What are these "errors and confusions of Western thought"? Sounds like a loaded question, don't you think?

Read on and you'll see that the biggest error is to think there is such a thing as "good."

If the structure of the Chinese language is so hospitable to modern physics, why weren't Einstein and Schrodinger Chinese and why wasn't modern 20th century physics discovered centuries ago in China?

A phonetic alphabet seems a better conceptual analog to quark theory, where all particles are simply different combinations of a few fundamental units. The mathematics of modern physics likewise uses just a few symbols, in different combinations, to express the relationships between observed quantities.

The real problem with this analysis is that it confuses the fundamental ground of language, i.e. spoken words and grammar, with its abstract representation, and makes this abstraction primary. But spoken language could be represented in many ways, and a phonetic system seems much more efficient that pictographs, ideograms, or hieroglyphs. This strikes me as a lame attempt to justify inefficient traditional writing by invoking modern physics.

Phoenician businessmen, who needed to trade with many groups speaking many languages, invented the phonetic alphabet. And that invention helped make the West richer and more literate than the East, which meant we could go farther in science, and then have some folks use this knowledge to prove that ancient or Eastern languages are, perhaps, in some ways "better"....

The problem is more fundamental. The Chinese invented the printing press, but its use with a pictographic language is extremely limited. Even a modest vocabulary is going to have 2500 words.

If they are pictographs, how do you sort them for retrieval? How do you deal with words occurring multiple times?

So printing, while invented in China, needed a phonetic alphabet to be useful.

Given how fundamental the printing press was to everything that came after it, it seems to me the alphabet is the single most important factor in the rise of Western Civilization. Sine qua non.

Jeff -

I started thinking that, interestingly, technology may ultimately mitigate the typographical inefficiencies you mentioned, given a computer's almost unlimited storage/processing capacity. Of course, talking to the computer would still br tricky as the usual input interface (keyboard) is almost by necessity suppose to provide only a fraction of the possibilities the computers code could process. Even if the interface moved to point and click, one could see the inefficiency. However, what happens when we move to voice recognition? Does this not almost nullify the disadvantage?

I am not sure, though, that even if the efficiency of information transmission were equalized, a system that is so "top drive" could be as efficient to one that can build almost anything from scratch. On the other, if a language such as Chinese requires that you have thought about what a word means before coining it, it would go to explain why China has not produced BS artists like Noam Chomsky and Michel Moore.

Jeff,

The Chinese did not invent the printing press it was the Koreans for the specific purpose of printing translations of Nagri to Korean Buddhist scripture.

As for the idea that Indo Aryan writing is more ancient that Chinese or Egyptian writing this is nothing new. Ancient Sanskrit as an actual real alphabet and method for writing is probably older than cuneiform in that cuneiform was for a long time a method solely for documenting accounts i.e. number of urns of olives etc. It was not till latter it became a real method for writing language with identifiable grammar and syntax.

While I am sure over time these views will change its interesting to note that the Indo Aryan roots from which English descends (as well as most of the worlds languages) may have been far more ancient that most historians currently accept. Indo Aryan civilization may be as old as Egyptian civilization and its written language may be that old as well. Some people may find this link interesting http://varnam.org/blog/archives/000321.html.

Its almost a cliche that phonetic written languages are not natural in the sense of
"intuitive, easy to learn". That doesn't
refute their utility. It's simply another
tool that once tried can't be done without.

Here is the kicker:

"This is what accounts for the predominant role played by complementary pairs of opposites and correspondences in Chinese thought and above all for its fundamental relativism."

Relativism good. Objectivity bad.

Let's not forget that much of modern liguistics has been tainted by Chomskyism and it's world view that everything Western is bad, including its languages. It leads to just this sort of intellectual drivel.

Here's a question-- how is a Chinese dictionary organized? How does one go about finding the right pictograph when one knows how the word sounds? Why does "bopumofu" exist if pictographs are superior?

"But in Chinese, good is represented by a character combining the sign for 'woman' with the sign for 'child'. Woman + Child = Good. "

What's the pictograph for "wymyn"? Why haven't the patriarchal Chinese degendered their language? And doesn't that pair of signs discriminate against homosexual men?

Computer voice recognition would not be all that helpful with Chinese, which as a spoken language is unintelligible among significant groups, although they can read each other's writing easily.

In a mostly illiterate society, that seems a doubtful "feature."

It is not at all obvious that the form of writing has great impact on the kinds of thoughts, the way it is obvious that the conventions of spoken language do tend to channel ways of thinking in different ways.

If Chinese ideographs as so great, though, why are acupuncture charts different? And why is there not a standardized ideographic list of points to resolve the charts?

Yes, yes, and the PikPik people of Outer OogaLooga are so gentle they don't even have a word for war.

MG wrote:

On the other, if a language such as Chinese requires that you have thought about what a word means before coining it, it would go to explain why China has not produced BS artists like Noam Chomsky and Michel Moore.

Whoa, there. I'd consider Mao a BS artist, and he did a lot more harm than Chomsky and Moore!

The Chinese dictionaries (like Japanese Kanji or Korean Hanja dictionaries) are organised according to radical. As noted above, the character for "good" is written with the radical for woman and the radical for child. To look up that character, you would turn to the "woman" radical (like flipping to "A") and then count the strokes, and/or run down to where you know the child radical would fall.

If you know the sound, I think that you can search by sound as well, because there are certain "sound" radicals, which indicate the sound of the character. I've never done that before (I don't actually speak any Chinese) so I don't know. Now, you'd probably just search with pinyin.

As far as Chomsky and language goes, I think he's pretty much monolingual in English, actually. I've heard he might know a bit of Hebrew too.

With comparative development, you could make all sorts of arguments for why the Chinese didn't advance beyond the West, for whatever ideological purpose you might have. I think a major component of their failure to do so was simply political, not cultural. Their governments, at various times (e.g. after the Zheng He treasure fleet expeditions) cut off all funding to research and exploration, and there were never comparable sources of funding in the empire. Capitalists were continually coopted by the government (e.g. Dialogues on Salt and Iron, in Ssu-ma Chien's histories, from ca. 100BC). Also, the Mongols wreaked havoc on the ecology and educational system of China. It took over an hundred years for them to reforest (Ming accession to Yong-le).

I think that's a big part of it. The Chinese did print (block printing) an encyclopedia of all knowledge, which comprised 10,000 volumes.

It is sort of a paradigm of overcentralization: it was too big to be used and too rare to be available even if it could have been used.

Whereas in Europe (somewhat later) many more than 10,000 volumes were printed, but in ones and small sets, and readers could afford to get what they were interested in.

In printing, as in so many other things, China choked on its magnificence.