LL-L "Language policies" 2004.04.05 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 05.APR.2004 (04) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Brian Holton <ctbah at polyu.edu.hk>
Subject: LL-L "Language politics" 2004.04.02 (02) [E]

I have a friend, John Minford (one of the greatest Chinese-English
translators ever), whose solution to the EU's translation problem is for all
official documents to be written in Classical Chinese.

It's not so daft as it sounds - this was never a spoken language: like
Modern Standard Chinese in its written form, in order to accommodate a whole
bunch of mutually unintelligible tongues (let's not go into whether
Cantonese, Shanghai Huan, Hokkien etc are languages or dialects, just for
the moment), the old written language was dialect-free. Speakers of
Cantonese read it in Cantonese, speakers of Mandarin in Mandarin, and so on.

Now, John's idea is that bureaucrats will simply learn the mother-tongue
reading of each word, and encode it into Chinese: readers will then decode
into their own mother tongue. So each character will have a German reading,
a French reading, a Danich reading, and so on.

He wasn't alogether joking: it could work. Within the Chinese culture
province during what we think of as the Middle Ages, Classical Chinese was
routinely written and read by speakers of Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese,
Mongol, Tibetan, etc., and messages were routinely passed between the
different language communities.

Imagine the fun we could have trying to get that through the Eu parliament!

:)

brian

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