn to speak enough Mandarin to get by, but they learn it by just picking up pronunciations different from one’s own dialect. Of course misunderstandings, often humorous, are common; and everybody can tell such stories on themselves. But the bottom line is this: the Han Chinese think of themselves as one people, with a common cultural heritage of some 5000 years. They feel themselves to be part of the same language community in ways that the Romance peoples, with their separate national histories, could never do.

--In China the speakers of all dialects look toward a common model. Ultimately, this is the written language.

--After the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, many of China’s new leaders, Sun Yat Sen for example, wanted to create a free and independent nation. [Sun Yat Sen] To make China a unified new nation, one of the first orders of the day was to give China a national language. Of course China had a linguistic standard, but it applied only to the written, classical Chinese that had existed for over 2000 years. This was the language of ancient poetry and Confucian philosophy, but not the modern vernacular. Every educated person had to write in the style of this rather artificial language. Over the centuries the pronunciations in each part of the country had changed. Reading a classic Tang Dynasty poem in Beijing would yield

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a sound incomprehensible to someone from Guangzhou, who was reading the very same poem.

--So it was the spoken language that somehow had to be unified. And no one had given any thought to how to do this. Of course Mandarin had been the language of government for several hundred years, and it had the greatest number of speakers. But Mandarin did not have the most prestige in all eyes. Cantonese were proud of their dialect, for it had preserved certain traditional linguistic features that had been lost in Mandarin. Finally, after much wrangling, including at least one fist fight in the legislature, in 1932 a new Pronunciation Dictionary was published. It enshrined the variety of Mandarin spoken in Beijing as the national standard.

--Having a national standard did not mean that dialects have disappeared. In the linguistically complex region of South China, Mandarin added another layer of language. All government business everywhere is conducted in Mandarin. TV and radio broadcast in Mandarin. Educational and cultural institutions, both under the Nationalist government and later under the Communists, used Mandarin. Classes were taught in Mandarin, although hundreds of thousands of teachers had to undergo crash courses in Mandarin pronunciation. I remember passing by a middle school in Wuhan and seeing in big red words on the wall: Please speak Putonghua! (Mandarin). In other words, don’t use your local Wuhan dialect. In practice, for schoolchildren, in school means Mandarin; everywhere else means the local dialect, including of course at home. As one result, it is today rather easy for someone speaking only Mandarin to function in a city like Guangzhou (Canton). Enough people speak enough Mandarin—even local farmers selling melons or tea eggs on the street.

--Here’s another interesting fact. Among Chinese people, there remains a pervasive and subtle discrimination based on speech. If a Chinese from elsewhere tries to function in Shanghai without speaking Shanghainese, he will likely complain of Shanghai snobbery. If she is my student from Fujian province, who comes to graduate school in Guangzhou—a Cantonese speaking city—locals will be less helpful in giving directions and will even laugh at her bizarre pronunciation. [earlier slide of South China dialects] She speaks Mandarin but with a Min accent. Moreover, it did not help that this girl had a mild case of cross-eyes.

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--I myself have spent enough time in China that I’ve developed some likes and dislikes. I find especially pleasing the Mandarin spoken by people north of Beijing; but I don’t care much for the sound of Cantonese. I do love their food, however.

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--Now let’s examine pronunciation in the Mandarin dialect. The sounds of Mandarin are represented in written form by the pinyin system of Romanization, developed by the Chinese in the 1950’s and taught to all children. Pinyin means “phonetic alphabet” or simply “spelling.” The pinyin system replaced various older systems of Romanization, and that accounts for differences like these: [Wade-Giles and pinyin]

--Beijing Mandarin has 405 basic monosyllables. Tones added to these monosyllables produce approximately 1200 syllabic distinctions. For a language this is a very small number of syllables. English has many times this number. Here’s a Table of Speech Sounds. [Table] Sorry for the fuzziness. There are 21 initial consonants followed by 35 finals.

--Mandarin has 4 tones, and every stressed syllable is pronounced with the distinctive melody of one of these tones [slide 4 tones demonstrated].

--Here are some words with the same syllable but different tones [slide]. As you can see, you must catch the tones when listening, and you must produce them when speaking. Change the tone, change the meaning. For native speakers of English, the tones present a real challenge. Sometimes you can pronounce each syllable in the sentence perfectly and get most of the tones right, but if you miss a tone, your listener might scratch his head. As you’ve no doubt found, speakers of every language differ in their sympathetic imagination: many people really try to understand you, but some just shut down if you make a mistake. One of my tricks when speaking Chinese is to speak really fast, so as to create a kind of Gestalt—a large enough pattern—so that local errors don’t matter as much. Have any of you ever done that in another language?!

--But to return to tonality. It isn’t that English is not “a tonal language”—we have tonality--but we don’t attach a tone to each syllable which determines its meaning.

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To complicate things a bit further, in Chinese not every syllable is stressed, and if it’s not stressed, it doesn’t have much of a tone. Here are some examples: [slide]

--Three more quick points about the tones. First, like all languages, Chinese has intonation, and this affects the phonetic realization of tones—up to a point. A 4th tone at the end of a sentence with a question intonation will fall less than one at the end of a declarative sentence, for example. The second point is a bit scary—some important dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese, have not 4 tones but 7, and a few dialects have 8 or more... One reason I never learned much Cantonese. The third point about tones: What do you think happens when a Chinese song is sung? See a problem? If tone determines meaning, how can someone sing meaningfully? Fortunately, context makes the meaning of songs pretty obvious [audio clip].

--This light-hearted point leads me to an important point. I told you that Mandarin has only about 1200 syllabic distinctions. This means that homophones are much more common in Chinese than in English. Of course, we have homophones: what do I mean by “write” [right, rite, etc.]. Unless you know the context you can’t be sure. Here’s a funny example: “I saw her duck.” Duck. Are we on a farm or are we seeing a snowball fight? Context tells us. Well, because of the vast number of homophones, Chinese people must be highly sensitive to context. And the ability to see something embedded in its context is a key feature of Chinese culture. It is hard to overestimate its importance. Understanding a love song is easy for them.

--You might wonder if the sounds of Chinese are difficult to master. As usual, the tough sounds in the new language are those your native language doesn’t have. For example, Chinese has no “v” so students must consciously work on that. I had trouble with some sounds in Chinese.

--Now I really don’t want to wander into the thicket of Chinese grammar and syntax. Maybe just a few points. The primary syntactic division of a Chinese sentence is between the topic and the rest of the sentence. The topic is a word or phrase that sets the stage for the statement or question to follow. It is what the sentence is about. Not all sentences have topics, but if it has one, it is always said first; here are two examples: [topical structure sentences]

--This is a good place to pause for questions.

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--Soon after I first went to China to live, in 1985, I discovered how fascinating Chinese people’s names can be.

--“Tell me about your name,” I asked my student. “Did your parents together choose it?”

--And Wang Zan Mei replied, “No, my parents didn’t choose my name; my grandfather did.”

--“Your grandfather! Why him?” I asked.

--“Because he had more time,” she said.

Zan Mei came from a traditional family of Zhejiang province, and her name was chosen according to traditional criteria. Her grandfather lavished his time and attention on his granddaughter’s name; and it took her about half an hour to explain these criteria, their hierarchy, and how they were used. I can’t remember very many of the details after all these years, but let’s consider a few. Here is her name, in characters and in pinyin: [slide]

Among other things, she should have a girl’s name, and it is common to include an indication of the birth season. The reference to plum flowers means she was born in the winter, since the plum is the very earliest tree to bloom, and much beloved for that reason. Certain tone patterns sound pleasing; here the 2-4-2 is more appealing than, say, a pattern of 4-4-4, which would sound harsh and abrupt. I remember her telling me that one of the most important criteria was the number of strokes when writing the name. One needs precisely 31 strokes to write these three characters, apparently a lucky number.

[slide of plum flowers]

A Chinese name will almost always have either two or three characters: a surname, and a given name of one or two characters. Here’s something interesting: about 40% of China’s 1.3 billion people has one of the following 10 surnames: Zhang; Wang; Li; Zhao; Chen; Yang; Wu; Liu; Huang; and Zhou. Among these, Li, Wang, and Zhang are the most common, used by 250 million people.

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A Chinese saying goes, “The way of the pine is not the way of the willow.” As in most languages, the given name indicates gender in most cases, though some names are neutral in gender. Some common given names: [slide]

Now, tell me: do any of you know the three most popular names for baby boys in America in 2011? {Aiden Jackson Mason} And the three girl’s names? {Sophia Emma Isabella} Explaining the rise and fall of given names would not be easy, would it? In China an equally mysterious rise and fall occurs, but with one difference: for much of their history under communism, Chinese people have experienced wave after wave of “patriotic” names, although parents pretty much stopped choosing political names during the 1990’s. In fact a child’s name choice is one of many indicators of growing personal freedom in China. Daily life has been increasingly freed from the heavy hand of the Communist Party. In 1985 nearly all university students were assigned jobs upon graduation. They had no choice in the matter. Now, they must find a job themselves, by no means an easy thing to do. But let’s return to the patriotic names of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s. Untold millions of girls born in the 1950’s and 1960’s bear the given name “Hong2” – Red. And millions of boys were named things like Wei4 Dong4, which means “defend Mao Zedong.” I had a female English teacher colleague in Wuhan, and my friend said, “when you meet this colleague, don’t ask what her name means.” What’s her name, I asked my friend. “You see, she was born during the Korean War, and her given name is Kang4 Mei3—Resist America”; he sighed, “It was a popular slogan then, but her name is just embarrassing now.” During the late 50’s there was a big push to increase steel production in China. So another friend’s name is Wu4 Gang1 –Wu the family name, Gang meaning “steel.” And maybe most bizarre example, back in Wuhan I had another colleague, a young man, whose given name was You2 Yong3 – “swimming.” He had been born in the year that Mao Zedong demonstrated his vigor by swimming across the Yangtze River right there in Wuhan!

But beyond the interesting old political names, there is endless charm and interest in people’s names. I asked my student Huang2 Han2 Xiao4 if she liked her name. She replied, “Yes, my name is unusual and easy for people to remember.” Her given name Han2 Xiao4 means something like “potential smile” – the way a face looks just before a smile appears.

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Some names are sad. My female student was one of eight sisters in a family of nine—the ninth, finally, was a boy, and his mother was the dad’s mistress, taken deliberately for that reason. And my student had a younger sister—one of the eight--whose given name means “hoping for a boy.” That’s what her name means!

One young man was named “Meng4 Hong2” which means “dream of a rainbow.” I was surprised—it sounded feminine, so I asked him. “My mother, when she was pregnant, had a vivid dream. And it seemed like good fortune to her.”

One night I was on a chilly sidewalk waiting for a bus, and when the mist began falling, I shared my umbrella with a delicate and lovely 12 year old girl standing next to me. We just stood waiting for a while and finally I asked, “What’s your name?” She replied, “Li2 Xiao3 Yu3.” Xiao3 Yu3 means light rain, or mist, or literally, small rain.

{ONLY IF APPROPRIATE; ASK JIA LI BO ABOUT HER NAME}

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3. Chinese Writing

--Westerners have long been fascinated with written Chinese characters, but I’d first like to turn things around and consider Chinese fascination with alphabets. We must begin in the Ming Dynasty—1368-1644—for during this period China was beyond doubt the largest, richest, most powerful, and most technically advanced country in the world. But during these years a mysterious decline set in, a stagnation that the Chinese have spent hundreds of years trying to understand. Whatever the reasons, Western Europe advanced, and through its development of modern science and capitalism and industrialization, through its imperial conquests around the world, it overtook China. The Chinese had grown complacent and inward-looking, still arrogantly assuming that they were the center of the world. The nadir was reached in the 19th century, during the Qing Dynasty. China was occupied by most of the world’s imperial powers, and parts of its territory were nibbled away; the Qing court was forced to sign a series of humiliating treaties with the British in the wake of the Opium Wars, which began in the 1840’s; and China was riven by internal revolts and disorder.

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--In their struggle to understand how China had fallen so far behind, Chinese intellectuals identified a number of national weaknesses and foreign strengths: the foreigners had created advanced industrial societies based on scientific knowledge; they had built modern universities and taught their children to read; they had developed democratic systems of government; Western women were able to make important contributions, while Chinese women hobbled around on bound feet. For many centuries, China’s relative geographical isolation—with the Pacific Ocean to the east and high mountains and deserts to the west—this isolation may have protected China, but it also cut China off from fruitful intercourse with the world.

--And one more difference was widely discussed: Western countries, beginning long ago with Phoenician merchants, had invented alphabetic writing; and after that all Western languages were alphabetic. Chinese intellectuals saw the history of writing as moving from pictorial systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics—and all early writing was pictorial in nature--towards ever more abstract, non-pictorial forms. Alphabets, by linking abstract letters to abstract sounds, fostered abstract thought, such as Greek philosophy. China was stuck with a pre-alphabetic writing system that had originally been pictographic. Therefore, these Chinese nationalists came to regard the alphabet as modern, attractive, sophisticated, mysterious, and as a source of national power. Chinese civilization had been held back by its writing system, they thought; it must take the last step, by abandoning characters and adopting an alphabet.

--This attitude was especially strong during the two “revolutionary” decades of the 20th century—the 1920’s and the 1950’s. But by the end of the 1950’s, the Communist government in China faced so many other challenges—it was the time of the calamitous “Great Leap Forward”—that something as drastic and destabilizing as abandoning written characters was postponed indefinitely. Occasionally one still hears the view that China should adopt an alphabet, but not often. Let’s now talk about the present.

--If you think about the differences between an alphabet and characters, a question might occur to you: How does someone use an ordinary alphabetic computer keyboard to write in Chinese?

In China most computer users type out their Chinese using the pinyin alphabet keys on a QWERTY keyboard. To generate a character, you type out

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its sound according to the pinyin spelling system. [slide] The computer automatically converts the Pinyin spelling to the correct Chinese characters on the screen.Or at least it's supposed to. You can narrow down the choices by typing in a digit to indicate which of the four tones it is. If the computer still doesn't have enough information to pick a character, you'll have to choose from a pop-up list of possibilities.The best Pinyin input methods can guess what you mean to say according to the context and by suggesting the most commonly used characters first. In this way they function a bit like the text-editing software on most cell phones.

Another quite different method is to use a bilingual keyboard, which enables one to construct characters stroke by stroke [slide].

--But let’s now go back to the beginning. Judeo-Christian teaching has it that God created human speech: “In the beginning was the Word.” In Chinese culture, however, the origin of speech is never accounted for. To the Chinese, the creation of language means the creation of Chinese characters; language is writing. Credit for this invention is given to Cang1 Jie2, a half-god, half-human figure from some 4000 years ago. [Cang Jie slide] The ancient Chinese believed that Heaven had secret codes, which were revealed through natural phenomena. Only those with divine powers could decode such things. Cang Jie was able to interpret natural signs and to transcribe the shapes of natural objects (mountains, rivers, animal footprints, shadows of trees and plants) into writing. The legend goes that when Cang Jie created written symbols, the spirits howled in agony as the secrets of Heaven were revealed. Since then all Chinese have shared an awe for written language. Shrines to Cang Jie can still be found, and memorial services are still held.

--Here’s an interesting cultural difference between East and West [slide] : our word “civilization” comes from the Latin civilis, meaning civil, related to the Latin civis, meaning citizen, and civitas, meaning city or city-state. The corresponding Chinese word for civilization is “wenhua” which means “the transforming power of writing.” I’m not sure if this contrast proves anything, but it is highly suggestive; and it will become relevant again when we study Chinese gardens.

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--Chinese characters have been in continuous use throughout China’s history, and in such a vast country with so many dialects, the written language has been a powerful force for cultural unity. The characters may be pronounced differently, but they bear the same meaning everywhere in China. With these characters all of China’s classic literature and philosophy were written. It’s no accident that the Chinese invented movable type for printing around the year 1041.

--When you live in China you are surrounded by Chinese characters. Early in the morning, near the old people doing tai ji in the park, you might see another kind of physical exercise: ground calligraphy [ground writing] … Here’s the place where I bought steamed buns for lunch [baozi slide; then teahouse] and here’s a teahouse with a poetic name. How wonderful Chinese characters look in neon! [2 slides] How many different styles there are! Even today ordinary Chinese will surround their front door with lucky inscriptions. [slide]

--Every institution of any significance, public or private, will have its name emblazoned in calligraphy: [2 university slides] and even a modest place may try to dress itself up by commissioning a grand entrance sign [grand sign slide]. Of course the most prestigious locations will have impressive characters: [Forbidden City slide] Here on the wall of The Forbidden City there is no question of an artistic calligrapher expressing his individuality; no, this is meant to say China Official. The slogan to the right of Chairman Mao may be translated, “Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World!” For a less serious occasion, lots of free style writing can be used: [Bruce Lee poster].

--It’s common to see signs using both Chinese characters and English [supermarket slide]. Here’s a warning sign in a park: [do not stampede]. This sign uses English, or I should say “Engrish”, to seem modern and chic: [store sign] Here’s another, just a couple of doors away: [Angel slide]

--Every so often you come upon some deeply interesting signs. One night I was in an unfamiliar part of the city, walking past the wall surrounding a large hospital. On the wall were a whole series of information or propaganda posters: [1 poster] How would you analyze this poster? …My answer: you should adopt a modern attitude and value a daughter as much as a son. [1 poster] In this next poster the Chinese government is offering passersby two role models: a pair of happy

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oldsters, the man in blue jeans, out for a dance with his wife. The English sentence here reads, “Agedness also enjoy sexual life.” And after the dance, when they get back to the privacy of their apartment… The interesting thing is the apparent need for such a poster. Clearly, lots of seniors are presumed to feel, “Oh, we’re too old for that!” They may need a bit of encouragement. Readers are even offered a list of the benefits of sex in one’s later years.

--Interesting also is how propaganda has changed over the years. This poster is inconceivable a generation ago. Here’s a billboard I passed in 1986 [Lei Feng poster] This was part of what was probably the longest-running campaign since the Revolution: the “Learn from Lei Feng” movement. Lei Feng was a semi-legendary truck driver in the army whose Christ-like selflessness made him unique. Most propaganda, as here, is touchingly naïve, but I don’t think I like what has replaced it either: modern advertising [China Mobile ad]. But I digress.

--Let’s return to our investigation of Chinese writing. We know that in Shakespeare’s day, any educated man was expected to be able to write a passable sonnet. In old China an educated man’s poem should be written in graceful and elegant characters! An official from the emperor’s court in Beijing, sent to a remote area for an inspection, would of course stay at many a government inn along the way. On the whitewashed wall he might write a poem to record his mood, and he would read the poems written by earlier officials; perhaps his poem would comment on an earlier one: a kind of elegant graffiti. Actually a good many of the Chinese emperors themselves excelled in calligraphy. Emperor Hui1 Zong1 (ruled 1082-1135), during the Song Dynasty, created a style he called Slender Gold [slide].

The calligraphy tradition endures. Here is Premier Jiang Zemin presenting his calligraphy to a society [slide]; and here is a famous poem by Chairman Mao [slide]. To me that looks like the writing of a dangerously romantic soul, as indeed he proved to be.

--Now let’s look at some Chinese characters, to see how they’re structured.

--There are more than 60,000 characters in existence, and they have been classified in various ways. Many early written signs originated from sketches of objects: these pictographs physically resembled the objects they represented [slide]. Such

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characters today represent no more than 1-2% of the total. An indicative is a character made by adding strokes to an already existing character in order to indicate the new character’s meaning [2 slides of indicatives]. Semantic compound characters are formed by combining two or more components that together contribute to the meaning of the new character [“bright” slide then “trust” slide]. A few moments thought should make it clear that none of the first three character types—the pictographs, the indicatives, and the semantic compounds—can provide enough characters in the long run. Moreover, abstract ideas and grammatical terms such as prepositions and conjunctions were impossible to represent with iconic signs. The solution was a new type of character. And this next part is somewhat complex… But today over 90% of Chinese characters are classified as “semantic-phonetic compounds.” As this name suggests, semantic-phonetic compounds are a hybrid constituted by combining a meaning element and a sound element. Let’s look at an example. Here is the character “host”, pronounced “zhu3”. [slide] It can function quite all right alone. However, in modern Chinese this character is used as a phonetic element in more than 10 semantic-phonetic compounds, five of which are illustrated in this table. The five characters in the first column are pronounced in exactly the same way, “zhu4”, although they are different in meaning. They share the phonetic element “zhu3”, which is the right-hand side of the characters. The signs on the left are the semantic elements, which offer some clue to the meaning of the characters. The semantic elements, for example “person” or “water”, are pictographs commonly known as “radicals.” Their function is to hint at the meaning of the characters in which they appear. At the same time, they also group semantically related elements into classes. So in theory all the characters with the “person” radical should have something to do with people. There are 214 radicals in the language.

--Now I’d like to spend awhile on the aesthetics and stylistics of characters. Every Chinese character is constructed from basic units called “strokes,” which are arranged in a two-dimensional space. They are applied in black ink by a person wielding a goat-hair brush. Ideally he has mixed his own ink, using an ink stick, a small amount of water, and an ink stone for mixing the ink [slide]. The brush, the ink, the ink stone, and the rice paper are known as “the four treasures of the study.”

The strokes, in themselves, bear neither sound nor meaning—they are simply component parts. Over centuries eight major stroke types were recognized [slide].

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The strokes may look simple, but they must be rendered exactly as shown, and this takes concentration and control, as well as a certain freedom. Students learn by endless practice from a young age. They are helped by certain pointers, which emphasize order, sequence, and balance. [3 slides] They must also remember the stroke order for each character: [stroke order slide]

Children always begin by learning the Regular Script, for it is the most straightforward and standardized. Then in middle school they learn the Running style, and finally the Cursive style. Let’s look briefly at each of those styles [comparison of 3 slide].

--The Regular Script reached its perfection during the Tang Dynasty, China’s Golden Age of Culture (618-907). [Liu Gongquan slide] This slide shows a rubbing of a stone-carved calligraphy. The Regular script is refined and dignified; it is written slowly, with the brush lifted from the paper after each stroke. Characters written in Regular have a precise and clear internal structure. It emphasizes control, not individual freedom. The writer here, Liu Gongquan, was a devout Buddhist. He was once asked, by the emperor, how to write upright characters. Liu replied that it depends on the mind of the writer: when the person sets the purpose of his life upright, he will be able to write upright characters... As this story illustrates, Chinese calligraphy is not thought of as a mere technical skill. The characters must flow directly from the body, and ultimately from the mind and spirit, of the calligrapher.

--In contrast to the Regular script, both the Running and the Cursive are executed by linking strokes, writing faster, and with more fluidity and freedom of expression. The Running and Cursive styles also differ from Regular Script in that no standards exist for their writing; they are not used in official documents. With the Running style, the faster speed creates not only kinetics but also softened corner angles and different linkages between some of the strokes. The strokes have a spontaneity, a grace and rhythm. The Running style is most people’s everyday style of writing.

--Writing quickly with the Running style enables one to combine strokes and simplify characters. Let’s look at some examples: [Run and Reg comparison]. In the first character yi3 (“according to”) the vertical line and uptick of the Regular

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becomes a dot in Running. The third and fourth strokes in Regular are linked as one in Running. The result is a very different looking character. Therefore, certain conventions govern just how the original Regular script character is stylistically varied. Characters in the Running style are written on one breath.

--The most famous calligraphy in Chinese history uses the Running style. In the year 353 Wang Xizhi wrote this Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection [slide]. Wang had invited 42 literary men to the Orchid Pavilion for the Spring Purification Festival. While enjoying their wine, the men played a drinking game. Sitting on both sides of a coursing stream, they waited as small cups of wine were floated downstream. If a cup stopped in front of a man, he must compose a poem. Anyone who failed to write a poem had to drink. Inspired by the abundant wine on this festive occasion, Wang composed his Preface to the collection he intended to gather of the men’s poems. The result was calligraphy of stunning beauty; and although Wang tried afterward to write with the same spontaneous joy, he could never again do so. This piece of calligraphy has influenced Chinese writers for 1700 years.

-- The last of the three main styles, the Cursive style, may be described as the Running Style on steroids: faster, more creative, more emotionally expressive than Running [Crazy Zhang slide]. Its most famous practitioner was doubtless Crazy Zhang, another artist who needed the lubrication of wine to free his genius. With the Cursive style, there’s much more continuity of strokes, as well as greater variation in size, in ink thickness and color. To maintain the energy flow in writing, the artist may write a number of characters before stopping to recharge the brush. [slide] Thus he is apt to begin with his brush heavily loaded with ink, and the first characters will be heavy and dark. Of course the succeeding characters will grow lighter and thinner as the brush dries up. This process of writing introduces yet another kind of rhythm between heavy and light, wet and dry. Since heavy dark characters look closer to the viewer, a three-dimensional space is created.

--Surprisingly, the Cursive Style is very nearly as old as the Regular and Running styles. All three styles have co-existed for nearly 2000 years. Crazy Zhang lived during the Tang Dynasty, China’s “Golden Age.” Professional calligraphers especially love the Cursive Style, as it gives them maximum freedom.

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--Now to conclude our investigation of Chinese calligraphy, we should stand back and briefly consider the art of composition. A typical piece of calligraphy will have three elements, all important: the main text; the inscriptions; and the seal or seals. [Ray Cheng slide] It is not unusual to see a single character as the main text [Dragon scroll]; here is the character “long”, which means “dragon”—a symbol of transformation and auspiciousness. More common would be a proverb, such as this: [Shi Jing Lan Xiang slide]. Equally common are poems or other longer texts. Here is a Buddhist sutra: [slide]. How do the inscriptions function? Typically they offer explanatory texts, often simply the name of the artist, the season of the year the work was done, and a location. If the calligraphy is to be given as a gift, the name of the recipient may be included. In the proverb I showed you a moment ago, the inscription provides an interpretation of the main text, the four characters. This calligraphy was evidently done for Westerners, since no Chinese would need the interpretation. The seals, though small, are vivid, since they are invariably done in red ink, forming a nice contrast with the black and white. The name seal of the artist, usually a small red square, is placed next to his written name. [slide of two seals] If he uses two seals, one should be a white-character seal, called intaglio, and the other a seal in red relief, [relief seal, then intaglio seal]. Some famous pieces of calligraphy have seen many owners, as the number of seals makes clear [slide].

--Calligraphy has been of some importance in the West, but much less so than in China. This is partly true because of calligraphy’s close association with painting in China. To pursue this association would require too much of our time, so I’ll close this lecture on the Chinese language simply by showing you a couple of examples of the painting/calligraphy relationship. The first example is by the early Qing Dynasty poet and painter Shi2 Tao1, who here combines the two arts [slide]. And here is a good example of the bland in Chinese painting. It is by the 14th century painter Ni Zan. Look at the exquisite calligraphy [Ni Zan slide]. In traditional China the calligraphy was esteemed even higher than the other parts of a painting. Contemporary Chinese painting, especially avant-garde work, seems largely to have dispensed with calligraphy. [Bloodline slide] Paintings like this are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars at Western and Hong Kong auction houses. This grim piece might be contrasted with a different kind of satirical painting by Yue Minjun [slide].

--Do you have questions?

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THEN SIMPLIFIED/COMPLEX CHARACTERS