Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
The first time I developed a genuine interest in linguistics and later decided to take linguistics as my main focus was after attending a lecture by Mr. Zhu Xiaonong from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, when I was only a freshman.
That lecture was held in Office 404 of the Dean’s Office at the School of Chinese Language and Literature, Hunan University, from about 8:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. on October 17, 2015. It so happened that the International Conference on Xiang Chinese was being held in Changsha at the time. Linguistics scholars and experts from across China and abroad gathered together; during the day they met and discussed at the Jixian Hotel, for two days. As the organizer, the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Hunan University also specially invited some of the guests to give lectures at the School’s Dean’s Office in the evenings—two nights in total, two talks each night, starting at seven o’clock. The two invited speakers would lecture respectively, about an hour each. The audience was mainly graduate students in linguistics from the School; among undergraduates, apart from me and another freshman, there were only two or three students responsible for writing news releases. Both nights were like this.
Mr. Zhu Xiaonong’s lecture was the second session on the first night; the first session was given by his good friend, Mr. Mai Yun from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Later I learned that Mr. Zhu and Mr. Mai were not only longtime friends, but also had much academic collaboration; intellectually they were quite kindred. Both gentlemen’s main research direction is phonetics, yet their talks that night both emphasized the importance of methodology in linguistic research. Mr. Mai was mainly preaching, highlighting the correlation between good methodology and good papers; Mr. Zhu was mainly demonstrating, showing the powerful explanatory force of good methodology. The two good friends seemed not without a division of labor.
I remember that as soon as Mr. Mai came on, he joked that tonight’s real show was all with Zhu Xiaonong, so he would try to speak as fast as possible. But by the time he finished, it was already close to eight o’clock. Mr. Mai’s lecture topic was “The Four Big Pieces of Doing Scholarship—Data, Theory, Method, Concepts.” What stays fresh in my memory is his requirement for papers written by his graduate students: at the very beginning, the paper must use at least one section to clearly state the methodology; otherwise he won’t read it and it fails outright. He felt that clarifying methodology is like sketching the skeleton of the whole book: it can make the author’s thinking clearer, the logic more rigorous, the paper smoother, and also help reviewers in their judgment. This reminded me of a 40,000-word paper I wrote in high school. In the “Introduction” of that paper, I specifically explained “how to write and what to write,” which counted as putting his old gentleman’s idea into practice. So for me, Mr. Mai’s lecture content was basic academic training, with not much novelty. At the end, Mr. Mai also solemnly recommended Mr. Zhu’s book Methodology: The Soul of Linguistics, as if to say: methodology is very important; Mr. Zhu is worth seeing, and his book is worth seeing too. Not without a touch of flattery.
I noticed Mr. Zhu even before he came on. At that time, he was playing with his phone at the guest seats—more precisely, he was browsing information on it. While Mr. Mai was lecturing up there, he hardly looked up, except at timely jokes, when he would show his face and smile. This formed a sharp contrast with how Mr. Mai later kept his head raised, watching and listening to his lecture the whole time. Of course, Mr. Mai’s lifestyle is also relatively traditional: he dressed in a retro style, and his gestures carried a certain aura of a scholar-official literatus; he seemed not to use a phone—at least I didn’t see one. In comparison, Mr. Zhu was much more modern and much more approachable: he could play with a phone, could rattle off English, could use real-life news and online jokes as examples; when he tossed in humor, the whole room was bowled over—no generation gap to be seen. His clothing was also fairly common: a white long-sleeved shirt with dress pants.
After Mr. Zhu took the stage, he first responded to Mr. Mai’s compliments, and then went straight to the point. Mr. Zhu did not look like a particularly energetic person; the white shirt only highlighted the fatigue on his face. But once he started speaking, he was indeed full of vitality. Although his intonation lacked much rise and fall, within that seemingly matter-of-fact flow of speech, we could all feel his passion, his humor, his quick-wittedness, and his aggressiveness as if his “hot blood had yet to settle.” In particular, the lecture that was scheduled to end at nine o’clock actually ran all the way to ten-thirty, and he still wasn’t quite satisfied. No one stopped him, no one hinted at anything; only at the very end did he look at his watch, feel that it was getting late, and then have to brake. It felt like he was someone with a desire to control the stage—and someone who knew how to do it. His talk—witty in language, distinctive in personality, wide-ranging in scope, substantial in content, rigorous in logic, and avant-garde in thought—made it more like a live performance by an academic star, unforgettable. However, some of his other performance details I can no longer recall. On the one hand, this is because so much time has passed; on the other hand, it is also because, as someone with particular pickiness about knowledge content and modes of thinking, I was completely absorbed by what he was saying and had no time to attend to anything else.
Mr. Zhu’s talk was titled “The Needham Question and Social Pinkeye,” with the subtitle “The Linguistic Roots of Collective Thinking and Social Unconscious Behavior.” The Needham Question is well known; simply put: China’s scientific and technological inventions were once unrivaled in the early period, but why did the scientific revolution occur in Europe rather than China? Social pinkeye—judging from the subtitle “social unconscious behavior”—can be inferred to refer to a kind of social, comparative behavior. To place the Needham Question and social pinkeye side by side is strange in one way; to find a linguistic root for the Needham Question is strange in another. At that time I had not yet studied linguistics, and I never thought about even a bit of “language matters” in daily life; it was only my limited training in social-science thinking that made me realize that this lecture would not be without something worth seeing.
Mr. Zhu first explained the title in two aspects: on the positive side, what Chinese is constitutes the etiology of social pinkeye in Chinese society; on the negative side, what Chinese is not constitutes the reason China did not produce science—namely, the linguistic root from which the Needham Question arises. In Mr. Zhu’s account, these are two sides of the same coin, both determined by the characteristics of Chinese. The underlying presupposition here is linguistic determinism (Linguistic Determination): language is our most frequent behavior, therefore the way we engage in speech behavior will influence, and even pattern, our other ways of behaving. Just as Wittgenstein’s famous saying goes: the kind of language I speak determines the kind of world I see (The limits of my language are the limits of my world). Mr. Zhu elaborated on this, further pointing out: linguistic characteristics refer to the structural rules of a language’s phonology, pragmatics, and syntax; the structural rules of phonology, pragmatics, and syntax determine a language’s form of logical expression; and the specific content of a form of logical expression specifies how a nation cognizes the world, which in turn specifies the degree of development of that nation’s science. This indirect relationship implies that, through the intermediate form of logical expression, the linguistic structure of a nation limits that nation’s scientific development. This is Mr. Zhu’s theory that “linguistic constraints entail constraints on logic, and constraints on logic entail constraints on science,” or the theory of “language constrains logic and then constrains science.” Later, when I was flipping through Mr. Zhu’s Methodology: The Soul of Linguistics, I saw a passage that is essentially a plain explanation of the above theory: “Specific language structures produce specific linguistic ambiguities; to resolve specific linguistic ambiguities, specific techniques of linguistic analysis arise; specific techniques of linguistic analysis lead to specific ways of reasoning; specific ways of reasoning prescribe future specific logical forms; specific logical forms prescribe specific ways of thinking for investigating the external world. The emergence of each nation’s specific ‘science’ is not accidental.” For me, this novel way of thinking about problems was unprecedented; when I now think philosophically about language, this “linguistic constraint” theory remains highly inspiring. No examples are given here.
With the “linguistic constraint” theory already laid out, what remains is to reveal how this theory can explain the linguistic causes of “the Needham Question and social pinkeye” and the relationship between them—this is not an easy task. For this, Mr. Zhu also proposed three hypotheses of a “linguistic necessity” (Linguistic Necessity): H1) S-P (Subject-Predicate) structure languages are a necessary condition for generating deductive logic; H2) deductive logic (subject term–predicate term) is a necessary condition for generating science; therefore H3) S-P structure languages are a necessary prerequisite for the establishment of science. Necessity theory says: having it does not necessarily mean it must happen; lacking it means it cannot happen—there is a certain contingency, but also a certain definiteness. For example, Mr. Zhu later said that China not producing deductive logic and science is not accidental; that India and ancient Greece produced deductive logic while other Indo-European languages did not is contingent; that modern science could emerge first in the Western world and not in China is because their grammatical sentences and logical propositions are isomorphic, both being “Subject-Predicate-Object,” whereas in Chinese the relevant terms are two separate sets: sentences use “subject–predicate–object,” but propositions use “subject term–predicate term–object term.” As rigorous as Germans are, they simply use the same word “Satz” to refer to both sentence and proposition, because in their view the two are the same. Chinese is very different. Anyone with a bit of knowledge of Chinese grammar knows that in Chinese the basic construction mode of “word–phrase–sentence” is conflated: all have five types—“subject-predicate,” “verb-object,” “modifier-head,” “coordinate,” and “predicate-complement” (at the lexical level, “complementation”). That is to say, the boundaries among these three are sometimes quite hard to determine: between “word–phrase” there are the controversial “compound words” and “separable words”; between “phrase–sentence” there are formally identical “clauses” or “sentence forms.” Even more troublesome is that Chinese sentences are mainly topic-functional; sometimes how to punctuate a sentence may be impossible to sort out at all! All in all, who knows how much trouble this has caused for grammatical analysis! But in sum, in terms of academic writing, the Western world’s academic work is generally more rigorous than the Chinese world’s—this is an indisputable fact. “Linguistic necessity” has strong explanatory power for this.
Also constrained by the limiting role of language, Chinese education does not place very great emphasis on logic education—at least in concrete practice and in educational outcomes, this is so. Mr. Zhu’s “linguistic constraint” theory and “linguistic necessity” theory, stated right at the outset (as Mr. Mai said one should first make clear the “methodology”), are so abstract as to be beyond abstract for people who have not received strict training in logic. Not to mention the few undergraduates present; even the vast majority of the linguistics graduate students present might well have been hearing it in a fog. Mr. Zhu had long been aware of this. In fact, he only touched on the two theories above. The real focus of his lecture was actually: how to display the unique and powerful explanatory force of these two theories, and through that explanatory force to in turn prove the reasonableness of his theories? Or, in other words, how to use the “linguistic constraint” theory and the “linguistic necessity” theory to explain the Needham Question and social pinkeye?
I will never forget how excited I was inside when I heard someone attempting to solve the “Needham Question” yet forcefully declare that this “question” is a “weak proposition” and even a “false proposition”—I was almost overwhelmed by his self-confidence, even his arrogance. Logically speaking, the reason the “Needham Question” is a weak proposition is that it is a specific, spatiotemporally constrained historical problem; in Mr. Zhu’s words, it is “either unsolvable, or solvable in countless ways.” A clear-headed person should ask the “Zhu Xiaonong strong proposition”! That is, ask a general, spatiotemporally unconstrained strong proposition: “Why can’t China produce science?” Once the strong proposition was put forward, Mr. Zhu also took the opportunity to negate eleven so-called “mistaken approaches to solving the problem”: he held that explaining the “Needham Question” from eleven external causes such as political system, social structure, administrative measures, economic factors, cultural factors, etc. all has obvious flaws, and he believed that internal causes are the fundamental cause-effect relationship in a thing’s development, while external causes are only external opportunities; external causes must work through internal causes. Before the internal causes are clarified, it is far too early to talk about external causes—and this internal cause is precisely the linguistic structure of Chinese. Specifically, whether in Classical Chinese or Modern Chinese, the subject-predicate structure is not treated as the dominant grammatical sentence pattern, nor is it treated as the only legitimate pattern in reasoning; therefore it cannot generate the deductive logic that conforms to the development of modern science. This is the innate limitation imposed by “linguistic necessity” on a nation’s level of scientific development, and “linguistic constraint” makes this innate limitation deeply entrenched. Without the intervention of external forces, changes unprecedented in a thousand years cannot possibly occur.
As for “social pinkeye,” that is, socialized comparative mentality, in Mr. Zhu’s view it is directly and positively determined by the structural characteristics of Chinese. On the one hand, the conflated basic construction mode of Chinese “word–phrase–sentence,” and the extremely large number of homophones and near-homophones (after all, Chinese has only a bit over 1,300 syllables), become internalized through repeated daily use into an inner psychological mechanism, which makes Chinese people’s associative nerves quite developed and pay less attention to the law of identity in logic; Mr. Zhu called this “isomorphic deduction.” For example, some Classical Chinese specialists, in response to Yang Zhenning’s statement that China has no deduction, indignantly rebutted: “King Wen deduced the Eight Trigrams!” Or, when Chinese people preach, they are keen on making associative extensions in reasoning from small to large and from oneself to others; the best example is the Great Learning’s saying: “Cultivate oneself and then regulate the family; regulate the family and then govern the state; govern the state and then bring peace to all under heaven.” Mencius himself was also a master of this kind of equivocation. Or again, Chinese people’s rather strong taboo against personal names and unlucky homophonic sounds—everything seeks auspiciousness in words, such as the time of the Olympic opening ceremony: 8:08:08 p.m. on August 8, 2008. On the other hand, Chinese is a language that heavily emphasizes pragmatics, or is topic-prominent (topic prominent language), which is vastly different from the subject-prominent languages (subject prominent) of the Indo-European family; this makes “comparison with other matters and antonymic comparison become basic rules of Chinese grammar” (topic emphasis stresses the targetedness of reference: this, not that; yes, not no), and when externalized into people’s daily behavior, it becomes a tendency to compare oneself with others. Mr. Zhu believed that Chinese speech and writing like to use parallelism, antithetical couplets, and ornate parallel prose; in debate they like to use contrastive propositions; many people take others being praised as themselves being criticized—all of these are group speech or behavior unconsciously following the contrastive grammatical principles of the mother tongue. Similar examples are too numerous to list, so I will not belabor them here. In short, it is precisely under the combined effect of associative habits and comparative psychology that Chinese people’s comparative mentality grows ever more intense, evolving into a kind of social pinkeye.
If Mr. Zhu’s first half—on “what Chinese is not”—controlled the room with his novel theories, extensive learning and strong knowledge, concentrated arguments, and “strong aggressiveness,” then the second half—on “what Chinese is”—had the whole room laughing with his wit and humor, rich examples, and down-to-earth expressions. The contrast and unity between the two halves left an extremely deep impression. But the words of this essay are so dry and weak, and Mr. Zhu’s lecture was so witty and vivid, and with the passage of time and the unreliability of memory, that this essay cannot reproduce even one ten-thousandth of the excitement of the scene at the time. The blame for this lies with the writer.
A year and a half has passed. I have never again heard a lecture as personally charismatic as Mr. Zhu’s, and the bellyful of questions I had back then, I now don’t know where they have vanished to. Near the end, Mr. Zhu said that the topic of this lecture was super big and sensitive, so he had “carefully and anxiously brewed it for thirty years,” and that “in the meantime I have written articles, and have also undergone countless interrogations in private, online, and at conferences.” Later, as I came to know him more deeply, I also came to understand that from On the Real and the Unreal thirty years before this lecture to Language Constrains Logic and Then Constrains Science: Why Can’t China Produce Science? a few months before, he really had been studying related issues all along. I also have never again seen someone like him who spreads with such passion and hope the scientistic linguistic ideas he has believed in his whole life. He might not have imagined that there would be such a person who, for his lecture, would ask Professor Peng Lanyu—the host of the lecture at the time—for the PPT for three consecutive weeks, and would not give up without getting it; he might not have imagined that this PPT that was obtained would later be shared by this then-freshman student with several teachers in the foreign languages school who do linguistics; he might also not have imagined that this diligent, inquisitive person would from then on gradually board the “pirate ship” of linguistics, and write a paper half a year later that won an award in a national-level competition; even more unbelievable is how strongly this student, after getting tired of those “must listen, must not listen again” or “don’t want to go listen, but can’t not listen” lectures at school, wanted to hear again that old gentleman’s high-spirited lecture— even if it were another The Needham Question and Social Pinkeye, he would listen attentively, and be ready at any time to pull out a pile of questions to “make it difficult for him.”
That student is me. I hope I will be fortunate enough to hear Mr. Zhu’s lecture once more during my university years, and I hope he can come to Hunan University again.
Comments