[Bernhard Karlgren] published by The Commercial Press. This book was written in 1946. The original English title is “The Chinese Language: An Essay on Its Nature and History.”
This book is a masterpiece. For a foreigner to write such a book a hundred years ago, Karlgren was truly a once-in-a-generation linguistic genius. Why should we read a book about Chinese written by a foreigner?
The author has a passage in the book that I think can serve as the reason:
Many Chinese scholars have traditionally not emphasized learning and understanding the languages of other nations. Their narrow linguistic perspective is also why they don’t want to explore the commonalities in language development. The situation in the West was the opposite of China - the colonial movement at the time allowed Europeans to understand various languages worldwide and gradually recognize the common developmental patterns of human languages, finding scientific methods to explore these patterns.
I think this is also why China is called “Central” Kingdom - “Central” represents a self-centered perspective, which Professor Cho-yun Hsu’s “China: A Macro History” elaborates on deeply. Foreigners exploring and learning other languages is essentially an extremely open-minded spirit. This open exploratory attitude, whether culturally driven or historically determined, has led to the rise of the Western world and today’s global situation.
Another reason, as Karlgren mentions in the book, is the essence of language learning. Karlgren says:
Every language you learn gives you access to a new way of thinking. Your thoughts are forced to leave the familiar track created by your mother tongue, thus elevating you to a higher level.
This is true for natural languages and equally applies to computer programming languages. When I first graduated from university, I thought different languages were just different ways of expression but essentially the same. Today, my view is completely opposite. Different languages represent different ways of thinking (thought patterns) - this is the core of language. Using a language means thinking in that language, constructing the world through it. When we learn and speak foreign languages, rather than “Speaking in English,” it’s more about “Thinking in English.” Think in English vs. Thinking in Chinese, analogous to Thinking in Java vs. Thinking in Python.
Therefore, we should maintain a more open mindset to learn multiple languages and elevate our thinking dimensions and heights.
Karlgren has a rather bold statement in the book:
Due to the characteristics of Chinese characters, Chinese people today cannot truly know the actual pronunciation of ancient classical Chinese. After nearly three thousand years of phonetic changes, although they can read ancient books, they must pronounce each character according to their modern pronunciation.
As a Swede making such an assessment of most people’s Chinese proficiency, I cannot refute a single word. The current Chinese language education in China really needs reflection.
As Chinese pronunciation has evolved to this day, many pronunciations have been simplified, to the extent that we need to rely on Japanese translations (and some other East Asian languages that borrowed Chinese) to pronounce Chinese as it was around 600 CE, which makes me feel quite complex. One possible reason I can think of is that modern Chinese is based on Beijing dialect as standard Mandarin. And Beijing, this millennium-old capital, was mostly ruled by non-Han people throughout history (Liao, Jin, Yuan, Ming, Qing - only Ming was a Han dynasty). Ancient Chinese was naturally simplified and integrated during this process to facilitate communication, promotion, and use among multiple ethnicities. According to Karlgren’s examples, southern Chinese dialects like Fuzhou, Shanghai, and Cantonese are all closer to ancient Chinese pronunciation than standard Mandarin. As a Cantonese speaker, I deeply agree - Cantonese grammar is also closer to ancient Chinese.
Undoubtedly, the invention of Chinese language was a highlight of human intellectual achievement. However, domestic research on the Chinese language itself has been lacking for thousands of years. Karlgren concludes in his book:
The old man came from far away, which will also benefit our country. We cannot recognize that no grammar is sufficient to help us analyze this sentence. This requires intuition, or more precisely, an understanding of how Chinese people construct sentences and express thoughts through language. You must understand Chinese people’s way of thinking, and there’s only one way to achieve this: read, read, and read more.
For us today, putting ourselves in others’ shoes, isn’t it the same? When we learn foreign languages and study the West, we need to understand their way of expressing thoughts through language, must understand Western people’s way of thinking, and to achieve this, there’s only one way: reading and learning their language. And learning their language is essentially learning their way of describing and thinking about the world.
These are my thoughts after reading this thin book. I recommend this book to everyone who studies language.
*translated by Claude Sonnet 3.5