Letter to Y. Supplemental addition. On Language and Oriental Character Study.2018. Translated by Google

Letter to Y. Supplemental addition. On Language and Oriental Character Study.2018

Letter to Y. Supplemental addition

Dear Y.,

"I think that Twitter numbers alone are not reliable enough to be treated as objective." I agree with this.

I was oversimplifying by showing only the results from Twitter. I made my judgment based on the results of each of the statistics , such as 8 general sites on Weebly in the past, 7 specialized sites on Webnode a little later, 3 sites on the invitational Wix, and 1 paper and essay site each on Blogger. So I don't think it's so self-satisfied. And I'm too old to be self-satisfied now.

However, the fact that visual language is becoming important has not been so popular in the history of linguistics since the modern era.
Saussure and others have formed linguistics based on the premise that language originates from speaking and listening.

In China, character studies have deepened dramatically in modern times, but this is largely due to Chinese characters.
Of course, Japan has also continued to retain its influence, including the introduction of Chinese characters.
In the West, there are few major linguistic fields such as graphology, and graphology has generally been placed at a lower level.
The research of Rokuro Kono of Japan is probably one of the most comprehensive works on graphology. He passed away last year, but his foundation was based on Chinese and Korean studies.

I take a slightly different route, but in the broader sense, I can say that I grew up on the academic achievements of Rokuro Kono and others.
One of Kono's memorable essays was published in the "Language" section of the Iwanami Lecture Series "Philosophy" in the 1970s, in which he stated that even if we trace the formation of language back to the level of cuneiform characters, he strongly felt that the basis of its structure was almost entirely based on the Chinese "Six Scripts." It was his great achievement to solve the difficult problem of the role of "transfer" in the "Six Scripts," which are the six ways of constructing Chinese characters.

In today's world, where the total amount of language has increased dramatically, there is no doubt that the proportion of written languages ​​has rapidly increased due to their excellent preservation properties.
Computers have further expanded the situation of the increase in characters.

It is certain that speaking and listening are the origin of language, but whether this actually constitutes the historical essence of language is another matter.
History has expanded and become more precise through characters. And we are probably at the leading edge of this.

In this situation, it is my position to try to think about language.
When I said "transcendental," I meant that it is important to think about it from a historical perspective that spans a long span.

It's simple, but I just added a little bit.

Cordially,

8 January 2018
Akio

31 August 2024 Revised
Hills West