VOCAB WARS -- Should Civilizations Compete for Terminologies
When people's names, ideas, inventions, and thus their socio-cultural identities are overwritten by Western biblical and philosophical translations, scholars of culture have all the reasons to be concerned.
By Thorsten Pattberg
We practically know the West like the palm of our hand, but the West's vision of the East is a murky confusion -- Ji Xianlin
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world - Ludwig Wittgenstein
BEIJING/TOKYO - Capitalism forces people to compete for market shares, natural resources, and
human capital. Less obvious so, they also vie for terminologies. This is called
lingualism.
'Philosophy', 'religion', and 'science' are ideological concepts that serve the
needs of the dominant West, and in the past were hardly ever challenged. In
this century, however, this could change.
Due to the former European conquest of the world most subject people adopted
European vocabularies. The result is a large body of "international students"
that no longer have any other concepts available to them other than philosophy,
religion, and science, to explain the whole range of human thought. It's a bit
dull.
The reduction of all the world's vocabularies to a few inherently European
words makes it effortless for our elites to compose for example a 'Philosophy
of China' without using a single original Chinese term.
The word "philosophy" includes all foreign, while being firmly rooted
in the Western tradition. At the same time the word lacks all foreignness when
we solely refer to ourselves. Thus, a book entitled 'History of Philosophy' may
include a chapter on Confucius or it may not -- either way it wouldn't fail to
fulfill its title's promise.
If we asked an American, What's the world's greatest syndicate?, she would
probably answer it's the trade unions, the Cosa Nostra, the Freemasons, or
maybe the anarchists. Actually, it's none of those -- it's the philosophers.
What started in
If we consult actual history, "philosopher" wasn't even a concept in
East-Asia before Nishi Armani translated it into Japanese tetsukagusha
around 1871. There is no instance of the word "philosophy" (in modern
Chinese: zhexue) in any of the East-Asian classics. Our books on
"Chinese Philosophy" are blatant forgery, and our "Departments
of Eastern Philosophy" are cruel fictions.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of foreign words. We've laid our hands
on the shengren, which is seijin in Japanese, and seng-yin in
Korean, and altered or, as the official term goes, translated them as
"Chinese philosophers", "Japanese philosophers",
"Korean philosophers". And we have, metaphorically speaking,
annihilated
We employ thousands of scholars, all "doctors of philosophy", who
make sure that our "corrections" to human knowledge will look like
the original. The public couldn't tell the difference between a shengren and a
philosopher anyway. In fact, the public cannot know what has been omitted from
their textbooks.
Perhaps our greatest invention yet was "science". Maybe equally
admirable ideas exist in
Maybe "globalization" is just another brilliant euphemism for this
ongoing destruction of non-Western ideas. We want 'economy', not jingji.
We want 'globalization', not tianren heyi. They are not the same. We
demand 'democracy' in
Next is "religion". Religion is Christianity. We all live in the year
2012 of our Lord, Jesus Christ. The reason why we call teachings like Buddhism
or Confucianism "religion" is simply because we want to pull our
Religion over whatever they have, to digest them, to administer foreign
knowledge in our books on "World Religions".
It's hard to imagine the President of the
Our students are conveniently told that there are "saints" and
"philosophers" all over Asia, yet evidently there isn't a single
buddha, bodhisattva, or shengren in Europe or
Any linguist who counts, knows that the vocabularies of the world's languages
add up, they don't overlap. Translation is always reduction: one word
acknowledged, the other" eliminated.
Here, like so often, we rely on the power drive of our best and brightest. In
the past the conquerors were granted rights to occupied territory. Today they
are granted contracts with some
Translation is a form of mental cheating, and its end is always power. The
power lies in the taking away from others. Sure, true names always beat the
fake names; that's precisely why the Chinese want to keep their true names, and
the Europeans do everything in our powers to take those names away from them.
Think about the Western habit to switch Chinese surnames and names around,
which borders on coercion.
What better use of an army of needy scholars who often live off state charity
than to help
Foreign key concepts like daxue (what we call "university"), shengren
(what we call "saints") or junzi (what we call
"gentlemen") have in their native usage unorthodox meaning. Foreign
thought like rujiao or fojiao is unwanted thought. The
"non-European" obviously exist, but because of their non-European
origins foreign concepts make
A prominent example is
Indeed, the most complete European sinologist is always the one least Chinese
himself. Have you ever met an entomologist who is a butterfly?
Nothing must interfere with our meanings of science, religion, and philosophy.
We must never allow foreign key terminology -- all those useless shades of
Eastern meanings - to influence our public sphere and weaken our lingualism. We
call this freedom. Another one.
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