Another Short History of Linguistics (82)

When 18 century came, the Europe and America broken the gate of Japan, this country found that in the world, there was another writing system with much more simple expression for the universe, they reviewed what they had learned from China during the past 10 centuries? They believed the language issue was the key reason of them that always being Chinese student and never turned to be teacher. Now if they adopted the alphabetic language, they would be the teacher or at least second-class teacher of China. With this intention they spread the theory of pictogram was the backward language. According Darwinist, the pictogram of Egyptians was gone forever and the Chinese pictogram was on the way of disappearing. This theory got positive response of western world. Coincidently, during that time, the Chinese economy from the world’s number one fell into number thirty something. With weak economy, this country experienced humiliation and aggression.

Later, more and more scholars, involved this trend. 1785 A.D. Japanese scholar declared that the Chinese and Indian pronunciation was incorrect sounds only the 50 sounds were the correct sounds of their empire. Some scholars tried to deny that their language was introduced from China, as they wanted to prove that their culture was not born from Chinese culture, they tried to find out witness about their native language before the introduction of Chinese language. After around one hundred year’s effort, they gave up their attempt, for truth is truth.

1798 A.D. they started using the geographic position to explain culture: “Only China, Korean, Indo-China using characters the rest world using alphabet; since the minority is subordinate to the majority so the character is a backward and barbarian language. The western world using twenty something characters can express everything.” This opinion didn’t cause a sensation at that time, but 1842 A.D. in the War of Opium the navy force of Qin Dynasty was beaten by the British fleet. When the news arrived Japan, their theory was proved again that the barbarian pictogram speaker would never win an alphabetic speaker.