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Some proleptical remarks on the evolution of archaic Chinese
... -d/r ■W3-Les accretions morphologiques retenues par la plupart des auteurs tentent d'une part, de différencier deux types de négations distinguées par l'une des deux initiales *p-ou *m-, et, d'autre part, d'identifier la consonne finale à la réduction effective d'un lexeme ou d'un mot grammatical. Les données ci-après résument les points de vue rencontrés : (Ding Shengshu 1935, Boodberg 1937, Lu Shuxiang, Wang Li, Kennedy 1947, Graham 1952, Mulder 1959, MeiTsu-Lin 1980 (*piwat < *piug + *t'iag)5 jp # < (♦mývat < *miug + *tiag) (Boodberg 1937, Mulder 1959, Graham 1952 (*miwang < *miuio + tiag) (dans le Luny и selon Graham 1952) (*piwar <*piug + dhvar) (Dobson 1958, Pulleyblank 1959 (*miwo < *m-+ *giug) (Shadick 1968) < /i1 + (*miwad < *patg + *k[ad) (Serruys 1 969) 5 ...
... -d/r ■W3-Les accretions morphologiques retenues par la plupart des auteurs tentent d'une part, de différencier deux types de négations distinguées par l'une des deux initiales *p-ou *m-, et, d'autre part, d'identifier la consonne finale à la réduction effective d'un lexeme ou d'un mot grammatical. Les données ci-après résument les points de vue rencontrés : (Ding Shengshu 1935, Boodberg 1937, Lu Shuxiang, Wang Li, Kennedy 1947, Graham 1952, Mulder 1959, MeiTsu-Lin 1980 (*piwat < *piug + *t'iag)5 jp # < (♦mývat < *miug + *tiag) (Boodberg 1937, Mulder 1959, Graham 1952 (*miwang < *miuio + tiag) (dans le Luny и selon Graham 1952) (*piwar <*piug + dhvar) (Dobson 1958, Pulleyblank 1959 (*miwo < *m-+ *giug) (Shadick 1968) < /i1 + (*miwad < *patg + *k[ad) (Serruys 1 969) 5 ...
This article is devoted to a semantico-syntactic analysis of the use of seven markers of negation in Early Archaic Chinese, especially in the Zhou bronze inscriptions. The negative BU 不 which is used with intransitive verbal predicates or with adjectives, establishes a descriptive relationship between the subject and the predicate in its clause; it only shows a simple descriptive intention and takes an integral part in the presupposition. The negative marker FU 弗 is fully adverbial and is used, essentially, with transitive verbs. The marker FEI 非, establishes an attributive, descriptive relationship between the two terms of the predication inside the clause just as does BU; but it introduces a polemic value in expressing the falsity of a presupposition. The marker WU2 毋, in contrast with WU1 勿, does not come under the category of a deontic modality. The obligation which it shows does not come from the speaker (or from any other source) but is internal to the subject-predicate relationship. The negation in this case is to be taken as a statement of fact and not as an injunction. However, according to the observations here, WU2 毋 refers to the epistemic modal category. That why it can express the double value of both
... The use of sound in devising characters goes beyond even such well-known cases, affecting even the huìyì type of character (Liu's "compound ideograms"), whose construction is traditionally thought to have no direct relationship to their pronunciation at all (Boltz 1994, chap. 2-3;Boodberg 1937). Boltz states his own position very strongly: "at no time did any of the graphs that were invented stand for ideas directly; they always primarily represented the sounds of a language, and meaning only as it was associated with those sounds" (1994, 59)-a nice reversal of Liu's priorities! ...
... But whatever the specific motivation of scholars like Liu and Hansen within and beyond Chinese studies for putting forward their points of view, their arguments are able to draw on a whole reservoir of character fetishization discourse that has become, to some extent, the common sense of the field. Furthermore, because scholars critiquing these tendencies, such as Boodberg andKennedy, andmore recently John DeFrancis (1984, 1989) and J. Marshall Unger (2004), have tended to take a dismissive, if not polemical, tone toward such arguments, the effect of the ensuing debates seems to have been largely one of drawing battle lines between the linguists and the non-linguists within the field. Rather than adding yet another name to this long and dismal list, I would like to end the present discussion on a more positive note by carrying out an analysis of one recent work calling on the kinds of arguments identified here and showing that, on its own terms, it does not need to argue from the nature of the characters in order to successfully make its points about the meaning of the text. ...
Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called “ideographs,” continue to bedevil Chinese studies. This paper considers examples of what are referred to as “discourses of character fetishization,” whereby an inordinate status is discursively created for Chinese characters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought, and culture. The author endeavors to analyze and critique the presuppositions and implications of such discourses, with the aim of defusing the passions that have been aroused by this issue, and showing the way toward a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of the nature of Chinese characters, both as a writing system and in relation to Chinese culture and thought.
... Together with the objection to the term 'ideographic,' the term 'lexigraphic' was introduced by DuPonceau (1883), and "logographic" by Sansom (1928Sansom ( /1968) and Boodberg (1937), followed by Reed (1983): ...
... Signs used in writing, however ambiguous, stylized, or symbolic, represent words. (Boodberg, 1937, pp. 329-332, cited in DeFrancis, 1984b As seen in these three quotations, there is an improvement in their use of the terms "lexigraphic" and "logographic" for Chinese writing, because these terms imply that kanji represent the speech of Chinese at the word level. ...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-161). Microfiche. xiii, 161 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm
... 1 Theoretically, there are four structural categories to which Chinese characters can belong: in addition to 'phono-semantic compound', there are the so-called 'pictographs' (actually very few), whose graphic form is directly inspired by the thing represented; the 'indicative characters' (also called 'ideographs'), i.e. characters written in such a way as to symbolically suggest their meaning. The last category, whose status is still quite debated (Boodberg 1937;Boltz 1994;Handel 2016;Galambos 2011;2014), is that of 'semantic compounds', so called because all the graphic components of the character convey semantic content. in Sanskrit writing and grammar (Siddham being an early derivative of the Brahmi script). For example, in the following passage 3 we can read a description of Sanskrit consonants made by the Chinese Buddhist poet Xiè Língyùn 謝靈運 (385-433 A.D.), where the different sounds are grouped according to their place of articulation, consistently with the Indian phonological tradition (see also Chaudhuri 1998). ...
The article discusses an interesting case of the use of Chinese characters as phonographic devices: the Sanskrit declension of puruṣa ( bùlùshā 布路沙) ‘man’ as transcribed by the Chinese monk Hui Li in his Biography of Xuanzang . In particular, the analysis will focus on two aspects: the way Hui Li renders the different Sanskrit nominal endings; the evaluation of the general accuracy of these transcriptions. For the latter point, I will take as reference the phonetic reconstructions of Chinese characters proposed by Pulleyblank (1991) and Baxter - Sagart (2014).
... The basic framework of Handel's discussion is set out in the Introduction, and follows the tradition of nomenclature and analysis developed by Boltz (1994) and, much earlier, by Boodberg (1937). Chinese characters are referred to as 'logograms' , a term that serves to indicate that the unit of writing with its square shape represents a 'word' , that is an individual morpheme or unit of meaning. ...
... The existence of evidence attesting initial consonant clusters in Old Chinese has been discussed in many other scientific publications, e.g., Gotō Asatarō 後藤朝太郎 (1908), Henri Maspero (1930), Peter Boodberg (1937), Tōdō Akiyasu 藤堂明保 (1953), and, of course, Bernhard Karlgren (1915Karlgren ( -1926. ...
This paper analyzes and evaluates the linguistic ideas of the British Protestant missionary Joseph Edkins (1823-1905), as well as the linguistic trends of his time, in order to recognize the merits and the achievements in the field of historical Chinese phonology. Furthermore, this paper seeks to demonstrate that many ideas about the sound system of Old Chinese were posited or at least presaged by Edkins in his philological works, where the earliest attempt to reconstruct the old language of the ancient Chinese classics took place for the first time.
... Nombre d'auteurs ont par la suite repris cette hypothèse sans toutefois examiner les données empiriques à même de la confirmer (cf. inter alia Boodberg 1937, Lü 1942, Wang 1958 (qui considère que l'on a là, non pas une coalescence phonétique, mais un amalgame fonctionnel de la négation et du pronom objet zh ), Kennedy 1952, Graham 1952et Mulder 1959. Plus près de nous, He (2001) a pu montrer que l'hypothèse en question n'est pas corroborée par les données textuelles antérieures aux Qin (3 e s. av. ...
... Boltz 1994cf. Boltz [2003:63, 103-5): Boodberg's original statement of this theory was elaborated in two rejoinders to articles by Herrlee Creel (Boodberg 1937(Boodberg , 1940Creel 1936aCreel , 1938; it was eventually codified with far more substantial support and more careful argument by William Boltz (1994[2003). At the outset, Boodberg seems to have been elaborating an original hypothesis, although he sounds as though he is stating established fact. ...
This essay reviews the phonological content of the Chinese script and what it implies about the tradition of literacy in early China. “Phonogram” (xíngshēng 形聲) structure in Chinese characters is well known. The “crypto-phonogram” hypothesis proposes that every complex Chinese character contains at least one element originally intended to have phonetic function, and that no such character can be entirely without such an element. The hypothesis is not falsifiable and both it and its “ideographic” rival appear to assume that an analytical process of decipherment is involved in reading characters, something shown by experimental studies to be incorrect. However, it has also been shown experimentally that explicit phonological content in a writing system improves its efficiency, even if only partially implemented, which favors the phonogrammatic principle. If, as proposed by the hypothesis, some phonogrammatic content ceased at some time to be recognized as such, then any associated efficiency was presumably lost, which suggests that literacy has not been a continuous tradition in China from the earliest times. Phonogrammatic content became especially widespread as part of the standardization of the script in the Qín-Hàn era, and the “xiéshēng 諧聲 series” (an inventory of phonograms sharing particular phonetic elements) seems to represent the first systematic statement of phonology in Chinese history and the beginning of a continuous tradition of literacy and phonological expression. But the phonology of the xiéshēng series is made up of distinctions far rougher than became fashionable in the later Yǒngmíng and Suí eras. Perhaps that was not an accident and only a very crude and functional notion of homophony was indeed meant to be embodied in standardized phonograms. A great advantage of such a crude system would have been to narrow the gap between high- and low-register language, helping to unify spoken language on the model of its own internal phonological relationships.
... China, separated by physical and cultural distance, enclosed in its borders, was a culturally relatively homogeneous empire which already had had thousands of years of history by the twilight of the sixteenth century, when it was "rediscovered" by European missionaries. The knowledge about China that was created at this time was strongly influenced by reports of those early visitors and then "frozen" in the books by the 25 Among others, Peter Boodberg (1937Boodberg ( , 1940, George Kennedy (1951), Marshal Unger (1990Unger ( , 1993, William Boltz (1994), Victor Mair (2002) and Imre Galambos (2006). Jesuits of the seventeenth century. ...
RESUMO Este artigo tem por objetivo expor uma breve história das ideias na Europa, entre 1550 e 1900, sobre a língua falada e escrita na China. Seguindo o partido teórico do historicismo moderado de Sylvain Auroux (2004), sugerimos como fio condutor os discursos na disputa pela natureza da escrita chinesa: ideográfica ou fonográfica. Recusando-nos a tomar partido de uma ou outra alternativa, mostramos que este debate se desenvolve em torno de questões revisitadas ao longo destes mais de três séculos e que os estudos publicados pelos europeus encontram-se profundamente enraizados em seu contexto cultural, social e ideológico de produção. O status precário da escrita na história das ideias linguísticas se sobressai e aponta para o papel protagonista da escrita chinesa nas concepções de escrita desenvolvidas no ocidente, em particular sobre suas possibilidades representativas. Propomos, por fim, que os debates sobre o tema hoje reproduzem muitas das questões exploradas ao longo desta história, cuja resolução permanece ainda longe de um consenso.
... For the lower figure, seeZou et al. (1999), for the higher, seeZhao (1993).10 SeeBoodberg (1937).11 SeeDeFrancis (1989, p. 100).Beyond the pictogram: echoes of the Naxi in Ezra Pound's… 237 ...
Two unusual characters appear in the closing lines of Ezra Pound’s Canto CXII (from his “Drafts and Fragments”), characters that may offer up the most complete example of Pound’s much-discussed “ideogrammic method”. The characters discussed in this paper belong to the Naxi dongba script, the logographic writing system of a tribe in China’s south-western province of Yunnan. Pound’s sources are analysed and a new theory of the origin of the two characters—from Joseph Rock’s translation of a Naxi ritual text—is put forward. The two Naxi dongba characters in Canto CXII unlock the meaning of the canto within which they appear, and echo themes that run through the Cantos when taken as a whole. But we can also see Pound using both pictorial and phonetic elements of the script to create a “cumulative ideogram”, and through this comparative Poundian lens we can update our historically limited understanding of the Naxi writing system.
... This claim has been most strongly made by DeFrancis (1989) who stresses that the vast majority of Chinese signs are of conjunctive semantic-phonetic combinations. Emerging no later than 2000 B.C. (Boltz 1996), modern Chinese writing covers a large area of the lower section of the triangle, including mnemonic signs of the iconic and abstractly iconic types, rebuses, as well as most all types of conjunctive signs. ...
... Linguistic science deals first and last with the word, its only reality. The 'disembodied word' which is what is generally meant by 'idea' or 'concept' does not exist for the linguist'' (Boodberg, 1937, p. 332 [n. 5]; see also p. 333 [n. ...
Prominent in recent discussions of East Asian writing systems has been a metadiscursive polemic that can be labeled the Critique of the Ideographic Myth. Associated primarily with John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger, this is an attack on the notion that the Chinese writing system represents ideas directly, and more broadly an argument for the primacy of phonography in inscription in general. This paper considers the disciplinary framework of the Critique, tracing its roots in a prewar Sinological debate (the Boodberg–Creel controversy) and in Leonard Bloomfield’s famous dismissal of writing, and locating it within the postwar field of Asian Studies.
This study documents the past and present of English scholarship of Shuōwén jiězì, the most important masterpiece of classical Chinese philology and lexicography. In an attempt to investigate the current status (synchronically) and developmental trajectory (diachronically) of Shuōwén scholarship, this study surveyed the bibliographical, theoretical, methodological and thematic state of Shuōwén literature manifested in an analytical framework of six parameters (geographic distribution, publication outlets, citations, theoretical approaches, research methods and research strands) by adopting a thorough bibliometric analysis subsequent to meticulous coding in terms of these six parameters in Shuōwén scholarship. The results showed that Shuōwén scholarship has displayed distinctive distribution patterns and chronological trends along bibliographical, theoretical, methodological and thematic dimensions. Synchronically, the research output is regionally based, thematically restricted and qualitatively examined; diachronically, the research quality is fluctuating, though research quantity multiplies steadily. To look ahead, the study sketched a few directions for advancement of future research agendas: a more global profile of researchers, a larger degree of internationalization of the native circle, a wider disciplinary range, and increased specialization streamlined into data-driven approach to core issues of liùshū, bùshǒu and GPS (graphic-phonetic-semantic) of head graphs. The study is useful in portraying an overarching disciplinary landscape for Shuōwén research and providing the basic reference statistics for possible comparisons across classical Chinese studies and for more general conclusions about the state of scholarship on sinology.
Chinese characters usually consist of two or more elements, of which one bears phonetic and other – semantic values. Some complex characters (usually referred to as ‘ideograms’) consist of semantic elements only. However, there is a ‘crypto-phonogram theory’ suggested by Russian-American sinologist Peter A. Boodberg (1903–1972). According to this theory, all or almost all Chinese complex characters comprise a phonetic element. Still, some of these phonetic elements are hard to discover, since the Ancient Chinese characters could be “polyphonic” and be read in several ways. For example, two characters from the Shang period (13–11 cent. BC) – he 禾 ‘cereals’ and nian 年 ‘harvest’ is very close with regard to their shape, meaning, and usage. Some scholars even believe that the character 禾 may mean ‘harvest’ as well as ‘cereals’. The present article aims to examine Boodberg’s theory by using quantitative analysis. If the idea of the ‘harvest’ could be transcribed by two different characters, this phenomenon should not be dependent on the context. However, if two characters stand for two different words, albeit close in meaning, the usage ratio should depend on their context. It turned out that the divinators of the Shang dynasty could ‘beg’ for both harvest and cereals, which in its turn is reflected by similar or equal ratios. Nevertheless, when the requested harvest was received the ratio between these characters changes significantly. Moreover, when a harvest of a specific crop was mentioned, the Shang scribes used the character 禾 only once. The data received may hint at the fact that the phenomenon must be purely lexical. However, one cannot consider these data as definitive. The article shows that the ratio does not depend on the context alone. It also depends on the nature and education of the scribe who carved the inscription on the bone. The results suggest an additional study to evaluate the full significance of this factor.
In the Anglophone sphere, according to popular and most academic understandings, the term “ideograph” is regarded as an unproblematic synonym of 漢字 hànzì ‘Chinese character.’ On graphological grounds, i.e. as applied to writing systems, it can easily be shown that the concept of “ideograph” is both theoretically incoherent and practically unfeasible (McDonald 2016); while historically it is clear that the notion was founded on an imperfect understanding of Chinese characters as a writing system, and grew out of a European obsession with the notion of a “universal character” at a particular historical moment (Mungello 1985; Saussy 2001). Nevertheless the concept has become deeply embedded in European understandings of Chinese language and culture, to the extent that it is, in effect, a valuable conceptual possession of Western modernity (Bush 2010), and promoted alike by those with a detailed knowledge of Chinese writing, such as H. G. Creel (1936), as by those in blissful ignorance of it, like Jacques Derrida (1967/1976). In the Sinophone sphere, while for most practical purposes, as well as in a large proportion of scholarly work, more grounded understandings of Chinese characters as a writing system operate either implicitly or explicitly, the traditional emphasis on characters as a link between civilization and the cosmos (O’Neill 2013), as well as a long tradition of pedagogical “just so stories” about the construction of individual characters (e.g., Zuo 2005), provide a key point of contact with Western notions of the “ideograph” as symbolizing not a word, but an idea or an object. The situation may thus be described involving a type of inversion of the phenomenon of faux amis or “false friends,” where two different words are understood as being more or less synonymous; or alternatively as an example of Lydia Liu’s (2004) notion of a cross-lingual “supersign” where two comparable terms exercise an influence on each other across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This article will attempt to trace the genealogy of these complex and overlapping notions, and see what differing understandings of Chinese characters have to tell us about notions of cultural specificity, cultural production, and cross-cultural (mis-)communication in the contemporary globalized world.
This essay, the first chapter in the author’s Xifang Hanxue chutu wenxian yanjiu gaiyao 西方漢學出土文獻研究概要 (Essentials of Western Sinology’s Research on Unearthed Documents), provides a survey of Western Sinology’s research on Chinese paleography from the time of the first such study (1881) through 2015. The survey includes especially the following topics: general discussions of Chinese paleography and/or unearthed documents, the origins of Chinese writing and its social functions, the nature of Chinese writing, methodological studies, and reference works, but does not cover studies of ancient Chinese grammar or phonology.
摘要這篇文章是作者著《西方漢學出土文獻研究概要》第一章，就 1881 年到 2015年間西方漢學對中國出土文獻與古文字研究成果作概括的論述，分成下列題目：中國出土文獻與古文字學綜論、中國文字的起源及其社會作用、中國文字的性質、古文字學方法論、古文字學參考書，但是不包括相關的古代漢語語法研究和古代漢語音韻學。
Although frequently cited as a typical hui yi, the graph míng 明 has attracted many different, in some cases somewhat conflicting interpretations regarding its formation and categorization. In this paper, I conduct a diachronic study of how the graph míng 明 and related graphs have been used from around the thirteenth century BCE when the earliest Chinese script, the oracle bone inscriptions, was in use, up to the turn of the twentieth century, when the traditional script was in use. I argue that today the graph 明 used for ‘bright’ is the result of simplification from míng 朙. This mostly occurred during the late Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States period when the scripts of the six states were used. Xu Shen mistook míng 明 as the archaic form of the graph míng 朙. In the orthography reforms conducted during the Tang dynasty, míng 明 was chosen as the standard form against míng 朙 and míng 眀.
In this article I question the assumption that all place-names in the Mu T'ien-tzu chuan refer to real places. I suggest instead a mythic origin for many of these seemingly referential elements. By analyzing a complex of myths either referred to or alluded to in the text, I show that several crucial place-names come in fact from cosmological referents rather than geographical ones. The Mu T'ien-tzu chuan cannot then be read purely as a historical account. I extend this argument by revealing how the elements of cosmological myth in the narrative must themselves be read as elements of symbolic discourse; that is, they have to be read within an astronomical context as references to celestial phenomena. By reading the cosmological and astronomical discourses of the myths together, I demonstrate the literary significance of the Mu T'ien-tzu chuan, a significance which to date has been obscured by misreadings of its historicity. Finally, I argue that only by reading the Mu T'ien-tzu chuan as a literary fiction can one understand what it tells us about how notions of political legitimacy were constructed and then altered in the representation of King Mu's (fictional) journey. The narrative is thus revealed to be a wholly symbolic tale whose interpretation has implications for the wider realm of the interconnections among history, literature and culture.
It has been suggested in the literature that "fu" is a fusion word of the negator "bu" and the pronoun "zhi" and that "wu" is a fusion word of the negator "wu" and the pronoun "zhi," but there still are many scholars who oppose this hypothesis. In this paper, we give supplementary evidence for this hypothesis based on the phenomena of the complementary distribution of the fused and non-fused forms. In addition, we show that some of the counter evidence is not so convincing as it appears. Specifically, we show the following: First, some of the sentences containing "fu" and "wu" which have been considered counter evidence to this hypothesis are actually not counter examples! Secondly, though many examples of "bu" are used as "fu" (which have been cited as counter evidence to this hypothesis), most of these examples can be explained in two ways: 1). "Fu" was rewritten as "bu" to avoid violating a taboo in the Han dynasty; 2). "Bu" might be the better choice between these two negators which modify transitive verbs in some circumstances in Old Chinese. Finally, in this paper we show that the frequencies anf functions of "fu" and "wu" changed with the passage of time, so "fu" and "wu" were confused with "bu" and "wu," and the original restriction on "fu" and "wu" gradually disappeared.
This paper explores hermeneutical strategies applied in Zhao Qi's (d. 201) Mengzi zhangju (Mencius: Chapters and verses). It surveys commentarial features of the earliest extant commentary on the Mencius and discusses examples of Zhao Qi's dealing with lexicon, orthography, grammar and syntax in his word glosses and translations from Zhou Chinese into contemporary parlance, which offer a window into the development of linguistic features of the Later Han period.
Many Western readers currently accept an account of the early evolution of Chinese script due to William Boltz, according to whom all graphs other than simple pictographs originated as phonetic-semantic compounds. This contrasts with the traditional Chinese account of 'six writings', according to which some graphs were compounds of separate elements each chosen for their meaning rather than their sound. This paper argues that (while the 'six writings' theory had flaws) with respect to that central issue it is correct, and Boltz is mistaken.
Why, for centuries, have the West and the world continuously produced China knowledge that deviates from Chinese realities? Why, since the mid-nineteenth century, have Chinese intellectuals oscillated between commendation and condemnation of their own culture, and between fetishization and demonization of all things Western? And why have some of the world's wisest thinkers expressed opinions on Chinese culture, which are simply wrong? In order to answer these questions, this book explores the process of knowledge production about China and the Chinese civilization and in turn, provides a critique of the ways in which this knowledge is formed. Ming Dong Gu argues that the misperceptions and misinterpretations surrounding China and the Chinese civilisation do not simply come from misinformation, biases, prejudices, or political interference, but follow certain taken-for-granted principles that have evolved into a cultural unconscious. Indeed, Gu argues that the conflicting accounts in China-West studies are the inevitable outcome of this cultural unconscious which constitutes the inner logic of a comprehensive knowledge system which he terms 'Sinologism'. This book explores Sinologism's origin, development, characteristics, and inner logic, and critiques its manifestations in the writings of Chinese, Western, and non-Western thinkers and scholars, including Montesquieu, Herder, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Russell, Pound, Wang Guowei, Guo Moruo, Gu Jiegang, Wen Yiduo, and many others in diverse disciplines from arts and humanities to social sciences. In doing so, Gu demonstrates why the existing critical models are inadequate for Chinese materials and makes an attempt to construct an alternative theory to Orientalism and postcolonialism for China-West studies and cross-cultural studies. Sinologism crosses over the subjects of history, thought, literature, language, art, archaeology, religion, aesthetics and cultural theory, and will appeal to students and scholars of East-West studies with a particular focus on China, as well as those interested in cultural theory more broadly.
Sinologism is basically a cultural unconscious in China-West studies predicated on an inner logic that operates beyond our conscious awareness but controls the ways of observing China and producing China scholarship. Its logic has exerted a profound impact on studies of Chinese language and writing. Since medieval times the difference between Chinese and Western languages has been viewed as a conceptual divide that separates Chinese and Western traditions. It has motivated scholars to generate a considerable array of ideas, views, and arguments on Chinese language and writing. These dazzling views operate on the logic of Sinologism: conditions of Chinese language are to be investigated from the Western linguistic point of view, and the nature of Chinese writing is to be determined in terms of Western alphabetic languages. This article reexamines the enduring controversy over the nature of Chinese language, especially writing, with the aim to see why the long-lasting debates have come to no satisfactory conclusion. By demonstrating how the epistemology and methodology predicated on phonocentrism and logocentrism in Western metaphysics have evolved into the logic of a language philosophy that manages to misunderstand and misrepresent Chinese language, especially writing, it explores how we can move out of the war of discourse and come to an adequate understanding of the true nature of Chinese language. It suggests that to be self-consciously aware of the hidden logic of Sinologism is the sine qua non for going beyond the war of discourse over Chinese language.
The composer John Cage once remarked that silence is the sound the environment makes. Though Cage showed insight by noting that we rarely if ever experience a total lack of sound, one could hardly imagine a worse definition of the word “silence”. Cage’s observation is an oxymoron: its truth derives from the rhetorical force of a contradiction, which in turn depends on the fact the word “silence” denotes the absence of sound, not its presence. Anyone who thought Cage had actually improved on the definition of silence would simply be missing the point.
I address two seductively simple questions. The first is “What does it mean to read a word?” This simple identification question is a scientific one about which research has had much to say. But it remains a tricky question with multiple answers, and the answer chosen provides a path of theoretical and methodological sequelae.
In the pre-Hann era, the graphs 望 and 朢 were used interchangeably to represent two homophonous words, 'full moon' and 'look into the distance', both read wanq < *mjang(s). While the phonetic component of 望 is obviously 亡, it is not easy to identify a phonetic component in the form 朢, and more difficult still for the earlier shell and bone inscription (SBI) form 𦣠. In this paper I discuss the distribution of the three forms in inscribed and manuscript texts and in the transmitted pre-Hann corpus, the words represented by these graphs together with their associated word families, and the function of the graphic constituents of the three forms of the graphs.
I t began with the Phoenicians . Most written languages now use their invention— a phonetic alphabet. The invention of alphabetic writing escorted an influential theory of language onto the intellectual stage. Aristotle expressed the basic outline of that theory, which has since dominated Indo-European views of language:
Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of the spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of—affections in the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of— actual things-are also the same.
The history of Chinese writing extends back more than 6000 years and the Chinese writing system remains unique among all writing systems. In this paper, the origin and evolution of Chinese writing systems will be discussed. It will be shown that in the Shang dynasty (about 1200 BC) the principles of Chinese writing had been formulated and that over the following 3000 years the structure and key elements of the system have remained, although the style of writing has changed (Li, 1969; Keightly, 1989). Explanations of the possible motivation behind the invention of Chinese writing will also be discussed. It can be shown that numerals had the highest frequency of occurrence in the earliest writing system - pottery inscriptions - and this finding indicates that one of the purposes of innovation of a writing system was for counting. This paper concludes that evidence of early Chinese writing confirms there is a significant relationship between the invention of a writing system and abstract counting and accounting requirements.
The ‘problem of myth’ for Western philosophers is a problem of interpreting the meaning of myths and explaining the phenomenon of myth making. The ‘problem of myth’ for the sinologist is one of finding any myths to interpret and explaining why there are so few—for myth-making is generally assumed to be a universal faculty of mankind. One explanation for the paucity of myth in the traditional sense of stories of the supernatural in ancient Chinese texts is the nature of Chinese religion. In China, gods, as well as ancestors and ghosts, were believed to be dead men, spirits who had lived in this world at a certain place and time and continued to need sustenance from the living and to exert influence over them. They related primarily to those who gave them ritual offerings and little thought was given to any possible interaction between them
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