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Pastimes : A CENTURY OF LIONS/THE 20TH CENTURY TOP 100 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (1648)	11/16/1999 1:03:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3246

My, Neocon, you DO seem down on the Chinese! And I am not sure it is polite to call Lu Xun a "fellow." <g> As for your specific questions, I am no more familiar with the Chinese linguistic situation than you profess to be, so let us turn to "Ethnologue": sil.org To sum up: The literacy rate in China is about 75%. Han Chinese account for about 1 billion of China's 1.2 billion people. Add to that about 20 million in Taiwan, 3 million in Singapore, etc. I am sure the Overseas Chinese have a much higher literacy rate. Although some (but not all) Chinese dialects are mutually unintelligible, when spoken, the written language is the same for all. That is the beauty of the ideographic system, and explains why it has not been abandoned for an alphabetic system. I have no doubt that non-Chinese minorities are taught a standard brand of Chinese (probably Mandarin) in school, and would not be at all surprised if that were true of ethnic Chinese as well. Lingua franca, and all that. But even if that is not the case, you can still read Lu Xun, no matter which dialect of Chinese you speak. (Or so I have been given to understand.) Joan