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Obras por David Moser

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Prompted by a brief segment in a Press Club broadcast featuring Penpa Tsering, the president of the Tibetan government-in-exile, I located David Moser's A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language (2016), on the Kindle and began reading.

I am not here to dispute Tibet's quest for autonomy, nor to say whether it is or isn't part of China because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. I recommend target="_top">listening to his address to hear what he says.

But clearly, the facts about education and literacy in Tibet are contested. This glowing 2019 report with happy photos is from CGTN, whose headquarters are in Beijing, while the Tibetan Review paints a different picture.

Nevertheless, I do think there's a case to be made for any country to ensure that all its people have access to a uniform language, and sometimes even in places where nationality is not in dispute, that meets with resistance. In the media I see Australia's First Nations people working hard to maintain and resurrect their languages but struggling with English and reliant on translators, and I feel anxious about the choices that their children don't have when they don't go to school.

The West can be criticised for many things, but mass literacy has been a priority in Western societies since industrialisation. Countries that have not achieved this goal for all their people condemn them to poverty and compromised economic development. Literacy enables full participation in society and offers access to information, ideas, health knowledge, and cultural and political activity.

Moser, however, who knows more about this than I ever will, says, however, that in China, the purpose of mandating Putonghua (Standard Chinese) as the common language and especially teaching it to children is to instill a sense of cultural identity, and to strengthen the ‘cohesiveness’ of the people residing within China’s borders. The impact on cultural identity is keenly felt in Tibet and among the Uyghur in Xinjiang, but Moser says that extreme reactions to the imposition of Chinese as the language of instruction are rare.
Most ethnic minorities acknowledge the advantages of the language policy, even at the expense of some cultural diversity. Many Tibetan and Uyghur parents have maintained that the problem is not that Putonghua is stressed too much, but rather too little. Faced with the practical reality of trying to succeed in a predominantly Chinese speaking country, both parents and children tend to emphasise Chinese language studies, in part because the gaokao, the national college entrance examination, is administered only in Chinese. (A Billion Voices by David Moser, Penguin Specials, Kindle Edition, Location 1073)

Anyway...

Moser's book tells me that it was not the Communists who took power in 1949 who mandated a common language in China.

When the Qing dynasty fell to the Xinhai Revolution in 1912, and the Republic of China was formed there was a chasm between the spoken and the written word. Only a tiny elite could read and write classical Chinese.
Classical Chinese was almost perversely difficult to learn and master, and a tiny percentage of privileged scholarly elites had the time and leisure to master it. As with all texts in pre-modern China, it was written entirely without punctuation, and stylistically favoured an extreme economy of expression, thus requiring a great deal of background knowledge and context to draw out the meaning from the cryptic text. The classical textual tradition was fundamentally anti-democratic, elitist, and, most importantly, a serious impediment to literacy. The May Fourth intellectuals therefore sought to release the world of Chinese scholarship from the stranglehold of Classical Chinese, and instigated a movement to publish all books in a vernacular form called baihua, (literally ‘plain speech’), a written form grammatically patterned on the standard northern Mandarin dialects, which were at least passively comprehensible by a majority of the Chinese population.

For the May Fourth activists, the baihua movement was not a matter of literary aesthetics; it was a matter of China’s cultural survival. The artificial classical language had remained the official written language of China for more than 2,000 years. Whereas Europe had discarded Latin and was publishing books in the vernacular by the sixteenth century, incredibly, Classical Chinese continued to be the language of Chinese texts until well into the twentieth century. Imagine a London of the 1920s in which all scholarly books were still published in Latin, enjoyed by only a small percentage of literate scholars, while the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Darwin remained inaccessible to the masses. This is essentially analogous to the case for Chinese literature of the time. In fact, it was not until 1920 that the Chinese Ministry of Education, with intense prodding from the May Fourth scholars and linguists, ordered that primary and middle school texts be changed from Classical Chinese to the vernacular, and mandated that all textbooks be written in baihua. (Literally, 'plain speech') (Loc 333-347).


To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/12/a-billion-voices-chinas-search-for-a-common-...… (mais)
 
Assinalado
anzlitlovers | Nov 11, 2023 |

Estatísticas

Obras
2
Membros
48
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#325,720
Avaliação
½ 3.7
Críticas
1
ISBN
2