The monosyllabic myth and linguistic chauvinism

Few days ago, the Taiwanese consultant of our company, when seeing the bilingual (English and Chinese) label design for our new product, said something like “English words cannot be separated into different units, where as Chinese words can be split into different meaningful units; therefore English is so underdeveloped and inferior compares to Chinese”.

While this really gets on my nerve, what the Taiwanese consultant said involves two common myths among many Chinese as well as Westerners.

The first myth is what many linguists refer as “monosyllabic myth”. This myth is actually based on the way Chinese is conventionally written, not the way it is spoken. Many people tend to believe that each syllabic-unit Chinese character represents a single word. This is not so, modern Chinese is a polysyllabic language. This might sound surprising to many people, including those who speak Chinese as their first language. A brief examination on modern Chinese words will show that Chinese is indeed a polysyllabic language with strong disyllabic tendency, for instance菩薩 “púsà , Boddhisattva” , 迪斯科“dìsīkē, disco”, 知識“zhīshì, knowledge”, 模特兒“mótèer, model”, 手機 “shǒujī, mobile phone”, 星座 “xīngzuò, zodiac”, 鴉片 “yāpiàn, opium”, 枕頭“zhěntóu, pillow”, 玻璃“bōlí, glass” and much more.

The main reason this myth arises is because many people cannot differentiate the differences between a word and a morpheme. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of sound and they do not necessary stand by themselves in transmitting information. On the other hand, a word is a unit of that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes. Sometimes a single Chinese character, representing a free morpheme that can stand alone and do function as a monosyllabic word, but the majority of Chinese words are still polysyllabic words. In fact, it is estimated that monosyllabic words account for just 12% of the contemporary Chinese lexicon

Splitting 迪斯科separately into ‘迪’, ‘斯’, and ‘哥’ will not make any sense. Maybe someone would argue that 迪斯科 is a phonetic transliteration of a loan word and cannot represent the so-called monosyllabic nature of Chinese. Let’s take 手機 as example. While 手 means “hand”, the syllable 機 alone can carry the meaning of “mechanism”, “germination principle”, “pivotal juncture”, “inner working” and “witty turn of thought”. Once the two syllables separated, the original meaning of 手機as “mobile phone” is lost; therefore 手機 is a disyllable word that cannot be separated. Similar construction can be found in English words, such as “backpack”, “lightweight”, “runway”; or German words like Bleistift, Mittagessen, Warenhaus and others. Even if these words are the result of semantic amalgamation, they are still polysyllabic, integral words with their own independent existence. And there are inherently polysyllabic Chinese words as well, such as玻璃。The individual syllables玻 and 璃 are meaningless on their own; they need to appear in tandem.

The second myth is concerning the superiority of a language over another. There is no such thing as “advance language” and “primitive language”. There is only a vast diversity of human language; some languages are agglutinating, some are synthetic and some are analytic. This does not mean that a synthetic language is inferior or superior to an analytic language. All languages from Albanian to Zulu are equal in their complexity and ability to convey idea. Every language is capable of interpreting emotions and thoughts of its speaker to an almost perfect degree, all languages are effective and valid, no language is more suitable to human expression than any other.

The equality of all languages means that there is no such thing as superior or inferior language. Calling a language superior or inferior is a cultural bias and prejudice, and in the case of the above mentioned Taiwanese consultant, this is simply a display of his own racial bias, his sinocentric linguistic chauvinism and ignorance.

He is not alone; there far too many people that I personally know are linguistic chauvinists. I notice that most of these linguistic chauvinists are usually unable to achieve satisfactory proficiency in other language or languages. Their linguistic chauvinism arises because they are ignorant of the nature of language.

In the end, it is these linguistic chauvinists that would suffer, for they cannot comprehend the beauty of other languages and the cultures behind these languages.

Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma, written by Wm. C. Hannas, offers an excellent debunking of the monosyllabic myth. An excerpt of the book can be found at: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html.