John DeFrancis Quotes

John DeFrancis was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. August 1911 – 2. January 2009

Works

John DeFrancis: 8   quotes 0   likes

Famous John DeFrancis Quotes

“[R]eformers seeking to speed China's modernization by modernizing the writing system through a policy of digraphia have to contend not only with the natural attachment of Chinese to their familiar script but also with chauvinistic and mindless claims for its superiority.”

Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989, p. 120) http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html
Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989)

“I think there are three possible scenarios for the future of Chinese writing, in all of which the government plays a major role. In the first, and at present apparently the least likely scenario, the government abandons its hostility to an expanded role for Pinyin and instead fosters a climate of digraphia and biliteracy in which those who can do so become literate in both characters and Pinyin, and those who cannot are at least literate in Pinyin. This is essentially a reversion to the Latinization movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Mao Zedong and other high Communist Party officials like Xu Teli, the commissioner of education in Yan'an, lent their prestigious support to the New Writing. Such a change within the governing bureaucracy would in all likelihood result in an explosion of activity that might end in Pinyin ascendancy in use over characters in less than a generation.
In the second scenario the government adopts a policy of benign indifference that involves abandoning its hostility toward Pinyin but without actively supporting it, leaving it up to the rival protagonists of the two systems to contest for supremacy among themselves. This is likely to result in a somewhat longer struggle.
In the third scenario the government continues its present policy of repression, resulting in a much more protracted struggle (though surely not as long as the fascinating parallel struggle between Latin and Italian in Italy, where it took 500 [! ] years after Dante’s start in 1292 for academics, the last holdouts, to finally abandon their long resistance and start using Italian in university lectures).47 In this long struggle, PCs and mobile phones and other innovations still to come will undoubtedly allow more and more advocates of writing reform to escape the stranglehold of officialdom, to the point where (in a century or so?) characters are finally relegated to the status of Latin in the West.
My own view is that this is actually the least likely scenario, the most probable one being that the Chinese pragmatism that has manifested itself so strongly in economics will extend further into writing, and that, perhaps sooner rather than later, given the success of the promotion of Mandarin, some influential Party bureaucrats will finally arrive at the conclusion that the "some day in the future" anticipated by Mao has arrived, and that wholehearted Party support should now be unleashed for his anticipated "basic reform."”

In any case it is basically all a matter of time. And the decisive factor that will seal the ultimate fate of Chinese characters is the new reality, noted by a perceptive observer, that "the PC is mightier than the Pen."
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 20-21) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

“[I]nfatuation with characters still pervades American classrooms and holds back essential improvement in instruction.”

"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 25) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

Similar authors

Noam Chomsky photo
Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist
Antonio Gramsci photo
Antonio Gramsci 22
Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and lingu…
Elfriede Jelinek photo
Elfriede Jelinek 50
Austrian writer
Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell 562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi…
Rabindranath Tagore photo
Rabindranath Tagore 178
Bengali polymath
Toni Morrison photo
Toni Morrison 184
American writer
Albert A. Michelson photo
Albert A. Michelson 5
American physicist
Tennessee Williams photo
Tennessee Williams 139
American playwright
Robert Fulghum photo
Robert Fulghum 82
American writer