This enchanting book tells the story of modern Chinese, “the oldest living language with the greatest number of native speakers in the world”, and the revolution that brought this intricate and arcane script into the modern era.
Jing Tsu is a professor of east Asian languages at Yale, and her love for the enigma and beauty of Chinese shines through in this delightful mix of history and linguistics.
All who study the language soon learn that it is a harsh mistress. “It is China’s first and last Great Wall,” Jing says. Forbidding to natives and foreigners alike, it lives behind a barrier of ideograms, or symbols. Thousands must be mastered to achieve basic literacy.
More daunting yet is a script whose origins lie in prehistoric
