中式英语之鉴4

Violet

        I gradually became aware of an unsettling truth: we are subjecting our mother tongue to a kind of gentle violence, imposing upon it the grammatical logic of English. Those warnings about "dangling modifiers," the discipline of "parallel structure," and the mandatory use of "logical connectives"—while ostensibly correcting the "errors" of Chinglish—actually conceal a cognitive colonization that forces Chinese thought into an English mold. When we label these so-called mistakes, have we ever considered that these "flaws" might instead be natural expressions of the uniqueness of Chinese thinking?

        The "flowing sentence" characteristic of Chinese is often diagnosed as a "lack of logical connectives" under English grammatical standards. The natural progression of information in a Chinese paragraph is labeled "logically chaotic" in English norms. But aren’t the seemingly "loose" yet exquisitely arranged sentences in Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged a natural manifestation of Chinese thought? When we force ourselves to insert "however" at every turn and add "therefore" at every cause-and-effect juncture, we are essentially reprogramming the expressive DNA of Chinese with English cognitive patterns. This process, at its core, is an alienation of thought.

        The paratactic, concrete, and fluid nature of Chinese is precisely what distinguishes it from the hypotactic, abstract, and logical Indo-European languages. As Wang Li noted in Chinese Grammatical Theory: "Western languages are rule-governed, while Chinese is human-governed." When we impose English’s "rule-governed" standards onto Chinese, we are not just distorting a language—we are suffocating a way of perceiving the world.

        To deconstruct this linguistic hegemony, we must return to an ontological reflection on Chinese. The teaching of Chinese writing should be based on a deep understanding of the language’s unique traits, not a simplistic application of English writing norms. When "correcting" Chinglish, we must first ask: Is this truly a linguistic error, or is it a legitimate expression of another mode of thought? In the context of globalization, while we must avoid isolationism, we must also guard against losing the cognitive foundations of our mother tongue in the blind pursuit of conformity.

        Language is never merely a tool for communication; it is the DNA of a people’s way of thinking. When we dissect Chinese with the scalpel of English grammar, what we excise may be the most precious neural pathways of the Chinese language. The value of this book  lies not in how many "correct" English examples it provides, but in how it inadvertently reveals the cognitive chasm between the two languages. True bilingualism is not about imposing the rules of one language upon another, but about harmoniously coexisting with both modes of thought by understanding their differences.