The British Nobel Prize winner Russell believes that Chinese characters have "three major flaws". Russell was born in the UK. He is not only a famous litterateur, mathematician, etc., he is also an htm The founder of l3 analytical philosophy can be said to be a very great figure. Even Lu Xun admired him very much. Russell also studied China. In 1922, he wrote a book "China Problem", which pointed out the flaws of Chinese characters.
The first point is that Chinese characters have a large number of strokes. Compared with the 26 letters in English, writing Chinese is much more complicated and energy-consuming.
The second point: Since at that time, the alphabetical sorting method was used, such as the cast typesetting machine, English was convenient for sorting, but there was no fixed order for Chinese characters, so don't think about using this kind of machine.
The third point: Chinese character translation It is difficult to translate proper nouns and scientific terms into foreign languages.
After the development of time, now it seems that these three defects have been well improved. Russell lived in a different era, so his evaluation at the time was unreasonable. In the past, ancient China used traditional Chinese characters, and there were many rare characters, so there were indeed a lot of strokes, but now it has been simplified. There are only 32 basic strokes, and it is not complicated to write.
The second problem is that after the invention of the Chinese Pinyin alphabet in 1958, this problem was completely solved. With the development of the times, our country’s characters have also kept pace with the times. The alphabet h The invention of tml4 has also made it much easier for us to learn Chinese. As for the third point, it is not a big problem if we cannot translate specialized scientific terms. We have transliteration, free translation, etc. What's more, it is also quite difficult to translate Chinese classical Chinese into English. This only shows that the culture is different.
Russell only stayed in China for one year, and he was able to see the flaws of Chinese characters. People in our country learned from them and corrected them. Chinese characters can adapt to the development of the times and become more perfect, which is why we now have Chinese pinyin and simplified Chinese characters that are easy to learn.
Russell saw the shortcomings of Chinese characters and also saw the advantages of Chinese characters. He also said: "It does not have the conveniences of alphabetic writing, but the simplicity and ultimate truth it embodies is unbreakable, immune to storms and hard times, and has protected Chinese culture for four thousand years. It is strong, square and beautiful, just like the spirit it represents."
Starting from the Qin and Han Dynasties, culture The writers and poets all used classical Chinese to write records, because the format of classical Chinese has been fixed for thousands of years, the vocabulary is stable, and the writing is concise and rigorous. However, during the Qing Dynasty emperors, although they could also write Manchu, they still communicated with ministers in writing. The old ones used classical Chinese, which shows the importance of classical Chinese. If you want to understand classical Chinese, it is not difficult. If most people study it seriously, they can understand books written thousands of years ago. Except for Chinese characters that can do this, other languages may not be able to do it.
Li Dazui said in "Concise and Practical Study of Chinese Characters": Without the complexity of the physical structure of Chinese characters, there would be no advantages of strong generative ability and strong differentiation of Chinese characters; without the disadvantage of incompletely accurate radical pronunciation, there would be no advantage of Chinese characters transcending history and dialects. Knowing this, we will not blame the difficulty of writing Chinese characters.
