No Chinese Should Make Light of Their Native Language

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, July 22, 2002

No Chinese Should Make Light of Their Native Language

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Which language Marking off toilets?

The Guangzhou authorities are not joking when a capability is demanded of civil servants to conduct activities involving foreign nationals in simple English in the 10th five-year plan period (2001-05). So, don't dream to become a civil servant in Guangzhou if you can't read or speak English, says an article on Malaysia-based Nanyang Siang Pau June 16.

Chinese officials have enthused over promoting English among the common run of Chinese. In some big cities, civil servants are asked at the same time of being honest and devoted to their duties, to master English at a rather high level.

Shanghai has also made no less effort to that end. June last year, to keep accords with international practices it chose to brush native language off all public toilets but leave the sign "Toilet" in English. Should it be taken up on a nationwide scale, both town and country, people would not be able in their homeland to find public toilets relying on their own language!

China's craze for spreading English seems catching up with that of Grenada, an underdeveloped small country along the Caribbean Sea, where 80 percent of its 90,000 population are black people. There English is official language on the lips of every civil servant, and one can imagine "Toilet" hanging high. Besides, English illiterate students can not enter school for all courses are taught in English.

Traditional medicinal study demands good English

What should be pointed out is that the majority of people in Grenada are descendents of slaves, just like American black people. After losing their motherland tongue through successive generations they had to pick up the alien language on the land they were enslaved, that is, English. Or we should say they no longer have a national language of their own.

In contrast, the Chinese people boast a language over thousands of years of their own, only by which the secrets of Chinese tradition as shadow boxing and acupuncture can be clearly told.

In today's China, students with their mastery of English for college study of traditional Chinese medicine must be at a certain level.

By Reuter report in 1993, of 260 million of US people 40 million still can not read English after school education, showing that English was difficult to learn even in the US.

Then how are things with China? Though inherited rich national language and culture, Chinese people still have to meet the long face of English when they apply for higher education, even that of traditional subject such as acupuncture. This has gone too far.

What would Cangjie feel?

Cangjie was a legendary inventor of Chinese characters to China. It was said that his creation made ghosts cry at night, for the Chinese language revealed secrets between heaven and earth, and opened people's eyes and minds.

What would Cangjie feel in his underworld when Shanghai officials, under people's protest decrying removal of Chinese toilet signs, had to come to terms and abandoned both signs in Chinese and English and finally replaced them with little pictures of man and woman?

By PD Online Staff Member Li Heng

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