Yu Qiuyu — Deliberately Conflating Spoken Chinese with Vernacular Chinese. What's Your Game?
2006/5/16 16:25:03
Last night after returning from a social engagement, I turned on the TV and happened to hear Yu Qiuyu — who has been airing his views to the air on CCTV-3 every day recently — spouting off again. This time it wasn't about ancient versus modern pronunciations. Using a "Diary of a Madman," he was massively and deliberately conflating spoken Chinese with vernacular Chinese. Extremely pernicious.
Anyone who hasn't graduated from kindergarten knows that spoken Chinese (baihua) and vernacular Chinese writing (baihua wen) are two fundamentally different concepts. When Zhang Fei sold meat, he spoke in spoken Chinese. When Li Kui cursed people, he spoke in spoken Chinese. Even Lu Xun, when washing his feet, definitely wasn't speaking vernacular Chinese writing — it was just spoken Chinese. Humans have had spoken language since they first had language. Vernacular Chinese writing, however, is merely the result of the May Fourth brats peddling their ancestors down the river.
Most of the so-called Western-style concepts in early vernacular Chinese came from so-called Japanese translations. Its grammar largely came from so-called translated style. Put bluntly, it was a big mash-up. The people who promoted vernacular Chinese at the time used all manner of dirty tricks — put bluntly, no different from today's pyramid-scheme operators. Even by the standards of book thieves, a hundred years later, can a single one of these vernacular Chinese promoters measure up to Wang Yangming? Even without using the standards of Wan Hua and Dongpo, who among them can match Wang Chuanshan? Even using the most derided eight-legged essay as a comparison: who among them compares to the eight-legged essay master Tang Shunzhi? Look at the standards of these vernacular Chinese promoters and it's not hard to understand the ongoing prosperity of garbage culture and garbage literati.
Deliberately conflating spoken Chinese with vernacular Chinese writing, using every trick to denigrate classical Chinese — none of this can change the fact that vernacular Chinese writing is garbage text. China's greatest writing was all written in classical Chinese. China's most glorious cultural classics were all written in classical Chinese. This is historical fact! We can speak in spoken Chinese, because spoken Chinese as an oral language has always existed. But vernacular Chinese writing can only be a disgrace to Chinese civilization — the sooner it's abolished, the better!
Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán 2006/5/18 0:33:29
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