【经济学人】拼音的故事丨2017.01.21丨总第794期

FEW people live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as Zhou Youguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architect of pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to write Mandarin in the roman alphabet.

很少人能够活到111岁。很少人能够像周有光一样在语言学生涯中留下浓墨重彩的一笔。他于1月14日逝世。周先生是拼音界的主要缔造者，拼音是中国人利用罗马字母表写汉语的系统。

Pinyin has not, of course, replaced the Chinese characters. Rather, it is used as a gateway to literacy, giving young children a systematic way to learn the sounds of the thousands of characters required to be literate in Chinese. Pinyin is also used by most Chinese people to input Chinese characters into computers: type a word like wo (meaning “I”) and the proper character appears; if several characters share the same sound (which is common in Chinese), users choose from a short menu of these homophonic characters.

可以肯定的是，拼音并没有取代汉字的地位。而是被当成通往读书识字的大门，给孩子们学习汉语必学的成千汉字的发音提供了系统的方式。很多中国人也通过拼音在电脑上输入汉字：比如输入wo（I）相对应的汉字就会出现；如果有几个汉字发音相同（这在汉语中很常见），用户们可以从同音词列表中选取。

In other words, the primary way that the Chinese interact with their language in the digital age is via an alphabet borrowed by Communist China from its ideological enemies in the 1950s. The tale is an odd one. Mao Zedong (who was Mao Tse-tung before pinyin, under the “Wade-Giles” romanisation system) wanted a radical break with old ways after 1949, when the civil war ended in mainland China. He was hardly the first to think that China’s beautiful, complicated and inefficient script was a hindrance to the country’s development. Lu Xun, a celebrated novelist, wrote in the early 20th century: “If we are to go on living, Chinese characters cannot.”

换句话说，在电子时代，中国人和汉字的主要互通方式是中共在1950年代从意识形态上称为敌人那里借过来的字母表。这个故事还很有意思。毛泽东（在拼音出现前，使用威妥玛式拼音法被称为Mao Tse-tung，）在1949年中国大陆内战结束以后想和旧时代彻底说拜拜。他不是第一个认为中国优美、复杂且效率不高的文字会是国家发展的阻碍。著名小说家鲁迅，曾在20世纪早期写道：“如果我们要生存，汉字必定要废弃。”

But according to Mr Zhou, speaking to the New Yorker in 2004, it was Josef Stalin in 1949 who talked Mao out of full-scale romanisation, saying that a proud China needed a truly national system. The regime instead simplified many Chinese characters, supposedly making them easier to learn—but causing a split in the Sinophone world: Taiwan, Hong Kong and other overseas Chinese communities still use the traditional characters.

但是根据周先生在2004年《纽约客》中说道,1949年约瑟夫·斯大林和毛泽东在谈论全方位罗马化时说道骄傲的中国需要一个真正国际化的系统。这一制度不仅没有简化了汉字，使其更容易学习，反而导致了华语世界的分裂：台湾，香港和其他海外中华社区仍旧使用传统汉字。

Mr Zhou, who had been working for a Chinese bank in New York (he was largely self-trained as a linguist), had returned home in a burst of patriotic optimism after 1949. He was drafted by Zhou Enlai, Mao’s premier, in the 1950s to create a system not to replace, but to complement, the Chinese characters. After three years’ work, pinyin was ready. It used just the standard Roman letters and a few (often omitted) diacritical marks, especially over vowels to show the “tones”: steady, rising, dipping or falling pitch.

周先生，已经就职于纽约的一家中国银行（他作为一个语言学家基本上是自学成才的），在1949年以后怀着一腔爱国热情回到了祖国。在1950年代，他被周恩来总理征募在创造一个不替代而是完善汉字的系统。三年的准备工作后，拼音出世了。拼音利用了标准的罗马字母和一些（常被省略）的可区分符号，尤其是为了表现“语调”的元音：平声，上声，去声，入声。

People joked that Mr Zhou’s team had taken three years to deal with just 26 letters. But pinyin dealt neatly with all of the sounds of Mandarin with a minimum of tricky typography: even q and x were used (for what had been ch’ and hs in Wade-Giles). These letters do not always sound the same as they do in Western languages, but pinyin overall was a hit, credited plausibly with a huge boost in literacy in China. Even the Taiwanese, who abhor Mao’s simplified characters, are gradually adopting Mr Zhou’s pinyin (which they had also once abhorred), making the use of pinyin one of the few practical things the two countries can agree on.

当时的人们笑话周先生的团队花了三年的时间去研究仅26个字母。但是拼音以最微妙的排印？非常干净利落地处理和汉语中的各种声：就连q和x都派上了用场（用来指威妥玛式拼音法中的ch’ 和 hs）。（期待您的翻译，明天会有针对这句话的长难句解析哟~）即使是讨厌毛氏简写汉字的台湾人，也慢慢使用起来了拼音（他们也曾厌恶拼音），使得拼音成为这个两个地区可以达成一致的少数实际事实之一。

Why don’t the Chinese just adopt pinyin? One is the many homophones (though these are not usually a problem in context). Another is that Chinese characters are used throughout the Chinese-speaking world, not just by Mandarin-speakers but also speakers of Cantonese, Shanghainese and other varieties. These are as different from each other as the big Romance languages are, but the writing system unifies the Chinese world. In fact, character-based writing is, in effect, written Mandarin. This is not obvious from looking at the characters, but it is obvious if you look at pinyin. If China adopted it wholesale, the linguistic divisions in China would be far more apparent.

为什么中国人不直接采用拼音呢?一个原因是汉语中有很多同音词（尽管在语境中同音词并不是问题）。另外一个原因是汉字是为讲中文地区所普遍使用的，不仅仅是讲普通话的人，还包括讲广东话，上海话和其他方言的地区。这些话之间也各不相同，就像罗曼斯语一样，但是书写系统统一了汉字界。事实上，字符式书写也是书写普通话。如果只看字的话可能不是很明显，但是如果你看拼音就会很明显了。如果中国全面采用拼音，中国的语言划分将会更加明显。

But there is another reason for attachment to the characters. They represent tradition, history, literature, scholarship and even art on an emotional level that many foreigners do not understand. Outsiders focus so much on efficiency probably because those who do try to learn the characters cannot help but be struck by how absurdly hard they are to master.

但是喜爱字符还有一个原因。他们能在外国人不能理解的感情层面上象征传统，历史，文化，名人，甚至艺术。外行人如此注重效率可能就是因为那些努力学习汉字的人常常被如何艰难地掌握他们的用法所困住。

There is a real trade-off between efficiency and culture. English-speakers have rejected most efforts to clean up the language’s notorious spelling, making coff, ruff, thru, tho and bow from cough, rough, through, though and bough. The Irish accept the expense of keeping Irish on signs and in classrooms, even if it isn’t efficient. In language, as in love, the heart is often the master of the head. Pinyin, which has helped the Chinese have a bit of both, will long outlast the long-lived Mr Zhou.

效率和文化之间存在真正的权衡。讲英语的人拒绝那些试图清除英语中臭名远扬的难拼写词的努力，如试图将coff，ruff, thru, tho and bow 变成cough, rough, through, though and bough。爱尔兰人接受了保持爱尔兰语而需要付出的代价，尽管它效率不高。在语言中，正如爱一般，心总是大脑的掌控者。拼音，帮助中国人收获了两者，也会比长寿的周先生更加长寿。

翻译 ▍人文一组

审核 ▍ww

编辑 ▍苏叶