EDITORIAL
Not 'Art for art's sake'

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

POEMS
Invisible Things
For King and Country
On the Way Home
We 21st Century Youths

MULTILINGUAL PAGE:
Chinese
Interview with Ms Xiao Dan Gao
Interview with learners of Chinese as a second language

RELAY WRITING
Cafe Evergreen - Chapter Two

ESSAY
Identities on the move: society, borders and me

NOTES ON WRITERS

Let's Talk Language - Chinese

- How has Chinese language developed?
As for written Chinese, as you know, Chinese language is from pictures. In Qin dynasty (bc200-300), the first emperor of China united all the writing system. At that time, most of the characters still looked like original pictures, but they were reformed for three times after that, and eventually it got to the system we have now. It was about 2000 years ago.

Today, originalpicturescannot be recognised in about 80% of characters any more. For example, the word 'rest' consists of a person on the left side and a tree on the other side. It was a kind of like a picture, but it refers to the meaning. A lot of words have got different meanings, but similar sounds, because part of the characters are similar. For example, the word 'pang' and 'bang'. Because these characters have similar parts, they have similar sounds. The system has developed like this from pictures.

- How various dialects have come to exist?
Chinese has got only one written language because of the unification of China. But there are a lot of dialects in southern China, because of geographical features such as hills and mountains. So in the past, when transportation was not very good, from one village to the next, they didn't used to see each other. That's why although they seem to be speaking the same dialect; it has quite a bit of variations. So there are more dialects in the South than in the North, the major language is Mandarin Chinese, but even that, again there is a slight variation between provinces, villages.

Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokken (minnan), Wu, (Hunan), Xiang are the major dialects. These are only the major groups and each group has variations. Even Mandarin, it differs from place to place. Also, there are 55 minority groups mostly in the south part of China. Most of them have their own languages.

- Is Mandarin one of the dialects?
Mandarin is an official language, but it can be considered as one of the dialects Actually because the written language is the same, people call them dialects. But a lot of people see them as individual languages. Not only sounds, but also features of the languages are quite different as well.

Mandarin Chinese is being modernised. It's not what people are doing on purpose but it's the way language evolves. Topicalisation is an example. In the past, they used to use more [Subject + Verb + Object] like English, but there is a tendency of changing towards topicalisation which is [Topic + Subject + Verb]. However, southern dialects are not quite like that. They seem to stay as what they were and not changing much.

- What are the major reasons for simplifying Chinese characters?
I think the government wanted to promote Mandarin Chinese. Also at that time the Communist party wanted to get rid of old things. One of the old things was writing. They wanted to speed up producing things. For that, they simplified the way they write.

- What aspects in Chinese do you think are good and bad?
In English although there are some irregularities, once you learn pronunciation you can generally spell words. But in Chinese, it is very unlikely. It's quite hard for learners. You might be able to take a guess but very likely to get it wrong. You can't say that because these two characters look very similar they have the same pronunciation. There seem to be no connection between sounds and words. This is another bad aspect.

What's good about Chinese? I find Chinese language is very compact in meanings. For example, if you have a page of English, you'll find the translation of Chinese will be about half of it. I think it's because in Chinese a word has much meaning.
Another good aspect is that I find Chinese quite useful when communicating especially to Japanese people. Even though the person speaks neither Chinese nor English, and I don't speak Japanese we can still communicate with writing. What else...? Chinese language is rich in idioms coming from stories. A lot of the phrases that we use nowadays, you can trace the story to where it came from. I find that part of this language quite fascinating.

- What kind of influence has English had on Chinese?
Nowadays, huge. Because of advanced development and technology coming from the Western world, and Chinese actually didn’t have those words in Chinese. So the influence in that sense was just mainly the huge amount of new vocabularies based on English were created. Many young people living in China like mixing English words in their Chinese because they think it’s cool (laugh). Not because they know much English very well. They like this word, cool, 'Wa... lei hou cool!!' (laugh).

- Any recommendation of famous Chinese writers?
There was a Chinese writer (Gao Xing Jian) who won the Nobel Prize. He's very famous. Actually I'm more into reading classical Chinese rather than modern ones. I used to hate Chinese literature but I'm picking up interest now. There's a Taiwanese writer Jin Yong, he wrote a lot of kind of half historic, half comical, half romance, half action... mixture of everything and it's very interesting. I'm not sure if he's really really famous, but I know that a lot of people are buying his books. The one I'm reading at the moment... The writer's pen name is Fong Yue Hua, it's about emperors, but it's biography type of novel.

- Any special features in Chinese poems?
Classical poems have either five or seven words in a line, and quite often the last words of the sentence are rhymed. That's the main feature I can tell. They have more than that, but I hated Chinese poems you see (laugh). Because I used to study Chinese poems and in the test we had to explain every single word in the poem. Poem, shouldn't really be explained like that. They should be able to be explained in different ways. But somehow actually ancient Chinese poems don't give you much space for interpretation. There's always a set answer. That's why I hated them.

But there also are prose-type poems. They don't have classical poem-type features. They are more like prose. I think this is the kind that is more popular among young people nowadays.

-Are there any differences in speech according to class?
There's no actually upper class or lower class. But there are what you mean upper class. In the past upper class were the ones who were more educated. There was wealthy class but wealthy class didn't necessarily mean educated. But nowadays upper class are educated as well. There are two kinds of upper class to me: the very wealthy and government officials – they are what I see as upper class.

If you have to do with education, yes your speech will be very different. I notice friends from more educated family, they don't seem to talk about small talks. For example, they don't talk about clothes or movie stars. In the way they talk, the expression they use seem to be from And they speak more 'standard' Chinese. If they are Mandarin speaker they speak more 'standard' Mandarin and if they are Cantonese speaker they speak more 'standard' Cantonese. If what you mean 'upper class' is to do education that would be the features but if it's wealth then I can't tell because there are so many wealthy people who speak terrible Chinese.

- Is Confucianism a religion?
I don't consider it's a religion. In religion, there is something you have to worship, and follow certain rules which control your life. But I think Confucianism is more like philosophy. It does affect our life, the way we think, but quite often I don't realise that the way I think is Confucianism. Often it's after reading a book, 'Oh, OK...' (laugh). Actually it has amazingly deep root in Chinese culture. Not challenging authority and not challenging parents... Probably the reason why it became so popular among the Chinese rulers was because it helped organising the society and helped to maintaining stability of the dynasties.

- What kind of differences in personalities do they have in their general characters from place to place?
Southern people are generally considered as very business minded. So they are very untrustworthy. So they do whatever they can to achieve their goals. And Northern Chinese people are always open minded and straightforward, honest kind of people. I think my theory is because the North geography is mostly quite flat, right? You can openly talk to others even from distance. So probably that's why they are straightforward. But that's my theory I'm not so sure. But this is very general view and other parts have different personalities as well.