Another Short History of Linguistics (75)

Science, may be a means of simplify language in order to help people understand the same thing in shorter period. The function is similar to the math from plus shift to multiply. But grammar do the opposite thing, it put more burden on language. In the old linguistic history no one questioned about that. Even Leibniz believed grammar is the logic of language.

By math we may easy to understand that developing tones are a real step to simplify language for it increased the interface between our brain and the world (tone language vs. none-tone language similar using the ten decimal number input system vs. the 26 English letter input system). This phenomenon no one had ever thought about for the European linguists didn’t know what tone was and the Japanese didn’t know this either although they had introduced the Chinese writing system 1,200 years ago.

Until the Japanese was ready to get rid of Chinese characters they still didn’t know the knack of tone. What they could see was that the alphabetic letters could represent the pronunciation better than the Character. This was the only reason that they were going to dump it. Coincidently, the world at that time turned to be a time that linguistics was decided by military power. Not only the French and British beat China badly, even the Japanese invaded large area of China. They believed that one of the reason for their victory was that they had shift from character language to the alphabetic letter. This idea echoed by their European counterparts.