Applied Languages

As the old Chinese saying goes, one word is worth a thousand pieces of gold, but moves to update 44 characters in China’s historic lexicon could cost the nation a whole lot more.

Scholars from home and abroad have reportedly worked for eight long years on revising the way some of the language’s 8,300 standardised characters are written. The proposal to tinker with 44 characters was made public by the Ministry of Education and State Language Commission on 12th August 2009.

Those behind the proposed moves say they have received waves of support for the changes, while those in the publishing industry as well as netizens have overwhelmingly shot down the plan, with many citing the financial implications and potential impact. Suggested revisions include changes to the angles and length of the writing strokes of the 44 characters, which include commonly used words such as cha (tea), chun (lip), sha (kill) and qin (intimate).

So far, there have been no clear reasons given by the ministry or experts who suggested the changes. “According to our studies, 67 percent of respondents favour the proposed revisions of the 44 Chinese characters, while those opposed to the proposals account for only 6 percent,” said Wang Ning, a professor at Beijing Normal University who worked on revising the vocabulary.

She did not reveal how many people had been involved in the study but officials at the Ministry of Education, who invited the public to air their opinions about the proposals via email, letter or fax before next Monday, said the statistic was from the near 1,500 respondents. “We proposed the revision according to the principle of Chinese traditional calligraphy practice,” said Wang, who explained the new standard 44 characters would conform to the typeface for printing during the Song Dynasty (960-1276). “The revision of 44 characters accounts for less than six per every 1,000 characters in the glossary.”

Small changes can have a huge economic impact on the publishing industry, however. “Revising 44 Chinese characters would immediately lead to a total overhaul of dictionaries, textbooks and all other books across the country,” said a spokesman for the State-run Xinhua Bookstore, one of the publishing companies in China responsible for a combined output of around 330 billion yuan ($48.32 billion).

The company has printed, on average, 8 million volumes of the Xinhua Dictionary annually for the past 50 years, he said. If the proposals get the green light from the State Council, all the dictionaries already produced would need to be recalled, retyped, reprinted and rebound. “Imagine how mammoth the costs would be,” he added and estimated that, with one Xinhua Dictionary costing around 10 yuan ($1.4), the impact could run into billions of yuan.

And the effects will not just be confined to the publishing industry. Citizens would have to change their bank accounts and identity cards, which cost 20 yuan for every new application, and companies would have to change their name and signage.

Read more: China Daily

If you thought that English is the language of the 21st century, think again. In Europe, the future could be Latin. “It’s not practical if you have to translate the name of an EU programme into 23 languages, so if you have a Latin word which can be pronounced in all 23 and means something at the same time, it’s practical,” European Commission translator and classical linguist Wolfgang Jenniges said.

In the EU, languages are big political business. Each member state fights fiercely for its national tongue, with EU texts routinely translated into all 23 of the bloc’s official languages. As long as the EU has enough computer memory and printer paper to handle 23 versions of every text, it is a perfect political solution.

But trouble starts when there is only room to use one word from one language – such as when creating an internet domain name. English, the EU’s most widespread language, might seem to have the advantage in such questions. But other member states fear that too much English use would cement it as the EU’s unofficial working tongue, a politically impossible position. “English has become the lingua franca, but we are not allowed to say so,” one EU linguist commented.

The EU’s solution has been to find a politically neutral language in the only place it could realistically look: European history. “The fact that Latin doesn’t belong to any one nation makes things easier,” Jenniges said.

With Latin at the root of many of the technical, scientific, religious and legal terms in Europe, Virgil’s language is perfectly placed to become the EU’s virtual language. “There is a dose of Latin in all 23 EU languages: the dosage varies, but it’s always there,” the linguist pointed out.

In a striking blend of ancient and modern, the EU has therefore adopted Latin titles for some of its top internet addresses. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg has the domain name “curia” – Latin for “court.” The council of EU member states uses the domain name “consilium,” Latin for “council.” Both those names are sub-addresses of the EU’s web domain, “europa” – the Latin name for Europe.

EU projects are also being given Latin names. A recent translation contest was called “juvenes translatores” (“young translators”), while the EU has a “Tempus” (“time”) project for upgrading universities outside the bloc.

Classical names are even coming back into fashion for EU military missions. In recent years, the bloc has run operations named Althea, Artemis, Themis and Concordia – the goddesses of healing, hunting, justice and reconciliation.

The tradition was reinforced in December, when the EU sent a fleet of warships to fight Somali pirates under the codename “Atalanta” – in Greek myth, the only woman to sail on the quest of the Golden Fleece. Those names “transcend modern cultural and historical references of a national nature, as well as linguistic considerations,” an EU official said.

Admittedly, EU-watchers are not likely to have to reach for their Latin dictionaries any time soon. Any decision to extend the use of Latin on a larger scale would be “eminently political,” and would have to be preceded by “the renewal of Latin teaching in schools and universities almost from scratch,” Jenniges pointed out.

But with political sensitivities showing no sign of fading, the EU may well find that the simplest way of avoiding fights between living languages is to look for more and more names in a dead one.

Read more: EarthTimes