雷立柏 中国人民大学
Leeb, Leo, Renmin University of China
原文Original
The Competitiveness of Modern Han-Chinese
The purpose of this paper is a reflection on the competitiveness of modern Han-Chinese in the international context, and on ways of improving the popularization of Han-Chinese. The author considers the possibility of modern Han-Chinese becoming a world language. Modern Han-Chinese is a language capable of clear and exact expression. The modern Han-Chinese language is the fruit of the protracted work of countless translators and editors, and it already is a language that can sufficiently communicate with the international academia. Whether it is in the field of the natural sciences or in the humanities, modern Han-Chinese is able to aptly express all kinds of academic theories. The different systems of technical terms are quite unified and standardized in modern Han-Chinese. Only on this basis it was possible that in the last years many big dictionaries and encyclopedias were published in China. Thus modern Han-Chinese already is a language of science and of education. Most native Chinese have a quite good command of the basic terms and concepts of thought as they are expressed by modern Han-Chinese. The process of the development from classical Han-Chinese to modern Han-Chinese has been a process and development of “clarification” and “definition”. The greater part of the terminological system created by the Italian translator L. Buglio (1606-1682) is no longer in use today, but the terminology used in modern Han-Chinese today will probably not undergo major changes in the future, since modern Han-Chinese has a fix form today already.
In the future modern Han-Chinese will become a “world language” even in a deeper sense, that is to say many people in many regions in the world will read or use Han-Chinese, just like it is the case today for English, French, or Arabic. However, the Chinese characters are somewhat diminishing the competition power of the language, because the Chinese characters are still a writing system that is very difficult to learn, even if the characters have undergone a simplification process. One of the difficulties of the Chinese characters is that they do not have clear pronunciation symbols. The phonetic part of many characters is often ambivalent, for example the pronunciation of characters containing the symbol 工, which is variedly pronounced as “gong”, “jiang”, “hong”, “kang”, “zhu”, etc. If somebody does not know the pronunciation of a character he needs a long time to look it up in the dictionary, and even native speakers face this difficulty. This creates considerable problems and challenges for people who want to learn Han-Chinese.
Because many Chinese characters are rather difficult to remember, students need much time and energy to learn this writing system, and the meaning of the characters might be neglected. Seen from a comparison of different ways of education, a simple writing system may quickly lead students from “reading” to “analysis of the contents”, “understanding” and “discussion”. Written letters should evoke and provoke thinking and should not form an obstacle to spiritual pursuits. The efforts of promoting the Han-Chinese language need to take into consideration new possibilities of improving texts written in Chinese, so that more foreigners would have an opportunity to study them. The western script (the alphabet) has undergone many changes in the course of history, and these changes are practically all based on this one concern: how to make a writing system more attractive or user-friendly. Written symbols are not unchangeable, but they should be a medium of thought and ideas, just as an old Greek proverb says: “Letters are lifeless, but the spirit gives life.”
This paper suggests to enhance the comprehensibility and competition ability of modern Han-Chinese texts by way of some improvements, for example one could use more punctuation marks and blanks in Chinese texts in order to clarify the ideas and concepts of sentences. Besides this, the author suggests that the Latin ABC should be used more frequently in Chinese texts to signify the original names of foreign place names and personal names. In this way modern Han-Chinese could become a language that has more competition ability in the international context. According to a limited research done by the author, the majority of university students supports the view that Chinese newspapers should use the ABC to write foreign personal and place names. The increasing pluriformity of Han-Chinese is a slow process, but the bilingual education of the younger generation in China today may change certain attitudes toward the ABC.
译文Translation
论现代汉语的竞争能力
本文旨在反省现代汉语在国际上的竞争能力以及更有力地推广汉语的可能性。作者考虑到现代汉语作为一种世界语言的可能性。现代汉语是一个具有精确表达能力的语言。现代汉语是无数译者和编者多年工作的成果，它已经成为一个能充分与世界学术沟通的语言，无论在自然科学或人文科学上，现代汉语很适当地可以表达种种学术理论。现代汉语的种种术语体系已经比较统一、比较规范化。在这个基础之上，近几年有许多使用汉语的大词典和大百科全书问世。因此，现代汉语也已经是一个科学语言和教育语言。一般的华人也都相当全面地掌握现代汉语的基本术语和思想概念。从古汉语到现代汉语的发展是一种“澄清”和“定义”的发展过程。意大利的翻译家利类思（L. Buglio，1606-1682年）曾创造的术语体系大部分今天不再被使用，但今天所使用的术语体系大概在将来不再会经过全面的变化，因为现代汉语在很大的程度上已经“定形了”。
现代汉语将来在更深的意义上要成为一种“世界语言”，即一种在世界很多地方有读者或使用者的语言，和英语、法语或阿拉伯语一样。然而，汉字在一定的意义上减弱汉语的竞争能力，因为汉字虽然经过一个简化过程，仍然是一种非常难学的文字体系。汉字的难度之一是缺少清楚表达发音的部分，而很多字的声旁部分可以有不同的发音，比如“工”、“江”、“红”、“扛”、“筑”等等。如果不知道一个字的发音，需要相当多的时间才能在词典里查清这个字的发音和意义，甚至对那些以汉语为母语的人也是这样。这种情况对学习汉语的人造成很大的挑战。
因为许多汉字的写法比较难记，学生需要在文字体系方面投入很多时间和精力，而这些词的含义可能被忽略。从教学方式的比较来看，一个简单的文字体系很快引导学生从“阅读”走向“内容分析”、“理解”和“讨论”。文字应该引发人的思想，不应该阻碍精神性的追求。推广汉语的努力应该考虑到如何改进汉语的文献以便使更多外国人有机会学习汉语。西方文字（即ABC）在历史上经历很多变化，而这些改变似乎都是出于同样的考虑：如何能使某一个文字体系成为一种更有吸引力的、更好用的体系。文字并不是永远不能改变的，而是一个要成为思想和理念的载体，正如古代的希腊语格言所说的那样：“文字本身没有生命，但精神使人生活。”
本文建议通过一些改进提高现代汉语文献的可理解性和竞争能力，比如在汉语文献中使用更多标点符号，甚至使用空格来澄清汉语语句中所表达的概念。另外，作者建议要多使用罗马字母（ABC）来直接写出外国人名和地名的原名，这样使汉语进一步成为一个国际竞争力很强的语言。根据作者进行的一个小的调查，大多数中国大学生支持这样的观点：在中国的报纸和杂志中应该多使用ABC来写出外国人名和地名。汉语的多元化和多样化是一个漫长的过程，但双语教育将会改变人们对于ABC的基本态度。