I like any articles with serious argument on this topic, although I may not agree with them. Let me put it this way in answering your questions: 1.Culture or civilization is merely the collective outcomes of a nation’s intelligent where language plays critical roles. I will say language is the very basic of all since it shapes human being’s thought or intelligent. The nature of thought has been closely connected to the language itself by modern linguistic studies.
2.The differences of all cultures identify themselves from each other. Every culture changes over the history all the time, no exception. It keeps changing and never stopped and there still no two cultures are the same. Even the nations using same languages can identify themselves from each other, such as the United States and Canada. The concerns of losing nation’s identity are groundless. One can paint his nose in blue to identify himself. He should not worry about losing identity if he wipe out the color on nose since there will never be lack of differences to identify him with others.
3.In recent 100 years, China has changed dramatically from its distinguish backward status in Qing Dynasty to now, while we are still pretty much using the same old writing system. It seems that most of Chinese people are desperate for the changes and have put their long efforts to make the changes happen. If culture changes all the way, I don’t know why losing nation's culture ID should be a concern. Probably what we should concern about is rather to change it for better or to keep it for worse.
4.Culture identity of a nation is determined by its people based on their value system that is developed over time. I do not think Chinese people want to go back to where they were in the Qing dynasty. People in Qing dynasty dressed up very differently and that was their distinguish identity at the time in front of whole world. Do we want to dress like that just for keeping our identities? I don’t know others, I am suddenly not.
5.What I have suggested here is to change writing system of the old Chinese characters into alphabetical system, which is referred as the Hanzi reform to be specific. The Chinese language itself will not be changed but enriched. I really do not know why people are scared by that. To change writing systems is not some new. Japanese did it, Korean did it, Vietnamese did it, Indonesian did it, Malayan did it, Hongkong people did it… We will never short of examples for that kind of reform.
Chinese people have used Hanzi for thousands of years and it has been proved to be an awful writing system. It is hard to learn, hard to use, hard to communicate with other peoples, and worst of all, it is way insufficient in developing Chinese language. Chinese people are isolated by Hanzi spiritually and that is why Chinese ways of thinking are so unique.
|