This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Li Xutong
When we look at Chinese characters from the standpoint of modern logic, linguistics and certain philosophical views, the questions above are hard to answer. So to clarify this matter, we need to study how applicable disciplines such as logic and linguistics are to the study of Chinese characters. Where they do not apply, these theories may need to be expanded, and applicable theoretical views and systems established.
Moreover, starting solely from traditional Chinese theories such as the Book of Changes (Yijing), it is also hard to understand Chinese characters fully. Common Roots argues that Taiji yin-yang was a formalized method of logical thinking that existed in ancient China. Taiji theory is a formalized method of obtaining concepts, and also a formalized method of logical reasoning, understanding and problem-solving. In fact, the concepts obtained through Taiji yin-yang and the concepts defined by Aristotelian logic are complementary. But both of these ways of thinking have certain limitations; most human concepts come from a more general way of thinking, which encompasses these two formalized modes of thought and should also be the way of thinking corresponding to natural language in general.
As the writing system of a natural language, Chinese characters must cover all the concepts that natural language involves, and their design principles must necessarily be built on this more general way of thinking.
Only by standing on an appropriate theoretical foundation and correct views in examining the origin of Chinese characters, the origin of Classical Chinese, and the relationship between Classical Chinese and Chinese characters, can we build a thorough understanding of the Chinese language and Chinese characters.
We know that among all the writing systems in the world, Chinese characters have the strongest expressive power. In the classical texts of more than two thousand years that we can see today, Chinese characters have remained stable throughout. The things of today’s society are extraordinarily rich, yet the five thousand or so characters we commonly use express them with ease. In contrast stands the rapidly expanding vocabulary of English, which is said to have now reached over a million words.
A script created several thousand years ago that can easily express today’s richly varied human, scientific, technological and natural phenomena must hold inner mysteries that we do not yet understand. It is hard to imagine that a script evolving from primitive scratches and pictographic drawings into mature writing could have such a wondrous capacity.
The scholarly outlook of ancient China was almost completely different from that of the modern West. The West mainly values innovation, creating things that did not exist before. China was entirely different. In the records of the classics over the past several thousand years, the mainstream view of Chinese scholarship held that in high antiquity human society had possessed things that were profound, vast and deep, and that the writing, culture, society and so on of later ages all came from what was transmitted from that high antiquity. Over the long passage of time much of this transmission was lost, so the scholarship of later ages was largely about recovering these ancient transmissions.
This feature of scholarship is typical in the field of writing. After five hundred years of war in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, much of the transmission of ancient writing was lost, so the later “Lesser Learning” (xiaoxue), or exegetics, was mostly an inquiry into the original forms of Chinese characters or of word meanings.
And so it was in fact. Exegetics reached its peak in the Qing dynasty, and the “learning of Duan, Dai and the two Wangs” had studied Chinese characters quite systematically and minutely. For example, Duan Yucai combined the traditional exegetical methods of “seeking meaning through form” and “seeking meaning through sound,” proposing the exegetical method in which form, sound and meaning “seek one another,” reaching a considerable height in the study of cognate words and to a certain extent sorting out the origins and development of Chinese characters.
This tradition was carried on by some great scholars of the Republican era, but after 1949 everything came to an abrupt halt in mainland China. Only in the last ten or twenty years has mainland China begun again to study Chinese characters. But in this research much of value has been suppressed, while much of the rest consists of distortions based on philosophical and political-economic theories already shown to be false, and is of little real value for understanding Chinese characters.
Knowing the origin of Chinese characters has many other, more important meanings as well: it helps us understand the origins of ancient Chinese civilization and the history of high antiquity, understand the secret of how this civilization has been passed down for five thousand years, understand the core values of this civilization, and understand the relationship between language learning and the cultivation of thinking ability, and so on.
One of the great challenges of present-day technology is computers’ understanding of natural language. Any company that made even a small advance in this area would become one of the world’s top enterprises. If Chinese characters were designed, then their design principles would be of incalculable value for machine understanding of natural language. Otherwise, people can only guess and speculate bit by bit within big data.
In learning Chinese and Chinese characters, once one understands the principles by which the Chinese language and its characters are constructed, I believe learning them will become a very easy and pleasant thing.
(To be continued)
