From: jerry norman <jerryn40@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, June 18, 2012 at 1:35 PM
To: Weldon South Coblin <south‐coblin@uiowa.edu>, Axel Schuessler
<xsch1678@wavecable.com>
Subject: Karlgrenianism
Nanlin, Axel:
I often entertain myself with what I might call counter‐thinking. Suppose
that everything we believe about something is wrong. Ordinarily this
entertaining process ends in failure and at other times I have a feeling that I
have just approached the threshold of something but can't quite see my
way forward. This brings me today to the interesting case of Bernhard
Karlgen (hereafter K).
The curious thing is that K began his academic activities with Slavic studies
and Swedish dialectology. In the latter case he must have tried to elicit the
peculiarities of local Swedish dialects, perhaps in order to draw isoglosses
or dialect maps. Then he studied Chinese, and like almost every Westerner
at that time, he became fascinated with the writing system; he became
aware of earlier work on phonology (the Ching philologists, the Sonq
rimetable compilers, Schaank, Volpicelli, Pelliot). His passion then turned
to what he called le Chinois ancien, a reconstruction of what he thought
was a Tarng time koine. Henceforth, he was able to dismiss further dialect
survey work if it did not somehow feed into his project of le Chinois
ancien. He declared rather imperiously that Chinese dialectal phonological
categories could be accounted for by the reconstructed categories of le
Chinois ancien. He thought that this possibly wasn't true of the Min dialects
but he decided early on not to pursue that line of investigation.
If we look at his own practice of Chinese dialectology, we see immediately
that it had a peculiar character; he was not interested in the actual lexicon
of local dialects but only in the way people read characters. This a
reflection of the tendency of both Chinese and foreign scholars to view
Chinese as identical to the characters. As stated above, he had dismissed
the relevance of genuine dialect data early on. I think in a way this explains
why he put so much value on the Sinoxenic systems: they were purely
reading systems and there were no vernacular languages that they
matched. Grootaers tried to point out this deficiency but was by and large
ignored. The essence of the Karlgrenian approach then is to take the
Chinese writing system as the only "real" Chinese, the only type amenable
to scientific study. This has to be inferred from what he did since I don't
think he was ever very explicit about it. (Maybe I'm wrong on this.)
In China Luo Charngpeir, Y.R. Chao and Li Fang‐kuei translated his
Phonologie, thus setting the stage for decades of study in the Karlgrenian
spirit. We see this in the early dialect surveys like the Hwubeei survey;
their main component was a list of characters and a matching of these
forms with the categories of the rimebooks and rimetables. It is to the
credit of these survey compilers that in most cases they did include data on
a number of basic dialect components such as pronouns and
demonstratives and some very basic vocabulary. But in true Karlgrenian
spirit, almost the only goal of Chinese historical phonology became
questions of reconstruction and how various dialects reflected the
categories thus reconstructed. Dialect data (overwhelmingly comprised of
lists of character readings) became ancillary to the reconstruction of le
Chinois ancien or Middle Chinese. From the 30s of the last century down to
the beginning of the present century precious little real dialectology was
done. At some point, linguists like Lii Rong and Ding Shengshuh more or
less abandoned reconstruction and went directly to an abstract system
based on faanchieh and deengyunnshyue. As for Middle Chinese (le Chinois
ancien) perhaps Pulleyblank was the last real reconstructionist.
But K convinced himself that not only could one reconstruct the Tarng
koine, it was also possible to reconstruct a much older stage of Chinese
based on ancient rimes and character structure. His "reconstruction" was
very different from his earlier endeavors since the Archaic (Old) Chinese
material was not nearly so focused as that for le Chinois ancien.
What we know of character structure actually comes from the Hann
dynasty and it is possible that even the rimed texts underwent major re‐
editing at the same period. So it is questionable that the so‐called Old
Chinese (OC) systems can be dated reasonably. About all we can say
realistically is that such systems predate the systems based on the
Chiehyunn. Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that the different data
on which OC systems are based were even contemporaneous.
I think there is a real sense in which the reconstruction of earlier stages of
Chinese have reached a dead‐end. Although people continue to
reconstruct OC schemes, these become ever more speculative and divorced
from actual history. I suspect that even these endeavors will die out in
time. So where do we go from here? Let's go back to the study of dialects
before they all die out. Compared to K's time, we now have an immense
wealth of new data on dialects, yet without a new method to study it, it
mostly remains unexploited for historical study. Major questions like "how
did the present configuration of the Chinese dialect map come about?" are
not really addressed. So K's ghost remains hovering over the whole field.
An even broader question is, to what extent does our conventional
approach to historical comparison correspond to reality? Do related
languages necessarily go back to some unitary protolanguage or is that
merely a gross simplification of matters that we don't really
understand? Here I am perplexed.
Beeimen