Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. 1823. “Extrait d’un Mémoire sur les plus anciens Caractères qui ont servi à former l’écriture chinoise.” Journal asiatique. March 1823. pp. 129–142.
In this essay, Abel-Rémusat examines the radicals of old Chinese, with an eye toward using the vocabulary of ancient Chinese to make claims about the state of civilization in ancient China.
The number of signs is very small:
| Sans doute, avec deux cents images, les premiers Chinois ne composaient pas de livres: ils n’écrivaient pas encore d’annales, ni même de romans cosmogoniques. | Without a doubt, with 200 images, the first Chinese did not write books. They did not write annals or narratives of cosmogony. |
So of what use were these signs?
| Avec ce petit nombre de caractères, ceux-ci pouvaient s’envoyer les uns aux autres des signaux pour résister à une incursion, ou renfermer leurs troupeaux; se rassembler pour une expédition, tomber à l’improviste sur leurs voisins pour les piller, toutes actions qui marquent les premiers pas des sociétés humaines. | With this small number of characters, from which they could send signals to one another to resist an incursion, or to reinforce their troops; to assemble themselves for an expedition, to attack without warning their neighbors to pillage them, all actions which mark the first stages of human societies. |
Abel-Rémusat divides classifies the Chinese radicals thematically, placing them in the categories of : the Heavens, the Earth, Man, and Parts of the Body. The remaining radicals are classed under a miscellaneous placeholder.
Abel-Rémusat, surveying some of the old Chinese characters, claims that there are no words for “dragon” or “phoenix,” which to him proves that the system of writing is anterior to the development of Chinese mythology.
What else does old Chinese lack? Words for religion, moral ideas, divisions of time, civil ranks. The language had very few terms for furniture and utensils, metals, or animals. In terms of the advancement of society, the early Chinese were very much like the tribes of New Zealand. But in inventing the art of writing, they would be able to eventually lift themselves up from their primitive state. By combining radicals to form more complex characters, the system of writing contained within itself a principle of classification, such that similar animals would contain similar radicals, not unlike “the essays of the binary nomenclature of Linnaeus” (p. 141)!
Abel-Rémusat closes his essay by making a case for the study of Chinese language as a quintessentially historical field:
| La paléographie chinoise n’est pas l’étude des formes variées que le caprice a fait prendre aux lettres, moins encore l’étude des abréviations et des ligatures, des accens et de la ponctuation: c’est véritablement l’étude des anciennces traditions, des vieux usages, des mœurs antiques. C’est sous ce rapport qu’elle mérite une attention toute particulière; car l’histoire des mots n’a droit à nous intéresser qu’autant qu’elle conduit à l’histoire de choses. | Chinese paleography is not the study of the different forms which caprice has wrought on the letters, even less the study of abbreviations and of ligatures, of accents and of punctuation: it is truly the study of ancient traditions, of old usages, of antique customs. It is in this respect that it merits our particular attention; for the history of words should only interest us insofar as it advances the history of things. |
