[KS] NYTimes.com Article: Writing as a Block for Asians

[Young Kyun Oh]

I haven't read the book that was introduced in the article, so maybe I shouldn't be saying anything.  I would like to make a comment, however, on some of the things mentioned there.  It is not about whether or not Koreans fall under the category of the less sientifically-minded because they use "syllabaries (?)", but about the following lines in the article.   

"Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity."

"The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans." 

This kind of remarks are not at all strange to us.  Didn't Hegel make similar remarks about the Chinese a long time ago?  He said that Chinese people must not be capable of abstract thinking because the Chinese characters are basically 'pictographs'.  In other words, every time Chinese people refer to a concept, which has to be abstract, they would be bound to have in their mind the concrete object (e.g., a real 'tree', not the idea of 'tree') that the character pictures.  Thus, they would not be able to see the realm of "Ideas".  This line of reasoning was revived rather recently by certain writes as Hajime Nakamura.

I don't know what Mr. Hannas meant by "analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity".  But, these remarks sound very much like the Hegel-Nakamura hypothesis.  Nakamura even went further to bringing in more linguistic elements to interpret (or misinterpret) the Chinese/Asian mind, such as: 'Since the Chinese language lacks devices to keenly discern plural/singular difference, it must be that they don't perceive more than one objects.'  (We all know that Korean also does not use the plural marker -tul unless it is necessary, and that there is no such singular/plural agreement in grammar that we find in English.)  I remember reading Chung-ying Cheng's article where, in refutation to this hypothesis, he says that pronouncing speakers of a language incapable of abstract thinking just because their language don't process or express abstract thoughts/concepts in the same way that the Platonistic idealism does, is a form of linguistic imperialism.

I am not sure if the author (Mr. Hannas) made the distinction between writing system and language itself beforehand.  If he did, and started from discussing the writing system as the vessel of text formation, which eventually leads to how language processes (abstract) thinking in texts, then he might have taken the semiotic line of approach (I am only guessing here).  Umberto Eco, reading essays on China by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, once said: "...[I]n the seventeenth-century England, Chinese writing was considered perfect in so far as with idegrams every element on the expression-plane corespond to a semantic unit on the content-plane.  It was precisely these one-to-one correspondences that, for Kircher, deprived Chinese writing of its potential for mystery.  A Chinese character was monogamously bound to the concept it represented; that was its limitation...." (Eco, The search for the perfect language, p.161.)  Still, this may not be entirely fair a description for the Chinese writing system, either.  As we know, multisyllabic words, where individual morphemes (carried by individual characters) are combined to produce a new concept that is NOT necessarily bound to be reduced to the concepts represented by the individual morphemes, have started to appear in the earliest classical Chinese documents.  Even with single characters, we find numerous examples where one character corresponds to multiple meanings/concepts.  (Remember the long list of meanings just for one hanja, and you don't know which to choose to translate with?)       

I better stop here.  Maybe it is fair to say, "Asians are brilliant imitators but poor innovators, adept at borrowing and improving on Western science but not so skilled at making advances themselves," as quoted in the article.  I honestly think that I might have to agree with it.  But, are their languages or writing systems (and only those) to be blamed for that?   

 
Young Kyun Oh
Instructor of Korean 
Arizona State University
(480)727-7447
http://www.asu.edu/clas/dll/kor/korean.html
http://www.learnkorean.com
----- Original Message ----- 
?? ??: "J.Scott Burgeson" <jsburgeson at yahoo.com>
?? ??: <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
?? ??: 2003? 5? 5? ??? ?? 7:18
??: Re: [KS] NYTimes.com Article: Writing as a Block for Asians


> I read that article in the International Herald
> Tribune last week and thought it was funny when they
> said that Korean does not use an alphabet, unlike
> Western writing systems... Very impressive reportage,
> indeed...
>    --Scott Bug
> 
> 
> 
> --- Ruediger Frank <rf2101 at columbia.edu> wrote:
> > Dear listmembers,
> > 
> > since we have had quite some discussion on language
> > etc. going on on this 
> > list, I think the follwing article might be of some
> > interest. It is about 
> > the controversial connection between language and
> > thought.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Ruediger
> > 
> > 
> > New York Times (www.nytimes.com)
> > 
> > >Writing as a Block for Asians
> > >
> > >May 3, 2003
> > >By EMILY EAKIN
> > >
> > >A better understanding of Asian writing systems has
> > not
> > >stopped Western experts from making grand claims
> > about
> > >their virtues and limitations.
> > >
> >
> >http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/03/arts/03ASIA.html?ex=1053142398&ei=1&en=f1a3637a7f455b2a
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
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