Jon,

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>From: Jon & Anne Weidler <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: The image & orientalism(e)
>Date: Thu, Feb 6, 2003, 12:26 PM
>

> Interestingly, during the
> nineteenth century, while German philologists did everything they could
> to denigrate Chinese as a fossilized, stunted, only-half-finished
> language (far inferior to their beloved Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and, oh
> hey, German as well,) Egyptian hieroglyphics were decoded by M.
> Champollion, and European thinkers had a different kind of ancient
> pictographic language to idealize and reify as something that it was
> not.

    Yes, what it was not was an ideogramatic system of writing because
Champollion's great discovery was that the hieroglyphics actually composed
an alphabet. But I am sure that despite your sarcastic and fashionable
Teutophobic tone (hey,,,,English as well) 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.
    Another book on this subject I would mention but with reservation as I
would any of his work is semiotics professor Eco's "The Search for the
Perfect Language", 1995. In it he states, "I have no wish to saddle the
honest students of Indo-European with blame for the extermination camps,
especially as - at the level of linguistic science- they were right." p.105.
He also points out that the Monogenetic hypothesis has retreated even
further back to proto-history in Sevorshin's "Nostratic" hypothesis now very
far indeed from the Garden of Eden unless that was in Africa. Frobenius
anyone? Perhaps some work on the Adamic language is still going on in places
like Bob Jones U. or in the pages of BAR.
    Could you give examples where German philologists denigrated Chinese
language? Eco has a section on Leibniz and the I Ching. There seems to be no
animosity there but interesting early work on binary calculus.

Charles