Thursday, May 26, 2005
Notational Standards
discussion à
The next generation knowledge tools
A note from John Sowa:
Tom and Andrew
A few comments:
TA (Tom Adi)
Please do not forget Islamic philosophical influences on Western
thinking, either, both old and modern.
Yes, indeed. I was just responding to Dick's comments about the ancient Greek tradition, and I objected to some of the points he made.
In any case, Islamic philosophy was very strongly influenced by the Greeks. One of Aristotle's chief commentators, Simplicius, established a major school in Syria, which became absorbed into the Arabic and Islamic traditions.
While the Europeans concentrated on the Greek literary works, which were not easy to translate to Arabic, the Islamic-Arabic philosophy emphasized the Greek work on mathematics and science. That had a major influence on the great flowering of Arabic civilization during the middle ages -- while Europe was left very far behind in technology.
In the 12th century, the western Europeans rediscovered Aristotle, but in translations from Arabic to Latin. (They later got some fresh translations from Greek to Latin.) The Europeans also discovered Arabic numerals around that time (which were actually imported from India).
WAO (Andrew) > The Chinese language differs
considerably from European languages in
that it is a loose conceptual framework rather than a recording device for
phonetic and inflected human speech. So, Chinese scholarship on this issue has
a different focus than European works. And, in many ways, Chinese sources do
not share the same linguistic Vs semantic divide.
Actually, linguists treat the spoken language as primary, and the written form as secondary. Until very recently, only a tiny percentage of the speakers of any language could read and write. Most modern languages evolved from the way the uneducated people spoke (which is definitely a *good thing* -- otherwise, we'd all be speaking highly inflected Latin or Old English).
Although the written form does have a strong influence on the spoken today, the two forms evolve very differently. England, for example, was conquered by the French in 1066, and the written languages of the educated people were Latin and French. The English language, meanwhile, changed enormously with very little influence from writing until about a couple of centuries later. By Chaucer's time, English became an amalgam of a very simplified Germanic form with a huge influx of French words.
We can thank the French for the highly simplified English grammar, and something similar happened to Chinese. Ancient Chinese had much more phonetic complexity, but it wasn't recorded in the writing. What is written, the so-called classical Chinese, is very different from the way that anybody speaks today (and probably from what people actually spoke when it was written). Even though the characters are recognizable today, the texts are terse and cryptic, and there are many volumes of commentary written in more recent prose to help interpret it.
And although it is true that a kind of ontology is embedded in the characters, it isn't really systematic. It should be considered more of a mnemonic aid for learning the characters than a well-developed ontology. (And in Chinese schools, they teach the characters to the kids by rote, not by the careful analysis that is presented in books for foreign students.)
For a brief comment on issues in translating to and from various languages, including Chinese, see
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/ontoshar.htm#s5
John