Good woman child language

Things to raise casually in Taiwan.

To test the hospitality of your hosts in Taiwan, one may choose to innocently suggest that their Chinese characters look pretty complicated, so simplifying them might be a good idea.

The reason to simplify things — which China under the communists did but Taiwan did not — was (if you believe the communists) to promote literacy; some characters are very complicated, and learning to read and write was very difficult. On the other hand, you might hear,  the traditional characters are essential to understanding and connecting with the ancient culture, to advanced brain development, and to achieving aesthetic elevation. Also, not destroying the ancient culture.

Why is this ongoing, raging debate breaking news for family inequality? The discussions about characters led me to Chinese Characters for Beginners for the plane home from Taipei. And my recent concentration on language regarding union or marriage types (homogamy and heterogamy), on the one hand, and sexual dimorphism / gender on the other, made me sensitive to my first lesson. In it, I learned that to make good, you need woman (nǚ):

plus child or son (zǐ):

equals good (hǎo):

On the other hand, if you combine farm/field (tián):

and strength (lì):

you get one version of male (nán):

Source: Character images from, translations from lots of places, such as this one. Ironically, these are such basic characters that they weren’t affected by the simplification program.

I was already assuming language shapes our thinking. But it’s impossible not to marvel at how people who learn Chinese versus English from infancy have such identical brains to begin with, learn to think so differently, and yet can communicate with each other in such profound ways. In that, I’m apparently up to about 1972 in the lay-person’s understanding of linguistics theory:


What about gender, then? Obviously, languages differ but are deeply gendered. But now, the next time someone sees a common pattern of gendered behavior, and attributes it to genetics or evolution, I’m going to ask them to first demonstrate that the pattern holds among people who aren’t exposed to any language at all (and raised by parents who haven’t been exposed to language either). Otherwise, the influence of ancient cultures is impossible to scrub from the data.

On language, simplification is only one thing we should have heated debates about.


Filed under Me @ work

4 responses to “Good woman child language

  1. Pingback: Homogamy: Start the presses « Family Inequality

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  3. Pingback: Chinese: Maternal grandmothers, outside women « Family Inequality

  4. Pingback: Teaching family inequality: Some posts by subject | Family Inequality

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