What is “the Chinese Language”?

There are certain things that everybody “knows” about Chinese. There’s something called “Mandarin” but most people don’t speak it. There are lots of dialects but they all write the same. They changed the name of the capital and now it’s called bayzhing. Shanghai seems to have had a lot of Germans because they have something called a “boont”. And my talkee velly chop chop.

The key to understanding the Chinese language is to realise that China has been more linguistically conservative than any other country. Right up to the beginning of the twentieth century Chinese was written the same as it had been in the Tang Dynasty (seventh to tenth centuries AD). A tiny minority of Chinese officials wrote a language which had not been spoken for over a thousand years. This did not matter to over 90 per cent of the population because they couldn’t read.

This was the period of China’s humiliation. China had been beaten in battle by almost everybody. People started to question whether China should learn from the West. An enormous intellectual ferment began.

At around the time of the First World War a great reform movement appeared in China. A key area for reform was language. There were three issues. The first was reforming the written language so that it resembled the spoken language. The second was the reform of the writing system. The third was the question of spreading literacy so that China could compete with literate Western nations.

Reform of the written language meant making it conform to the spoken language. In spoken language there was a sort of standard. The written language remained unchanged since the Tang, but there was no suggestion that Chinese officials should speak to each other in classical Chinese (which would be analogous to the modern-day practice of priests in the Vatican speaking to each other in Latin). Since Beijing had been the capital of the empire since the thirteenth century, Beijing dialect became the basis of a language which officials in different parts of the country spoke (but not wrote) to each other. This language was called guan hua, official language or Mandarin. Of course there were many regional variants of this language. An old Chinese saw goes: “I fear neither heaven nor earth, only a Cantonese speaking Guan Hua.” But there was agreement as to the basis of a standard for spoken Chinese.

The written language was more problematic. Over the centuries there had been some writing in the vernacular. This was mainly in novels, books which are known in the West, such as Dream of the Red Chamber or Water Margin. But these books did not conform to Confucian standards of morals and behaviour. They dealt with profane subjects such as love and banditry and even, in the case of the famous seventeenth-century novel Jin Ping Mei, pornography. The language used in these books was not standard. Regionalisms, archaisms and just plain oddities were common. But they retained a wide readership, even if it was often in secret under the bedcovers. And they did provide a starting point.

Colloquial Writing—The New Thought Movement

The people who first seriously promoted the use of spoken Beijing dialect as the basis of written Chinese formed a group around Peking University during the latter years of the First World War. This group was named the “New Thought Movement” and it spoke through its magazine New Youth. Many famous modern Chinese intellectuals were members of this group.

Chen Duxiu was the editor of New Youth and was considered the leading reform intellectual of his day. He was the first Chairman and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. His role in the reform of written Chinese was mainly in journalism. New Youth itself was written in colloquial Chinese, probably the first magazine to be so written. Alongside this, Chen founded several colloquial newspapers including Guomin Ribao and Anhui Suhua Bao. In 1918, Chen started the Weekly Review with the specific objective of promoting colloquial writing. He was one of the most influential figures in modern Chinese thought and many books on him have recently been published.

Hu Shi had a different background. Whereas Chen Duxiu had received his education in the Chinese classics and had even sat the civil service examination, Hu was very much the modern man. He studied philosophy at Cornell under John Dewey and on his return to China rapidly became the main theorist of colloquial writing. Hu was also probably one of the first to write poetry in modern Chinese. He wrote a famous article in New Youth in January 1917, the first attempt to establish some sort of standards for written colloquial Chinese. Since the mid-1990s there has been a large number of books written on the mainland about Hu Shi, all in Chinese of course.

After this period, a large number of colloquial writers emerged. Let me talk briefly about a few of them. First Mao Dun. You only have to look at his name, which means “contradiction”, to know that he was a leftist writer. Indeed he was Minister for Culture from 1949 to 1965. He wrote grand sagas of modern life based around Shanghai. He wrote in colloquial Chinese but the influence of Southern speech, particularly Shanghainese and Zhejiang dialect, is always present.

Similarly with Lao She, a novelist and short story writer who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Lao She, who was a Beijing-born Manchu, wrote wonderful stories of Beijing life in an extremely colloquial style heavily influenced by Beijing dialect. Remember that the objective of the early reformers was to create a written language based on Beijing dialect which would eschew some of the more extreme manifestations of that dialect such as its ever-present “r” sound. Lao She wrote wonderfully but, in the eyes of many, did not set the new standard.

Ba Jin’s writing is dark and heavily influenced by Russian—not the stuff for a Saturday afternoon read. But it is recognisably colloquial, even if occasionally influenced by his native Sichuan.

Standing above all of these is Lu Xun. Lu, a novelist, short story writer and essayist, was the greatest Chinese writer of the first half of the twentieth century. A leading light of the New Thought Movement, he has been continuously published for the past seventy years. His wonderful novella The True Story of Ah Q (1922) is considered by many to be the first work published in colloquial Chinese, although to my ear it retains a slightly southern tone (Lu was a native of Shaoxing in Zhejiang province).

Mao Zedong himself has an important role in this story. Much of his theoretical work is clearly colloquial in style: some say that it is the first sustained colloquial Chinese writing. Of course it is impossible to attribute something like this totally to a man who had a full political plate. And if you read stuff which is unquestionably Mao’s (there is a letter from him to He Xiangning in the He Xiangning Gallery) it seems that Mao was not averse to the occasional classicism. Some authorship credit should also go to his secretaries.

So after a century of reform, colloquial Chinese writing is the norm. That is not to say that it is universal. Even today, the more formal the writing, the more classical the style. Hong Kong newspapers are notorious for their semi-classical style (there are notable exceptions). On the mainland you are more likely to get a classical style in the more serious papers (such as the Shenzhen SEZ Daily) than you are in the tabloids. But when they are trying to save space, even the tabloids will revert to a classical style. Headlines are always in particularly impenetrable classical style.

Reform of the Writing System

Another theme of language reform was reform of the writing system. This took two forms: simplification of characters, and phonetic writing. This movement, like so many other things, had its genesis in the activities of missionaries. In Confucian China, writing had been considered an activity for the literati. But to the missionaries, everybody high or low was equal before God. And universal literacy was not only the European fashion of the time; it was also considered the best way to spread the gospel. Soon missionary schools and universities had sprung up all over China. Many of the leaders of the New Thought Movement were from missionary schools. They accepted the premise that universal education and literacy were essential to China’s modernisation. They agreed that the Chinese writing system was the main barrier to literacy. They applied their minds to ways of making writing easier and therefore more accessible.

Their first objective was to make Chinese writing phonetic. For centuries Chinese intellectuals had searched for ways of representing the sounds of the language. This had usually involved combinations of two well-known characters, one representing the initial sound of a syllable and the second representing the final sounds. Those familiar with Daniel Kane’s excellent book The Chinese Language know of the Qie Yun system, which was used from 601 AD onwards to represent sounds in the Tang Dynasty’s official dictionary.

The first strictly alphabetic system used to write Chinese was probably that of Chinese Muslims, who from the eighth century used the Arabic alphabet to write Chinese. But the most famous ancient phonetic writing system was sponsored by Kubilai Khan. Kubilai had a multi-racial empire with many languages. He was a native Mongol speaker, his court used Persian, and most of his subjects spoke Chinese. He decided that there should be a single writing system for all the languages of the empire. To achieve this he turned to Phags Pa.

Phags Pa (whose full name was Drogön Chögyal Phagpa) was a key character in China’s history. Kubilai Khan was the son of a Buddhist father and a Christian mother. His own religious convictions remained vague until Phags Pa, who was head of the dominant Tibetan school of Buddhism, converted him and most Mongols to Lama Buddhism.

Writing was a passion for Kubilai. At the beginning of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan had captured a Turkish scribe from Xinjiang named Tatar-Tonga. The Mongol language had no writing system so Genghis got him to commit the Mongol language to writing using the Uighur alphabet. Kubilai commissioned Phags Pa, who was a linguist, to devise a new writing system for the languages of the empire, including Chinese, and the result was an elegant phonetic script based on the Tibetan script (which in turn was based on an Indian script). It was never fully accepted and it died with the dynasty in the fourteenth century.

A series of Romanisations appeared subsequently. The Jesuits used a Portuguese-based Romanisation which was subsequently the basis of the modern Vietnamese writing system. In the nineteenth century two British diplomats, Thomas Wade and H.A. Giles, devised and modified a system of Romanisation which was widely used. But this was never considered for general use in China. (Incidentally, in one form of this Romanisation Beijing is written Peking. It was pronounced the same. They never changed the name, just the way it was written.)

The intellectual ferment of the New Thought Movement produced a rash of schemes for Chinese phonetic scripts. Let us look at three of them—Zhuyin Zimu, Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Hanyu Pinyin.

Zhuyin Zimu is sometimes known as Bopomofo after the names of its first four symbols. It resulted from a Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, established in 1912 to set standards for the Chinese language. In 1918 it promulgated Zhuyin Zimu, a system of thirty-seven symbols plus four tone markers. The system owes nothing to Latin script concepts and is ideally suited to Chinese conditions. It is easily written using normal Chinese brush strokes. Like the Qie Yun system, it differentiates initial and final sounds. And like Japanese it lends itself to being written above or alongside a character as a pronunciation or education guide. It was in common use in Taiwan until the 1960s.

If I had written this essay twenty years ago, I would have said a brief prayer over the grave of Zhuyin Zimu and gently pronounced it dead. But a modern development has given it a new lease of life. It is now included in almost all computer operating systems as a method for writing Chinese using a standard keyboard. To type unsimplified Chinese requires a knowledge of Zhuyin Zimu, which means that even the youngest now learn it again.

Another system was not so lucky. This was Gwoyeu Romatzyh, National Language Romanisation or GR. This was conceived in 1925–26 by possibly China’s greatest modern linguist, Y.R. Chao, and subsequently developed by Chao and Lin Yutang. The system does not use tone marks for the four tones of Mandarin. Chao rightly thought that to a Chinese, wu sounded totally different in the four tones, and that any Romanisation system which ignored this fact did not represent the language properly. Therefore wu is written u, wu, wuu or wuh, depending on tone. Likewise kan, karn, kaan and kann for the four tones of the kan syllable. GR was officially adopted in 1928 but its use never became general and on the mainland it died out after 1949. In Taiwan it continued to be widely used as a transliteration, particularly of names on name cards, until the 1970s. The current Taiwan president, Ma Ying jeou, uses GR for the transliteration of his name.

Hanyu Pinyin

The Romanisation which finally prevailed in China is known to us as Hanyu Pinyin. This is the Romanisation which most Westerners are taught Chinese in and the one used to transliterate Chinese names in places such as the Metro.

The origins of Pinyin lie in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Soviet policy was to bring literacy to all the peoples of the Union and in the 1920s this meant Romanisation of writing systems. Lenin proclaimed that “Latinisation is the great revolution of the East”, thus guaranteeing the success of Latin alphabet programs. The initial impetus for the reform in China came from Qu Qiubai, a leading communist intellectual. Qu could not afford tuition fees at Peking University so he went to the Peking Russian-language school, where he became a communist. He was one of the first Chinese to travel to and report on the Soviet Union. In collaboration with the Soviet linguists V.S. Kolokolov and A.A. Dragunov (Qu was not a linguist), he worked at the Translation Bureau of the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow to create Latinxua or Sin Wenz. This was used to produce literature for the large number of Chinese who lived in the Far East of the Soviet Union and also for the Dungan, Chinese Muslims who had settled in Central Asia after the rebellion of 1870.

Sin Wenz rapidly became the standard in leftist-controlled areas of China such as Canton in the mid-1920s and in Yan’an. Mao Zedong made special mention of its role in education during his discussions with Edgar Snow in Yan’an in 1936. If you’re ever lucky enough to get your hands on currency issued in Yan’an during this period you’ll notice that Sin Wenz is prominently used.

Shanghai was a strong centre of propagation of Latin script. Leftist refugees gathered in the International Settlement while it was still free from Japanese rule, and the Shanghai Sin Wenz Society produced a wide variety of Latin script materials. However it was immediately suppressed at the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941.

After the communist capture of Beijing, Romanisation was once more high on the agenda. In 1949, one of the original proponents of Sin Wenz, Wu Yuzhang, wrote to Mao Zedong and proposed the improvement and popularisation of Romanisation. Mao handed the letter over to Guo Muoruo and Ba Jin for consideration and in October 1949 the Association for Reforming the Chinese Written Language was established. Wu was appointed chairman.

There is little information publicly available on this subject. This is probably because, unlike in many other areas where he has been credited with personal intervention, Mao Zedong really was very heavily involved in Pinyin and other aspects of language reform. Mao endorsed the use of Sin Wenz in Yan’an. But his early conversations with Stalin during his visit to Moscow in 1950 left him with a dilemma. Stalin commented that China was a nation with great traditions and that rather than using Latin characters for phonetic script, it should come up with an alphabet which was national in character. This caused some confusion in linguistic ranks and a profusion of new alphabetic proposals. In 1956, under the signature of Zhou Enlai himself, the first draft of official Hanyu Pinyin was promulgated. This would just be recognised as the ancestor of modern Pinyin. It used several Cyrillic and International Phonetic Alphabet characters.

Between 1956 and 1966 the Pinyin which we now recognise gradually took shape. Most of the argument was over vowel clusters, which still cause confusion around the Chinese-speaking world. Should it be uei or ui, iu or iou? The Cyrillic and IPA characters disappeared.

But Pinyin never lived up to its inventors’ dream that it would one day become the written standard for Chinese and characters would disappear. Stalin’s directive to Mao that writing should be national in character saw to that. By the Cultural Revolution, even the Pinyin on the mastheads of China’s newspapers disappeared. But in 1977, Pinyin once again came to the fore. This was when the Chinese government began to propose the use of Pinyin in writing (such as Beijing instead of Peking). By 1982, even the UN bodies governing international geographic nomenclature had accepted Pinyin.

Simplified Characters

The reforming Chinese intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century also supported the simplification of Chinese characters. They believed that the complexity of Chinese characters caused China’s illiteracy. Most seemed to think that the real objective should be alphabetisation and that simplification was just a step in the process. Fu Sinian, a leading historian of the period and subsequently the founder of the Academia Sinica, said that Chinese characters were the writing of ox demons and snake spirits and called for their abolition. As important a figure as Lu Xun himself said, in uncharacteristically classical Chinese, “If we cannot destroy Chinese characters, China itself will be destroyed.” Characters were associated with Confucianism, and leading intellectuals of the day were implacably opposed to Confucius.

But Confucius and his system are too deeply embedded in the Chinese culture and especially in the culture of the Chinese intellectual, whatever he might think. So it is not surprising that character simplification measures were at least as attractive as alphabetisation. During the thirties, the KMT government put forward several simplification proposals, but they all failed to attract support. Communist governments in the Soviets and in Yan’an itself were enthusiastic supporters of simplification and in the climate of the time the KMT government in Nanking found it just a little too leftist to be comfortable with it. Taiwan remains resolutely opposed to simplification.

Stalin’s 1950 directive to Mao that China should look to tradition in writing reform gave a boost to simplification and set Romanisation back. Simplification came in several stages. In 1955 the first list of simplified characters was promulgated and China broke firmly with the past. A second list was promulgated in 1964. Then, as in so many areas of language reform, there was a long hiatus during the Cultural Revolution. It was not until the overthrow of the ultra-leftists that there was further progress. In 1977, a new list of simplifications was released. This was not widely accepted and in 1986, the list was retracted and a further list, pretty much the same as the 1964 one, was released. Many people will tell you that this is because the simplification was associated with ultra-leftist thought. I beg to differ. If you look at the chronology of simplification, it is striking that nothing happens during ultra-leftist periods like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. My own feeling is that the 1977 list came during a period of greater literacy, and people who could already write, the bulk of the urban population and a good proportion of the rural, just found it too radical and couldn’t get comfortable with it.

The current situation with simplified characters is that the Chinese-speaking world is split. The mainland and Singapore use simplified characters. Taiwan and Hong Kong are firmly in the unsimplified camp. In Taiwan, men of a certain age, but not women, are quite familiar with simplified characters. This is because, during the period of compulsory military service in Taiwan, soldiers were taught simplified characters so they wouldn’t get lost when they retook the mainland. On the mainland, the situation seems to be getting complicated. Alongside the fashion of using more and more classical forms in speech, it is becoming trendy to use unsimplified characters, certainly in advertisements where a feeling of culture or high class needs to be encouraged. Many intellectuals question the way in which the use of simplified characters divides China from its traditional culture and even question whether it really promotes literacy. Literacy rates in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which use unsimplified characters, are no lower than on the mainland and in most cases are higher. Obviously something other than the form of the character is critical to literacy.

Dialects

Chinese has split into a large number of what are called dialects but which, in terms of mutual intelligibility, are separate languages. An Italian is much more likely to understand a Spaniard than a Cantonese is to understand a Shanghainese if they are attempting to converse in their own languages. And yet we class Italian and Spanish as different languages but Shanghainese and Cantonese as mere dialects of Chinese. Against most people’s expectations, this extends to the written language. This is a complex situation. Suffice to say for our present purposes that there is such a thing as a written Cantonese language and that a northerner can read it only imperfectly. In written Spanish and Italian, the words for a simple thing like he is—el es and egli e—both come from the same root, the Latin ille est. In Shanghainese and Cantonese these are i zz and koei hai and they not only sound different but come from different roots and are written with different characters. Written Spanish and French, not to say written Portuguese, French and even Romanian, are more similar.

Conventionally the dialects are ordered into groups. Most authorities have traditionally recognised seven dialect groups. These are the Mandarin group, the Wu or Shanghainese group, the Min, also known as the Fujian or Hokkien Group, the Gan or Jiangxi group, the Xiang or Hunan group, the Hakka group, and the Yue or Cantonese group. This is a tidy classification but it doesn’t stand up to close examination.

Take for example the Mandarin group. Before I go on to talk about it in detail, it’s probably worthwhile talking for a moment about why, in English, it is called “Mandarin”. I mentioned above that the Qing Dynasty lingua franca for officials was called guan hua or “official language”. The first Europeans to live in China after the sixteenth century were Portuguese traders and Italian Jesuits, who all had as their cultural reference points the Portuguese settlements in India. When they described things in China, they often used Indian or Persian words for what they observed. Thus the Indian word mantri or minister of state, was used to translate the Chinese word guan, and mandarin was the standard Portuguese translation of guan hua. In Malaysia and Indonesia the word menteri means government minister. Same word.

Conventional linguistic wisdom is that Mandarin is spoken by a billion people, 70 per cent of China’s population. The problem is that if you dig a bit below the surface, you will find that even champion Chinese speakers, wandering through the wilds, or even the not-so-wilds, of Shandong or Sichuan will find that a grasp of “Mandarin” is of limited use. They all talk funny.

A closer examination of the criteria suggests that the source of the classification was the work of the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978). Karlgren constructed this group on the basis of criteria which may have made linguistic and historical sense but which ignored such practical trivia as whether speakers of this supposed dialect could actually understand each other. Try following a drunken conversation in Beijing dialect on the basis of your learned Mandarin. It eludes all but the most proficient. So if we are to take a slightly broad view of Karlgren’s criteria, my own experience suggests that it would be easy to add several Mandarin sub-groups who speak quite unintelligible dialects. Sichuan and Shandong immediately come to mind.

Karlgren was a brilliant linguist. But the best linguist is only as good as the data he collects. And during the mid-twentieth century it became clear that there were tens of millions of people in his “Mandarin” area that didn’t fit his linguistic criteria. So in 1987, Chinese linguists recognised a “new” dialect group, the Jin dialects, in Shanxi, parts of Shaanxi, and parts of Hebei. Now I have a friend who is a native speaker of this dialect and I have spent quite a bit of time wandering around his province trying vainly to understand a word they were saying. This is only 200 kilometres from Beijing. And until thirty years ago, wise linguists would have told you that they spoke “Mandarin”.

Similarly, to greater and lesser extents, with the other dialects. For sheer mutual incomprehensibility the dialects of Fujian are hard to beat, and people from Amoy in the south and Fuzhou in the north communicate best in a third mutual tongue like Mandarin.

Let me address the old myth that Chinese can all understand each other when they write stuff down and that the written language transcends all dialect differences. A Cantonese and a Shanghainese can both understand stuff when it’s written down. But that’s not because there is some underlying universal Chinese sub-strate. It’s because the Cantonese doesn’t write in Cantonese and the Shanghainese doesn’t write in Shanghainese. They communicate in some form of modern written Chinese. This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as written Cantonese. There is. It’s at its liveliest in Hong Kong, where the newspapers regularly use it. Most of the news is written in modern standard Chinese. But the racing columns and the financial pages are written in Cantonese. The popular broadsheet the Apple Daily is largely written in Cantonese. On Hong Kong television, The Simpsons is subtitled in Cantonese.

Hong Kong is something of a cultural beacon in China, so the Cantonese language’s influence has spread over China. But things are rarely simple. Take the famous Canto pop songs. There is such a thing nowadays as proper Cantonese pop, sung in colloquial Cantonese. But until fifteen years ago, Canto pop was different. The spiritual homeland of Chinese pop in those days was Taiwan, where most songs were in Mandarin. So originally, grammatically speaking, Cantonese pop songs were Mandarin but sung with a Cantonese pronunciation. Confused? So are they.

People will also tell you that Cantonese is the only dialect that has its own written form. Don’t believe them. Some are more written than others, and there is often confusion about orthography, but pretty well anything that can be said can be committed to writing with a little creativity. To my mind, the determinant is opera. Every province, every major district of China looks to one or more cities as the source of its local opera. The opera is always sung in local “dialect” and opera is usually the standard for correct pronunciation. This is even true to some extent for Mandarin. Nobody ever pronounces the word for who as shui in normal speech. It’s invariably pronounced shei. And ui itself is always pronounced uei. But shui is the Beijing opera pronunciation.

Similarly with Hong Kong Cantonese. Every text book on Cantonese will tell you that I is pronounced ngo and you is pronounced nei. And that is exactly how you’ll hear Hong Kong television newsreaders pronounce them. But everybody else says o and lei. Why do the television newsreaders pronounce things differently? Cantonese opera pronunciation. It’s “nicer”.

Finally a word on remnants of China Coast Pidgin. Many people have been bemused in Hong Kong at signs telling them to pay the “shroff”, meaning the cashier, or have been tempted to pronounce the Shanghai “Bund” as boont in the German fashion. Or possibly you’ve wondered why some people still talk about Canton when they mean Guangzhou, or Amoy and Quemoy when they mean Xiamen and Jinmen. These are remnants of China Coast Pidgin which until quite recently was the main form of communication between Chinese and Europeans. Likee soupee? My no catchee that piecee man.

It has its origins in Portuguese India. When Vasco da Gama arrived in Kerala he discovered a whole word of trading. Arabs and Genoese took spices from India and Indonesia to Europe via Egypt and Asia Minor. Chinese, Arab and Indian traders rode the monsoons carrying porcelain and silks to India via Indonesia and Malacca. They needed a common language, and trading pidgins grew up, based on Indian languages but including Arabic, Malay and Chinese words and, progressively, Portuguese and other European words. When the British entered the China trade in 1635, they established themselves at Macau and became leaders of the Europe China trade. Thus the existing Portuguese pidgin became anglicised. But it was still full of Portuguese words and words which predated the Portuguese.

You may have eaten congee, the Chinese rice porridge which, depending on your point of view, you either hate with a passion or can’t live without. And you possibly know that the Chinese word for congee is zhou, a word which obviously has little to do with the English name. Congee is a Malay word, kanji, meaning starch. If you look at a can of Malay or Indonesian ironing spray you will see “tanpa kanji” meaning “no starch”. Similarly, the word godown, meaning warehouse, is still used in Hong Kong. It is a Malay word, gedung, meaning warehouse. Shroff, which you still see commonly in Hong Kong, is from the Arabic word for cashier.

A personal favourite of mine is bund as in Shanghai Bund. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the common trap of pronouncing this in the German fashion as boond or even boont. It’s not a German word. It comes from the Persian word band meaning an embankment and is pronounced to rhyme with fund. There were many bunds in China including the Canton Bund and the Wuhan Bunds, generally applied to embankments in rice paddy fields. The zhen in Shenzhen is the drain which takes the water between the bunds of paddy fields (paddy is another Malay word).

And if you want to win a bet, try telling a Chinese that the English typhoon has nothing to do with the Chinese word taifeng or the Cantonese daaifung, although there is some mutual influence. Hobson Jobson, the great authoritative dictionary of Anglo-Indian speech, tells us that it derives from the Arabic tufan meaning a sudden and violent storm.

It is fashionable to deride the use of Pidgin by our fathers and say that it was contemptuous of the Chinese because it assumed they were too stupid to learn English. But I invite you to consider another possibility, which is that the Chinese used it because they considered barbarian foreigners incapable of the intellectual heights required to speak Chinese. So let’s be a little easier on our forebears.