WHY TEACH SPOKEN CHINESE?

IT IS a commonplace in modern linguistics that the spoken language i s primary and that the written language, any written language, is derived. While no linguist seriously challenges this axiom there a re a good many conscientious language teachers who fail to see its relevance; they cannot conscientiously teach the spoken language, which they consider to be of questionable utility, in place of the written language, which i s of incontestable value. If the modern linguist i s to induce any change, he must f i rs t show the relevance of a knowledge of the spoken language to the mastery of reading. A text of written Chinese consists of a continuum of Chinese characters. In modern texts this line i s broken by occasional commas o r semicolons and by periods. Unpunctuated texts a re generally limited to the classics, and for that reason extremely difficult to read. This rudimentary and unsatisfactory punctuation (commas, semi-colons and periods) is an attempt to suggest to the reader the places where the text must be broken into subsidiary grammatical structures. The spoken language is much more careful in i ts indication of grammatical juncture by the use of pause. As Professor Y. R. Chao points out, the first fracture in a simple Chinese sentence is between the subject and the predicate. In the spoken language, with very few exceptions, there is a pause between the subject and predicate; sometimes there is even a "particle of pause." An older system of purely Chinese punctuation indicated this in the writing too, but modern writing systems make no provision for this important item of grammatical information. There are other breaks almost as important: sometimes the break between a verb and an object, often the break between multiple modifiers and a noun nucleus. The correct isolation of these grammatical complexes is essential to an understanding of a continuum of the language; and in every instance the spoken language provides indications that the written language lacks. Frequently a person will be reading alone in a text and will meet a rather complex or involved grammatical structure. For