Another Short History of Linguistics (41)

Another proof of the Chinese geometry had been underdeveloped for a long period is that in ancient Chinese book, there were no unit for area. For instance a kingdom invaded other kingdom, they didn’t say how many square kilometres they had taken but say how many kilometres they had taken. This unit would be meaningless when counting land. As for the time, we have talked about the Seven-Steeps-Poem that is composing a poem within seven steeps, yet how long a step would be, what if he make filibuster? No one asked.

The ancient Chinese people had overconfident about their expressing system. They thought their character was the perfect one and no one doubt it. In this way they start discussing something out of writing symbols.  During the time of魏晋南北朝（220—589）the scholars and intellectuals loved to talking about得像忘言，得意忘像; that means: once we get the image, then we can forget the language and once we get the real meaning, we can forget the image too. But what if we get a wrong image? As above we have talked about plenty wrong image in the mind of ancient Chinese, do we still get the real meaning?

I believe the problem of pictogram is that with overconfidence, they

Didn’t get a right image of what they expressed.  And this overconfidence blind their eyes.

Many years ago Dr. Joseph Needham had asked a question: why didn’t science rise in China? I think this is the answer.

Now let’s make a summary. That at the beginning people believe that pictogram was connecting with the real world directly, for every symbol came from the nature. The ancient Greece worried about it as being an alphabetic language. When Thales faced this question, he decided using mathematics to overthrow the authority of pictogram. Pythagoras supported his master but they failed to do it, yet during this process they found the science for the human kind. Or we may say, when the pictogram language didn’t know what the correct image is as they indulge in self-delusion about their direct picture system, the alphabetic language was studying how to find the correct image.

But I believe that in the end, the world will still go back to pictogram language. Because the pressure of the increasing quantity of information. And although mathematics is a good assistance to help us to know the true image, yet it could note replace language. Another issue is that before pictogram language accept by peoples of all the world again, they have to introduce mathematic idea into it.