Language reform and script reform

Language Log 2025-12-16

Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there were countless Chinese intellectuals and common citizens who perceived that their nation was in such desperate straits that something drastic had to be done or it would collapse altogether. Many of these concerned citizens focused on the archaic script as unsuited for the purposes of modern science. Others concentrated on the "unsayable" classical / literary language (wényán 文言) as primarily responsible for China's backwardness, which resulted in Japan's defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). There were scores upon scores of reformers, the best minds of the country, who put forward a broad variety of proposals for language and script reform.

A Chinese colleague who is writing a dissertation about the eminent scholar and philosopher Hu Shih's (1891-1962) agenda for language reform recently wrote as follows:

John DeFrancis argued that Hu Shih made a major mistake by comparing his idea of vernacular Chinese (baihua) to Dante’s use of Italian. He believed Hu misunderstood the nature of the comparison, claiming that promoting baihua as similar to Italian was misleading. DeFrancis thought that Hu’s suggestion to follow the style of Ming dynasty novels, like Water Margin, was like telling modern writers to abandon Arthurian English and write in the style of Shakespeare. He also said that comparing Italian to Chinese vernacular writing was flawed—the proper comparison should be Italian written in an alphabetic script versus Chinese also written in an alphabetic script.

I chimed in:

The problem is that Hu Shih and his Chinese colleagues who were language reformers had to deal both with changing from Classical Chinese to Vernacular Chinese and from characters to a phonetic script. They had two tasks, and I think they felt that changing the language was a prerequisite for changing the script.

To which, J. Marshall Unger replied:

Well, Dante, Bocaccio, and Petrarca wrote in both the Tuscan Italian of their day and in Latin. They chose the language for a particular work depending on their intended readerships. A recent article on Bocaccio in the New York Review about why his Decameron argued that if the readership was to include or be primarily "the ladies," Italian was chosen because Latin was for scholarly stuff, presumed to belong to the domain of males. And some people knew Latin well enough to speak it if necessary: the Hungarian Diet used Latin as its official language up to 1844, with German briefly imposed 1784–1790; Magyar became the official language of the Diet in 1844, and German was re-imposed only from 1849 to 1860. The proific Gauss wrote his first paper in German in 1804, but also produced papers in Latin as late as 1841.

When Italy was unified in the 19th century, it took only a few years for the government to decide that the Tuscan Italian of Dante should be the standard national language and the language taught in schools. Of course, dialects (some would call them distinct languages) have flourished on the peninsula notwithstanding the official policy. I bring this up not only because it shows that a major political change was needed to make Dante's language a national standard but also to contrast Italy with Japan, which also went through a major political change (the Meiji Restoration) at roughly the same time: in Japan, the Ministry of Education dawdled until 1902: it couldn't decide whether to choose the high-prestige kamigata speech of the Kyōto region or the much widely distributed variety of Edo Japanese that generations of samurai from all over Japan had picked up during the many decades of required sojourns in Edo. In the end, the fact that higher-class mean all over the country had some knowledge of the language used in the old mansions of the warlords in Edo won out over traditional prestige.

I am no Chinese expert, but I would imagine that, although there were classics of non-wenyan literature circulating for centuries, what was 'vernacular" in the Ming must have been rather different from what is now considered baihua. To this, add the differences among Sinitic languages, which are surely at least as great as the difference between, say, Venetian and Sicilian or between Kagoshima and Ōsaka. (And of course, there were non-Sinitic languages, though I get the impression few Chinese were any more concerned about them than the Japanese were concerned about Ainu-itak.) At any rate, I think DeFrancis was right: centuries of Italian history were a poor basis for thinking about policy changes in China to be implemented in a matter of a few years.

Which will it be — language or script? You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Selected readings

"Hu Shih and Chinese language reform" (2/4/17) — must read for what he says about language and script reform
"How the Chinese Language Got Modernized: Faced with technological and political upheaval, reformers decided that Chinese would need to change in order to survive." By Ian Buruma, New Yorker (January 10, 2022).

[Thanks to Jing Hu]