Factually! with Adam Conover - China's Kingdom of Characters with Jing Tsu

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

China is now one of the world’s most powerful nations. But how did its unique and formidable language shape its rise? Jing Tsu, the author of Kingdom of Characters, joins Adam to explain the history of the Chinese language, and the amazing innovations that brought it into the modern world. Check out her book at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello everyone, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about all the incredible shit that is inside their brains as we try to get it into our brains. Does that make sense? I was trying out a new intro. I don't know. Let me know what you think. I want to thank once again everybody who supports me and this show on Patreon. If you want to support, go to patreon.com slash adamconover. You get bonus podcast episodes. You get live stand-up that I have never published anywhere else, including my entire one-hour show,

Mind Parasites Live. And you can join our live book club where we are reading a nonfiction book together and then discussing it all together on a big Zoom with the author. Our first book is Four Lost Cities by Anna Lee Newitz. It's really incredible, super fun. We're going to be talking to Anna Lee in just a couple of weeks. So hop on the Patreon if you want to join. Now, let's talk

about today's episode. You know, as I've discussed recently, I've been trying to learn a lot more about China, the country, the culture, the history, the people, the politics, the whole deal. It is a fascinating topic, a fascinating place, and we have not even come close to exhausting it and probably never will. That's one of the reasons it's so fascinating. There is just so much to learn. But today, specifically, we are going to talk about the Chinese language. Now, for much of my lifetime, Chinese has been considered by a lot of ignorant Americans as a strange and inscrutable language. But lately, that has started to change somewhat. It seems like the Chinese language is gaining cachet in America. Mark Zuckerberg is even learning Mandarin, or at least a couple of his robots are. And more and

more schools across the country have created Chinese language programs. Now, this isn't surprising. China is a huge country, and it's increasingly a hugely important country for the global economy. So Americans are starting to realize, you know, it might be good if we could, you know, have a conversation with the billion plus people who live there. Now, Chinese also has a reputation as a difficult language for English speakers to learn. And that is in part because it is very different from English. You know, romance languages like Spanish, French, Italian, those aren't such a big deal. At least they share the same alphabet, even if the grammar and words are different. But Chinese doesn't have an alphabet in the same way English does. Rather, there are thousands of specific characters. And Chinese is

a tonal language. So the way the word is spoken, the literal tone that is used to speak the word, can totally change the meaning of that word. There are four or five different tones depending on how you count them, and those tonal differences can be hard for English speakers to even hear if they are not brought up speaking and reading the language. But now here's where things get really interesting, because it's obvious that language shapes culture. So it's really interesting to ask, how did the different structure of the Chinese language affect the history of China? For instance, when the printing press gained popularity in the West in the 15th century, the culture of Europe was transformed. Suddenly ideas could spread at a rapid pace.

But interestingly enough, movable type was actually invented hundreds of years earlier in China. And while it did increase literacy like it would later in the West, it didn't lead to a similar cultural explosion in that region. Could the differences in structures between the languages have something to do with that different cultural impact? Quite possibly.

But either way, it's indisputable that Chinese language has informed Chinese history and culture and vice versa. And today we're going to talk about how and how China's entry into the global economy required many interesting developments and accommodations in its language that were spearheaded by fascinating historical figures. To talk about it with us today is our guest Jing Zhu. She's a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale and the author of the fantastic new book, Kingdom of Characters, The Language Revolution That Made China Modern. Please welcome Jing Su.

Jing, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Adam. Great to be here. So we've been talking about China, Chinese history, Chinese culture a lot on this show. It's been a real interest area of mine and for folks who listen. You've written a book about the Chinese language, about Chinese written language and its history. Why write this book? What drew you to the topic? Well, you know, I feel that at a time when China looms so large on Americans' minds, there's actually been a lot of understanding of what China's actually like from the inside, what makes them tick,

and what's something that they really prize more than anything else over the centuries. And it really is the language, which I talked about as China's first and last great wall. It kept insiders in, and it kind of kept foreigners out. It has like a really outsized cultural importance to the country and to the people. And it's also something that we've been paying more attention to in the US anyway. I know many, many more people who are studying Mandarin, etc. But so let's get into it. But first,

I'd love to just talk about like the basics of the language, like, you know, what, I don't want to say what is it, but what makes it distinct? And what do folks who are English speakers who don't know much about it, what are normally its most surprising facets to them? Well, you know, to start, I would say, think about the English alphabet for a second. So you have 26 letters, it's a finite set, and they come in a particular order, right? So you're never going to see B before A, S is followed by T, so on and so forth. Okay, so that's all you have to know, 26 letters, and you can compose any word, basically the Indo-European language is out of it. Now, switch gear to Chinese. Chinese doesn't have an alphabet. It has instead what are called characters. And they basically look like square

shaped clusters of smaller patterned intersection of lines and dots inside them. So they're kind of clustered together. They're not written down successively. And they're kind of composed of these parts that's just kind of nestled in one another. And you don't have 26, obviously. Instead, you have thousands. In fact, I think one count is 80,000. But luckily, you only need to know about 3,000 to 4,000 for basic literacy. So don't worry. I don't even know 80,000. Okay. Now, I knew that generally, but I want to dig into some specifics that I don't know. Is there not a phonetic alphabet whatsoever? Like I know Japanese, for instance, has the kanji characters that are roughly analogous to what you're describing, but there are also phonetic alphabets. Is there a phonetic alphabet of any kind?

No. The short answer is no. Not originally, not at the turn of the 20th century. So Japan is a good example because Japan, basically, Chinese was its first writing system. So a lot of China's neighbors borrowed from it. It was like a big empire. It was most literate, most accomplished in many ways. So Japan borrowed character writing from China, but they kind of turned it into their own.

But in addition to that, they recognized that you kind of need something more phonetic. So that's why they have what's called the kana syllisseur library, these two other systems that basically kind of sound like Western alphabet. You put them together and they piece out what something sounds like, except instead of letters, they're kind of these simpler parts that are actually derived from character writing. But Chinese doesn't have a equivalent alphabet like that. Well, now they do, but certainly where the book starts, where the whole story starts in the early 20th century,

the answer is no, which is why to consider where it is now with a Romanization system, and also somehow you can call it up on your computer screen, text it across the world, and have it show up, pop on a different screen.

All this is extraordinary accomplishments. It's kind of the unseen revolution that's been happening throughout the 20th century. Yeah, that's a really cool way to put it. I mean, so the fact that the language works that way is such a fundamentally different paradigm for a language than, you know, what I grew up with, obviously. It must present like really specific challenges, especially using it on a computer. But let's start at the beginning of the story with your book. Where does your story begin that you tell? So it opens in 1900 with this Buddhist monk who turned out not to be a monk, but a wanted fugitive who was actually on the brink of coming back to the Chinese empire. Now,

he was a wanted fugitive in China. He was one of these conservative, progressive reformers. So he was part of the Mandarin elite in the last dynasty. And he was thinking that there are so many institutions in traditional China that seemed rotten, right, in comparison to Western countries and civilizations. So he's thinking, you know, for China to survive, it kind of needs to have a better writing system that's easier to learn. Because to become modernized, you kind of have to have this people literate. And how do you do that? Because traditionally, written word, probably in most civilizations, belong to the elite and the few.

And so he wanted to somehow, first of all, so his first task was, well, that's all great. We want to modernize Chinese, but frankly, there's so many spoken dialects, right? So people don't see it now, but China has hundreds of spoken dialects.

So someone from the South cannot necessarily understand someone from the North. In fact, officials who used to go out and distribute famine relief would complain that it's like speaking foreign languages. They can't communicate with local officials and get their job done.

So Wang Zhao decided he would come back. But this was really at great peril to his own safety because he was basically, he had a bounty on his head. The Empress Dowager personally wanted him dead. So he could have stayed in Japan. He could have lived out his years there. He was, in fact, there for already two years. But he had this burning desire that he would not die, which was to come back to China and do something for his language. And so he stole across the border and decided that he would make this work at all costs. And so what year, by the way, was this? And what did he do? 1900.

So he came back, he looked around for allies, and he said, you know, the Chinese language, he showed them his pamphlet, because he had it tucked away in his robe, he had been working on it. It's basically like a, it's like a blueprint of a kind of alphabet, a kind of phonetic alphabet, more like the kana we're talking about, so not in letters, but kind of using symbols from,

actually similar to Japanese kana, but he had an additional inspiration. And this is something that no one really thinks about, which was, you know, the last Chinese dynasty was not ruled, but we think of now as Han Chinese, right? The majority, the ethnic majority. But it was ruled by the Manchus, which was a foreign kind of ethnic, another ethnic group. And so the Manchus themselves,

the reason people don't know the last dynasty was ruled by Manchus because they actually assimilated. They didn't impose their language or culture because they're looking at a vast empire, but they decided to just basically learn Chinese themselves. And basically it became easier to do that

and try to convert the entire population. And so the Manchus themselves had a kind of phonological system to teach themselves how to pronounce Chinese. So it's kind of like an alphabet. And Wang Zhao also took inspiration from Japan and took inspiration from Manchu phonology in order to sound out

what his native dialect would sound like, which was Beijing Mandarin. So this is almost like a form of linguistic technology that needed to be, someone needed to develop. I mean, when you talk about, you know, bringing like all languages, I think at some point, you know, public literacy, bringing language to the people is like something that someone has to do.

But in addition to say, you know, getting a printing press and printing a lot of, you know, primers for people to read, there also needed to be like some new way of understanding the language, like new tools to be developed for people to be able to speak it easily or write easily. Yeah. You know, the number one, the first step before all else was, okay, you can publish textbooks and primers, like you said, you can develop tools, but you really needed a standard language to Meiji Mandarin would be like the model, the blueprint for that national language tongue, right? Or the national pronunciation. Back that up. That would be the basis for the national language pronunciation, which is why there's this conference I talk on chapter one, which is one of the most melodramatic episodes. I mean, I can't even make this up if it didn't exist in historical records,

which was, you know, he held this conference. It was a national conference. He didn't hold it. He participated in this conference. And there was a Northern delegates. There were the Southern delegates. They all came with their dialects and they all rooted for their own dialect

to become the national standard. And Wang Zhao decided he's going to push Mandarin through hell or high water. He's going to do it. So he gerrymandered and manipulated the different sessions. And Wang Zhao decided he's going to push Mandarin through hell or high water. He's going to do it. So he gerrymandered and manipulated the different sessions. He got into a fight with a southern delegate who was just having some conversation on the other side of the aisle and said something like rickshaw in his home dialect. But to Wang Zhao's Beijing Mandarin year, it sounded like he was calling Wang Zhao a son of a bitch.

So he flew out of his chair. He grabbed the guy and basically chased him son of a bitch. So he flew out of his chair, he grabbed the guy, and basically chased him out of the hall. It was one of the most infamous. But there were so many other things that happened. The passion that people brought to this task. People passed out, they had to go home, they couldn't stay

anymore in these long struggle sessions because he was so antagonistic, he drove people away and he himself you know was very proud the fact that he had he has some kind of ailment too so he had like blood actually running down his pant leg and he's like yeah but he stayed he was really proud of this fact yeah it's kind of it was kind of gross when you think about it but he was unstoppable but the fact the fact that at a conference to standardize a language, you would have a misunderstanding like that where like, okay, everyone, we got to get, we got to all get on the same page with regard to the language. And then someone says rickshaw and someone else is like, you call me a son of a bitch and like chases them out.

It's like, wait, that's exactly the problem that you're like trying to solve is. Exactly. That's exactly right. So you can tell how this is actually a major issue. Exactly. That's exactly right. So you can tell how this is actually a major issue. If the Chinese cannot communicate with their own people, how are they supposed to communicate with the outside? Right? Because they needed one language. Every nation has a national language. And for China to become a proper nation, it needed that. And it needed citizens who spoke that language. Wait, so that brings me to a question that I almost wish I had asked at the very beginning when we're talking about what we mean when we say the Chinese language and when we talk about these dialects. I'm really ignorant of all this. The level of my understanding is I know that there's Mandarin. I know there's Cantonese. I understand that these are not the

same language or are they different dialects? Are they the same language? You know, how do we walk me through that piece of it, please? Yeah, I'm finding this great quote for you, Adam, which is, you know, that's right. There are hundreds of dialects in Chinese. What you really need to know is basically what this Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich once said. He said, a language is a dialect with an army and navy. He said, a language is a dialect with an army and navy.

So essentially, it's really just a power standardization. Who has the bigger guns, and that's the language, that's the dialect that's going to become the language. And that's basically what happened. Because Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, is really not, it was a language spoken by officials to bridge the communication gap between themselves when they're out distributing famine relief. But the issue is, it was not a national standard per se. So Wang Zhao wanted it to be such, but people in the South wanted their language to be such. So when we talk about Chinese language, it's true. If you're talking about spoken, it's really languages. language is true if you're talking about spoken it's really languages but when you're talking the writing system which is what makes it so remarkable is that china only had one writing

system really so that's been so cantonese mandarin the other dialects all use the same writing system that's how they communicated and in fact was even, so before Western alphabet came along, Chinese was actually the regional lingua franca for Japan, Korea, and even Vietnam. And in fact, the Vietnamese borrowed Chinese characters to sound out their own language. So, you know, because Chinese characters actually has a phonetic quality to it.

It's just not as obvious as the alphabet. And so, you know, before Western alphabet came along, Chinese was the ABC of the region. So let me get this right though. Like when you, is there such a thing as, and I'm very sorry for my extremely basic questions, but is there such a thing in Chinese writing as like a Cantonese version of writing and a Mandarin version of writing? Or is it just, there's a thing in Chinese writing as like a Cantonese version of writing and a Mandarin

version of writing? Or is it just there's a single version and then one might say those same characters in different ways? By the way, I love what you think of as basic questions, because they're always the hardest to answer. And the thing is, there are in fact characters that exist only in the uses of Cantonese writers, but they're really more local. They don't have, they're not part of standardization, the standard character writing list of acceptable characters that you will write. There's certainly lots of what we will call variants of characters, right?

Characters that kind of look alike become different. And this is actually, it was a huge problem in the 60s when computing age required, you know, Chinese to also come up with a character set that you can code and problem in the 60s when computing age required you know chinese to also come up with a character set that you can code and put in the computer because they had to adjudicate all this like god for every character there's like two or three other cousins like how do we decide who is the first cousin so it is kind of a it's just a fact of language language is a very social thing and they're messy and they change over time but so so if I am a Cantonese speaker, and that's what I know, I go to Beijing, and I can read a newspaper but maybe have trouble conversing. Is that the case?

Yes, that is true. That's amazing. Because it sounds actually – I find Southern tones very different than Northern tones. Southern tones actually traditionally is said to have nine tones. If you think about Mandarin, Mandarin now basically has four. There's kind of a fifth tone, but it's basically just four tones. So that's what you hear, this putonghua, what we call common speech now, which is basically standard Chinese.

It only has four tones. So when you go to the South, the tones become more because that's just where a lot of, that is just historically the case. And so you have in Taiwan where the Ming, the Ming, big topo that kind of rings there, and that you have also several more tones than Mandarin. And by tones, this is a quality of Chinese language that it's the pitch at which you say a particular part of a word has like meaning, correct? Am I right that is a pitch or not? Yes, exactly.

Actually, I try and thanks for giving me a chance to demonstrate this because I love demonstrating. Yeah, I want to hear a demonstration. It's kind of different between saying yes and yes. So in English, we hear a kind of question, yes, and then an emphatic yes. But in Chinese, this would be the difference in tones. So yes would be almost like a second tone that kind of goes up.

And then yes would be the one that goes down, which would be the fourth tone. So in Chinese, it doesn't mean a question, but it's just a different pitches. And it's actually, there's a reason why tones are so important for chinese characters because of the massive inventory you need to have some way of telling them apart because chinese characters chinese writing system has this one problem

or one historical product you know uh characteristic that english alphabet doesn't, which is it has a lot of homophones. So homophone is like, for instance, when we say a kernel of a corn versus a kernel as in general in an army, right? These words occur sometimes in English, but they don't really confuse it. And there are very few instances. In Chinese, there's a huge number of them. For instance, my name, J-I-N-G, without knowing the tone, it could be any variety, but they're all different characters. And so for Chinese, it's very important that you, when you hear it, you're able to tell also with the help of context,

that is to say what other characters are said alongside of it, like what characters actually meant, which obviously is why Chinese is so visually complex, because it's the only way to tell characters apart. I really love your example, your demonstration, though, because I've always heard of tonality being very unique to the Chinese languages. And so, oh, yeah, we don't have that in English, but they do in those languages. But your demonstration made me realize, well, we do use tone and pitch. Like when I ask my girlfriend, like, hey, do you want to go to a concert? And she goes, yeah, like that.

I know that means no. That means no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, no, you don't want to go. You said yes, but you meant no.

And I can tell because it's up there rather than as you said, yeah,'s you know more emphasis but also a different pitch you know it's like that high up pitch but this is just like a it so it does have a different meaning but in this case it's like the the pitch actually makes it a completely different word in addition to maybe adding some emotional quality to it totally even just what you said emotional quality to it if you. Even just what you said, emotional quality to it. If you had no tones, it would sound like emotional quality to it, like a robot. So in fact, we're constantly modulating our tones and pitching speech to convey expressivity. But for Chinese, it's actually more structural and more structurally important than that. Yeah. Okay. So we've talked about these, you know, major differences between Chinese language and at least English. The immense number of characters, the tones.

What I'm curious about is, you know, these are not features of the language that anybody like chose. Like nobody 10,000 years ago was like, hey, let's invent a writing system. I mean, there are people who, you know, make their decisions, right? But like a language is something you're born into. And that sort of springs up organically. And so what I've always wondered is how does that make, how does that change like the cultural context of the language? You know, how does that change how the language is used? Does it present any difficulties in terms of like literacy?

You said with computers, for instance, it was a lot more difficult to put the Chinese language on computers than, say, English, I would imagine. So what are some of those differences? Adam, I love your questions. Actually, just give me a chance because now actually I seldom get to talk about this, but this is actually why I picked up this project in the first place. Because I really want to know, like, is Chinese really that much of a disadvantage? I mean, honestly, is the fact that it's harder to learn, does it actually weigh down our brains more? Is it what, you know, stopped Chinese from modernizing earlier? As has been said by a lot of Western theorists of language and globalization, they say, you know, someone said, well, you know, China is so cumbersome to learn.

That's why the Greeks invented philosophy and mathematics, you know, in the West, because people didn't have to spend so much time learning the language. They can just sort of move on and think more abstractly. So it turns out to really pursue this question about five, six years ago, I wanted to find out. So at the time, neuroscience was developing this subfield, which is about the science of reading. Like what actually happens inside your brain when you read writing systems, right? You read language. Of course, at the time, the field was mostly done in alphabetic speaking environments. So to really test their hypothesis, they were looking towards Chinese writing system as

the conception that could prove the rule, right? If they could bring Chinese under its fold, then that would have, this theory would have universality. So I tracked down these two neuroscientists, one in the States and one in Paris, and went to see them. So here's an interesting fact. You know, writing, the history of writing, it's only about 5,000 years. So evolutionarily speaking, there's not enough time for our brains to actually adapt to a capacity

for just reading and learning written languages. So it turns out it's actually built on a more primitive prior infrastructure for recognizing patterns in nature. So I'm talking about nature, not like, you know, cityscapes because that's really a modern invention. Just recognizing different plant species, things like that. Yeah, like shapes around us, you know, things that intersect, you know, horizons, right, trees, plants. So here's the mind-blowing part. So at that moment when I learned this,

it blew my mind because it just so happens that there's a very old theory and philosophy of the origin of Chinese writing in Chinese. And it tells a story of a four-eyed sage who looked up and watched the patterns of the cloud formation and looked down to see and observe the tracks left by birds walking on sand. And he realized that there's a pattern, there's an inherent order in the universe. And that's, it was said, when he started inventing characters. So Chinese character is supposed to be these patterns of lines intersecting that is actually part of the natural universe, not against it, not abstracted from it, but actually partakes in it. So that's why historically, writing has such a power of authority and legitimacy in Chinese culture, which I think is why it has persisted, despite the demands, you know, modern linguists tell you all languages tend towards simplification. And on that count, you know, Chinese script should not have survived. But lo and behold, it has.

Yeah. So in your view, the idea that the Chinese language is very difficult to learn and that's been like a barrier, that doesn't hold up? Well, some people say, some newer scientists say that the startup cost is greater. I mean, as I said, you have to learn like 3,000 to 4,000 characters to be basically literate. But once you learn that, it seems to go by pretty quickly. And I can tell you from personal experience, and I talk about this a little bit

at the beginning of the book, it was really hard for me to learn English because it's not because letters were hard to learn. In fact, they were so easy to learn. There were only 26 of them too. But I found it very hard. Oh my God, it was so easy. I was like, I know it's like,

could you get any easier? But this is after spending years as a kid learning, you know, memorizing stroke orders and shapes of characters. But I developed a much more natural emotive relationship with reading Chinese, like in poetry. I still read poetry in Chinese, like in traditional characters. And with English, it was just like, it's like the letters are too simple. I couldn't develop a kind of affective relationship to it. So there is a kind of difference, but I can skim and read a lot faster in Chinese.

Like if you give me a page, I can look at it and pretty much know what it's kind of about. As opposed to English where, you know, you still kind of go through the whole page because there's just not that much variation in terms of visual differences. Yeah, because you can just sort of like look at a word and a character and like understand the content of it a little more quickly because it's just

part of the character rather than being a word that you have to sort of scan past. Is that my understanding? Yeah. And to tell you the truth, alphabetic reading also functions very similarly. I mean, if you read a page right now, I can guarantee you're not reading word for word. You're actually pretty much reading probably the first letter and the last letter of a word. And then the rest of your brain kind of fills it in for you. Because your brain is like, yeah, we've seen this before. And it kind of fills it in for you. So you can read faster.

And so what's really interesting about this, so, you know, throughout the book, I basically talk about how Chinese and Western alphabet, because remember, alphabet letters were also ideographic to begin with, right? When it was a Phoenician alphabet, the letter A, capital A, is actually supposed to call to mind a house. Or the letter M is how it resembled kind of rivers. So, you know, we've forgotten that in the Western alphabet

because after the Greeks took over, it just became more and more abstracted, became like a set of phonetic symbols, but it's actually not its origin. So there's a lot of interweaving histories and characteristics between the two language systems. But what's really remarkable is that, despite the fact I just told you that writing is, you know,

has a pretty short history, you know, despite that languages have more in common than they have, you know, in differences, you know, we still think of language as a real dividing barrier between cultures and understanding, right? I mean, it makes me think of this analogy, which is how they did the study of the racial difference, like in terms of the skin color, eye color,

that defines racial difference. The genetic expression of that is only a fraction, like I think 2% to 3% of our total available genomic expression. So in other words, our differences are really minuscule compared to the rest of us and how much we have in common. And I think the same is for languages. We forget, but then we tend to go to wars with those who have languages that we don't understand, like they have a different skin color. And in fact, these days, we actually talk about our mother tongue and being a native speaker of this and that language, you know, pretty much unproblematically, as opposed to when we talk about gender or race, right?

What we understand is constructiveness and how there are certain kinds of essentialisms that doesn't work or isn't fair. But we still kind of hold on to language as that last bastion of essentialism that, frankly, we just love to keep. last bastion of essentialism that frankly, we just love to keep. Yeah, it's true. Like, and we make judgments about people based on their language and based on accent or based on lack of fluency that are really hard to get past, you know, the, just the, the basic stereotype of, you know, when someone doesn't speak your language as fluently as you do, you know, feeling that that connotes a lack of intelligence on their part, right? That is extremely hard to overcome. And it's not that we put less work into overcoming than we do a lot of other prejudices that we know we should not carry. Totally. And having been on both sides of that in, you know, two different languages,

I mean, I can tell you, can't we just get over that? Don't you think, Adam, that the world would be a better place to do that? But language is so inherent to us. And it is, you know, when someone expresses themselves in a way that we feel is slow or whatever, it's very hard to not just say, oh, they must think that way, too. That must be deep within them. Like, I agree that we should overcome it, but I also understand why it's so deeply rooted in us. Yeah, we have a lot of implicit and implicit bias when it comes to language, right? When you hear an accent like Chinese, you're thinking, you know, broken English immigrant.

When you hear French, you're thinking, ooh, European distinction tradition, right? So there's a lot of prejudices that we do that's kind of hidden in language, which is why I tell you, like, we have to stop protecting language in some ways as kind of like a mother tongue or, you know, a native speaker quality that we don't interrogate. I have to ask, what is the Chinese stereotype of English speakers who are speaking, you know, Chinese poorly, Mandarin poorly, who have half learned it? I'm not sure if you want to know, Adam. I mean, I'm curious. Frankly, I have to tell you, Chinese often feel they're curious, they're really amused, and they actually really admire foreigners who can speak Chinese well. So, you know, my favorite example is actually Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary that basically compiled the first, he compiled the first Romanization scheme for Chinese,

this 16th century. And Matteo Ricci was known to be able to learn just like thousands of characters. And he was made almost like an honorary Confucian. And the Chinese really revered him and they treated him like an honorary Mandarin. Amazing. Well, we have to take a really

quick break. When we come back, I want to ask you about how the Chinese language interacts with technology, with the modern world, but we have to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Jing Tzu. Okay. We're back with Jing T su so uh we're talking about how the chinese language differs from others and we've talked about whether or not you know it has actually served as a barrier um to people learning the language to the the country as a whole One thing I'm really curious about, though, is once, you know, mechanical type comes into it, right? Once everyone else in the world is using a typewriter to communicate, you know, more quickly to make official documents, seems hard to make a typewriter when you've got 8,000 or so characters. So how does that work? I'm sure you have that story in

your book. Well, it's pretty extraordinary, right? What are you supposed to do? You look at your keyboard, I'm looking at my computer right now as I'm talking to you. I got pretty much the QWERTY layout. It's got one key per letter, but it's still just 26 letters. And for Chinese characters, what would that mean? Supposed to come up with a keyboard that has thousands, tens of thousands of keys? I mean, in fact, the first Chinese typewriter invented by this American Presbyterian missionary in China around 1897, that was pretty much his kind of, you know, workmanlike approach that he, you know, he put all these characters on a big, you know, circular tray, like a disc, and he just might roll it around like a drum and try to line it up and then, you know, circular tray, like a disc, and you just kind of roll it around like a drum and

try to line it up and then, you know, press to type. But when it came to the typewriting age, in the proper typewriting age, where we kind of pretty much have the form we have now with an external keyboard, it became a different kind of challenge. So there's a couple of people who took this on. And here we then move into kind of the, I would say, like the first generation of the model Chinese minority, you know, the kind of stereotype, which is say, like the first generation of the model Chinese minority, you know, the kind of stereotype, which is, you know, this young man from China who got this scholarship to go to MIT. And this man, Zhou Houkun, you know, he was kind of like a good Confucian son, but he had an engineer's mind. So he saw this very much as a problem to be solved,

right? So he didn't think about doing something to the characters themselves. He just thought, you know what, I can maximize on the mechanism of storage inside a typewriter. And so that's kind of what he did. But the biggest breakthrough to come out of this typewriting era is that someone else came along and figured out that what if we go inside the character writing itself and look at each character and try to figure out, can it be broken down like an alphabetic word? Can I break down the character into parts,

you know, smaller units, more elemental units that maybe can then be moved around like pieces on a chessboard and so that you can use them to recombine? Because it turns out, when you try to break down characters this way, there's about three to 400 components, they call it, that recur. I know, I know. It's not a huge, it's not a big... We brought it down from 8,000 to three to 400. It's like, okay, still kind of too big to fit on my desk on a keyboard, but we're getting closer.

We're getting closer. And you can further kind of distill and simplify and slot them to bigger categories. So finally, they got to a point where they cleverly matched these parts to basically each key on an alphabetic keyboard. So you can use that to recombine. Now, what's really interesting is, okay, so the average English word length

is about close to five letters, which means to compose an English word, you basically have to tap five times on the keyboard. But for Chinese characters, turns out when you break them down like this, each character is composed about between two to four components. So in other words, you just need two to four taps on the keyboard to make a Chinese character. So guess what? With the typewriting keyboard technology, China was able to one-up the English alphabet and use it even better than the Western alphabet. I mean, that to me was a truly ingenious part, right? It's like they had this infrastructure they had to fit themselves into as the latecomer, you know, the belated arrival. But then they figure out a way, it's like they had this infrastructure they had to fit themselves into as the latecomer, the belated arrival.

But then they figure out a way. It's like, yeah, we're going to do this. And they figure out how to turn that disadvantage into an advantage. That's so cool. So you just literally, or at least at that time, there's different strokes, different components, and you're sort of layering them on top of each other in order to create a word? Well, see, here's the interesting thing. You said layering. Now, what's complicated about Chinese character is,

you know, with an English word, the alphabet, the letters come one after the other, right? It's basically a row of letters. Yeah. But the compositional, the spatial structure of a Chinese character, when you look at it, it's not side by side. Sometimes it's side by side.

Other times it's one on top of the other. But other times it's kind of this weird diagonal or, you know, bisectal diagonal shape. It's got these complicated structures. So a challenge has been how it's easy to take it apart, but then how do you put them together in the right proportion that it wouldn't look weird, which the Chinese was actually very important. Now, remember, this is a civilization that prized calligraphy.

So how a character looks means a lot to them. So that took a lot of ingenuity and kind of, you know, further refinement. Yeah. I mean, I know that the language is, as you say, has been sort of like the jewel of Chinese culture in many ways. It's been like very, very important. So like you, you need to get it right. But did the language itself have to make any accommodations for the typewritten age? Like, were there certain characters that you couldn't write? Or is there a certain, you know, is there something different about how the language ends up being used? how the language ends up being used. If you're sitting down at the equivalent of an IBM typewriter, right? And you're writing a letter in that way, do you end up, did you end up writing

in a different way than you would have if you're doing it by hand? I'm very curious. Well, it's definitely a trade-off, but you know, it was actually a good trade-off because it forced Chinese to be selective about, okay, what characters are actually used in daily communication versus character

that are really cool to know because they're so esoteric and maybe great for dinner conversations. But you know what? We're not going to ever use them. So, you know, they had to make that distinction. But you know what? That turned out to be a really good move because when we get to the digital computing age, you know, every human language system that enters into this platform called Unicode had to have what's called a character set, which is they had to have like a particular size and number of characters, different from Chinese characters, by the way, but that's just more of a technical language. They really had to come down to basically a finite, like a selected finite size. So it was

a good thing for Chinese to do. But I'll tell you what the big trade-off is for Chinese to become Romanized. That is to say, to have a Romanization form. Because the current day standard Romanization form is called pinyin, P-I-N-Y-I-N, which literally means to piece sounds together. And that's basically, pinyin is the Romanization. It's like my name, Jing, J-I-N-G. That's a pinyin spelling. Writing Chinese. It's like my name, Jing, J-I-N-G. That's a pinyin spelling. Writing Chinese using like English or Roman characters. Yeah. Exactly. So the big trade-off of that is you cannot indicate the tones in Romanization.

So, you know, there's this one chapter where I talk about, I don't know if you remember this. I talk about Sir Stone who likes to eat stone lions. And he thought he bought these 10 lions and brought them home. Turns out they were made of stone. So this is a parable that in Chinese, in character form, in the original Chinese, you see it as like a great little story, very charming, very quaint. But if I were to represent the entire parable in Roman letters, it would literally be S-H-I repeated like 92 times. So it would sound like she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, all the way. Whereas there's because there's no tone indication. You have no real idea what's being said.

Yeah. So that's kind of the tradeoff, right? China was Romanized, but the final Romanization form does not carry tones. Yeah, because our alphabet has no way to indicate tone. Like, even though we do have it to some smaller extent, you know, tonal differences in the way things are expressed, there's no way to write that down using A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Yeah. And it doesn't really matter to English either, right? And we don't need to note tones in our speech. Like, we have other ways of indicating, you know, what we mean. Now, you can imagine with all these sort of, you know, pitfalls and difficulties and challenges

and characteristics to our particular Chinese language, how important it was in the modern age when language become a kind of information, right? In an information age where whoever controls information basically controls the world. So this is where like the book, I think this is in chapter six, where, you know, after standardization, after the Mao period, you know, these swashbuckling adventures throughout the revolutionary period, these individual inventors that we talked about. Now we get into serious global power. Because in the late 1950s, both China and the US were basically engaged in kind of Cold War politics, where it was actually really important to be able to intercept or to spread propaganda or to be able to be the information source for language systems.

So in 1959, for instance, there was a foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Graphic Arts Research Foundation that under this man named Samuel Caldwell at MIT came up with a prototype of an ideographic composing machine that basically was going to revolutionize Chinese and other ideographic printing industries. So, you know, printing itself, you know, from this already in the works and typewriting era, it's really important to be able to mass produce your language, right? I mean, to be read, like, you know, to have messages, you know, why I wrote this book and why I would like to be read. And it's all because of standardization and writing on who publishes, who gets to disseminate it, the power of language. And so United States at the time was, our president was Eisenhower. And Eisenhower thought,

he had actually had a working group that was in charge of national security policies. And this particular working group was called the Operations Coordinating Board. And they discovered that, wow, we actually have this invention that works. Also partly because between you and me, the American military basically financed it. But that, of course, is not really mentioned in the internal documents. Be that, you know, well, let that be. And they were saying how this is really important. Like, we got to announce this.

They feel like we got to tell President Eisenhower to announce to the world that America came up with a new, the first, you know, computing machine that could actually print Chinese. And they say, we should let this be a one-two punch. Because after that, we should figure out how to use this technological advantage to basically spread propaganda, right? To convince the minds and hearts of people around the world, especially the Chinese people, to the message of America. So it didn't quite transpire because as the one obstacle that has basically happened throughout the Chinese Revolution, it was difficult to scale. It was difficult to mass produce, right? So at the time, that would have cost like $300,000, which actually to current days is about $2.8 million.

Don't worry, I actually looked this up. I didn't just do a calculation in my head. Not to over impress you, Adam. But in any case, so it's kind of aborted. But the internal documents, which is in this archive in Abilene, Kansas, actually talks about the internal discussions. They were sure

that, yeah, we're going to use this to sway the hearts and minds. We're going to get a jump on this Cold War propaganda and bring around communist China. So you see the Chinese Great Revolution really kind of dovetailed with all these very important global moments. And from the Chinese perspective, in retrospect,

they could have abolished their own writing system, right? At the dawn of the 20th century, when our monk, our fake Buddhist monk came home, they could have just said, let's just use Western alphabet, which some proposed and just forget the Chinese writing system. But the Chinese held on.

And so imagine if they hadn't done that, where would they be now? Right? They don't have an advantage in Western alphabet. They would be, yeah, they would be looking at a very different world. That's fascinating. And that story really goes to show how much language is often used as a tool of state power, how political it is a lot of the time. I know that, you know, in the Mao years, I know that there was a big attempt to reform the Chinese writing system then, but I don't know many of the details. Can you fill me in on that story? Because that's a huge change to the language, is it not?

on that story? Because that's a huge change to the language, is it not? It really is. It was a huge inflection point and it was because under Mao, two things were accomplished that were critical. One was Romanization.

It's when Mao standardized the Romanization that we now know as Pinyin, right? When the chapter's called when Peking became Beijing. You know, Beijing, Peking does not sound like Beijing at all, but that spelling system actually was, you know, developed Beijing. You know, Beijing, Peking does not sound like Beijing at all,

but that spelling system actually was, you know, developed by, you know, Western missionaries and statesmen, Wei Giles, two people. And it kind of was awkward for the Chinese to use because it was basically for foreigners who didn't know Chinese. And so Chinese always wanted to come up with a romanization that's their own and propose it as the international standard, which makes sense. I mean, of course, we'd rather represent, we want to have a say, right? We all want to have a say of how our language is represented to the world. And so Mao was credited with that, and he was credited with simplification, which was taking

basically strokes out of characters to make them easier to learn. So they look simpler, characters to make them easier to learn. So they look simpler, you know, simpler patterns. So the prevailing wisdom is always that simplification was accomplished under Mao. But as I point out, it's not true. Because the nationalists, which were communist arch nemesis, right, who then who is now the government and the government in Taiwan, the nationalists actually already proposed simplification in the 1930s. But because the 20th century was rife with wars and toppled regimes, they didn't really have the environment to push it through. Now, the communist China, 1949 was actually the first time that modern China as a nation was unified.

And that's why, you know, to enforce a standardization of language, you really need state power. But as I point out, the credit cannot go to Mao alone. And frankly, as I point out in this other story that very few people know about, it can't even go to the nationalists, It can't even go to the nationalists, but to this small minority of Sino-Muslims, Chinese Muslims, who were the descendants of these Muslim communities in northwestern China, who were persecuted during the last empire and fled across the border to current-day Kazakhstan. So they lived there completely outside of nationalization, revolution. They were completely, you know, they had no idea all this stuff was going on in China. But because they had brought their spoken tongue with them, which is kind of like a northern dialect that sounds a little bit like Mandarin, you know, except they didn't have a writing system because they were illiterate peasants,

right? We talked about how illiteracy was extremely high. So these were poor peasants. And so they didn't have a writing system. So guess what? Their first writing system were actually given to them by the Soviets, who under their own multinational language policy, decide that each minority group, these national minorities, ethnicities, will have their own writing system at that time in Latin letters. Wow. So totally wild. So again, these are the small stories I felt between the cracks of big nations and empires,

which is why I loved having a chance to cross it. So this is a Chinese Muslim minority that is using, that is speaking a Chinese dialect, but using Latin letters given to them by the Soviets. And that is a language variant that like currently exists that people are currently using. Yes. Well, it's even more awesome. So this is not to be too mind bendy because I don't make this up, but history has this way of getting super complicated. So the way it comes full circle is that this Sino-Muslim romanization under the Soviets somehow dovetailed and converged with a Chinese effort

to Romanize in the 1930s. Because the Chinese were looking to their Soviet big brothers for inspiration and tutelage. And so the Soviet also had this precedent that they already did for the Chinese. They're called Dongans, by the way, the Chinese Muslim. So these two actually came, two halves came together in 1930s. Except by then, nobody really kind of remembered the sign of Muslims, and maybe they don't want to.

Wow. Okay. That's an incredible story. And it also goes to show how, like, as much as we try to impose our will on language, it also changes in ways that are unpredictable and, you know, that are so historically contingent, just based on the way people move around and those sorts of things. My understanding is, though, that the simplification of Chinese is, like, was somewhat contentious. Is that the case? I've also seen, like, was somewhat contentious. Is that the case? I've also seen like, this is extremely stupid, but like when I'm choosing a language on a piece of software, right. And I like scroll by Chinese, sometimes it'll say Chinese simplified or Chinese perhaps traditional or something like that, which makes me think, okay, well, this transition is maybe

not quite complete or not quite unanimous. And what is, can you fill me in on that? Oh, yes. Okay, now I see what you mean. Yes. So what happens in 1949 when the communists took over China and the nationalists retreated to Taiwan, the nationalists decided that they're going to be the defender of traditional Chinese culture. the defender of traditional Chinese culture. So they decide that they would champion and protect to the death traditional character writing,

which is why when you see that option, like I'm looking at my computer window now, I can switch between the two, is that there are actually two systems. But the mainland system will also allow you to use complex or traditional characters because at the time of simplification, and the number has grown since then to maybe 8,000

or something like that, the originally simplified characters were only about around 2,000, a little above 2,000. So it's not that they simplified all characters, right? So if you were to draw a Venn diagram, there's a subset of characters that have both simplified in traditional forms. Got it. So is it that when I see that choice, is it really sort of asking, okay, mainland or Taiwanese writing systems? Is that the distinction? Or is that a simplification myself?

distinction or is that is that a simplification myself pretty much pretty much i would say so but as you say but yeah i mean you can imagine if you were to talk about as this is a prc versus taiwan yeah that's going to get you into a little bit of trouble it's like at the olympics where i was just at um you know the the parade of nations comes in you know in order of the alphabet normally yeah but china doesn't have an alphabet so they come by the first character of the Chinese name of the country. And the big controversy this year, as it happened also in 2008, when China last hosted the Olympics, it was about putting Taiwan called Chinese Taipei right next to Chinese Hong Kong. Chinese Taipei, right next to Chinese Hong Kong.

And it was a huge road that Taiwan almost did not participate in the Parade of Nations, in the opening ceremony because of it. And guess what? This happened in 2008 too, but guess who saved the day? It was Central Africa Republic, which in Chinese, happened to be right between Chinese Taipei and Chinese Hong Kong. Isn't that awesome? That was my favorite story. And this time just thinking, man, if only Central Africa had worked great at winter sports.

If only they had a bobsled team. Totally. And I'll maybe leave it for a different podcast episode why that is so geopolitically sensitive for those two regions, those two delegations to march right next to each other. Suffice it to say, the politics of the region are very complex. But I think it's really interesting that when we're talking about language, it very quickly becomes so political that, you know, you have different factions, different groups using language as a tool to advance their priorities and also to, I don't know, fence off. You know, we will use the language this way because it represents X, Y, Z to us and also aligns with our political goals.

And that's how we're going to show ourselves as being distinct from a different group. This group is trying to do this with the language. We're not going to do that. We're going to do the opposite because we are a different group of people or we have a different claim to power, that sort of thing. It's, you know, often language becomes a political football in that way. And I do think that language is politics. It is political because it is always about power. Yeah. That's so fascinating. It makes me want to learn Chinese a little bit. I mean, I've always had a desire to, but it also has the reputation of being a very difficult language for

English speakers to learn. And also all the people I know who are learning it are like, well, I don't know Mark Zuckerberg, but when I think of who's learning, who's learning Mandarin, I'm like, it's Facebook, Facebook people, you know, it's like tech industry people who are like trying to learn for business, you know? And it's, it seems like something that I have, I have less access to, but I have that curiosity about the language. You can totally do it. I mean, look, I, I see freshmen freshmen coming in not knowing a single word of Chinese. And by the time they graduate from Yale, they're like speaking, you know, Beijing dialect better than I can.

But I can't go to Yale right now, Jing. But you can do it online. I'll connect you, Adam's so much, you gain so much access to a culture and a people when you do understand the language. There's all these little details that you get. You know, when I was in college, I studied German for a number of years, which is of course a much, much closer to English. I was a philosophy major and I read some philosophy in the original German. I had a great time. And now I've lost all of it because I have not had a reason in once in the last 20 years to practice any German, which is a real loss to me. But there's all these little things that you pick up,

you know, when you learn it. And yeah, so it was something that I wish I had more access to. So maybe I should give it a shot. Well, if you read Heidegger in German, I think you can learn a little Chinese because that to me was the hardest thing. I read Kant, but that might've even been harder.

Well, Kant is actually very good. He's very much more methodical and he didn't come up with, you know, wonky German words himself the way Heidegger did. That's true. Okay. Wow. So you, have you read both in German? Yeah.

I mean, I had to, that was my European language when I was in grad school, German. So I have to tell you, yeah, it's a hard one, but it's, you know what? It's a really useful one. It's a really useful one. It's a really fun language. German's a really fun language because in a lot of cases, for folks who don't know, the verb goes at the very end of the sentence and the sentences can be very long.

So it'll be like, you know, me and her at the cafe sat and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, ate. And you're like, okay, you ate. It's like a big surprise at the cafe sat and da da da da da da da da da ate and you're like okay you ate it's like a big surprise at the end to find out what they actually did you find out the person the location the number the time the emotional quality of it and you're like what did they actually do

and then finally at the end of the language kabam at the end of the sentence it gets you and I love the literal quality of it I mean where else do you have a language that calls skunks stinktier? Literally an animal that stinks. It's wonderful. Okay, so let's come back to Chinese.

What is a fun quality of Chinese or we could say Mandarin specifically that works that way that you really love and appreciate? Oh my gosh. The question is, where is it not in Chinese? I mean, you will not find a more colorful language to have like a street spat in or like banter, street banter is wonderfully fun in Beijing. But what I really love is also Chinese tongue twisters.

I think they're super awesome. Oh. Do you want to hear one? Yes, I would love to. I will meet you with one as a gift. This is a great note to end on. Okay. This is something about eating grapes

and not spitting out the skin versus eating grapes and spitting out the skin. Okay? You ready? Yes. 吃葡萄不堵葡萄皮, 不吃葡萄倒堵葡萄皮。

Wait, let me try that. Back up. Let me try this to be clear. 吃葡萄不堵葡萄皮, 不吃葡萄倒堵葡萄皮。 Wow. wait let me try that back up let me try this to be clear wow that that's a hell of a tongue twister you can take that go back to that passage in my book where it's like she she she she she she all the way you have an appreciation oh my god that because there are tones in there too i mean mean, that's like next level from Betty bought her butt some butter, you know? Oh, I'm very impressed with that one. Oh really? That one's easy.

Are you a singer too? Betty bought her butt some butter, but she said the butter's bitter. If I put it in my batter, it'll make my batter bitter. So Betty bought her butt some better butter. That's a very easy tongue twister. That's not a hard one. I am very, are you an actor too?

Yes, I am. Only actors practice. I am an actor, but I could do that ever since I was a kid. That was my favorite one to do as a kid. And people were like, wow, that's amazing. I'm like, no, that's an actor. Only actors practice. I am an actor. But I could do that ever since I was a kid. That was my favorite one to do as a kid. And people were like, wow, that's amazing. I'm like, no, that's an easy one. You know what's harder is toy boat. Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.

You ever do toy boat? No. Wait, is this supposed to morph into something else? Yeah, it's very hard in English. Now we're off the topic entirely. But it's very hard in English to say the word toy boat over and over again without having it morph. Toy boat, toy boat, toy boy, toy boy. You end up going toy boy at the end. It's just it's a tongue twister in a different at a deeper neurological level.

What do you OK, so where do you suggest if people are curious from this conversation to learn more about the Chinese language and just want to dip their toe in and maybe understand a word or a character or two? What do you suggest? Actually, and here's a really good way to put this, because a problem that I often have, I love traveling to Asia, to various Asian countries, to Chinese countries that use Chinese characters. One of the problems is it's a lot different than going to France or something where at least I know the alphabet, right? And I can like read a street sign and like understand it. But when you go to Japan or China, a place like that, you look at a street sign and you're like, I can't read a character at all, right?

Because I have no exposure to the language. So in terms of people who say, I just want to get, I want to be at better than zero, right? What is the best place to start? Well, if I just want to get, I want to be at better than zero, right? What is the best place to start? Well, if you're traveling to China, I would say, by all means, reap the benefits of this century-long Chinese script revolution that I wrote about and use Google Translate. Actually, Baidu, the Chinese company Baidu, leads in the area of natural language processing for reasons I talk about in chapter six and know, in like chapter six and seven in the book.

It's because of these breakthroughs in the 20th century. You actually now, you can just kind of waltz into China and kind of put on your Google Translate. You can read your menus. I think it's actually a lot easier to navigate than you think. Incredible. But short of that, come to Yale. Hmm. Incredible. But short of that, come to Yale.

Well, I wish, you know, I think, I think we got to take that up with the people who run Yale and say like, Hey, start some more cheaper classes that the rest of us can take. Cause I would love to, but thank you so much Jing for joining us. It's been wonderful. Tell, tell people where they can get the book. You can get it at Amazon. That's probably where everybody gets their books these days. Anywhere.

It's very Google-able. Just don't get a free copy from the Russian Pirate website. Well, and of course, you can get it from our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books, if you want to support the show and your local bookshop. Thank you so much, Jing, for coming on the show. Thank you, Adam. How fun was this, huh? Thanks so much for having me. I had a great time.

Well, thank you once again to Jing Su for coming on the show. If you want to pick up her book, once again, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to say a special thank you to everyone who is supporting this show at the $15 level on Patreon. That's Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska, Antonio LB, Charles Anderson, Chris Stale, Drill Bill, M, Hillary Wolkin, Kelly Casey, Mark Long, Michael Wernicke, Michelle Glittermum, Paul Mauck, Rachel Nieto, Robin ranks, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Thank you to our producers, Sam Roudman and Chelsea Jacobson, our engineer, Ryan Conner, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on.

You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on Factually.