Limitations of Chinese characters

We compare Chinese and English to illustrate the scientific nature of Chinese. English pronunciation has 20 consonants and 6 vowels (12) and 4 monosyllabic diphthongs ([ei] [ai] [? U] [au]) with some special letter combinations, there will be no more than 320 different tones at most (because Chinese and English have different concepts of syllables, so "syllables" are not used here). In order to express 1 10,000 English words, only these 320 monosyllables can be used for repeated combination, which will inevitably bring a large number of polysyllabic words. English can't give every single tone a word meaning, because there are not many kinds of single tones, and because these single tones only play the role of phonemes, not morphemes. Therefore, English is a multi-tone phoneme group language. English compound word friendship uses five sounds when combining morphemes, while Chinese only uses two sounds. If "beef" also uses a compound word, such as bull+meat, which has four sounds, then we have to create a new word beef. If you don't know how to form a compound word like "NPC Standing Committee" with dozens of sounds, you may have to make a silent abbreviation. This determines that English can't express 99% of the semantics with 23 15 words like Chinese, and it can't be rich in idioms like Chinese. It also determines that millions of words in English are still increasing, which makes the memory overwhelmed. In fact, human knowledge can be classified and compounded, and Chinese is scientific in this respect. Similar to the beef example above:

Sheep: sheep

Mutton: mutton

Chimera: The sheep's body.

Jimmy: Sheep head

gigot

lamb

Wool: wool

Calf: calf

Niuhuang: Niuhuang

cowshed

Dairy farm: dairy farm

Leglen: milk pail

Hamburg: Beef patties.

Bastard: beef jerky

Beer: beef soup

All Chinese related to cattle and sheep belong to the names of cattle and sheep, and there is no need to name everything separately. If you want to name four parts of ten animals, the Chinese method only needs 14 words, and the English method needs 40 words. The scientific nature of Chinese also lies in that new things can be expressed and named in combination with the original concepts. For example: laser-light generated by activating atoms, Chinese is a word with original roots, and English laser is a new word. There are about 400×4 tones = 1600 different sounds in Chinese, and there are more than 1200 useless combinations. Each of these sounds represents a different morpheme, which makes Chinese have the advantage of using basic morphemes to synthesize words, so Chinese is a monosyllabic language. Assuming that English and Chinese only use disyllabic words, theoretically Chinese can group about 1.44 million words, while English can only group about 1.44 million words with 320exp2. Therefore, more than 90% of English words are more than two tones, and more than 90% of Chinese words are within two tones. This makes English speak slower than Chinese. For example, from 1 to 10, Chinese can send 10, and English can send 18. Chinese has five sounds of "profound friendship", while English can only say "friendship". Chinese uses six sounds to say "using superconducting technology", while English can only say "superconducting". Therefore, Chinese thinking is faster than English. This conclusion has been statistically proved in the section "Pinyin Chinese Characters Express Information Efficiently" of the monograph "The Road to Chinese Acceleration-Innovation of Pinyin Chinese Characters". This is the advantage of Chinese in quality.

Chinese civilization is the only civilization in the world that has lasted for 5,000 years without interruption. Han nationality is the largest single nation in the world, and Chinese is the language with the largest number of people as the mother tongue in the world. This is by no means accidental, and its formation must have internal reasons. According to a recent study by scientists from University of London, the reason of modern human behavior is more due to the increase of population density than the evolution of brain ability, because the high concentration of population density enables people to exchange ideas and abilities better, and human beings transmit and accumulate all kinds of knowledge, skills, discoveries and inventions through language communication, thus preventing the loss of innovation ability. Too scattered individuals or ethnic groups lack communication, and it is not easy to accumulate knowledge and acquire new knowledge. The urbanization process of human beings also embodies this law. (Yaisa Martinez, author of "The Reasons for British Scientists to Decode Modern People's Behavior" on June 7, 2009, the website of the weekly magazine "265438+20th Century Trends" in Argentina). Because the population size and density in ancient China were much higher than those in other places, such a scientific language was born after thousands of years of uninterrupted civilization. Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, UK, has conducted IQ tests in 130 countries and regions for 30 years. The results show that the average IQ of people in Northeast Asia (Chinese mainland, Taiwan Province Province, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Singapore) is the highest in the world. Their similarity is that the population originated in Chinese mainland and belongs to the cultural circle of Chinese characters. The digital representation of China's composition embodies China's ancient thought of harmony between man and nature, which conforms to the natural cycle;

Chinese morphemes have four elements: pronunciation, tone, part of speech and meaning-there are four seasons in a year.

Chinese vowels can be classified into seven monophonic series-seven days a week (see Figure 30).

Chinese * * * has 30 vowels-there are 30 days in January.

Save 400 non-standard (useful) sounds in Chinese-365 days a year.

One-year deposit 1200- 12 months.

There are about 2400 basic Chinese roots-there are 24 hours in a day and 24 solar terms in a year.

With such a scientific language, why did we lag behind Europe in modern times? This is due to the following limitations of Chinese characters:

1. One syllable in Chinese corresponds to multiple Chinese characters. According to statistics, there are more than 12 homophones with 52 syllables and more than 30 homophones with 12 syllables in Chinese. However, the method of distinguishing Chinese homonyms is confusing.

2. 16.7% of Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation, which was originally separated in the language, but Chinese characters use the same form to express different morphemes. This polysyllabic phenomenon is more prominent in ancient Chinese.

3. The separation of Chinese characters and phonetics makes Chinese characters difficult to learn, remember and read.

4. There are more than 200 components of Chinese characters, which are irregular in sound and meaning. Chinese characters are difficult to write, unlike pinyin, which is simple and can be written by speaking.

5. The use of disyllabic words and polysyllabic words in modern Chinese has gradually become the mainstream, but there is no distinction between Chinese characters and words.

6. Chinese characters cannot fully express the four elements of Chinese morphemes: pronunciation, tone, part of speech and meaning.

These limitations of Chinese characters offset the scientific nature of Chinese to some extent, and even make Chinese one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world. In the era of underdeveloped science, writing is only mastered by a few people in the ruling class. No matter how difficult it is to learn, it will have little impact on the economy. The industrial revolution in Europe brought great development and popularization of science and technology. The invisible hand of the market has inspired the creativity of millions of people, and the simple and easy-to-learn phonetic alphabet has made the scientific and cultural quality of European people surpass other places. In the era of great scientific development, we failed to catch up with the inventions of mathematics, physics, biology, logic and informatics. In modern times, we missed the inventions of electric lights, telegrams, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, televisions and computers. Most of the things we use today were not invented in China. According to the statistics of 200 1, the number of international patent applications ranks first in the United States, second in Germany, third in Japan, eighth in South Korea and twelfth in China. One fifth of the population should account for one fifth of the inventions, right? Not to mention the state's attitude towards the invention of "valuing officials over the people". It should be noted that invention is a collision of knowledge structure, experience and personal inspiration, and it is a hard exploration full of interest and perseverance. This depends on the practical wisdom of the general public, not just a few experts organized by the state. It is necessary to cultivate the wisdom of invention among the people and create a market mechanism that is beneficial to inventors and society. When Lu Xun saw the ruling class's indifference to the people's intellectual development, he issued: "If China wants to survive in this world, it is obvious that those scholars who only know the names of the Thirteen Classics are useless to those literati who are drunk, but they all rely on everyone's practical intelligence. In order to survive, we must first remove tuberculosis, which hinders the spread of intelligence: nonverbal and square characters. If you don't want to sacrifice old words, you have to sacrifice old words. Which way to go? This is not accused by cynics, but the success or failure of Latinizers, which is related to the survival of China people. I don't think it will take long to get empirical evidence. " Fortunately, we have now deleted non-Chinese, and there is also a "Chinese Pinyin Scheme". Imagine if we still use classical Chinese and traditional Chinese characters, and there is no "Hanyu Pinyin Scheme", what will the cultural popularization in our countryside look like? What is left now is the square characters that are out of touch with the language. Symbol languages, such as mathematical language, laws of physical chemistry, logical language and computer language, are not expressed by square Chinese characters. Due to the defects of characters, we were unable to innovate in this respect in the past. The development of science has expanded the use of Latin letters instead of Chinese characters. Europeans can do modern scientific research without learning Chinese characters. You can't introduce modern science without learning the Latin alphabet. Chinese has many advantages that western languages don't have, but due to the limitations of Chinese characters, it not only affects the improvement of our national scientific and cultural quality, but also affects the communication between China culture and the world.

The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation depends on the rejuvenation of Chinese culture. If you want to do a good job, you must sharpen your tools first. As the most widely used and scientific language in the world, Chinese, with a profound cultural heritage of 5,000 years and scientifically easy-to-learn characters, is expected to become the language of international communication with the rise of China.