Another Short History of Linguistics (69)

When Leibniz met Chinese language, he found that the structure of Chinese word compromised with the idea of Aristotle’s ontology and he hoped to do something more as finding out the so called semantic primitives. As Leibniz believed that there were only 100 universal semantic primitives that in all languages; others claimed different number but still the same order of magnitude. Yet the practice of Chinese language proved the number could be around 3,000. And by my language law, the number may be changeable, if the number of sounds going up, the number of semantic primitive may going down, vice versa. 

Again, this issue is emerged in alphabetic language, but no problem with a pictogram language like Chinese, so the Chinese scholar lost the another chance to ask a question in linguistics.（the first chance was ancient Greece’s two controversies ） In Chinese term it is called 无的放矢to shoot in the air.

That why the first time when the scholars of East Asia went to Europe, they found the rich linguistic idea that they had not even think about. Immediately they fell in love with such new idea. They loved them for they got a chance to show off a new branch of study to their fellow Chinese, no matter what is the real content.

Before Leibniz died, he believed that the best language was a chemical compound of western grammar and Chinese characters.