语言与文风2017lithub.com
废除汉语：一个世纪的改革修辞
To Abolish the Chinese Language: On a Century of Reformist Rhetoric
导读
这篇文章梳理了近百年来中国关于文字改革的激烈言论——从废除汉字、推行拼音到简化字的种种主张。它值得写作者阅读，因为它展示了抽象的语言政策争论如何被具体口号、轶事和时代情绪推动，也是修辞分析的绝佳样本。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把极端主张当作修辞杠杆：改革者提出"废除汉字"，往往是为了让渐进方案（简化、拼音）显得温和可行，写作时可以借此设计论点梯度。
- 02
用一则具体轶事承载抽象论点，比如北大博士生写不出"喷嚏"二字，比空泛论断更有说服力。
- 03
按时间线呈现百年论争的起落，让读者看到观点如何随政治与文化自信变化，形成清晰的叙事弧。
- 04
直接引用当年的口号与原文措辞，让读者听到那个时代的声音，而不是只读转述。
HN 评论精选
用亲历的具体轶事佐证论点，比抽象论断更有冲击力。
这让我想起《为什么中文这么难》里的一段：我在北京大学的饭局上遇到三位中文系博士生，都是母语者（其中一位来自香港）。那天我感冒了，想写张便条给朋友取消约会，却想不起"喷嚏"的"嚏"字怎么写。我问这三位朋友，没想到他们只是尴尬地耸耸肩，没有一个人能正确写出这个字。北大通常被视为"中国的哈佛"。你能想象哈佛英文系的三个博士生忘记"sneeze"这个词怎么拼吗？然而这种情况在中国并不罕见。
roddylindsay查看英文原文
I'm reminded of this passage from the delightful article "Why Chinese is so Damn Hard": 'I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.' http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html Book looks very interesting, just ordered a copy.
问题不在语言本身而在教材与方法，分词、标调、直译等辅助手段能大幅降低学习门槛。
中文不会消失，说它的人足够多。汉字本身不是问题，简化字反而让事情复杂了一倍。中文和日文真正需要的是词与词之间的空格。我在台湾学了两年中文，试过很多方法，就是学不进去。后来我做了 Pingtype，它在词间加空格、用颜色标注声调、并给出直译。我开始每天用它读《圣经》，也听歌读歌词，此后进步很大。问题不在语言，而在教材。我现在觉得繁体字更好，因为只凭记得的部分输入，就能在 Pingtype 的键盘里拼出并搜到合适的字。我不得不自己造工具，但我希望这类工具能普及，帮到成千上万放弃学中文的外国人。Pingtype 也支持台湾闽南语。
peterburkimsher查看英文原文
Chinese is here to stay. There are enough people who speak it. Characters are not the problem. Simplified characters made it twice as complicated. What Chinese and Japanese need are spaces. I struggled for 2 years to study Chinese here in Taiwan. I tried many ways (see the blog), and wasn't picking it up. Then I wrote Pingtype, which puts spaces between the words, colours for tones, and a literal translation. I started reading the Bible every day using it, and also listening to music and reading the lyrics. Since then I've learned so much more. https://pingtype.github.io The problem is not the language. It's the education materials. Now I think that traditional characters are better, because I can rebuild a character from typing only the parts I know into Pingtype's keyboard and searching for a suitable match. I had to build my own tools, but I wish these could be popularised to help the thousands of foreigners who give up learning Chinese. Support for Taiwanese Hokkien is also included in Pingtype, thanks to the Taigi dictionary for POJ transcription. See the Advanced -> Regional section. It is very different to Mandarin, but learning Chinese is a necessary stepping stone. I'm working on a lyrics video of some popular songs by Fire Ex as some educational materials. Please give me feedback on Pingtype; only a few hundred people have visited the page and it's kind of depressing. I don't know how to do marketing, so it's not catching on. Even if the tone colours and pinyin don't become widely used, I really wish that spaces between words could be introduced to this beautiful language.
把语言改革放进帝国兴衰与文化传播的框架里看，提出语言难度与文化扩张意愿的双重解释。
这篇文章触及一个我一直着迷的更大问题：语言与一种文化向世界传播的能力之间是什么关系？在我看来，美国文化在全球的推广很大程度上要归功于大英帝国对英语的推广；而这又归功于帝国的文化及其相对宽松的统治方式，正是这种方式让它能把语言和文化扩散到那么多地方。作为正式帝国的控制瓦解了，却为一种软性的"美国帝国"埋下种子。有意思的是，其他语言与文化组合似乎都没做到这一点，尤其是本文所说的中文。中文难以作为文化传播出去，有多少只是因为它对外国人来说实在太难学？还是中国人似乎并不热衷把文化推得超出直接获益的范围？又或者这种不热衷，恰恰源于他们知道自己语言文化难以穿透，甚至以此为傲？与此相关的是，中国国内那些激进简化语言的运动似乎从来成不了气候。
ufmace查看英文原文
This article touches on a broader point that I had always found fascinating - what is the relationship of language to the ability of a culture to spread around the world? The promotion of American culture around the world owes a lot IMO to the British Empire and it's promotion of English around the world. Which in turn owes a lot to the culture of the British Empire, and the relatively light-handed way in which they ruled it. That's the only way it was possible for them to dominate and spread their language and culture throughout so many places. Control of it as a formal empire fell apart, but it left the seeds for kind of a soft American empire, when America became a world power and started spreading ideology and massive amounts of media around the world. It's interesting that nothing like this seems to happen for any other language and culture combination, most notably Chinese for this article. How much of the lack of ability for Chinese to spread as a culture is just how damn hard it is to learn Chinese as a non-native? Or is it that the Chinese just don't seem that interested in spreading their culture and ideology farther than they can directly benefit from? Or is the fact that they aren't interested in that based on them knowing and even taking pride in their language and culture being particularly impenetrable? Related to this article, it seems notable that movements within China to radically simplify the language never seem to pick up much steam. Sure, it would be insanely complex to do on a logistical level, but even above that, it seems like nobody is much interested in it. It reminds me a little of thinking about AIs. They say that an AI will only want to do what it gets programmed to want to do. It may become smarter and more powerful, but there's no reason for it to change what it wants to do. Changing what it wants to do would itself be an action, and it has no reason to take that action, because it isn't part of what it originally wants to do. It seems similar that cultures sort of evolve to care about some things and not care about other things, and efforts to make them care about something they don't care about at best have quite the uphill battle.
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