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Thread: Is the Chinese language dead?

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[quote=TRAVELLERMIKE,38765]What an interested thread you kicked off GRIZ.

Since setting my mind to learning Mandarin (little more than a year ago) I have been variously puzzled and amazed by the differences between the character based approach to written language, and the 'alphabet' approach of my native english.  I think the question you posed regarding whether new characters will ever be created for new words, and how this reflects on the nature of the language development, is certainly an interesting one.

Many respondents have shown that the Chinese language has been developing by constructing new combinations of characters to create 'words' to represent emerging new technologies, and previously unexpressed concepts, and have shown this can be independent of any importation from the west.  However, this is rather similar to the mechanism of new word creation used by all the other (alphabet based) languages of the world, and doesn't tap the potential for generating new characters to capture concepts pictorially.

Maybe it would all be too difficult to manage if the language were dynamic on all levels.  If you were to consider the introduction of a new character for representation of say 'motor', how could you possibly integrate this into the spoken language where it would already have established a multi-character, multi-syllable identity?

Clearly it has been demonstrated that the Chinese character set can be revised in a controlled manner (as in the simplification), but could the language accommodate many new characters if these did not come with new sound/stress combinations? Would it not be frightening if new characters were to be brought into being that necessitated use of more western sounds!! :-)[/quote]

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