An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics

by Perry Link

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao exhorted the Chinese people to “smash the four olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Yet when the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square chanted “We want to see Chairman Mao,” they unknowingly used a classical rhythm that dates back to the Han period and is the very embodiment of the four olds. An Anatomy of Chinese reveals how rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey time-honored meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be consciously aware, and contributes to the ongoing debate over whether language shapes thought, or vice versa.

Perry Link’s inquiry into the workings of Chinese reveals convergences and divergences with English, most strikingly in the area of conceptual metaphor. Different spatial metaphors for consciousness, for instance, mean that English speakers wake up while speakers of Chinese wake across. Other underlying metaphors in the two languages are similar, lending support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain. The distinction between daily-life language and official language has been unusually significant in contemporary China, and Link explores how ordinary citizens learn to play language games, artfully wielding officialese to advance their interests or defend themselves from others.

Particularly provocative is Link’s consideration of how Indo-European languages, with their preference for abstract nouns, generate philosophical puzzles that Chinese, with its preference for verbs, avoids. The mind-body problem that has plagued Western culture may be fundamentally less problematic for speakers of Chinese.

Genres: China, Language, Nonfiction, Linguistics, History, Philosophy

376 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2013

Reviews

[Karen Chung · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're seriously into Chinese language, culture and linguistics, this book is well worth reading.

Perry Link was a senior department-mate when I was in grad school at Princeton. I heard LOTS about him, but unfortunately never met him in person, I don't think.

Actually, this is a book I myself might have written – well, maybe something similar – had I decided to sit down and do it. Hey, I *have* written many similar things already – in Chinese though – for example this article on the similarities between English and Chinese "dyads", like "black and white", "man and woman":

Do you have an English or a Chinese brain?
http://www.eisland.com.tw/Main.php?st...
(registration required for access to the articles, but it's free)

Link's interests and views align uncannily with my own, including our shared interest in political power struggle. Well, maybe it's not *that* surprising, considering we studied in the same department of the same university under some of the same teachers.

It would be great to sit down with him over coffee for a good long chat. But reading his book is a reasonable, and in fact very rich, substitute. Please do get in touch with me at karchung@ntu.edu.tw, Perry, if you ever read this!

[Syd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really hoping this book would be a cohesive adventure through prosody etc. in Chinese, but it seems to be more of an exoticizing collection of a professor's post-it notes; "Here is a cool metaphor and what it implies about thinking!" "Oh but here is a contradicting metaphor, whup!" Sort of pseudo-sociolinguistic/psycholinguistic rambling. (which is fine, just know what you're in for)

I also do not totally trust the author's interpretations--at one point he mentions the English saying "push a meeting up a week," which in my usage means having the meeting sooner (and some cursory googling says this is the more common interpretation), to mean having a meeting later, which also explains his failure to connect it to "up" and "down" on a calendar when trying to explain and compare it with the Mandarin use of up/down for time. This is not exactly reassuring seeing as I cannot proofread his Mandarin translations. As for rhythm; citing TV jingles, political slogans, and public signs as having rhythmic patters is very reasonable, but extrapolating that this makes Mandarin "more rhythmic" is to ignore the same phenomena in English. Casual experiments have shown that from prosody alone people have a hard time distinguishing between Mandarin and English (see Language Log for some examples).

So while I do not want to say this is the latest version of "Eskimos have 50 words for snow," do go in not looking for facts but more for a selection of thoughts. There is some interesting historical information interwoven, and his tracings of rhythm from classical poetry through The Cultural Revolution is certainly laudable. He also is definitely correct about rhythm having meaning, but you don't need to trudge through this if that's your main interest. (I will admit I have not finished the "Politics" section, but it does seem to be stronger than the rest.)

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

Reviewed by Asian Review of Books

[Mills College Library]

495.116 L7562 2012