One thing nice about reading the obits is that you learn about cool people who did cool things. I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard of John DeFrancis, probably when I was studying Chinese in school. According to his obituary, he was “one of the most influential scholars and teachers of the Chinese language in the last century.”
These days, it’s relatively easy to pack the ol’ passport and head out to the Far East, but back in the day, one had to have a sense of adventure to travel from West to East or vice versa. The early twentieth century was a busy time for China with the Boxer Rebellion and the downfall of the last emperor, and anyone traveling during that time had to be pretty brave.
His experience with the language was deeply rooted in his living and traveling in China at a time when poverty and violence were endemic across the country. Mr. DeFrancis was born into a working-class family on Aug. 31, 1911, in Bridgeport, Conn. Though his father was a laborer and his mother illiterate, he graduated from Yale in 1933 with a degree in economics. He found it hard to get a job during the Great Depression, and so he boarded a ship for China at the suggestion of a dorm mate from a missionary family.
Mr. DeFrancis enrolled in the College of Chinese Studies in Beijing. He had intended to work as a businessman, but he soon became disillusioned with the prevailing attitudes toward the Chinese among expatriate businesspeople. In 1935, he was asked by H. Desmond Martin, a military historian, to undertake a trip across China tracing the path of Genghis Khan.
Together they traveled 1,000 miles across the Gobi Desert by camel and 1,200 miles down the Yellow River on a raft of inflated sheepskins. Seeing the poverty of rural China up close made Mr. DeFrancis profoundly disillusioned with the Kuomintang, the ruling party at the time. Mr. DeFrancis recounted the journey in the book “In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan,” published in 1993 by the University of Hawaii Press.
Exciting stuff. Language is important, and the teaching of languages is going to be increasingly important in the future, especially the teaching of Chinese, now that China is the world’s #3 economy.
The obit also talks about DeFrancis’s controversial stance on overhauling the Chinese writing system:
Among longtime scholars of the language, Mr. DeFrancis stood out as an iconoclast. Perhaps his most controversial argument was that the writing system needed to undergo a major reformation, with characters that had evolved over thousands of years to be replaced by a phonetic Latin script.
Replacing hanzi with Latin script? It could never happen. Asian cultures put a large emphasis on learning, reading, writing, and history, and the script simply has too much cultural significance. The Taiwanese created a simplified hanzi system, and the Japanese added romaji to their list of syllabaries, and the result was that people had to learn two and four different writing systems, respectively, rather than just one (Taiwanese don’t have to learn how to write traditional hanzi, but they can’t read older or mainland texts without the ability to read.). But DeFrancis was working this angle before the cultural demonstrations of the 60′s and 70′s, so perhaps we can excuse him for not seeing why phonetic Latin Chinese would be a hard sell.
It’ll be interesting to see how the teaching of Chinese evolves during the course of our present century. It’ll be exciting, especially as the computer age and internet bring everyone in the world a bit closer together.
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