Another Short History of Linguistics (35)

In the Chinese history, there were many scholars understood that by the pictogram symbols one could not get exactly the real world or real meaning of others. They had talked too much about why language could not express the detail of clearer information. Such as：

Reference from: http://www.guoxue.com/discord/louyl/069.htm

Until someone 欧阳建 (269-300) argued that language could express human’s idea exactly. This debate in China similar the Naturalists and Conventionalists. The argument have no result but the argument itself was worthwhile. One thing I have to point out is that among these arguments, someone had talked about the Confucius had said that if language could not make things clear, than adopt the 八卦the Eight Diagrams. They called this idea as系辞.We know that the so called the Eight Diagrams is in fact a Binary number system. If we express everything by it, it could be like the idea of Thales and Pythagoras that replace language by mathematics. It tells us that the same idea could happened in various cultures the only different is if the later generation take it into account or not. It is a pity that without any pressure about expressing the ancient Chinese gave up the further study. It was not turned to be a serious knowledge instead the main stream Chinese intellectual believe that if a language could not give the detail, then people can learn the detail by sense perception. Some extremist even said that without language we can get the meaning too, or perhaps better.  They said that the true to the essence of heaven (Chinese people regard heaven as God) could not be learnt by language but by heart. When such opinion full the forum of Chinese linguistics, we will see how the unscientific techniques of expression developed.