Schrift und Sprache der Chinesen (Verständliche Wissenschaft)

by Bernhard Karlgren

Inhalt: Die Fr}hstufe der Sprache. Wortbildung. Schrift. Synthax. Die Kunst der Rede.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction

119 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 1989

Reviews

[Patricia]

This is probably my fifth reading of this little book (less than 100 pages) over many decades and one's appreciation of it only grows as one's knowledge of Chinese grows. Why is it so many introductory texts only make sense when one has passed that introductory stage?! The subjects covered in each short chapter are what one would expect, in Karlgren's words "the material of the Chinese language, the simple words and their representation in script ... [and] as a medium of thought" (p. 54). His explanation of the appearance and evolution of its characters is the best I've found to date, as he explains their elements as "logical compounds and phonetic compounds", which is how a language can produce such an extensive vocabulary with so few individual sounds. How characters evolved by the combination of components ("two objects both conspicuous for the quality or condition to be expressed, or at least possessing it in common"--such as using the 'picture' of a sun (日) and a moon (月) to mean 'bright' (明), p. 38), or a "significant part and a phonetic part". How over time the language changed from simple one-element characters into pairs, necessitated by the need to help listeners identify the meaning when a single character could have dozens of homophones, what Karlgren calls "synonym-compounds" or "the coupling together of two simple words with the same or at least analogous meaning" (example that will only be helpful to those who already know some Chinese--a word that means 'meaning' because each individual character once meant 'meaning': 意思 ). But the 'lightbulb going off' on this reading for me was Chinese sentence word order and I won't deny readers the joy of reading this wonderful little introductory essay to the Chinese language by giving it away here.

PS - For those of you under the age of 40, don't let the use of Wade-Giles deter you. if you've come this far, you can manage the few simple conversions you'll need to make (just go online and print out a WG-Pinyin guide sheet and you'll be all set).

[Clifford]

The edition I read was published in 1971 and used Wade-Giles or another pre-pinyin romanization that is extremely hard to follow. I wonder if the later editions have been updated to pinyin? That would make it far more useful. Even with that problem, Karlgren, a pioneering linguist of Chinese, makes some remarkable observations about the language.

[David]

A bad on line edition of a brilliant little book by the man who figured out the pronunciation of Classical Chinese.

The scanning was terrible, so the characters and phonetic transcriptions were not there. That said, still an excellent sketch of the Chinese writing system, language, and manners..