What you have written is common knowledge among linguists, although not so dramatically stated. As for 文言文, it was abandoned for 白话 precisely because it was so remote from how people actually spoke. 白话 is real Chinese, not European. Still, the Europeanisation is a fact, especially the creation of new vocabulary. It happened to languages around the world. And the bloat and jargon phrases (“make a suggestion”) are, too — although many blame the Communists for that particular vice. It didn’t have to be so bad.
But for all that, I would suggest that many of your examples aren’t really representative of current Chinese, eg, the grotesque examples of hypotaxis. Translating a European language into Chinese is nowhere near as simple as translating into another European language. Chinese is still different!
Thank you, Greg. I appreciate the nuance. Linguistically, there is definitely more to unpack here.
While I agree that Chinese remains distinct at its core, I believe my examples—even if they don't reflect the loose, omission-heavy nature of daily speech—accurately represent the prevalence of 'Translationese' (翻译腔). For a long time, particularly in the 90s and 00s, literal and often poor translations were the norm.
As the writer Yu Kwang-chung (余光中) famously argued, this 'Westernized' syntax has eroded our sense of what 'good' Chinese should be, seeping from books into daily life. I was actually one of them myself, until I realized there was a bizarre 'one-to-one correspondence' between the Chinese I wrote and the English I learned.
Good comment to an interesting topic by JingYu. If I had an opportunity to bastardise written Chinese further, I would encourage writers to use spacing to punctuate their sentences, so it’s clear whether the relevant character collocations is a noun, verb or adverb. As a student of Chinese as a second language, trying to parse a group of text with no spacing at all is tough! Punctuation with spacing seems a relatively easy way to achieve clarity. And I am a fan of clarity in writing.
Totally understand the struggle. What you are looking for is explicit word segmentation.
Actually, during the language reform era (early 20th century), there were debates about how to modernize writing. While Pinyin uses spacing, Hanzi retained its 'block' nature because characters often function as flexible morphemes rather than fixed words. If added spaces, it has to strictly define what is a 'noun' or 'verb,' which in Chinese is often fluid and context-dependent. It would definitely be easier to read for learners, but might feel very 'loose' to native eyes.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of Chinese as existing in a 'Superposition State'. Because the characters aren't locked into rigid word boundaries, they hold multiple potential meanings and grammatical functions simultaneously. Reading it becomes a form of mental cultivation: you have to hold that ambiguity in your mind until the context reveals the true meaning. Adding spaces would collapse that superposition and remove the 'rich context' that makes the language unique.
Wow very interesting. Chinese writing seems to demand a lot of effort from the reader. I have a legal background, and my training emphasises clarity. We really don’t want to write ambiguous contracts that can be interpreted in many different ways! So I tend to equate “good writing” with clear, easy to understand writing. But I agree there is a place for interpretation, eg in poetry.
The thing about Classical Chinese, of course, is that it was a language that was never really spoken, and was essentially impossible to speak. It only made sense on paper; without seeing the characters, it would be extremely hard to guess the words' meaning, since the one-character words could mean a lot of different things when spoken out, and the lack of connectors makes it all the more ambiguous. Classical Chinese could never have survived in an era of television and radio broadcasts.
Modern Chinese is much closer to the spoken Chinese of the 19th century, 白话. It certainly has undergone a lot of changes due to Western influence (as did many other official languages of Africa and Asia). On the other hand, I wonder if you might be overstating the case somewhat. In practice, most Chinese still tend to say things like 雨大，不去了. Few people use the 因为...所以 construct in daily life, as far as I can see.
Chinese certainly still feels very different from European languages in its structure. As a native speaker of both Italian and English, I found it hard to start expressing things the way Chinese people do. It was really unintuitive to me, in a way that a different European language would not be. One big difference, of course, is the complete lack of inflections. It's true that 们 is used to make the plural of pronouns, but in general Chinese still doesn't distinguish singular and plural, masculine and feminine, or verbal tenses. While English inflects less than most European languages, it still has inflections.
Totally agree. In daily conversation, connectors are often omitted, inversions (倒装) are common, and people frequently quote Chengyu or Classical phrases. It remains a high-context language where most speakers aren't consciously thinking about grammar.
However, if you follow strict 'textbook' grammar, it is understandable, even if it sounds a bit stiff for casual chat. I think you find the 'purest' example of Europeanized Chinese in technical, scientific, or academic writing, where precision often relies on those imported structures.
On the linguistics side, I admit I exaggerated slightly regarding inflections; describing it as 'analytical' should be better. Also, Karlgren (高本汉)’s The Chinese Language: An Essay on its Nature and History suggests that Classical Chinese may actually contain remnants of inflectional morphology, which is a whole other fascinating topic.
It's so interesting that you describe Classical Chinese as code, JingYu! Something I've been following for a while is a programming language called Wenyan, which is, yes – a programming language based on Wenyanwen. https://github.com/wenyan-lang
Oh yes, this is super cool! I've heard of it before. Definitely one of the most unique coding projects to come out before the AI rush took over everything.
Wonderfully illuminating post! It also made me reflect on the Japanese language. For Nihongo, I see that it's still very much contextualized and relationship based, rather than the use of explicit connectors or argument structures. I can switch the words around and it would still make good sense.
Growing up in Chinese schools in Malaysia, I learned 简体字 and learning Japanese now is teaching me to appreciate 繁体字. So I'm glad you mentioned 文言文! I'm slow reading the 原本 of 庄子. It really is better to read the original. Do you know 文言文 and how to learn it? I'm also curious about 严复 and his core work, can you share more with me?
Thank you! I do have training in 文言文 Wenyanwen, it is actually a standard part of the middle and high school curriculum. However, true appreciation really depends on the teacher. Many students struggle with it, but I was lucky to have a mentor who provided a rich background; we spent several semesters just reading the original text of 史记 Shiji
I am actually thinking about developing a method to teach Wenyanwen, a sort of 'shortcut' to help people appreciate original texts like the Tao Te Ching and Tang poetry.
Regarding to Yan Fu, he was truly a pioneer who translated a vast amount of contemporary Western work by the time (late 19th centruy). However, some of his terminology is now considered outdated or slightly inexact. For instance, he translated Darwin's Evolution as Tianyanlun (天演论), which was later replaced by Jinhualun (进化论), a term that fits modern understanding much better.
It was a really interesting read, although I do think it's important for all of us to reflect on what a 'pure' Chinese language would be.
All languages change over time (of course, that's how humans developed multiple languages in the first place), and Chinese is no different. One interesting example is the pluralisation of Chinese (which generally wasn't in practice before the Yuan) through interactions with the North. In that sense, fundamental parts of Chinese today (我们， 他们， etc.) are 'impure'. Another big one is the incredible influence of Buddhism on the language from the Han onwards, introducing a lot of concepts such as 因果， 世界， etc. that would become very influential. A lot of the greatest writers of Classical Chinese would build on those foreign concepts! I'm sure Indian logic / rhetoric also came into use through the same way, you can see that in the way the 心经 is structured.
I wonder to what extent it's possible to keep Chinese in the same state it was 200 years ago, with all the changes happening in the world? And its interactions with English are especially complex, because English has been changing throughout this time as well.
It's a difficult one. But I agree with you that Classical Chinese is beautiful. It's not just a part of Chinese cultural heritage, but a gift to the world - and with so much to teach us, I hope people will continue to learn and love it.
Thanks for bringing up the influence of Buddhism and the Heart Sutra (心经).
Totally agree. The Chinese language has historically absorbed changes from so many different cultures. For instance, the Standard Mandarin most people speak today is highly adaptive, it’s heavily influenced by the Qing Dynasty. In fact, Standard Mandarin pronunciation wasn't solely based on Beijing city dialect, but on the speech of Luanping (滦平), a small area northeast of Beijing that hosted the imperial estates of the Manchu elite.
Also, the dichotomy between 'Modern' and 'Classical' isn't as black-and-white as we often think. Classical Chinese is varied and layered; the classical writing of the 1600s is totally different from that of the 1200s, 700s, or 100 BC.
I don't feel the need to discuss the 'purity' of language, which I don't think exists. My main point in the article is that with the rapid adaptation to the modern world, Chinese risks losing the unique concepts and ideas that can only be encoded by its own logic, rather than Western logic.
Thank you for sharing this, Geremie. Your essay on 'New China Newspeak' is fascinating, especially the way it maps the political genealogy of this linguistic shift.
While the effort here to help people understand the Chinese language better is laudable, the argument or argumentation, alas, is lamentable, as it is unfortunately strewn with faulty comparisons, factual errors, and/or dubious understanding of basic linguistics.
Basic linguistics tells us that a language can incorporate sentence patterns and syntactical features from other languages without harming or reducing its independence or identity as a language. Otherwise, we may as well say that the English language as we know it is actually a disguised branch of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, or even Chinese.
Well, the writer here is apparently presenting the joke above as a serious theory.
In effect, more often than not, too many examples the writer produces to support his argument harm his argument instead of helping it. For instance,
Softly I am leaving,Just as softly as I came;I wave my sleeve,Not taking away a single cloud.
(轻轻的我走了，正如我轻轻的来；我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩)
The writer tries to have the reader believe that the original Chinese poetic sentences from the famous modern Chinese poet Xu Zhimo are essentially English wrapped with the Chinese skin, because they can be so easily translated into English.
Frankly, such an argument is at best far-fetched, and at worst muddle-headed. If we are to believe it, then Du Fu (born in 712 AD) , arguably the greatest poet of China, must have somewhat and somewhere be well trained in modern English and hence written like an English poet,
The good rain knows its season,
Bringing life when spring is here.
It steals into the night with the breeze,
Silently moistening all things with its fine touch.
好雨知时节，
当春乃发生，
随风潜入夜，
润物细无声。
Do we have here a case that Du Fu’s Chinese is fake, that he constructed his sentences according to the modern English language, and that therefore his sentences can be so easily translated into modern English by AI (in this case Gemini AI), with perfect modern English sentence structures and syntax? But last time that I checked, Du Fu didn’t learn any English, old or modern, and neither did all his friends or family members.
Or, do we have here pinned down evidence that modern English is just “Chinese in the Roman alphabet” since Du Fu is way older than modern Chinese?
I actually love your Du Fu example, it’s a great reminder that universality often looks like 'westernization' to the modern eye, that Du Fu translates well because his imagery is universal.
But Xu Zhimo translates well because his syntax was intentionally mirroring the English Romantics (Keats/Shelley).
My argument isn't that translatability equals influence, but that the May 4th writers actively engineered that translatability.
I think we have to agree to disagree on the modern context. While languages always borrow, the scale of grammatical shift in the 20th century is unprecedented in Chinese history.
“My argument isn't that translatability equals influence, but that the May 4th writers actively engineered that translatability.”
Fine. But by your logic, we should say English has actually been Hebrew or Greek in the Roman alphabet. After all, see how many Hebrew or Greek sentence patterns or structures were actively introduced (engineered?) into English. Oh, English has been totally genuine Latin, from the alphabet to sentence patterns to syntax, actually.
Of course Japanese has been Chinese.
Conclusion: your logic or your argument doesn’t hold water.
As to your statement “While languages always borrow, the scale of grammatical shift in the 20th century is unprecedented in Chinese history,” I have a very simple question to ask - Is the scale of shift bigger/larger than that between the old English and the modern English?
I bet you cannot read the old English at all (if you are not an expert) because its grammar is wildly different from that of the modern English language. If you can still call the modern English English, why not call modern Chinese Chinese, considering you can read and understand the Chinese before the 20th century with no problem?
Obviously, your thesis or theory is illogical, faulty, and therefore cannot stand.
That's a very interesting point. I think you omit a few things.
Linguists like John McWhorter point out that in the development of Anglo-Saxon (what we call old English) to modern English, modern English shows features of creolisation - similar to the development of pidgins and creoles in modern times - that you would expect when an invader comes and rules a people that speak a different language. The event was of course the Norman invasion where the French aristocracts replaced the English ruling class and ruled using French. So, no, modern English is in no way Anglo-Saxon (also known as old English): they are entirely different languages that are mutually unintelligible.
Old English is unintelligible to speakers of modern English in the way that old French is not unintelligible to a speaker of modern French. A speaker of modern French can read French from the 1066s and largely figure out what is going on, simply because there was no invasion to drive linguistic change and French did not undergo the kind of massive change that Anglo-Saxon underwent to become modern English. French from 1066 is mutually intelligible with modern French, indicating that it is not a different language.
Also while English might be Indo-European, its syntactical roots are west Germanic and not Latin, which is an Italic language.
But the question is: are you challenging the factual accuracy of the statement "that the May 4th movement and the Chinese intellectuals at the time from 1900-1950 deliberately and knowingly worked to produce a form of Chinese to update it to the 20th century and that in doing so, they introduced features in the Chinese language that it did not have before then"? If so, which part? That the May 4th movement is fiction? That modern Chinese does not have features different from classical Chinese? That if you rendered classical Chinese in 简体, it is easily understood by modern Chinese speakers and that works from -500 CE written in classical Chinese do not need glosses and footnotes so that the modern Chinese speaker can understand them? Or are you just reacting emotionally to his, admittedly, click-bait statement that modern Chinese is just English written in Chinese characters?
Thank you, Charles, this is a fascinating perspective. As a French learner, I honestly had no idea about the mutual intelligibility of Old vs. Modern French compared to the drastic shift in English. It's such a perfect example of how historical events drive massive structural changes in a language. I’m definitely going to look into that.
Well, an actual comparison is useful. These are the first three lines from Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon from the original manuscript which dates from around 1000CE:
These are the first three lines from La Chanson de Roland, also dating from around 1000CE:
Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes,
Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne :
Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne.
It's not easy to follow but it can be roughly understood. More importantly, this is not remotely as different from modern French as the Anglo-Saxon that Beowulf was written in is different from modern English. The difference in the degree of comprehension is as night and day.
His thesis is of one that's written entirely of knowing only two language, English and Mandarin in this instance. As such the main statement of this statement might have sound so brilliant to him without realizing he's been infected by English Monolingualism.
Very interesting article. I also agree with the comments that the article’s rhetorical momentum may go beyond the historical evidence, but the overall point – that contemporary Chinese has adjusted itself to many Western traits that has in many respects diminished its character and force – is very well taken.
Of course, if one traces vernacular literature in China back over the centuries, it is evident that it underwent significant changes on its own as well as via other influences such as from Mongols during the Yuan. Even the prose of say 世说新语 in the Six Dynasties period exhibits colloquial and vernacular traits that distinguish it from pure 文言文, to say nothing of the drama and narrative works of later periods in the Yuan, Ming and Qing, well before any Western or Japanese influence. That said, the Western influence did change things dramatically, in terms of grammar, word order and overall sentence structure. Vernacular novels such as 三国演义 are not 文言文 yet neither are they Western prose translated into Chinese!
Another way of thinking about the changes is to compare the contemporary speech of say, a hutong dweller in Beijing from a Western-educated Chinese professional working in China: The hutong local will use a grammar, vocabulary and mode of speech that is radically different from the Chinese white-collar professional, and unfortunately, many of those “professionalized” i.e. Westernizing, trends are also evident throughout the professions: science, journalism, academic writing, etc.
Yet there are still many areas where a more “authentic” (untainted) Chinese still exists, certainly in the oral and popular genres such as 相声, and one can only hope that it is preserved and maintains a living presence in Chinese writing and speech going forward.
Great points. The language has certainly evolved organically for centuries, as Gong Zizhen (龚自珍) said, '文体五百岁一变' (styles naturally shift every five hundred years).
However, I feel the Western influence of the last century wasn't just a natural turn of that cycle. It was a hyper-accelerant that fundamentally altered the structure.
Your comparison between the 'hutong dweller' and the 'white-collar professional' is spot on. I feel that this divergence is creating a distinct social divide, where 'Europeanized' grammar becomes a class marker in the future generation.
Dear, Jingyu, I must congratulate you on this piece on Modern Chinese language being Europeanized. Hope to see and read a lot more from you in the near future. All the best!
I wish you'd spent more time talking about the collapse of Chinese cultural confidence; the debates within China about how much of Chinese culture should be jettisoned. So when you talk about Chinese writers, especially the May 4 Movement, I wonder how many people not familiar with Chinese history and its debates at that time realise how much agony Chinese intellectuals went through and how deliberately they relooked at their culture, even their language, to make it "fit" for the modern world in a way that went beyond mere inventing of new words.
Everywhere across the world, non-Western cultures agonised about whether they had to give up their own cultures so as to become strong enough to stand up to Western aggression, whether there was something inherently superior about the West and something innately inferior about being non-Western. I still cannot forget reading Sanshiro by Natsume Soseki and one of his main characters looking at a Western blonde woman says, "The Westerners are fundamentally superior to us. Look at that woman. She is more beautiful than any of our Japanese people." My heart broke.
That attitude still exists among many non-Westerners and among many Westerners. This devastation and rape of non-Western hearts and minds will take many more decades to overcome, but I think the process is gradually starting and is often derided by Western media as nationalism.
Watching Chinese productions from China now like ballet is fascinating to me because I think the Chinese have synthethised elements of Chinese and Western culture with a confidence that did not exist in the 1900s. Think of Cao Yu's Thunderstorm which in form is an exact duplicate of Ibsen's plays. That insecurity is, I think, starting to go away. It's a process that makes me think of the effervescence of the Renaissance when Western culture was incorporating Greek and Roman thinking onto a Catholic scaffold via transmission through Islamic works.
Yes, in many ways, the narrative built by the May 4th intellectuals was a massive success. Most people today still hold the views they established without ever looking at how the construction was actually done. It's like living in a building without knowing how the foundation was poured. But I agree, it is time for a renovation, and that requires taking out the original blueprints and examining the structure.
I think one of the great lessons of Western history is that the Renaissance came before the Enlightenment. For the past 150 years, in the rush to modernize, Chinese intellectuals essentially skipped the Renaissance and went straight for the Enlightenment.
Hi JingYu, I’m an educator in Zhuhai, and your "English with Hanzi" take is the most accurate thing I’ve read this week. It explains exactly why the 1958 attempt to force a Latinised script on the Dong people in Guizhou was such a spectacular failure.
The state tried to graft Western bureaucratic logic onto an "Oral Library" that lives through song. It didn't work then, and as you've pointed out, the result for Modern Mandarin has been a "poetic desert." I'm currently writing about the "Trilingual Shield"—the idea that English can actually be used as a global tool to protect what is left of these oral traditions from being hollowed out by national assimilation.
Subscribed. Looking forward to more. — Clive Kingshott
This sounds like a fantastic concept, Clive. Using a third language gives them a completely new perspective to appreciate their own tradition, stepping outside the rigid binary of what is 'true or false' or 'modern vs. backward.' Maybe Mandarin temporarily lacks the distance to provide that fresh perspective or retrospect, as it functions primarily as a force of assimilation.
By the way, the dynamics of ethnic groups in China is a topic I plan to cover in future newsletters, so stay tuned!
This is fascinating – thank you for such an important set of observations.
The same phenomenon occurred with Indian classical culture. The Vedas were not normally written down, they were passed down by memory, until 18th century Englishmen asked for them in writing, then projected onto the Indian tradition the characteristics they expected to see in a religion, from their own version of Christianity.
Buddhism was re-invented by Westerners in the 19th century. They did the archaeology that showed that the Buddha was a historical figure, not a myth. The Theosophists rescued Theravada Buddhism from collapse in the face of Protestant Christian missionaries.
The Turks did the same thing to themselves in founding the modern. secular Turkish state in the 1920s.
It is very hard to disentangle these cultural elements, and this article is a great help to a non-linguist such as myself.
Your article opened my eyes about modern Chinese which I don't speak or read. In intercultural communication theory, there is Edward Hall's distinction between high-context and low-context communication. In high-context communication, meaning is understood through familiarity with and attunement to the speaker and extensive knowledge of the context. Communication is indirect and the listener has responsibility for reading between the lines. I
In prewar and postwar Japan, there were attempts to preserve something like a village society so that high-context communication could continue. Vagueness was aesthetically satisfying. A great emphasis was placed on homogeneity and "we Japanese." There was no May Fourth movement although the left was strong in the postwar era for about 30 years. Therefore, the language in modernized Japan has followed a somewhat different course than in China., although, as you point out, the translation process from Western languages did lead to some similar modifications.
This is a fascinating application of Hall's theory. It suggests that by 'Europeanizing' its grammar, Modern Chinese has actually lowered the context barrier, making it more explicit than before.
Just out of curiosity, I’ve been observing a trend in Japan that seems to contradict the careful 'meaning-making' of the past. In the Meiji era, Japan was the master of translating Western ideas into meaningful Kanji. But today, they seem to have abandoned that tradition in favor of direct Katakana transliteration.
They often abbreviate these into codes that are unintelligible to outsiders (e.g., 'First Kitchen' becomes the unfortunate-sounding 'Fakkin'). In a way, doesn't this create a new layer of 'high context' barriers—a sort of cultural encryption? I wonder how this shift will influence the language long-term.
Yes, Katakana Japanese is a phenomenon. It can be annoying, particularly when the Katakana word's meaning diverges from the (usually English) foreign word or phrase it is copied from. Also, often there are perfectly good Japanese kanji words/phrases that could be used. As a foreigner in some ways this makes it easier but (see divergence) not always
Interestingly back in the 1990s IBM Japan tended to use meaningful Kanji for computer concepts, while Japanese companies like NEC or Toshiba just katakana-ed the English words. And then shortened them as in the famous Paasukon (Paasonaru konpyutaa == Personal Computer or PC). I think IBM now follows the katakana trend along with everyone else
You have raise an interesting issue about Japanese use of katakana. I have only a sketchy knowledge of this area. The use of katakana goes back at least as far as the 15th and 16th centuries, But there was also a tendency in the late 19th century to use kanji for foreign loan words. During the prewar era of ultranationalism, the use of katakana was discouraged and words that were once written in katakana were written in Chinese characters. After the war, katakana prevailed and the strange-sounding adaptation of foreign words into Japanese has amused and confused more than a few foreigners over the years, including me.
I was just discussing this with my Chinese teacher the other day! We spend all this time learning grammar structures and parts of speech, when those constructs are more of a post-hoc overlay to help English speakers understand Chinese. When the rules don't apply, it helps me to understand that the rules aren't endemic to the language - they're just a way of trying imperfectly to describe something that already existed. Thanks for your article on this!
Many of the more "traditional" patterns you mention are what close to what we say in Singaporean Mandarin. Our vocabulary in Mandarin is usually limited, but with the vocab we have we speak more like the traditional patterns.
雨下很大，我不要去了。
这朵花红的。
我建议....
I wonder if it's because our substratum consists of the southern fangyan?
Interesting point! From my experience working with Singaporeans, I always got the impression that modern Singaporean Mandarin is actually a perfect example of 'English with Hanzi.' It feels like a lot of the everyday phrasing comes from direct English translations that just coincidentally overlap with those older fangyan patterns. But that’s just my outside observation, as a Singaporean, I'm sure you have a much better feel for what's really driving it.
What you have written is common knowledge among linguists, although not so dramatically stated. As for 文言文, it was abandoned for 白话 precisely because it was so remote from how people actually spoke. 白话 is real Chinese, not European. Still, the Europeanisation is a fact, especially the creation of new vocabulary. It happened to languages around the world. And the bloat and jargon phrases (“make a suggestion”) are, too — although many blame the Communists for that particular vice. It didn’t have to be so bad.
But for all that, I would suggest that many of your examples aren’t really representative of current Chinese, eg, the grotesque examples of hypotaxis. Translating a European language into Chinese is nowhere near as simple as translating into another European language. Chinese is still different!
Thank you, Greg. I appreciate the nuance. Linguistically, there is definitely more to unpack here.
While I agree that Chinese remains distinct at its core, I believe my examples—even if they don't reflect the loose, omission-heavy nature of daily speech—accurately represent the prevalence of 'Translationese' (翻译腔). For a long time, particularly in the 90s and 00s, literal and often poor translations were the norm.
As the writer Yu Kwang-chung (余光中) famously argued, this 'Westernized' syntax has eroded our sense of what 'good' Chinese should be, seeping from books into daily life. I was actually one of them myself, until I realized there was a bizarre 'one-to-one correspondence' between the Chinese I wrote and the English I learned.
Good comment to an interesting topic by JingYu. If I had an opportunity to bastardise written Chinese further, I would encourage writers to use spacing to punctuate their sentences, so it’s clear whether the relevant character collocations is a noun, verb or adverb. As a student of Chinese as a second language, trying to parse a group of text with no spacing at all is tough! Punctuation with spacing seems a relatively easy way to achieve clarity. And I am a fan of clarity in writing.
Totally understand the struggle. What you are looking for is explicit word segmentation.
Actually, during the language reform era (early 20th century), there were debates about how to modernize writing. While Pinyin uses spacing, Hanzi retained its 'block' nature because characters often function as flexible morphemes rather than fixed words. If added spaces, it has to strictly define what is a 'noun' or 'verb,' which in Chinese is often fluid and context-dependent. It would definitely be easier to read for learners, but might feel very 'loose' to native eyes.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of Chinese as existing in a 'Superposition State'. Because the characters aren't locked into rigid word boundaries, they hold multiple potential meanings and grammatical functions simultaneously. Reading it becomes a form of mental cultivation: you have to hold that ambiguity in your mind until the context reveals the true meaning. Adding spaces would collapse that superposition and remove the 'rich context' that makes the language unique.
Wow very interesting. Chinese writing seems to demand a lot of effort from the reader. I have a legal background, and my training emphasises clarity. We really don’t want to write ambiguous contracts that can be interpreted in many different ways! So I tend to equate “good writing” with clear, easy to understand writing. But I agree there is a place for interpretation, eg in poetry.
Great article.
The thing about Classical Chinese, of course, is that it was a language that was never really spoken, and was essentially impossible to speak. It only made sense on paper; without seeing the characters, it would be extremely hard to guess the words' meaning, since the one-character words could mean a lot of different things when spoken out, and the lack of connectors makes it all the more ambiguous. Classical Chinese could never have survived in an era of television and radio broadcasts.
Modern Chinese is much closer to the spoken Chinese of the 19th century, 白话. It certainly has undergone a lot of changes due to Western influence (as did many other official languages of Africa and Asia). On the other hand, I wonder if you might be overstating the case somewhat. In practice, most Chinese still tend to say things like 雨大，不去了. Few people use the 因为...所以 construct in daily life, as far as I can see.
Chinese certainly still feels very different from European languages in its structure. As a native speaker of both Italian and English, I found it hard to start expressing things the way Chinese people do. It was really unintuitive to me, in a way that a different European language would not be. One big difference, of course, is the complete lack of inflections. It's true that 们 is used to make the plural of pronouns, but in general Chinese still doesn't distinguish singular and plural, masculine and feminine, or verbal tenses. While English inflects less than most European languages, it still has inflections.
Totally agree. In daily conversation, connectors are often omitted, inversions (倒装) are common, and people frequently quote Chengyu or Classical phrases. It remains a high-context language where most speakers aren't consciously thinking about grammar.
However, if you follow strict 'textbook' grammar, it is understandable, even if it sounds a bit stiff for casual chat. I think you find the 'purest' example of Europeanized Chinese in technical, scientific, or academic writing, where precision often relies on those imported structures.
On the linguistics side, I admit I exaggerated slightly regarding inflections; describing it as 'analytical' should be better. Also, Karlgren (高本汉)’s The Chinese Language: An Essay on its Nature and History suggests that Classical Chinese may actually contain remnants of inflectional morphology, which is a whole other fascinating topic.
It's so interesting that you describe Classical Chinese as code, JingYu! Something I've been following for a while is a programming language called Wenyan, which is, yes – a programming language based on Wenyanwen. https://github.com/wenyan-lang
Really fascinating stuff.
Oh yes, this is super cool! I've heard of it before. Definitely one of the most unique coding projects to come out before the AI rush took over everything.
Wonderfully illuminating post! It also made me reflect on the Japanese language. For Nihongo, I see that it's still very much contextualized and relationship based, rather than the use of explicit connectors or argument structures. I can switch the words around and it would still make good sense.
Growing up in Chinese schools in Malaysia, I learned 简体字 and learning Japanese now is teaching me to appreciate 繁体字. So I'm glad you mentioned 文言文! I'm slow reading the 原本 of 庄子. It really is better to read the original. Do you know 文言文 and how to learn it? I'm also curious about 严复 and his core work, can you share more with me?
Thank you! I do have training in 文言文 Wenyanwen, it is actually a standard part of the middle and high school curriculum. However, true appreciation really depends on the teacher. Many students struggle with it, but I was lucky to have a mentor who provided a rich background; we spent several semesters just reading the original text of 史记 Shiji
I am actually thinking about developing a method to teach Wenyanwen, a sort of 'shortcut' to help people appreciate original texts like the Tao Te Ching and Tang poetry.
Regarding to Yan Fu, he was truly a pioneer who translated a vast amount of contemporary Western work by the time (late 19th centruy). However, some of his terminology is now considered outdated or slightly inexact. For instance, he translated Darwin's Evolution as Tianyanlun (天演论), which was later replaced by Jinhualun (进化论), a term that fits modern understanding much better.
Thanks for writing the article!
It was a really interesting read, although I do think it's important for all of us to reflect on what a 'pure' Chinese language would be.
All languages change over time (of course, that's how humans developed multiple languages in the first place), and Chinese is no different. One interesting example is the pluralisation of Chinese (which generally wasn't in practice before the Yuan) through interactions with the North. In that sense, fundamental parts of Chinese today (我们， 他们， etc.) are 'impure'. Another big one is the incredible influence of Buddhism on the language from the Han onwards, introducing a lot of concepts such as 因果， 世界， etc. that would become very influential. A lot of the greatest writers of Classical Chinese would build on those foreign concepts! I'm sure Indian logic / rhetoric also came into use through the same way, you can see that in the way the 心经 is structured.
I wonder to what extent it's possible to keep Chinese in the same state it was 200 years ago, with all the changes happening in the world? And its interactions with English are especially complex, because English has been changing throughout this time as well.
It's a difficult one. But I agree with you that Classical Chinese is beautiful. It's not just a part of Chinese cultural heritage, but a gift to the world - and with so much to teach us, I hope people will continue to learn and love it.
Thanks for bringing up the influence of Buddhism and the Heart Sutra (心经).
Totally agree. The Chinese language has historically absorbed changes from so many different cultures. For instance, the Standard Mandarin most people speak today is highly adaptive, it’s heavily influenced by the Qing Dynasty. In fact, Standard Mandarin pronunciation wasn't solely based on Beijing city dialect, but on the speech of Luanping (滦平), a small area northeast of Beijing that hosted the imperial estates of the Manchu elite.
Also, the dichotomy between 'Modern' and 'Classical' isn't as black-and-white as we often think. Classical Chinese is varied and layered; the classical writing of the 1600s is totally different from that of the 1200s, 700s, or 100 BC.
I don't feel the need to discuss the 'purity' of language, which I don't think exists. My main point in the article is that with the rapid adaptation to the modern world, Chinese risks losing the unique concepts and ideas that can only be encoded by its own logic, rather than Western logic.
JingYu: a nice essay. You might also enjoy this:
https://chinaheritage.net/archive/academician-archive/geremie-barme/grb-essays/china-story/new-china-newspeak-%e6%96%b0%e5%8d%8e%e6%96%87%e4%bd%93/
Thank you for sharing this, Geremie. Your essay on 'New China Newspeak' is fascinating, especially the way it maps the political genealogy of this linguistic shift.
While the effort here to help people understand the Chinese language better is laudable, the argument or argumentation, alas, is lamentable, as it is unfortunately strewn with faulty comparisons, factual errors, and/or dubious understanding of basic linguistics.
Basic linguistics tells us that a language can incorporate sentence patterns and syntactical features from other languages without harming or reducing its independence or identity as a language. Otherwise, we may as well say that the English language as we know it is actually a disguised branch of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, or even Chinese.
Well, the writer here is apparently presenting the joke above as a serious theory.
In effect, more often than not, too many examples the writer produces to support his argument harm his argument instead of helping it. For instance,
Softly I am leaving,Just as softly as I came;I wave my sleeve,Not taking away a single cloud.
(轻轻的我走了，正如我轻轻的来；我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩)
The writer tries to have the reader believe that the original Chinese poetic sentences from the famous modern Chinese poet Xu Zhimo are essentially English wrapped with the Chinese skin, because they can be so easily translated into English.
Frankly, such an argument is at best far-fetched, and at worst muddle-headed. If we are to believe it, then Du Fu (born in 712 AD) , arguably the greatest poet of China, must have somewhat and somewhere be well trained in modern English and hence written like an English poet,
The good rain knows its season,
Bringing life when spring is here.
It steals into the night with the breeze,
Silently moistening all things with its fine touch.
好雨知时节，
当春乃发生，
随风潜入夜，
润物细无声。
Do we have here a case that Du Fu’s Chinese is fake, that he constructed his sentences according to the modern English language, and that therefore his sentences can be so easily translated into modern English by AI (in this case Gemini AI), with perfect modern English sentence structures and syntax? But last time that I checked, Du Fu didn’t learn any English, old or modern, and neither did all his friends or family members.
Or, do we have here pinned down evidence that modern English is just “Chinese in the Roman alphabet” since Du Fu is way older than modern Chinese?
Thank you for the detailed critique.
I actually love your Du Fu example, it’s a great reminder that universality often looks like 'westernization' to the modern eye, that Du Fu translates well because his imagery is universal.
But Xu Zhimo translates well because his syntax was intentionally mirroring the English Romantics (Keats/Shelley).
My argument isn't that translatability equals influence, but that the May 4th writers actively engineered that translatability.
I think we have to agree to disagree on the modern context. While languages always borrow, the scale of grammatical shift in the 20th century is unprecedented in Chinese history.
“My argument isn't that translatability equals influence, but that the May 4th writers actively engineered that translatability.”
Fine. But by your logic, we should say English has actually been Hebrew or Greek in the Roman alphabet. After all, see how many Hebrew or Greek sentence patterns or structures were actively introduced (engineered?) into English. Oh, English has been totally genuine Latin, from the alphabet to sentence patterns to syntax, actually.
Of course Japanese has been Chinese.
Conclusion: your logic or your argument doesn’t hold water.
As to your statement “While languages always borrow, the scale of grammatical shift in the 20th century is unprecedented in Chinese history,” I have a very simple question to ask - Is the scale of shift bigger/larger than that between the old English and the modern English?
I bet you cannot read the old English at all (if you are not an expert) because its grammar is wildly different from that of the modern English language. If you can still call the modern English English, why not call modern Chinese Chinese, considering you can read and understand the Chinese before the 20th century with no problem?
Obviously, your thesis or theory is illogical, faulty, and therefore cannot stand.
That's a very interesting point. I think you omit a few things.
Linguists like John McWhorter point out that in the development of Anglo-Saxon (what we call old English) to modern English, modern English shows features of creolisation - similar to the development of pidgins and creoles in modern times - that you would expect when an invader comes and rules a people that speak a different language. The event was of course the Norman invasion where the French aristocracts replaced the English ruling class and ruled using French. So, no, modern English is in no way Anglo-Saxon (also known as old English): they are entirely different languages that are mutually unintelligible.
Old English is unintelligible to speakers of modern English in the way that old French is not unintelligible to a speaker of modern French. A speaker of modern French can read French from the 1066s and largely figure out what is going on, simply because there was no invasion to drive linguistic change and French did not undergo the kind of massive change that Anglo-Saxon underwent to become modern English. French from 1066 is mutually intelligible with modern French, indicating that it is not a different language.
Also while English might be Indo-European, its syntactical roots are west Germanic and not Latin, which is an Italic language.
But the question is: are you challenging the factual accuracy of the statement "that the May 4th movement and the Chinese intellectuals at the time from 1900-1950 deliberately and knowingly worked to produce a form of Chinese to update it to the 20th century and that in doing so, they introduced features in the Chinese language that it did not have before then"? If so, which part? That the May 4th movement is fiction? That modern Chinese does not have features different from classical Chinese? That if you rendered classical Chinese in 简体, it is easily understood by modern Chinese speakers and that works from -500 CE written in classical Chinese do not need glosses and footnotes so that the modern Chinese speaker can understand them? Or are you just reacting emotionally to his, admittedly, click-bait statement that modern Chinese is just English written in Chinese characters?
Thank you, Charles, this is a fascinating perspective. As a French learner, I honestly had no idea about the mutual intelligibility of Old vs. Modern French compared to the drastic shift in English. It's such a perfect example of how historical events drive massive structural changes in a language. I’m definitely going to look into that.
Well, an actual comparison is useful. These are the first three lines from Beowulf in the original Anglo Saxon from the original manuscript which dates from around 1000CE:
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
The full text can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version
And the translation to modern English:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50114/beowulf-modern-english-translation
These are the first three lines from La Chanson de Roland, also dating from around 1000CE:
Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes,
Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne :
Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne.
It's not easy to follow but it can be roughly understood. More importantly, this is not remotely as different from modern French as the Anglo-Saxon that Beowulf was written in is different from modern English. The difference in the degree of comprehension is as night and day.
The full text is available here:
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Chanson_de_Roland/Joseph_B%C3%A9dier/La_Chanson_de_Roland/Texte
And in translation to modern French: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Chanson_de_Roland/Joseph_B%C3%A9dier/La_Chanson_de_Roland/Traduction
His thesis is of one that's written entirely of knowing only two language, English and Mandarin in this instance. As such the main statement of this statement might have sound so brilliant to him without realizing he's been infected by English Monolingualism.
Very interesting article. I also agree with the comments that the article’s rhetorical momentum may go beyond the historical evidence, but the overall point – that contemporary Chinese has adjusted itself to many Western traits that has in many respects diminished its character and force – is very well taken.
Of course, if one traces vernacular literature in China back over the centuries, it is evident that it underwent significant changes on its own as well as via other influences such as from Mongols during the Yuan. Even the prose of say 世说新语 in the Six Dynasties period exhibits colloquial and vernacular traits that distinguish it from pure 文言文, to say nothing of the drama and narrative works of later periods in the Yuan, Ming and Qing, well before any Western or Japanese influence. That said, the Western influence did change things dramatically, in terms of grammar, word order and overall sentence structure. Vernacular novels such as 三国演义 are not 文言文 yet neither are they Western prose translated into Chinese!
Another way of thinking about the changes is to compare the contemporary speech of say, a hutong dweller in Beijing from a Western-educated Chinese professional working in China: The hutong local will use a grammar, vocabulary and mode of speech that is radically different from the Chinese white-collar professional, and unfortunately, many of those “professionalized” i.e. Westernizing, trends are also evident throughout the professions: science, journalism, academic writing, etc.
Yet there are still many areas where a more “authentic” (untainted) Chinese still exists, certainly in the oral and popular genres such as 相声, and one can only hope that it is preserved and maintains a living presence in Chinese writing and speech going forward.
Great points. The language has certainly evolved organically for centuries, as Gong Zizhen (龚自珍) said, '文体五百岁一变' (styles naturally shift every five hundred years).
However, I feel the Western influence of the last century wasn't just a natural turn of that cycle. It was a hyper-accelerant that fundamentally altered the structure.
Your comparison between the 'hutong dweller' and the 'white-collar professional' is spot on. I feel that this divergence is creating a distinct social divide, where 'Europeanized' grammar becomes a class marker in the future generation.
Dear, Jingyu, I must congratulate you on this piece on Modern Chinese language being Europeanized. Hope to see and read a lot more from you in the near future. All the best!
白話，或曰市井口語，古已有之，不解此中諸君何以將之與文言混為一談？
口語，數十年一變，故文言出世，以記千古，文以載道
君不見各類疏注汗牛充棟，今人學藝不精，卻多妄揣古意，豈不哀哉？
歐美濫觴之餘，吾前人亦多拾東瀛牙慧，諸如經濟、哲學等譯詞可見一斑
I wish you'd spent more time talking about the collapse of Chinese cultural confidence; the debates within China about how much of Chinese culture should be jettisoned. So when you talk about Chinese writers, especially the May 4 Movement, I wonder how many people not familiar with Chinese history and its debates at that time realise how much agony Chinese intellectuals went through and how deliberately they relooked at their culture, even their language, to make it "fit" for the modern world in a way that went beyond mere inventing of new words.
Everywhere across the world, non-Western cultures agonised about whether they had to give up their own cultures so as to become strong enough to stand up to Western aggression, whether there was something inherently superior about the West and something innately inferior about being non-Western. I still cannot forget reading Sanshiro by Natsume Soseki and one of his main characters looking at a Western blonde woman says, "The Westerners are fundamentally superior to us. Look at that woman. She is more beautiful than any of our Japanese people." My heart broke.
That attitude still exists among many non-Westerners and among many Westerners. This devastation and rape of non-Western hearts and minds will take many more decades to overcome, but I think the process is gradually starting and is often derided by Western media as nationalism.
Watching Chinese productions from China now like ballet is fascinating to me because I think the Chinese have synthethised elements of Chinese and Western culture with a confidence that did not exist in the 1900s. Think of Cao Yu's Thunderstorm which in form is an exact duplicate of Ibsen's plays. That insecurity is, I think, starting to go away. It's a process that makes me think of the effervescence of the Renaissance when Western culture was incorporating Greek and Roman thinking onto a Catholic scaffold via transmission through Islamic works.
Yes, in many ways, the narrative built by the May 4th intellectuals was a massive success. Most people today still hold the views they established without ever looking at how the construction was actually done. It's like living in a building without knowing how the foundation was poured. But I agree, it is time for a renovation, and that requires taking out the original blueprints and examining the structure.
I think one of the great lessons of Western history is that the Renaissance came before the Enlightenment. For the past 150 years, in the rush to modernize, Chinese intellectuals essentially skipped the Renaissance and went straight for the Enlightenment.
Hi JingYu, I’m an educator in Zhuhai, and your "English with Hanzi" take is the most accurate thing I’ve read this week. It explains exactly why the 1958 attempt to force a Latinised script on the Dong people in Guizhou was such a spectacular failure.
The state tried to graft Western bureaucratic logic onto an "Oral Library" that lives through song. It didn't work then, and as you've pointed out, the result for Modern Mandarin has been a "poetic desert." I'm currently writing about the "Trilingual Shield"—the idea that English can actually be used as a global tool to protect what is left of these oral traditions from being hollowed out by national assimilation.
Subscribed. Looking forward to more. — Clive Kingshott
This sounds like a fantastic concept, Clive. Using a third language gives them a completely new perspective to appreciate their own tradition, stepping outside the rigid binary of what is 'true or false' or 'modern vs. backward.' Maybe Mandarin temporarily lacks the distance to provide that fresh perspective or retrospect, as it functions primarily as a force of assimilation.
By the way, the dynamics of ethnic groups in China is a topic I plan to cover in future newsletters, so stay tuned!
This is fascinating – thank you for such an important set of observations.
The same phenomenon occurred with Indian classical culture. The Vedas were not normally written down, they were passed down by memory, until 18th century Englishmen asked for them in writing, then projected onto the Indian tradition the characteristics they expected to see in a religion, from their own version of Christianity.
Buddhism was re-invented by Westerners in the 19th century. They did the archaeology that showed that the Buddha was a historical figure, not a myth. The Theosophists rescued Theravada Buddhism from collapse in the face of Protestant Christian missionaries.
The Turks did the same thing to themselves in founding the modern. secular Turkish state in the 1920s.
It is very hard to disentangle these cultural elements, and this article is a great help to a non-linguist such as myself.
Regards,
Trevor
Your article opened my eyes about modern Chinese which I don't speak or read. In intercultural communication theory, there is Edward Hall's distinction between high-context and low-context communication. In high-context communication, meaning is understood through familiarity with and attunement to the speaker and extensive knowledge of the context. Communication is indirect and the listener has responsibility for reading between the lines. I
In prewar and postwar Japan, there were attempts to preserve something like a village society so that high-context communication could continue. Vagueness was aesthetically satisfying. A great emphasis was placed on homogeneity and "we Japanese." There was no May Fourth movement although the left was strong in the postwar era for about 30 years. Therefore, the language in modernized Japan has followed a somewhat different course than in China., although, as you point out, the translation process from Western languages did lead to some similar modifications.
This is a fascinating application of Hall's theory. It suggests that by 'Europeanizing' its grammar, Modern Chinese has actually lowered the context barrier, making it more explicit than before.
Just out of curiosity, I’ve been observing a trend in Japan that seems to contradict the careful 'meaning-making' of the past. In the Meiji era, Japan was the master of translating Western ideas into meaningful Kanji. But today, they seem to have abandoned that tradition in favor of direct Katakana transliteration.
They often abbreviate these into codes that are unintelligible to outsiders (e.g., 'First Kitchen' becomes the unfortunate-sounding 'Fakkin'). In a way, doesn't this create a new layer of 'high context' barriers—a sort of cultural encryption? I wonder how this shift will influence the language long-term.
Yes, Katakana Japanese is a phenomenon. It can be annoying, particularly when the Katakana word's meaning diverges from the (usually English) foreign word or phrase it is copied from. Also, often there are perfectly good Japanese kanji words/phrases that could be used. As a foreigner in some ways this makes it easier but (see divergence) not always
Interestingly back in the 1990s IBM Japan tended to use meaningful Kanji for computer concepts, while Japanese companies like NEC or Toshiba just katakana-ed the English words. And then shortened them as in the famous Paasukon (Paasonaru konpyutaa == Personal Computer or PC). I think IBM now follows the katakana trend along with everyone else
You have raise an interesting issue about Japanese use of katakana. I have only a sketchy knowledge of this area. The use of katakana goes back at least as far as the 15th and 16th centuries, But there was also a tendency in the late 19th century to use kanji for foreign loan words. During the prewar era of ultranationalism, the use of katakana was discouraged and words that were once written in katakana were written in Chinese characters. After the war, katakana prevailed and the strange-sounding adaptation of foreign words into Japanese has amused and confused more than a few foreigners over the years, including me.
I was just discussing this with my Chinese teacher the other day! We spend all this time learning grammar structures and parts of speech, when those constructs are more of a post-hoc overlay to help English speakers understand Chinese. When the rules don't apply, it helps me to understand that the rules aren't endemic to the language - they're just a way of trying imperfectly to describe something that already existed. Thanks for your article on this!
Many of the more "traditional" patterns you mention are what close to what we say in Singaporean Mandarin. Our vocabulary in Mandarin is usually limited, but with the vocab we have we speak more like the traditional patterns.
雨下很大，我不要去了。
这朵花红的。
我建议....
I wonder if it's because our substratum consists of the southern fangyan?
Interesting point! From my experience working with Singaporeans, I always got the impression that modern Singaporean Mandarin is actually a perfect example of 'English with Hanzi.' It feels like a lot of the everyday phrasing comes from direct English translations that just coincidentally overlap with those older fangyan patterns. But that’s just my outside observation, as a Singaporean, I'm sure you have a much better feel for what's really driving it.