I’d like to express my deep appreciation of being the first recipient of the Walton award. I’d also like to share this honor with a number of other people who have helped me in my career.

The first of these is George Kennedy. He was my teacher at Yale. He exercised a great deal of influence over me, because he was a very good scholar and also because he had a knack for simplifying his material (to make) it more readable than most scholarly materials. He also exercised a great influence on my approach to teaching Chinese. He was, as you may know, the creator of the Yale romanization (system), and he laid the groundwork for what was to be known later as the Yale series of materials. I was his first student and he was new to Yale at the time I became his student. I began my academic study of Chinese with George Kennedy.

Another person who helped me tremendously was Mrs. Teng Chia-Yee, my collaborator in a series of textbooks. She was a wonderful woman, very imaginative, a perfect Beijinger, easy to get along with, a perfect collaborator on the series--I enjoyed many happy years of work with her. Another person who was extremely helpful was John B. Tsu, then of Seton Hall University, who was the main factor in my getting started on my whole series of textbooks. He had a Midas touch and was able to come up with funds to produce the books, so my main task was to sit back and simply work on the books, while he scrounged around for money. Kennedy influenced me in both my academic approach to Chinese and to the pedagogy involved in the textbooks.

Another important influence on my work was Lu Xun. In the late 30’s I was involved in the study of Chinese nationalism and was particularly interested in, at one point, the terminology--the change in terminology by Sun Yat-Sen as he came under Soviet influence. As part of what was originally a largely political study of Chinese nationalism, I encountered references to people who wanted to adopt a alphabetic system of writing for Chinese. At first I brushed these materials aside, because the wisdom of the time was you just couldn’t write Chinese alphabetically. Characters were indispensable to writing, and the supporters of alphabetic writing were just a bunch of crackpots.

But when I came across the fact that Lu Xun was an ardent supporter of what was then called Latinization, I decided, in view of my great admiration for this wonderful writer, this wonderful man both as a writer and as a human being, I’d better look more closely into this subject. I began a very detailed search for largely obscure materials that lead to my production, eventually, of Nationalism and Language Reform in China.

I want to emphasize here that my approach to this subject does NOT involve any idea of abandoning Chinese characters. Even some of my best friends have expressed surprise when they look at my advocacy of alphabetical writing and think that that means an abandonment of Chinese characters. One, I think it is utterly impossible that Chinese characters can be abandoned. Two, if it could be done, I would not approve of it. What I am in favor of is something that the Chinese call shuàngwénzï, that is, a two script system, which I’ve translated as "digraphia." That is, the joint use of traditional characters and pinyin, each in the area to which it’s best suited.

This advocacy lead me into the area, in most recent years, of dictionary compilation. And here I’ve had extensive help from Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania who started the whole business and who has been extremely helpful in many areas of the work; and Cyndy Ning, who has shared her meager resources in the University of Hawaii’s Center for Chinese Studies unstintingly with the project.

I’d like to mention now, three aspects of the Chinese field that have interested me. I’d further like to comment on what seems to be the present state of our field.

As far as pedagogy is concerned, tremendous advances have been made since the time when I was involved in the production of teaching materials. The field is much broader, a lot more people are involved in it, there are lots more fresh ideas, new techniques, and so on. So I feel that that area is quite strong. Our field is doing quite well in that area, I feel.

Another aspect of our field is the linguistic one. At the time when I became involved in this whole business, it was George Kennedy, Y.R. Chao, and a handful of other linguists involved in Chinese. Now, there are hundreds of people, and there is a tremendous amount of production of work in the linguistic field. That area too, I think, is strong. Our field is doing well in that area.

The third area of my interest is that of sociolinguistics. And here, I’m afraid, the field is not doing as well as it should be. By sociolinguistics, I have in mind such areas as what’s going to happen to the linguistic situation in Taiwan for example; where the democratization of that area has resulted in an upsurge of Taiwanese. And there is a controversy raging as to what the language policy should be in that island, and what is the bearing of all this on the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland. Another problem area is Hong Kong. I’ve received publications from Hong Kong and they are still in the traditional characters. What does this mean for the future of writing in China?

An extremely important area is the use of computers, and how we handle characters on computer. Here I must express my extreme disappointment with the Chinese government in its emphasis on an approach based on the shape of characters to its sponsorship and support of inputting systems. I think this is a serious mistake; China is being held back by this narrow-minded approach. The only efficient system that I can think of is to use pinyin for inputting and then, of course, characters for outputting. This needs to be studied in depth. At present, the field largely takes the Chinese language situation as a given. I think this is an error. I think that the Chinese language is going to be undergoing strange changes that we should keep on top of. We should look into the future: what’s going to be the language situation in China 10, 20, 50 years from now? I hope that younger people, particularly, will take an interest in this area and keep abreast of what’s going on in China, where, I’m sad to say, there’s very little discussion of these issues, because of what I consider to be an extremely negative, xenophobic attitude toward the writing system.

I hope we can bring a bit of fresh air to this whole business and I think our work on the dictionaries is going to help in this area. The dictionaries have both pedagogical value as the most efficient look up system, and an extremely important sociolinguistic aspect. We are doing a job that the Chinese, for some reason or other, seem to be unable to do themselves, despite the fact that, long ago, one of China’s leading linguists, Lþ Shöxiàng, called for the production of alphabetically-based, alphabetically-arranged dictionaries.