This is part one of a two part response, first to Charles, and second
to Tim:

On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 05:14  PM, charles moyer wrote:
> Champollion's great discovery was that the hieroglyphics actually
> composed
> an alphabet.

Indeed.  This aspect of Champollion's discovery is the most important
aspect, in that it laid bare the weakness of pre-Rosetta Stone attempts
at reading hieroglyphics.  Because of Champollion's breakthrough (that
hieroglyphic characters often represented phonetic markers, thereby
doing more than "mere" picture writing), ancient Egyptian writing was
laid open to philological, "scientific" interpretations.  It would be
foolish not to notice that Chinese characters as well carry phonetic
markers and directions to its readers.  This aspect of ideogrammatic
writing (its phoneticism) is what is first ignored by non-Chinese
readers looking to idealize it as an "immediate" system of presenting
nouns and verbs at the same time.  I do not blame anyone for ignoring
this fact; what I do wish to emphasize is the ideological work taking
place when a writing system with which one is almost entirely ignorant
is recast as an aesthetic paradigm of sorts.  Pound's theory of
ideogrammatic poetry is just such an aestheticist paradigm, and says
much more about rhetorical adjustments in English prosody at the turn
of the century than it does about "real" Chinese.

>  you surely do not mean to
> denigrate the work of the scholars who gave us the concept of an
> Indo-European common linguistic origin even though it was quite
> different
> from the fantasy perpetuated by the Monogeneticists who peddled
> pseudo-scholarship exhumed here as "Adamic language", Babel theory,
> and all
> those Biblical inspired explanations of how the world was made.

Indeed I do not mean to denigrate their work, and I apologize for the
non-professional tone I seem to have projected.  The aspect of
"pseudo-scholarship" that I want to underline is the hierarchies of
languages that scholars like von Humboldt and Schlegel built, with
inflectional languages at the top of the developmental chain,
agglutinating ones later, and "incorporating" ones last.  Chinese, as a
non-inflected, monosyllabic language highly dependent on word order for
meaning (much like English), falls outside of this three-part rubric.

>     Could you give examples where German philologists denigrated
> Chinese
> language?

Humboldt says that "no matter how you explain it, apparently there is
imperfection in the linguistic structure of Chinese thought" (Kern 83).
  His attitude is not merely prejudicial, however, as Schlegel's might
be.  Schlegel says that Chinese, unlike Sanskrit or Greek, "is "formed
by supplementary particles, instead of inflections of the root, [and]
have no such bond of union: their roots present us with no living
productive germ, but seem like an agglomeration of atoms, easily
dispersed and scattered by every casual breath. . . These languages, in
their earliest origins, are deficient in that living germ essential to
a copious development; their derivations are poor and scanty, and an
accumulation of affixes, instead of producing a more highly artistic
construction, yields only an unwiedly superabundance of words, inimical
to true simple beauty and perspicuity.  Its apparent richness is in
truth utter poverty, and languages belonging to that branch, whether
rude or carefully constructed, are invariably heavy, perplexed, and
often singularly subjective and defective in character" (qtd. in Kern
76).

Languages with the "living productive germ" are those with roots that
inflect, and that produce new language structures as logical extensions
of those roots.  The Indo-Aryan language that Humboldt and Schlegel,
among many others, hypothesized is seen as not merely "better" as a
structure, but also productive of better thought and intellect.
Humboldt did not denigrate the Chinese intellect as much as did
Schlegel, asserting that because of its perceived lack of grammar,
"Chinese increases the sharpness of the mind. . . with respect to the
formal concatenation of speech" (84).

I didn't want to broadcast what Charles called "sarcastic and
fashionable Teutophobic tone".  If I have done so, it was with honest
intentions.  Part of my point is that it took an inversion of the
paradigm later in the 19th century, by Otto Jespersen, for scholars to
begin thinking about Chinese as something better than a deficient
tongue.

Thank you for the interrogation -- I appreciate your probing questions
and caution.
-Jon