Chinese: Pinyin Empowers the Chinese Language

The most powerful feature and the biggest problem, simultaneously, for the Chinese language is the lack of association between sounds and characters. It is powerful because the Koreans, the Japanese, and the Vietnamese were, once upon a time, able to use the Chinese characters and pronounce them their own way. More importantly, people who spoke any of the hundreds of dialects, even the most radically different ones, could communicate in written form but pronouce it in their own way. The written language was what helped unite China millennia ago. Now, let us review the problem.

How do you know how to write what you say or think? There is only one way and it is pure memorization. In most Western languages one needs to memorized the alphabets, but not Chinese. Thus, if one is searching a traditional Chinese dictionary for a word/phrase one must first know how to write it and then know how to search using pen strokes. But, one searches a dictionary often because one has no idea how to write a character. Thus, it created a circular process that would drive anyone insane.

For example, we dined a few nights ago at the home of an eminent Chinese philosophy professor and scholar. Then, one of the lovely Chinese ladies around the table wondered how the Chinese word for "scoop" is written. They or their families were all from Northern China near Beijing so the word was likely a regional one. Now, a professor of Chinese philosophy, one may expect, would have many Chinese dictionaries. And, he did, but we could not find the word. So, I said I will find it once I were home. I have pinyin installed on my computer, so I typed in the sound of the word. Based on the choices offered, I found the word in a matter of minutes (擓- kuai3).

In any case, someone tried to create alphabets similar to those used in Japan. But, it proved somewhat cumbersome to use and special typewriters or typing conventions have to be used. On the other hand, in their goal to make Chinese more easy to learn and to be used by people, the PRC created the Pinyin system that maps sounds to a variation of the English alphabet. Whether it was the intention or not at the time of its creation, this act allowed for digital technology developed mainly for English to be used.

As a result, one could now type on the QWERY keyboard and use Microsoft Pinyin to write in Chinese. Pattern recognition technologies developed for voice recognition could be applied to simplify the Chinese writing process. Pinyin thusly empowers the Chinese language by allowing it to exploit the potential benefits of digital technology.