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Confession of a linguistic spy

By Joseph Christian (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-18 07:55

Yes, I am guilty. Put me up against a wall and hang a wooden board around my neck. Let all around know of my crime of linguistic imperialism.

Cock the gun, press it against my temple and squeeze the trigger, because as an English teacher I am one of the worst offenders.

It's true. For the last five years I have been associated with a secret movement, backed by English-speaking countries around the world, to invade China with English in an effort to destroy the purity of the Chinese language.

In secret meetings attended by other English teachers we made Chinese character soup and symbolically ate it to show our dominance. We burned Chinese books and mocked the complexity and artistic beauty of Chinese characters we do not know. Our crowning achievement is the success of subliminal messages that have now convinced all Chinese to use words like "bye-bye", "CEO", "OK" and "Kobe".

Little do you know how we laugh devilishly inside every time we hear you speak these words.

So, yes, I am guilty as charged.

But too bad. You caught us too late. The damage is already done.

While the above might make an excellent start to the next Dan Brown novel, it is certainly far from the truth. So I was quite surprised to hear accusations of an English language invasion from Huang Youyi who is not just a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference but also secretary-general of the Translators Association of China.

"If we don't pay attention and don't take measures to stop the expansion of mingling Chinese and English, Chinese won't be a pure language in a couple of years," Huang warned colleagues.

Any linguist will quickly tell you there is no "pure" language in existence. Look up "pure" in the dictionary and you will see phrases such as "free from anything different" and "unmodified".

Perhaps if I made up a language, locked it in a box and buried it I could call it pure. But any language in the world today is far from pure.

Over the centuries languages have mixed, merged, and swallowed each other in such a confusing mess that even the most well-versed linguists have trouble sorting out the details today.

In regard to Chinese, let me first dispel the misnomer it is "free from anything different". Long before English was even a language, ancient Chinese was already borrowing words from and being influenced by other languages.

Buddhism brought the influence of Sanskrit into Chinese with words such as heshang (monk), a clearly borrowed word from Buddhists texts.

Also, the Silk Road brought more that just trade to China; it also brought other languages. Words like putao (grape) and shizhi (lion) are obviously borrowed from the people of the vast Persian and Turkic empires that once ruled Central Asia.

Now let's tackle the notion that Chinese is "unmodified". Read the works of Confucius and Mencius and then proclaim that Chinese is unmodified. It's like saying that everyone in England still speaks Elizabethan English. Hast thou lost thy brain? Need more proof?

What about the simplification of Chinese characters that began in the early 1900s and was finally cemented by the People's Republic in the 1950s and 1960s? Oh, but I guess that doesn't qualify as a modification.

I am sorry, Mr. Huang, but your ideas don't stand the test of time or pass scrutiny. I wonder how the secretary-general of a translation association could be so afraid of ruining the "purity" of Chinese? It seems ironic.

It's the natural ebb and flow of any language to change over time. It's not something to be scared about.

Anyway, given the fact that Chinese is numerically still the largest spoken language and that a growing number of foreigners are now studying Chinese there is no chance it will be thrown into the dustbin of lost and useless languages.

Now if you will excuse me. I have to get back to brainwashing my students about the superiority of English. Today, I will try to convince them that "fear" is much better than "pa".