Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schrifrestschn'fi: &says in Honor of John DeFrancis
Appendix 111 records the errors of the Taiwan students in reading each of the four passages
shown in Appendix 11. Note that the superscripts beside each character indicate the number of
occurrence, e.g. 6 bd'rneans the second occurrence of the compound tai-vang 'sun' in the text.
The errors are llsted in order of their appearance in the Reading, each followed by the total
number of errors, followed by a breakdown of the exact number of each type of error. plus those
who simply could not guess at all (marked by "0"). The overall number of errors can be seen to
be small relative to the large number of simplified characters in the readings and to the number
of students (34). Certain of the more interebiir~g errors in each of the four passages will be
examined briefly below.
In Reading 1, note that two of the four respondents who attempted a reading of the coverb
corrg A).. 'from' chose another grammatically appropriate coverb zai 6 at'. one guessed the
graphically similar literary cocerb pi 'taking', and the fourth the contextually possible rrreirian
'every day'. while the remaining twenty -six a1 beit with some hesitation correctly guessed the
correct reading aided by context. Again, of those ten out of thirty-four students who encountered
difficulty with the first instance of the simplified character fa 6 in fa(-hlile 'sent out', three
substituted the verb hti #%'pull out' presumably on the basis of similarity of shape, while the five
others who guessed erroneously also substituted semantically appropriate verbs. When fa
occurred again in jZ ~dng 'hurt' in the next to the last line of Reading 1, the choice of verb or
adverb substituted was again based largely on grammatical and collocational considerations.
Similarly, note that context usually forced the substitution of another measure word for those
unable to recognize the simplified form of gi. 'instancelpiece of in zl12gb.~~ 'this' and r~agr 'that1.
Thus we see that even when erroneous readings were made, those same contextual factors which
presumably assist the majority of readers in making the correct readings operate to restrict the
range of possible guesses.
In Reading 2, similar observations may he made. The various errors made for ling in sinlittg
'spirit' are all collocations based on coocurrence with the preceding morpheme xirl. The
misreading of jirn 'military' as ldo 'prison' is obviously based on their graphic similarity, and the
misreading of hiirliii as hiiwo was explained as being due not only to the similarity of p).and&b
but also to the idea common in Taiwan propaganda that Kuomingdang agents are 'lying' in wait
on the Chinese mainland. The collocational force of ke le fdlr 'kowtowed' is so strong that not
one of the thirty-four respondents misread the simplified character rori 'head' in this context,
although fourteen later had difficulty recognizing the same character in Reading 3 in a less
obvious context. The two misreadings of && 'strong' for 'although' were obviously hased on
graphic similarity, as was the subsequent misreading of for )b. Three readers substituted the
appropriate particles~@and %g for the simplified 'P;. despite its lack of a D 'mouth' radical.
Normal collocation explains clrianw2i 'console' being misread as lin~vei 'comfort' and wi.icr+n
'sympathize'. Lastly, the three substitutes for me /I, in name 'so' are all hased on grammatical
context.
In Reading 3, the relative difficulty of yrran 'far' as an independent verb versus its
recognizability when embedded in the compound noun wangyuhrlgjing 'telescope' has already
been noted above. As in Reading 1, the second and third occurrences of the coverb cdng
'from' produced predictable alternative coverbs suitable to the context, but as noted above, roll
'headlend' is not as recognizable in a less structured context as it was in kt? tori 'kowtow' in
Reading 2. Context also makes it clear that yi 'one hundred million' is a large number, although
it was not clear to sixteen of the thirty-four readers which multiple of ten it is. Similarly, context
made clear the character ji 'extremely' to all but seven readers. Lastly, shu was known
to all thirty four readers as part of the compound jishir &K'techniquef, but was not clear to five
readers in the following Reading 4 in the less commonly encountered context xao xhi shir 'paper
making techniques'.