The Myth of Chinese

Many myths have sprung up around the language that is spoken by so many people around the world because of how different it is from English and other European languages in both speech and writing. During the 17th century the writer John Webb described Chinese as "clear, easy, and simple as a natural speech ought to be," and he hoped to prove that it was the first language spoken on Earth.. Chinese, according to Webb (1669), was both chaste and natural, because he was under the notion that the language did not have a method of referring to "the private parts." "The very first expression of existence, at the very minute of our birth, is.. speaking the Chinese word Ya," he incorrectly believes that humans possess.

For as long as anybody in the West can remember, the Chinese language has captivated and repulsed them in equal measure. The seventeenth-century philosopher of language John Wilkins, who tried to create an ideal artificial language, complained that Chinese, like Latin and Greek, is imperfect: it has too many characters, words that are ambiguous, and are too difficult to pronounce. He described it as "pure applied logic," but others disagree. Proponents of the alphabet hold up the ancient Chinese writing system, one of the oldest in the world, as a mockery. However, as proponents of spelling reform contend, neither is the alphabet.