The Ideogram versus the Phonogram in the Past, Present and Future

Keenote Speech at The First Conference on Redefining 21^st Century Chinese Culture. October 27, 2000, Taiwan

Shigeru NAKAYAMA

The East and the West: My Definition

    I thank those who have kindly given me the chance to speak today. It provides me with the opportunity to present an idea of mine which would be impossible at a normal academic gathering of historians. I wish to make an historical comparison of East and West, drawing on my personal insights.

When I was at Harvard as a graduate student in the late 1950s, it struck me how my East Asian friends, mostly Taiwanese and Korean students, were calm and much less talkative than the Westerners and Indians. There appears to be an Eastern over-dependence on reading rather than hearing and discussion, visual rather than aural. As I carried out my studies in the discipline of the history of science, I found a remarkable cultural difference in that the Aristotelian trivium (rhetoric, logic and grammar) is largely missing in China and East Asia.

When I speak of the Eastern tradition in the history of science, I always refer to the tradition of China and its satellite countries in East Asia, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. If we trace the tradition of the exact science of astronomy, we can clearly see how the center of cultural activity moved from one place to another simply by comparing the value of astronomical parameters, in the way that Otto Neugebauer’s school has been doing for years in the history of astronomy. If we find identical astronomical parameters, which are usually six or seven effective numbers like a tropical year length of 365.2422 days, we can prove unmistakable intercourse between two cultures using the same parameters. It would otherwise be unthinkable to find the coincidental appearance of such high order numerals in two different cultures. Thus, we can trace the tradition of exact science when it first appeared in Babylonia in the 5^th century B.C.[1] and when it moved its center to Greece, Hellenistic Greece, (India), the Islamic world, and then Renaissance Europe, 17^th century England, 18^th century France, 19^th century Germany and 20^th century America. This is the tradition of Western civilization. On the other hand, the center of Eastern tradition stayed in China up until 19^th century. [2]

When I have previously spoken of the above definition of Western civilization, Indian people have been shocked, for as far as they are concerned, Indian culture belonged to the Eastern civilization rather than the West. But from my point of view, the Indian civilization is definitely located in the extreme West. Essentially the difference between East and West may be attributed to the style of language, ideograms vs. phonograms, an emphasis on reading vs. the spoken language, visual vs. aural communication, and a recording vs. a debating tradition. Historically, the Eastern tradition has been heavily influenced by Buddhism, which started in India, and in the East debating has been practiced only in the context of the Buddhist tradition.

Kuhnian Approach

I was personally very close to Thomas Kuhn since our first meeting at Harvard in 1955-56. I read Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the first edition [3] and regularly corresponded with him during the 1960s. An idea came to me of applying his “paradigm and normal science” scheme to a comparative history of science and scholarship between the East and the West as discussed earlier. It eventually appeared in Japanese as Rekishi toshite no gakumon (Scholarship as History)(Ch?? K?ron, 1973) and was translated into English as Academic and Scientific Traditions in China, Japan and the West (Tokyo Univ. Press, 1984).

Paradigm Formation

I wanted to present my ideas by beginning with the formation of paradigms [4] in each culture from Han times in the East, and Hellenistic Greece in the West.

  These were the times when paradigms were consolidated and normal science started accordingly. Then, there was pre-paradigmatic time in the Hundred Schools period and pre-Socratic classical Greece. In these periods, I have noticed the symptom of bifurcation between the Eastern documentative tradition and Western argumentative scholarship. Its very paradigm must be the Shihchi史記 and Aristotelian trivium respectively.

Originally, excited with my broad attempt at comparison, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin worked on the comparative history of science in the East and West in a much more detailed and scholarly way for many years. Last summer, there was a workshop held at Cambridge centering on the manuscript of their forthcoming book of “Tao and logos”[5] by Lloyd and Sivin, which compares ancient Greece and China much more deeply than I did before. The close comparison highlights the difference between them. While in pre-Socratic Greece debate was conducted democratically among citizens, in China, Hundred School scholars mainly addressed feudal lords with the anticipation of being employed and being able to implement their theories. The difference is in the final analysis due to the difference of social base; while Greece was a small mercantile city-state, China was a big agrarian, irrigational state. I would agree with their major thesis with a minor criticism that in order to make the difference more visible, they are comparing Han China with pre-Socratic classical Greece, rather than the more bureaucratic Hellenism.

   Later developments which exacerbated the difference between East and West, is shown in the following chronological table. We may contrast the difference in cultural style or academic paradigm by referring to the infrastructure of each civilization.

There are some commentaries to be added to this table.

The development of the Chinese documentative tradition and paper and printing

As to the origin of paper-making, there is still an on-going controversy. Whether everything is attributable to Tsai Lun蔡倫 of the later Han is very much in doubt from the viewpoint of the history of technology.[6] We can apply to the nascent state of technology then, unlike the present-day situation of modern technology with targeted R&D activity, a Darwinian thesis that there are lots of seeds of technologies which can be later developed when the environment is favorable. This might have been the case with the idea of paper-making in the pre-Han period. Unless the seed of the idea was followed by favorable social conditions, it would be forgotten and disappear. There must have been a number of such instances for paper-making throughout history, though it is difficult to reproduce a disappeared history. Only when a continuous need existed, could the technology of paper-making be perpetuated. Bureaucracy was said to be the politics of paper. In trying to control a vast area, paper was quite an appropriate technology, indispensable in China since the Han times on. In contrast, in the oralistic argumentative democracy of the city-state in the West, paper was not much needed. This can be seen in the Platonic tradition where the most important matters were not transmitted by paper but orally.

We could say that the most favorable situation to perpetuate paper-making technology existed in the Chinese bureaucracy, dating from the Han period. This situation was further strengthened during the Tang and also the Sung periods by the written examination for the civil service. I do not know to what extent the still precious paper was employed for the competitive civil service examination in Sui and Tang China, or for that matter in Nara Japan in the 8^th century, when the Chinese civil service examination was accepted and practiced. Recently excavated Japanese evidence shows that wooden tablets were still used for communication within the bureaucracy. But when it comes to the Sung period, there should be no doubt that paper was employed for examination purposes.

Besides, the Sung period was the time when printing was disseminated widely. In the beginning, printing was employed to disseminate Buddhist sutra to the populace but we may ask why, at a time when the vast amount of Chinese classical encyclopedia were being printed, that we have a situation in Japan where little such activity was occurring. Such vast printing of classical collections would be unthinkable without a wide readership of candidates who were preparing for the civil service examination. In Japan, such an examination system was faded out in the 9^th century and never resumed until the late 19^th century. How could the Chinese have such a printed tradition (as evidenced inSsuk’u ch’uanshu四庫全書) that they could account for more than half of the printing in existence in the 18^th century world? Without the tradition of civil service examination, was it really conceivable?

Western debating tradition

The debating tradition of the West hardly needed paper for records. Papyrus was too fragile to preserve historical records and parchment in the medieval West was too costly to be used for printing. Thus, without paper, printing was utterly impossible.

In contrast to the dating practice of any historical record in China, the lack of dating in Indian historical sources must have been due to their debating tradition and its associated way of thinking in terms of unhistorical, logical abstraction. Papermaking technology was transmitted from China to medieval Islamic culture, which preserves the most abundant Aristotelian sources, more so than in Latin culture.[7] This promoted the debating seminars conducted at madrasas. But printing was not adopted particularly early, perhaps for some religious reason.

Finally, I would like to add the reader that I am not exactly a technological determinist. The earlier Chinese invention of paper and printing did not necessarily give them an advantageous position in history. In the West during the Renaissance, printing started with religious sources, the Bible, just as in China, but unlike China, the Western debating tradition contributed to the creation of modern critical journalism, magazines and newspaper, and modern scientific journals, none of which the Chinese developed. 

Thus, the general notion of scholarship in China was about memorizing classical phrases for the ultimate purpose of repeating them at civil service examinations, while in the West it was something to defeat and persuade an opponent on a public occasion, the model being the lawsuit in a court or public debate at an open forum.

The most basic paradigm of all Western academic tradition was the Aristotelian trivium that was introduced to seventeenth-century China by the Jesuits. The Jesuits coined Chinese translation words for logic, rhetoric and grammar, but these were totally forgotten by the Chinese in the course of later development, and it was only in the late nineteenth century that they were reintroduced by Protestant missionaries as a part of Western curriculum. Around the same time, the Japanese were translating the Aristotelian trivium into their own words, also as a part of Western curriculum. Since it was the time when rhetoric ceased to be taught in the modern Western curriculum, the introduction of (oral) rhetoric was so unfamiliar in their culture that it was not properly understood by the Chinese, nor by the Japanese. Logic and grammar were treated in the modern East as a bookish way, separated from the Western origin of debating tradition.[8]

On the other hand, I believe that the most genuine Chinese invention that was imported into the West from the Renaissance on was the invention of the civil service examination system, perhaps arguably more significant than the invention of paper, ammunition and magnetic needle. It impressed the seventeenth-century Jesuits sent to China and it was imported to Collegio Romano but until the nineteenth century it did not become a widely-known practice in Western culture. The nineteenth century was characterized as “the century of the written examination”, on the basis of which meritocracy and egalitarianism took root in Western society, while prior to that nepotistic practices were customary in the recruitment of bureaucrats. The Japanese had abandoned the civil examination system as far back as the 9^th century but they re-introduced the written examination system in the late nineteenth century, not from China but from England.

The above instances exemplify how different academic traditions co-existed without much intercourse in between. The difference was so deeply rooted and embedded in both cultures that the transmission of ideas from one to another was nearly impossible, unless the whole institutional or social system in toto underwent paradigmatic change. As I noted in the beginning of this article, a dichotomy between the written and oral tradition still continues.

Ideograms vs. Phonograms

What clearly divides the East and the West was not an historical accident. There was a deep-rooted difference, which made translation difficult or often impossible. It is due to the radically difference style of language, which can be contrasted in terms of binary opposites such as Eastern ideograms vs. Western phonograms, language for reading vs. language for talking, language for eyes vs. language for ears, the electromagnetic wave vs. the vibration of air in physics term, and finally double-byte vs. mono-byte in language code of word processors. Which is better or more promising will be discussed towards the end of this paper. We should not overlook the fact that the relationship between two language styles was not always competitive but actually complementary and cooperative through mutual translation.

Parallel to the development of written language translation, an attempt was made to translate spoken language. At one time there seems to have been a hope for spoken language translation but it requires the memory of an individual voice-print. At the moment, we are convinced that the right track of translation is written language rather than oral, as written language is subject to clearer and easier digitalization.[9] Thus, we are now in a position to contemplate the future of our digitalized ideographic society.

My own experience with the computer language transformation

In the 1970s, I had a rather critical view of the development of word-processors. The microelectronic revolution in the Western world appeared to lead to a particular kind of technological unemployment, in which three-fourths of all secretaries and typists were said to have lost their jobs, as the Western offices were, in a sense, a place to type all the documents and transactions. Since a word-processor is four times more effective than an ordinary typewriter, the simple outcome of the replacement of a typewriter with a word-processor was estimated to be the redundancy for three-quarters of the office labor force. This never happened in Japan, as the Japanese office, and I believe Chinese office as well, still involved writing office documents by hand. Only very official documents were produced using a Japanese typewriter, which was slow and inefficient. It was operated by a specially-trained female typist, who had a license to use it.[10] Big offices usually had such a specialist typist. It follows that only a handful of Japanese typists would lose their jobs when word-processors with character conversion started to be used in 1979. Thus, the resulting unemployment was much less in Japan. Business people as well as academics all welcomed the introduction of the word-processor. For Westerners, the introduction of word-processors was merely an evolution from typing on a mechanical or electrically driven typewriter to a computer word-processor. For the Easterners, it was a dramatic transition from handwriting to word-processing, largely without the interim experience of mechanical typing in between.

In my own experience, I used to prefer to work in Western universities or research institutes, where a secretarial service was provided mostly for the writing of letters and drafts. In the absence of much typewriting work, Japanese offices on the other hand did not know how to efficiently utilize secretaries, their main job remaining to serve tea.

With the introduction of word-processors, we do not need much secretarial assistance. I can write, edit and print myself quite easily and perhaps more quickly than if I asked for the assistance of a secretary. With the advent of Internet communication --- I believe that it was mainly designed to fit into the academic work style [11]--- we do not need secretarial help even with correspondence.

Is Many-Byte Technology Another Paradigm?

Up until the 1970s, I had never foreseen the time when Chinese characters could be handled on computer and utilizing an alphabetical keyboard. Unlike other phonogramic languages, Chinese characters were not to be able to deal with mono-byte letters. Then, in late 1979, the conversion from phonograms to characters that required two-bytes to express total ideograms was successfully carried out and since then, we have been enjoying the power of conversion technology. It was really fascinating. Compared to the Western experience, it meant to us, phonogram users, a double-fold revolution from handwriting jumping to digital. What can we expect in terms of further development ? perhaps a shift from mono-byte to double-byte technology? Is it possible to apply two or still more bytes for purposes other than character conversion?

Although I am no expert in computer science, and lacking an understanding of technical feasibility, it appears that two-byte culture can deal with complex phenomena as complex, rather than reducing it to the mono-byte. I dare to contemplate this, even as an amateur, as we can see occasionally in the history of science, amateurish ideas generated out of the community of the established normal science tradition can lead to a scientific revolution. What can we do with two-byte culture besides using it for representing Chinese characters? Some people have suggested to me that it be used for the digitalization of illustrations and some have proposed the digitalization of handwritten scripts.

With the advent of modern science and technology, Western culture has so far swallowed the Eastern. With the advent of two-byte culture, there is the potential for Eastern culture to swallow the Western if the bigger can swallow smaller and the two-byte can swallow the mono-byte.

Considering the toil spent on realizing the use of two-byte, it is too precious to limit the use of two-bytes only to character conversion. I am claiming it from the hindsight of those who have already mastered thousands of characters. We have already memorized thousands of characters and upon it constructed the two-byte or many-byte representation of characters. With the further development of two-byte culture, we have the hope of the East overcoming the West.

At the moment, the American-made Unicode system, that requires the use of two bytes, has not been widely employed by Westerners for the obvious reason that they do not need it. But if the Unicode system proved to be useful for conversion of Chinese characters among Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean, two-byte culture will settle down as a common vehicle of culture in the East Asia.

Some people in the East would like to go beyond the Unicode system, such as Japanese TRON, in which two or many-byte could extend its code to oracle bones.[12] It is still the matter of language code. More than that, if we could extend it to illustration or pattern recognition, it could be a revolution.

This is a revolution which cannot be completed at once but requires some time to be consolidated into normal science development. If you stay with two-byte culture without attempting to reduce it to mono-byte, a new line of normal science will follow and the revolution would be completed. It is a risky play, as a revolutionary endeavor used to always be, but worth trying.

If the two-byte paradigm revolution becomes successful, the Easterner will have a certain advantage at least for a time being as we are more accustomed to it. At least we could label 60 thousands more than single byte people who can label only 256. Beyond Eastern chauvinism, however, if the two-byte paradigm proved to be successful, the Westerner would participate in it and soon catch up. Then, we could at least appreciate historically the liberating and pioneering effect of the Han characters conversion on the progression from mono-byte reductionism to many-byte culture.

According to the Western viewpoint, whether mono-byte or two-byte is not profound revolutionary matter but the matter of system engineers to deal with and ordinary users even may not notice the difference.[13] Still, we would like to adhere at least emotionally something extraordinary would come out of double to many-byte as we could extend from our experience in Han characters conversion revolution.[14]

Or, we may stay in the present status quo of the exclusive use of two-bytes for character conversion. It is all right for us for those who have so far spent a lot of time for learning characters. For the next generation, though, they will forget the order of strokes. Or they may even forget how to write, and only learn how to convert from phonograms to characters. It is occurring even in my generation. Will this trend eventually lead ideogramic culture to be reduced to the mono-byte? Unless we go beyond the two-byte revolution, characters and its associated culture will eventually disappear or be completely swallowed by the mono-byte Western culture.

ENDNOTES