Part 2: Peculiarities of Chinese Language and Mind: A Contrastive Perspective

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Part 2 Peculiarities of Chinese Language and
MindA Contrastive Perspective
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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Their Language and Mind
• The first publication in the West on Chinese
• The Antiquity of China, or an Historical Essay,
  Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of
  the Empire of China is the Primitive Language
  Spoken Through the Whole World Before the
  Confusion of Babel. (By John Webbs, 1669, 1678,
  London)

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• And as if all things conspired to prove this the
  Primitive Tongue, we may observe how forceably
  Nature struggles to demonstrate so much. The very
  first expression we make of life, at the very
  instant minute of our Births, is, as was touched
  on before, by uttering the Chinique word Ya.
  Which is not only the first but indeed the sole
  and only expression that Mankind from Nature can
  justly lay claim unto.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• The naturalness of Chinese grammar
• They are not troubled with variety of
  Declensions, Conjugations, Numbers, Genders,
  Moods, Tenses and the like grammatical niceties,
  but are absolutely free from all such perplexing
  accidents, having no other Rules in use than what
  the light of nature has dictated unto them
  whereby their language is plain, easie and simple
  as NATURAL speech out to be.
• The Chinese language is natural.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Lin Yutang on The Chinese Mind
• Lin Yutang (???) 1936. My Country and My People.
  London William Heinemann.
• The Chinese mind is akin to the feminine mind
• The Chinese way of thinking is synthetic and
  concrete.
• The Chinese language and grammar also show
  femininity.
• The Chinese lack of science is attributable to
  its language.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Indeed, the Chinese mind is akin to the feminine
  mind in many respects. The qualities of the
  feminine intelligence and feminine logic are
  exactly the qualities of the Chinese mind. The
  Chinese head, like the feminine head, is full of
  common sense. It is shy of abstract terms, like
  womens speech. The Chinese way of thinking is
  synthetic, concrete and revels in proverbs, like
  womens conversation. They never have had higher
  mathematics of their own, and seldom have gone
  beyond the level of arithmetic, like many women,
  with the exception of those masculine women
  prize-winners at college. (Part One, Chapter
  Three, p. 76)

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Common sense and the practical mind are
  characteristics of women rather than men, who are
  more liable to take their feet off the ground and
  soar to impossible heights. The Chinese language
  and grammar show this femininity exactly because
  the language, in its form, syntax and vocabulary,
  reveals an extreme simplicity of thinking,
  concreteness of imagery and economy of
  syntactical relationships. (Part One, Chapter
  Three, p. 77)

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• This simplicity in best illustrated from pidgin,
  which is English meat with Chinese bones, as we
  say in China. There is no reason why a sentence
  like He come, you no come you come, he no come
  should not be considered as clear as the more
  roundabout You neednt come, if he comes, and he
  neednt come, if you come. In fact, this
  simplicity makes for clarity of expression. The
  Chinese love of simplicity is, as in the
  expression of sit eat mountain empty which to
  the Chinese clearly means that if you only sit
  and eat and do nothing, even a fortune as big as
  a mountain will vanish.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Women, so far as I know, avoid using abstract
  terms. This, I think, has been proved by an
  analytical study of the vocabulary of women
  authors. With the Chinese as with women,
  concrete imagery always takes the place of
  abstract terminology. The highly academic
  sentence There is no difference but difference
  of degree between different degrees of difference
  and no difference, cannot be exactly reproduced
  in Chinese.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Sufficient discussion of the characteristics of
  Chinese thinking has been made to enable us to
  appreciate the cause of their failure to develop
  natural science. The Greek laid the foundation of
  natural science because the Greek mind was
  essentially an analytical mind. The Chinese,
  with all their native intelligence, never
  developed a science of grammar, and their
  mathematics and astronomical knowledge have all
  been imported.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• A Stereotyped Conception

Woman (Chinese Language Mind) Man (Western Languages Mind)
Synthetic, concrete, Analytical, abstract,
Simple, natural Sophisticated
Artistic, intuitive Scientific, deductive
Implicit, indirect Explicit, direct
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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• The strangeness of Chinese
• Friedrich Schelling (1775 to 1854) The Chinese
  language is for us like a language from another
  world. And if one were to give a definition of
  language according to which all the other idioms
  are called languages, then one would have to
  admit that the Chinese language is not a language
  at all, just as the Chinese people is not a
  people.
• G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716) attempt to derive a
  Characteristica Universalis from Chinese
• If God had taught man a language, that language
  would have been like Chinese. (Leibniz)

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Jokob Golius (1596-1667) The artificiality of
  their language means that it was invented at one
  point in time by a skillful person in order to
  establish verbal communication between the number
  of different nation who live in that large
  country which we call China, although it has to
  be said that this language might be changed now
  through long usage.
• Leibniz his enquiry seems to me to be all the
  more important since I imagine that if we were
  able to discover the key to the Chinese
  characters, we would have found something which
  could serve for the analysis of thought.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Leibniz It does appear that if we Europeans
  were well enough informed about Chinese
  literature, then the aid of logic, critical
  thinking, mathematics, and our way of expressing
  ourselves which is more explicit than theirs,
  would make us discover in these Chinese monuments
  of such remote antiquity many things unknown to
  the modern Chinese and even to their later
  interpreters no matter how classical one takes
  them to be.
• If we understood the characters of the Chinese I
  think we would find some more connections (with a
  charactenstica universalis), but at bottom these
  characters are undoubtedly far removed from such
  an analysis of thought which is the essence of my
  plan.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• The issue of (un)suitability of Chinese for
  science
• Georg Friedrich W. Hegel (???1770-1831)
• When we speak of the Chinese sciences . . . we
  see that they enjoy very great public admiration
  and support from the government . . . Thus on the
  one hand the sciences are highly honored and
  cultivated, but on the other hand these sciences
  lack the free space of inner reflection and the
  properly scientific interest that would make it
  into a scientific endeavor.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• A free and ideal realm of the spirit has no
  place here, and what is called scientific here is
  of an empirical nature and is essentially in the
  service of what is useful for the state and for
  the needs of the state and the individuals. The
  nature of the written language in itself is a
  great hindrance for the development of the
  sciences or rather vice versa since the true
  scientific interest is lacking, the Chinese have
  no better instrument for the articulation and
  communication of thoughts. (Hegel)

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• J.E. Renan (1889) Is not the Chinese language,
  with its inorganic and imperfect structure, the
  reflection of the aridity of genius and heart
  which characterizes the Chinese race? Sufficing
  for the wants of life, for the technicalities of
  the manual arts, for a light literature of low
  standard, for a philosophy which is only the
  expression, often fine but never elevated, of
  common sense, the Chinese language excluded all
  philosophy, all science, all religion, in the
  sense in which we understand these words. God has
  no name in it, and metaphysical matters are
  expressed in it only by round-about forms of
  speech.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Marcel Granet (1920) There is no doubt that the
  progress and the diffusion of the scientific
  spirit are linked to the existence, in the West,
  of languages all of which to different extents
  are instruments of analysis which allow one to
  define classes, which teach one to think
  logically, and which also make it easy to
  transmit in a clear and distinct fashion a very
  elaborate way of thinking. Now I do not think
  that Chinese as it is written and spoken, in the
  slightest degree has any of these qualities of
  the great languages of Europe.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Marcel Granet (1920) Can a language which
  suggests rather than defines be suitable for the
  expression of scientific thought, for the
  diffusion of science, for the teaching of
  science? A language made for poetry and composed
  of images rather than concepts is not only not an
  instrument of analysis. It also fails to
  constitute a rich heritage of the work of
  abstraction which each generation has been able
  to achieve.
• The Chinese language works through musical and
  picturesque symbolization. (Granet)

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Marcel Granet (1920) This (Chinese) thought
  which seems in essence picturesque and musical
  and which expresses itself in any case through
  rhythm and concrete symbols, what can it achieve
  when applied to a domain where precise and
  distinct formulations as well as explicit
  judgments are required? What kind of sincerity
  can there be in a kind of thought which takes not
  lived experience but tradition as its point of
  departure? . . . What power would the principles
  of contradiction and of causality have without
  which scientific thought can hardly proceed or be
  expressed?

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Christoph Harbsmeier (1998) To the extent that
  the preceding volumes of Science and Civilization
  in China have shown that the Chinese were rather
  good at some parts of science, they have also
  shown that one can use Literary Chinese to do
  science. If Marcel Granet had known more about
  the Chinese scientific tradition he would, I like
  to think, have expressed himself in a different,
  less abrasive way. I also believe that if he had
  known more about the precise syntactic structure
  of Classical Chinese and the very subtle semantic
  and syntactic rules governing the use of
  Classical Chinese grammatical particles, he might
  have shown a little more respect for the
  articulatory power of that language.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Jen Hung-Chun (1915) The reason for Chinas lack
  of science In Kho-hsue (??) 8-13
• Feng Yu-lan (1919-1922) Why China has no Science
  - An Interpretation of the History and
  Consequences of Chinese Philosophy.
  International Journal of Ethnics. 20-33 237-263.
  
• Derk Bodde (1936)s The Attitude toward Science
  and Scientific Method in Ancient China. Toung
  Pao 2139-160.
• A. C. Graham (1973)s China, Europe and the
  Origins of Modern Science The Grand Titration.
  In Nakayama Sivin (eds.) Chinese Science
  Explorations of an Ancient Tradition. Cambridge,
  MA MIT Press.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Summery stereotyped conceptions
• 1. Simple, less sophisticated
• 2. Roundabout, implicit, indirect, less precise
• 3. Synthetic, concrete, and more natural
• 4. Musical, picturesque, poetic, and full of
  imageries and metaphors.
• A. Womanlike
• B. Childlike

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• (1) Baby talk duplication of syllables
• bow-wow (dog) English / wan-wan (dog)
  Japanese
• pee-pee (urine) English / shee-shee (urine)
  Japanese
• choo-choo (train) English / bu-bu (car)
  Japanese
• ?? (every day), ?? (everybody), ?? (take a look),
  ?? (rest a little), ??? (red), ???? (comfortable)
  
• (2) Telegraphic Speech
• My car has broken down and I have lost my
  wallet send money to me at the American Express
  in Paris.
• Car broken down wallet lost send money
  American Express Paris.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Roger Brown. 1973. A First Language The Early
  Stages. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press.
• Model Sentence Adam, 28.5 mo Helen,
  30 mo
• I am very tall. I tall. I very tall.
• I am drawing a dog. I draw dog. I drawing
  dog.
• Do I like to read books? I read books? I read
  books?
• (3) Omission of grammatical morphemes
• two book Adam fall toy. (Brown 1973)
• (4) S-V-O word order
• Subject Verb Object (SVO). ???. I hit him.

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1. Chinese thru Western Eyes

• Park Tschang-Zin. 1970. Language Acquisition in
  a Korean Child. MS. Psychological Institute,
  University of Bern.)
• SOV Susin cap look-at
• OSV Cap Susin look-at
• OVS Cap look-at Susin
• SVO Susin look-at cap