George Durand Wilder
Published: 2015-06-26
Total Pages: 378
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Excerpt from Analysis of Chinese Characters The author of the great Chinese English dictionary Mr. Giles, has not hesitated to express most trenchantly his contempt of etymology as it has been applied to Chinese Characters. He says that "Much of the etymology of the Shuo Wen is childish in the extreme", and that the phonetic principle of combination is the only one of which we can pretend to know anything. Notwithstanding the ridicule heaped upon it, scholars, like Chalmers, Chalfant, Wieger and others have continued to pursue the fascinating study of the origin of these symbols and have given us most interesting results. These results are so convincing that in the teaching of character writing we have unhesitatingly adopted the principle that the etymology of the earliest Chinese writers on the subject, childish though it may often be and fanciful, is yet superior to the numerous mnemonics that have been invented by foreign students to assist in the difficult task of memorizing the forms of a few thousand characters. The student of these pages may often consider the etymology suggested fanciful and the logic of the combinations far fetched but the following consideration should be borne in mind. They are the products of Chinese fancy and imagination and to some extent show the workings of the Chinese mind. Therefore they interest us who are students of Chinese thought. Moreover they often may only seem to be fanciful because we are ignorant of the ancient customs out of which they arise, or of the forms of the utensils of which they are pictures, or of the variations of pronunciation in the different dialects. If any oue of us were entrusted with the task of inventing written symbols for both concrete objects and abstract ideas it is doubtful if we would produce anything much less fanciful and we certainly could produce nothing of such rich historic interest, as certainly invests the 3000 most primitive characters. Writing Chinese characters is a task of memory. Modern pedagogy. insists on the value of logical or even fanciful links between ideas for fixing them in mind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.