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CHINESE - A CONCEPTUAL OR A NOTATIONAL LANGUAGE?

CHINESE - A CONCEPTUAL OR A NOTATIONAL LANGUAGE? GUSTAV HERDAN Sinologues have often stressed the importance of language structure for the understanding of East-Asiatic culture, and given expression to the belief that the difference between Chinese and Western thought had its cause in the peculiarity of Chinese logic. Much thought was thus given to the question, what alteration in his thinking mechanism a European must undergo in order to understand Chinese literature and art in the way an educated Chinese person does. This led to the question of the possibility of a logic without function words and symbols, i.e. without bound and free grammar words, and what changes in logic that would entail. All this was before the advent of structural and mathematical linguistics, in particular, before the conception of language as a coding system. It would appear that these new developments of linguistic science afford an answer to those questions. We shall therefore try to see the problem in the wider context of language structure. (1) "Le signifiant ... reprosente unc ctcndue; cettc etendue est mesurable dans une seul dimension, c'est une ligne .... Tout le mechanisme de la langue en depend."1 This is the 'principe lineaire' of de Saussure. The temporal linear sequence of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Linguistics - An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences de Gruyter

CHINESE - A CONCEPTUAL OR A NOTATIONAL LANGUAGE?

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Walter de Gruyter
ISSN
0024-3949
eISSN
1613-396X
DOI
10.1515/ling.1966.4.28.59
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

GUSTAV HERDAN Sinologues have often stressed the importance of language structure for the understanding of East-Asiatic culture, and given expression to the belief that the difference between Chinese and Western thought had its cause in the peculiarity of Chinese logic. Much thought was thus given to the question, what alteration in his thinking mechanism a European must undergo in order to understand Chinese literature and art in the way an educated Chinese person does. This led to the question of the possibility of a logic without function words and symbols, i.e. without bound and free grammar words, and what changes in logic that would entail. All this was before the advent of structural and mathematical linguistics, in particular, before the conception of language as a coding system. It would appear that these new developments of linguistic science afford an answer to those questions. We shall therefore try to see the problem in the wider context of language structure. (1) "Le signifiant ... reprosente unc ctcndue; cettc etendue est mesurable dans une seul dimension, c'est une ligne .... Tout le mechanisme de la langue en depend."1 This is the 'principe lineaire' of de Saussure. The temporal linear sequence of

Journal

Linguistics - An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciencesde Gruyter

Published: Jan 1, 1966

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