A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese

Abstract

THE learning of the Chinese language is complicated, to an extent unknown in the case of most languages, by the nature of its written form. Its ideographs present in themselves no correlation between sound and form, such as is made by the phonetic symbols in the alphabet-possessing languages. At the same time they have almost entirely lost what might have been a compensatory advantage, namely, the correlation between form and concept that would characterize a more primitive system of pictorial writing. Hence the student of Chinese is called upon to make three distinct and unrelated efforts in the learning of a Chinese He must memorize and be able to recognize as a unit the sign that represents the word. To this sign he must attach in quite arbitrary fashion a monosyllabic sound. Lastly, he must link with the sign or the sound, or both, the mental concept for which all this is merely a conveyance. The learning of the ideographs is thus the fundamental problem in the study of written Chinese. This is not to imply that it is the whole problem. Ability to recognize, pronounce, and give a meaning to a certain number of ideographs does not necessarily mean ability to read connected prose. Words in modern Chinese are more often than not represented by combinations of two or more ideographs in which the meaning of the whole is not always deducible from the sum of its parts. The significance of particular ideographs in connected discourse is often governed by arbitrary convention, by historical or literary allusion, or by the vagaries of indiscriminate borrowing. These problems of syntax require no small amount of mental application. The ideographs remain, nevertheless, the indivisible units out of which the language is built, and until a sufficient number of them has been mastered no progress along other lines is possible. It is thus a pertinent question to ask how many of these ideographs a student must master in order to make any headway in the language. To this question various answers have been given. An account appeared in a metropolitan daily early last year describing the studies of a group of Americans on the West Coast who, in order to be prepared for business life in the Orient, were making a courageous start to acquire some of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese ideographs. The popular view does not err on the side of minimizing the difficulties associated with Chinese. Probably the largest collection of ideographs ever made is that given in the socalled K'ang-hsi Dictionary, completed in A.D. 1716. It contains about 40,000 different signs, of which a large number are archaic variants. We may reasonably doubt that any one person ever knew them all. A dictionary published in Japan in 1917 under the title Great Dictionary of Ideographs (Dai jiten), and intended to meet all the needs of the scholar, contains 14,924 different signs. Another Japanese work, the Great Dictionary of