The Time of WANG Guowei Revised Edition

 

The Time of WANG Guowei Revised Edition

The Time of WANG Guowei

I learned the language study from CHINO Eiichi at Tokyo in 1970s.
He taught me the Linguistic Circle of Prague and the existence of KARCEVSKIJ Sergej.

One day he admonished me not to study the hard problems such as language universals that are the themes worked on by the geniuses like WITTGENSTEIN Ludwig.
But I chose the theme probably by my youth.

For long time I kept thinking on language universals being aided from KARCEVSKIJ’s paper, “Du dualisme asymétrique du signe linguistique“.
I roamed the vast field of language, wondering the streets of Tokyo.
The time passed fast.
CHINOI suddenly died by the fatal disease in 2002.

I wrote the original note on language universals at Hakuba, Nagano in March 2003.
This note was fundamental at that time for me but probably much conceptualised to others, to which I entitled ” On Time Property Inherent in Characters“.
It was written about the written language of ancient Chinese characters inscribed on tortoise shells.

WANG Guowei was the pioneer scholar on that field.
I had liked his papers that were almost contained in his most important work, “Guantangjilin“.
I bought the book at Kanda, Tokyo in the early 1970s.
The bookshop name was “Haifeng Shudian”, that are now removed to Chiba Prefecture.

Oh how many times I went to this shop and bought the Chinese classics.
Qing Dynasty produced many linguistic scholars who almost all researched the Chinese characters for their scholastic basis.
I also liked ZHANG Binglin, DUAN Yucai, WANG Niansun, WANG Yinzhi and so on.

In my first note I quoted WANG Guowei and DUAN Yucai.
They are the precursors of the study of language universals for the prime of life.
The study was traditionally called “Small study” in China.
But I could not remain standing at the excessive conceptualised place influenced from Small study.

The second note was “Quantum Theory for Language“, that were also written at Hakuba in August 2003.

The third note was “Distance Theory“.
In the early stage of my research, “distance” was one of the important concepts for language unversals.
The concept was inevitably related with time and space.
So I began to think the themes on Language universals based on mathematics that were another prime time theme of my youth.

December 20, 2011
February 15, 2020 Text revised
Tokyo
TANAKA Akio

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