Abstract
Chinese government and Chinese people were working out new conceptual framework for practices that departed from the traditional philology of the Chinese dialects. The essay not only discusses the differences between Wenyan and Baihua traces the progress made by modern Chinese, leading to a new type of literature. The discussion sheds light on the ancient Chinese language and the struggle between classical and vernacular literatures and how baihua promoted a sense of immediacy as compared to wenyan. Chinese ‘language’ and its dialects’ are as complex as their long history. One cannot deny the impact of Western’ languages on the Chinese languages and how the events of translation and cross-cultural negotiation led to the creation and development of new words, meanings and modes of representation. The contrast between baihua and wenyan as spoken language was apparent wenyan was the language of the classics and ancient documents while Baihua reflected more of spoken Mandarin.
Introduction
Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, and the Chinese words are a manuscript resulting from over a century of events in cross-cultural negotiations. Because of its contact and collision with others, new words, meanings and modes of representation surfaced. The vernacular baihua was a language known to everyone but not a mother-tongue. There is another language, the Chinese language based on the ancient-venerating tradition. The Chinese language is built up of ‘dialects’, and each dialect is made of different varieties. The term fangyan was still used to refer to the spoken language in the early 1920s. Any dialect could be the dialect of China as long as it was spoken and used within the territory of the Chinese state (Keeler, 2008). The Chinese language underwent melodramatic changes as the battle between new and old raged during the May Fourth period. Baihuawen, the written vernacular Chinese was replacing the classical Chinese and went on to become the voice in modern Chinese literature. The poets of Republican China were fascinated by Prose poetry, the poetic genre of sanwen shi, which was derived from a literal translation of the Western term. Sanwen shi suggested the well-respected genre of classical poetry, shi. The classical poems were more informal and better suited to the baihuawen movement (Admussen, 2009). Radical changes provoked by the Western Impact marked the transition in China from the traditional to a new society and from traditional to new literature. Baihua and fiction dominated the development of the modern Chinese ligature. During the pre-modern times, it was the Wenyan that was looked upon as the most prestigious literary language. In simple words, it was the rise of the “living” language of Baihua in place of the “dead” language, Wenyan. By the middle of the ninetieth century, there were three languages with limited functions and these were different local dialects along with Wenyan and Baihua (Goldman, 1977). Despite the growing importance of Chinese in the world economy, the language ranks seventh among the most popular languages taught. The students of modern China are getting increasingly diverse and often come from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.New Literature of the May Fourth Movement
The use of modern Chinese is recognized as the New Literature of the May Fourth Movement that made its debut in 1920’s period when a new type of literature was created. The New Literature brought a change-gear of a language with a unification of speech and writing. The literary movement changed the path of Chinese language and expanded its expressive capacity. European-styled vernacular written Chinese made its way in writing during the time of the May Fourth Movement. When the early Christian missionaries came to China during the modern times, they were the first ones to write European-styled vernacular Chinese. The missionaries felt the necessity of preaching in dialect spoken language by the rustic Chinese and the early Chinese versions of the translated Bible are mostly in the literary-styled wenyan (Yuan, 2009). The Movement for New Literature started in China in 1916 with the objective of replacing the wenyan literature with a Baihua, a vernacular literature. May Fourth Movement stimulated the wave of nationalism and influenced the political development. The distinctive quality of the baihua language lies in its similarity to the contemporary spoken language. However, over the time, stylistic, lexical and grammar changes have taken place. The wenyan structure was settled but was not able to follow the changes of the spoken language any more (Dluhošová, n.d.).
The classical Chinese is used to refer to the literary language that has bene used for official writing in China for the first decades of the twentieth century and the word used in this language is Wenyan. There is a close relation between Ancient Chinese and Wenyan (Peverelli, 2015). The syntactic units or words and the phonetic unit syllable coincide in the language, and the meaning of words gets represented by their function. The Chinese scholars wanted to study Chinese the way European languages had been studied historically. European and American linguists perceived Chinese to be ideographic, isolating and monosyllabic (Keeler, 2008). Early Western linguists described Chinese to be primarily the classical written form. It was not until the 19th century, Protestant missionaries encouraged the descriptions of local varieties of Chinese.
Wenyan and Baihua China is a huge country and with a long history. It would be a deliberate simplification to state that “Chinese” is the language spoken by the people here. The language covers a span of more than 30 centuries and has changed a lot. When sinologist discusses the Chinese language, they talk about Wenyan and Baihua plus the great number of dialects spoken in different regions (Peverelli, 2015). The primary differences between Wenyan and Baihua are connected to the structure, semantic and grammar. Efforts are being made to simplify the grammar structure so as to encourage higher literacy. Regarding written characters, the simplified version of Chinese has taken the lead in mainland China while the traditional characters are still in use in the Taiwan and Hong Kong (Weigum He and Xiao, 2008). Parallelism in classical poetry is essentially combined with rhythm and the two poetic lines or phrases in an essay that is parallel will always carry the same number of characters. In baihua, however, it is easier to recollect syntactic parallelism without having rhythmic repetition, and this is because of the addition of modern Chinese two-syllable compounds to the classical vocabulary. Shaoxing dialect differs from wenyan or classical characters, for example, there is a difference in third person singular pronoun (Admussen, 2009). Wenyan was a written language used for literature and educational, philosophical, political and scientific writings. Because of its extensive use in essays and poetry, it was considered a prestigious language in premodern China. It formed the core of the orthodox literature about Confucianism (Goldman, 1977). However, it lacked the standard pronunciation according to the various dialects. The northern vernacular language, Baihua was spoken as well as written. The spoken form was popularly known as Mandarin until the early twentieth century. Gradually, it was felt to discard Wenyan in favor of Baihua as the written Baihua was so much easier to learn. Moreover, its adoption would destroy the old-fashioned ways of learning. There would be no need to memorize by rote, and the preserved teachings of the sages could reach out to more people in when written in Baihua. The introduction of Baihua in schools and textbooks would liberate the intellectual potential of children (Goldman, 1977). It was felt that Wenyan will prove to be a lesser vehicle for the progress of the nation and learning can thrive under Baihua. Compared to Wenyan, Baihua was the most serious candidate for a national language as it was available in both written and oral forms. As an emerging national language, it could encourage a unified system of pronunciation. Both literary languages baihua and wenyan use different vocabulary, grammar and stylistic devices and are connected to various social groups. However, the boundary between the two often blurs as the style of one mingles ingot the other. As wanyan was not able to follow changes in the spoken language, it was not able to overcome differences of spoken languages in a different region (Dluhošová, n.d.). While wenyan was used by, educated elites and conveyed official literature, baihua, was the language of markets and the literature. The term “baihua” has three meanings, reciting on the stage, being pure and understand. The goal of literature in baihua was to convey new ideas in the new changing society and reach out to maximum people. Wenyan could not do so because the new social order and esthetics required a new language). The Chinese pronouns in both wenyan and baihua refer primary to persons and sparingly used with animals and inanimate objects. There is no general third person pronoun in modern Chinese as compared to 'other' in Classical Chinese. In the modern Chinese, one finds no distinction made between subject and object in baihua. However, there is distinction between the singular and plural form in baihua, and the plural form is made by adding (men) to the singular form. Three characters have been invented in the modern Chinese to differentiate between genders. Those different characters are “human and female," "human and male" and "non-human." Still, there is no difference in pronunciation (Important Differences between Wenyan and Baihua 2015).
The Chinese character script From the Chinese perspective, the written standards overrule the different oral varieties of the language. Historically, the two major written forms of Chinese’s are “Wenyan” and “Baihua.” Wenyan is the script of the literary classics and the ancient Chinese documents while Baihua is based on the spoken Mandarin. Generally speaking, the Chinese learn to read and write in Baihua, which is based on the spoken Mandarin. Wenyan is studied as an example of the Chinese cultural heritage (Weiyun and Xiao, 2008).
The Chinese character script is considered to be the oldest writing systems in the world. There are more than 56 ethnic groups in the mainland China that are officially recognized, and there are at least 61 indigenous languages. Mandarin, China’s major language is a leading mother tongue in the world (Weiyun He and Xiao, 2008). The ideographic script articulates every word with a single writing unit, whose characters are written in columns from top to bottom. Even today, Chinese without the linguistic knowledge find it hard to explain the concepts between “word” and “character.” Another difficulty is the lack of parts of speech in the language used by the ancient Chinese (Peverelli, 2015).
Regional varieties of Mandarin Survey finds that locals in China speak regions varieties of Mandarin, and the proportion of those speaking standard Mandarin depends on their education. There are seven varieties of the language spoken in China and Mandarin is one of them. The other six are referred to as dialects or “Fangyan” that can be differentiated according to the geographical and linguistic-structural characteristics. It is difficult to mask the large diversity of language used by the Chinese people under “Chinese.” As the dialects serve as the boundary markers, it would be interesting to know if a speaker of Mandarin and dialect speakers has a difference in their attitude towards language matters. Recent surveys reflect that current languages indicate a higher level of multilingualism. The more private and local space means more use of dialects and for the formal and public space, Mandarin was used. The degree of semantic transparency is reflected by the notion of transparent and opaque. Words like lunch time and fire engine are self-explanatory. It is generally believed that words with higher semantic transparency are easily understood by one who has never heard them before. Semantic transparency reflects relationships between a multimorphemic word and its constituent morphenes (Ma, 2014). Chinese lexical research especially makes use of these words and is fruitful in compounds. Chinese compounds are different from the English counterparts in being a headless language as it is neither left nor right centered. Studies reflect that the larger the number of the words in a compound, the higher is the semantic transparency. Based on the corpus of English- Chinese frequently used compounds, it is seen that the word frequencies are correlated to their semantic transparency. Still, there is a difference between the lexical structure distributions in the two languages. The fanqie pronunciation system ‘spells’ characters by reference to other characters and the characters are grouped into rhyme classes based on the second character. Thus, theoretically, if the user of one dialect pronounced a song in a different way than the other dialect, they were directed to pronounce differently. Gradually with time, the rhyme classes split or merged in various ways in different dialects. Traditional Chinese phonology involves systematic analyzes of the categories that are organized in rhyme dictionaries that become increasingly refined (Keeler, 2008).
Newest Textbook series
When science developed in China during the early 20th-century, the Chinese linguists were not interested in creating a uniquely Chinese science and accepted international scientific standards. It was believed that for scientific research, one must use the same methods (Keeler, 2008).Newest Textbook series for the upper-primary school standard in 1907 began with an imperial edict and aligned itself explicitly with the socio-political reforms. The vocabulary was made of words of the modernized lexicon that had developed over the second half of the nineteenth century. The popular textbook combined grammar constructions from wenyan and reflected the rapidly changing lexicon of the early twentieth century. Some educational reform activities led to the development of a book and newspaper reading society. The process of school-based language change incorporated a new vocabulary (Culp, 2008;2009). While there were textbooks that introduced the young people to a new world of knowledge regarding politics, science and culture, the first two generations of Chinese-language textbooks continued to use various wenyan styles. The co-existence of colloquial and professionalized baihua reflects the contradictory motives of Republican-period language. On one hand, while there were efforts to create a modern culture in China, on the other hand, they were inspired to write and speak a language that the common people found easy to learn and understand.
Respondents from Taiwan and Hong Kong learn traditional Chinese during schooling and Respondents form Mainland China learn simplified Chinese characters. When it came to learning other languages, there is not much support for the Chinese children to learn any other language except Chinese, English and Spanish (Weigum He and Xiao, 2008).
Adaptations of the text The gap between Wenyan and the fast developing vernacular language grew, and Wenyan text was not understood when read out aloud. Adaptations of the text were essential to spread the message of Buddhism. When the vernacular literature expanded to cover drama and fiction, Wenyan could not be used to write the drama, as it would be unintelligible on stage. Writers were rejecting Wenyan as they found it too rigid for their purposes (Peverelli, 2015). Baihua was another language that was developing side by side and because of diachronic variation, Baihua of different ages varies. By taking a specific example of a satirical poem called "My Lost Love," the speaker's return gifts violate traditional poetic expectations. Most classical poets would exchange the object whose name fits the stricture called "My Lost Love," shows the motivated use of sanwen shi over other options with baihua structures and in baihua characters. When reading "A Good Story," the poem has more rhyme and the syntactically parallel couplet ends with the contemporary Mandarin syllables "jin" and "bian," In classical poems. It was difficult to use rhyme as Chinese syllables are roughly similar in duration, and the number of syllables between punctuation marks provides a rough estimate of the time to speak the language (Admussen, 2009).. The variety of rhythmic repetition is what differs in "A Good Story" and the traditional Chinese poetry. The single-syllable words of classical language transform into the two character words of baihua, which requires more characters than classical Chinese. The compilers made sure that the students took more interest in literacy, and the importance of issues of language was discussed in meetings. The textbooks introduced new terms such as constitutional monarchy, citizenship, patriotism and occupations as well as chapters on modern material cultures such as railroads, telephones, companies. These new words were transforming the modern Chinese lexicon. The general masses had a high degree of comfort with the late imperial wenyan conventions but were also aware of the new terminology making way ingot the Chinese language. However, most of the mainstream language textbooks by the major publishing companies continued to use wenyan styles even along with the modern lexicon. Two separate generations of activists were engaged in this process (Culp, 2008;2009).
References
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