Another Short History of Linguistics (67)

For our case, if we don’t start from ‘substance’ (see 62) instead we start from ‘human’ then only two words would lead our memory to the right spot. If we start from ‘Aristotle’, with one word it would lead us to the right spot. That is to say sometimes we have to ignore some useless information for a particular case otherwise, our expressing would have no way to practice. Because our expression style is a linear one and our working memory is as short as lasting 2 second, if every word is as long as 2 second then there will be no room for the configuration.

For this reason, the Chinese characters are in fact a sub-substance. With this arrangement the metaphysics idea of Aristotle turned to be physics reality of language. As above said the Chinese find a neutral character 马 horse, then put plenty adjective to qualify it as female-horse, male-horse, and young-horse. From the female-horse split into one-year-female-horse young-female-horse, old-female-horse, etc. then put on the colour as white-female-horse, red-young-female-horse etc. As every characters is correspondently shorter than English word, all these words are in tolerable length.

When Marco Polo (September 15, 1254 – January 8, 1324) first brought some Chinese information into Europe, the European people admired the Chinese language, especially scholars as Leibnitz. Some other religion figure even thought it was the original language from God. The later development of semantic theory was carried by Rene Descartes and Leibniz. Leibniz invented the first mechanic computer and he got inspiration from the Chinese 易经invented the binary system also.

But after few hundred years, the mainstream academic world reckon that the Chinese language is a backward language as bad as the Egyptians pictogram; a disappearing culture.