Chinese language and Chinese thought—

or,How different is Chinese?

Bill Baxter

2

Background A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (1989:389):

‘Chinese thought before the introduction of Buddhism from India is the unique instance of a philosophical tradition which, as far as our information goes, is wholly independent of traditions developed in Indo-European languages …. It therefore provides the ideal test case for Whorf’s hypothesis that the thought of a culture is guided and constrained by the structure of its language.’

3

Background, continued: A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (1989:390): ‘The philosophising of most cultures has been

in Indo-European or Semitic languages with inflections which call attention to word classes and sentence structure. Their absence in Chinese, with its sequences of uniform and unchanging monosyllables, rendered the Chinese to a considerable extent blind to the structure of their own language.’ (emphasis added)

8

Comments: ‘Indo-European’ structure

‘Indo-European’ is a genetic grouping, not a structural type. There is no such thing as ‘Indo-European language structure’.

In the early days of comparative grammar, it was assumed that structure was indicative of ancestry (as it is with animals and plants).

Linguists now recognize that languages can change ‘structures’ over time, and that languages with different structures can belong to the same genetic grouping.

9

Main points: The processes by which simpler signs are

combined to form more complex signs are universal.

Linguistic signs are constructed in language-specific and culture-specific ways from sets of primitives (phonetic, semantic, and syntactic), which are universal or nearly so.

There is no dichotomy in either linguistic or conceptual structure between ‘East’ and ‘West’, or between Indo-European and non-Indo-European.

11

Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and comparative anatomy

Source:

http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/hst/scientific-identity/fullsize/SIL14-C6-09a.jpg

12

Georges Cuvier on comparative anatomy:

emphasized that although plants could generally be classified on the basis of externally visible structures, animals could be meaningfully classified only on the basis of their internal structure:

‘In animals, almost everything essential is inside: heart, blood vessels, nerves, brain, intestines; and unless one dissects them, one cannot explain their digestion, their motion, their sensations, or their degree of intelligence.’ (1810: Rapport historique sur les progrès des sciences naturelles depuis 1789, p. 242)

13

Cuvier, continued So he thought animals should be classified

according to their inner structure or morphology (a term later borrowed by linguists).

At an early stage, Cuvier distinguished simply between vertebrates and invertebrates—those animals which had a central backbone and those which did not (1805: Leçons d’anatomie comparée, 35–36).

Later he proposed a four-way classification: Vertebrata, Mollusca, Articulata, and Radiata, (1817: Le règne animal distributé d’après son organisation, 57–61), and this classification had wide influence.

14

The Schlegel brothers

[Source: http://www.arthistoryclub.com/art_history]

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829)

August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845)

15

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829): ‘die innre Struktur der Sprachen’

Arguing that Greek and Latin are derived from Sanskrit (which they aren’t—BB):

‘The decisive point however which will clarify everything here is the inner structure of the languages or comparative grammar, which will give us quite new information about the genealogy of languages, just as comparative anatomy has illuminated the higher natural history.’ (1808: Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier; emphasis added)

16

The Humboldt brothers

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1772–1829) educator,

philosopher, linguist

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) naturalist,

explorer[Source: http://www.museum.hu-

berlin.de/ min/sammlung/humboldt.jpg][Source:

http://www.arthistoryclub.com/ art_history/Image:WilhelmvonHum

boldt.jpg]

17

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835): das vergleichende Sprachstudium

Advocated both thorough empirical studies of individual languages, and cross-linguistic studies of particular aspects of language (e.g. verbs):

‘Only in this way can the important question be answered, whether, and how, based on their inner structure, languages may be assigned to classes, like, for example, the families of plants.’ (1820, ‘Ueber das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschieden Epochen der Sprachentwicklung’)

18

Guess which are the linguistic invertebrates?

Chinese was widely regarded as having no ‘grammar’ at all.

For most educated Europeans, ‘grammar’ meant, more or less, ‘lots of annoying forms for each verb and noun, as found in Latin and Greek’.

They were nearly unanimous in regarding ancient Greek as the most perfect language in the world for expressing the most sublime human thoughts.

(If it wasn’t, then how could they justify having spent so much of their youth studying it?)

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Some examples:W. D. Whitney’s best-seller (1867):

LANGUAGEAND

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE:

TWELVE LECTURESON THE

PRINCIPLIES OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE

BY

WILLIAM DWIGHT WHITNEYPROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT AND INSTRUCTOR IN MODERN

LANGUAGESIN YALE COLLEGE.

20

The Whitney brothers

William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) linguist

Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819–1896) geologist (measured Mt

Whitney)[Source: http://www.yosemite.ca.us/history/up_and_down_california/images/1-2-1.jpg]

[Source: http://www.thefronttable.com/onthetable/March18th_files/69.JPG]

21

Whitney 1867: 233

22

Whitney 1867: 330

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Languages as populations of signs

To say that languages have different ‘structures’ is an unfortunate metaphor: at the most basic level, all human languages have the same structure.

The human language faculty consists of the ability to acquire and manipulate tripartite linguistic signs (which associate phonetic, semantic, and syntactic properties), from which indefinitely many more complex linguistic signs can be constructed

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Language: a social view Each speaker has his/her own idiolect or

repertoire of linguistic signs. For successful communication in a speech

community, speakers’ repertoires must overlap to a large degree, but will never be identical. There is no perfect communication; what language provides is pretty good communication.

The repertoires of speakers in the same speech community evolve under selective pressure imposed by the need to share information and ideas efficiently.

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Semantic features Some semantic features are simpler

than others, more likely to be shared by all individuals, easier to translate into other languages.

Even expressions which are truth-conditionally equivalent will have different associations for different individuals (and, a fortiori, for different cultures): e.g. Chinese 父 fù and English father.

28

Semantic features, continuedMore elaborate combinations are culture-specific

and harder to translate.弟 dì < MC dejX < OC *ddəjʔ ‘younger brother’悌，弟 [tì], MC dejH < OC *ddəjʔ-s ‘respectful towards older brothers’孝 xiào < MC xæwH < OC *xxru-s ‘to be filial, filial piety’

The semantic values used by a speech community are not a random set of the possible ones; they are structured or patterned (like the Chinese specification of relative age among siblings).

29

Syntactic features Grammatical patterns need not be expressed as

a large set of language-specific rules. Most linguists now agree that there are instead

a small number of basic principles or processes which are universal to all languages (with possible slight variations in form)

These principles interact with the properties of particular lexical items to account for how simpler expressions are combined into more complex ones.

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Syntactic features, continued Some examples of basic processes:

Functional application (using the output of one operation as the input to another)

Coordination Question formation (yes/no and ‘wh-word’

questions) Negation relative clauses or their equivalent (identifying an

entity by reference to a known situation in which it plays a role)

Talking about situations that don’t exist (fraud, literature, etc.)

Conditional statements

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An approach to investigating the concepts of another language

Try to unpack the semantic values of concepts in terms of simpler concepts

Use context and etymology as guides Modeled after Émile Benveniste

(1902–1976), Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (1969).

Result: pretty good translation

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心 xīn ‘heart, mind’ 心 xīn < MC sim < OC *səm ‘heart, mind’—

used for both the physical organ and the seat of emotional and intellectual processes and feelings.

Cognates in Tibeto-Burman languages are sometimes verbs meaning ‘to think’, sometimes nouns meaning ‘spirit, breath’ or the like.

Conclusion: Probably the original Proto-Sino-Tibetan word ancestral to 心 xīn ‘heart’ was not the word for the ‘heart’ as an organ.

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心 xīn < MC sim < OC *səm ‘heart, mind’: Tibeto-Burman cognates

Written Tibetan sem(s) ‘soul, mind’; sem(s)-pa ‘to think’ (perfect: sems; future: bsam; imperative: som)

Bahing sam ‘breath, life’ Lepcha a-sóm ‘spirit, breath’ Burmese ă-sam ‘sound, voice’

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An aside… Benjamin I Schwarz (1985), The world

of thought in ancient China, p. 185:‘Thus as early as the Book of Poetry [Shījīng

詩經 ] the heart/mind [ 心 xīn] already seems the center of all those expressions of the conscious life which we attribute to both heart and mind in the West.’

Not so clear ‘in the West’…

37

[ 心 ] *səm *‘mind, spirit’ > ‘heart’ (the organ): a parallel in Romance

The Romanian word for ‘heart’ (the organ) is inimă, which is descended from Latin anima ‘air; breath of life; soul’

An important point: meanings can change from abstract to concrete, not just concrete to abstract.

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A dòu 豆 food vessel (Warring States period, 475–221 BCE)

Source: Lǐ Xuéqín 李學勤 , The wonder of Chinese bronzes (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press), pl. 21.